Puerto Rico is not autonomous. In Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, the US Supreme Court found that sovereignty of Puerto Rico ultimately resides in the United States Congress. The US Congress can pass a law for Puerto Rico and there is nothing anyone in the Puerto Rican government can do about it. US Congress has ultimate control over Puerto Rico (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PROMESA as an example). That isn’t autonomous.

“If Congress chose to alter Puerto Rico’s political status, it could do so through statute regardless of whether a plebiscite were held or what sentiment such a vote revealed.” Political Status of Puerto Rico: Brief Background and Recent Developments for Congress (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44721/7)

Puerto Rico had been owned by the United States since the US took it during the Spanish-American War in 1898. It is part of the US. There have been multiple votes asking if they want to become an official state of the US. Other countries don’t get the choice to become US states. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territories_of_the_United_States#Incorporated_vs._unincorporated_territories

You don’t need a passport because it is inside US borders.

It can be just like you’ve said. You can also run tailscale directly on the system hosting a service and access it directly over the tailscale network.

I would agree with this except that I don’t have faith that it won’t be leveraged as a way to get out of a whole crapload of taxes. I’m pretty sure that unemployment insurance, and a lot of the federal taxes, are based on wages and not tips. Also what is the limit? Can I pay my friend $50 to mow my lawn and tip him an extra $25,000, just so I can get around the limit for a gift tax? I wouldn’t trust a Republican administration to implement this without making it easier for Rick people to avoid paying taxes.

Just use Snapraid & MergerFS. No special Hardware required and you don’t need to change what is on your disks.

From a quick search: https://perfectmediaserver.com/02-tech-stack/snapraid/

This is how I do it. No striping, normal partitions, different hard drive sizes, pretty easy. This way makes upgrades super easy too. Currently running 76TB mergerfs with 2 14TB Snapraid parity drives.

I know that Pixel 7’s and above support it. There are Reddit posts showing they have the feature already. Satellite messaging is just using standard 4G/LTE from Starlink. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is only an OS update away for most newer phones.

Looks like it’s been available on some android devices for at least a month. I don’t know about free though, I think it depends on your carrier. I know T-Mobile has been talking about supporting it using Starlink satellites.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/1ct1no1/satellite_messaging_option_appeared_on_my_pixel_7/ https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/first-spacex-satellites-launch-for-breakthrough-direct-to-cell-service-with-t-mobile