Even if you never plan to return, you are still (legally) on the hook to file a 1040-NR form with the IRS every year.

There’s a foreign earned income tax credit: this reduces your US tax bill by any income tax you paid to your residence country. For many expat working stiffs, this means they don’t have to pay anything to Uncle Sam, but they still have to file a tax return.

Windows was never oriented around “just works”. That was Mac. Windows’s main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!

Comparing national militaries is a complicated and tricky business. I would like to recommend Perun on YouTube. Usually pretty good defense economic analysis in digestible one-hour PowerPoint presentations. Some comparative material.

• “Case law,” meaning deciding court cases by referring to the results of previous cases, is much less important in Louisiana. Courts of appeals and the Louisiana Supreme Court are more liable to go against previous precedents than they might be in common law states.
• A lot more basic stuff in Louisiana is written into law statutes. The Louisiana constitution was completely rewritten in the 1970s, but today it is still the size of one of those old fashioned phone books.
• Louisiana has parishes instead of counties.
• In a criminal case, the Louisiana constitution does not guarantee defendants the right to trial by jury. That’s an English law tradition thing, not French (or “continental European”). Louisiana criminal defendants do get a right to jury guaranteed by the US constitution and by Louisiana statutes.
• Louisiana is (basically) the only state in the Union that doesn’t require a unanimous jury verdict in criminal cases. They got partially overruled by the feds on this recently, though.
• Louisiana does not participate in the Multistate Bar Exam. The Louisiana bar exam is the longest one to sit in the Union.
• You cannot disinherit any of your children. All children are entitled to a minimum fractional share of your estate. This is a reform actually from Napoleon, getting rid of “primogeniture” that was all the rage in England.
• Louisiana has a thing called “usufruct” that could be used to, say, let your spouse keep using your assets after you die (and your assets were force-inherited to your children).
• The governor of Louisiana is required to recite the oath of office twice, in English and French.

We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before,

Except Louisiana. Louisiana is instead gifted with laws from Napoleonic France.

Cue up Pulp Fiction conversation about foot massage.

At ISS altitude, it’s probably not decades to decay, but a few years instead.

Rockets do not aim straight up when they are leaving. They go straight up for a few seconds, and then they tilt over in the desired direction to pickup speed.

They don’t burn up on the launch because they time the tilt over maneuver so that they get above nearly all of the atmosphere before they start picking up serious speed.

The energy that makes you burn up is your own kinetic energy. The “small” deorbit burn slows you down just enough to touch the atmosphere, but you’re still going nearly full speed: 7200 m/s. Around 30,000 km/hr.

If you slow down more in space, so that you enter the atmosphere at low speed, you don’t burn up. But you need a whole lot more backpacks to handle the full speed. It’s cheaper and burns less gas if you use the air to slow down.

It seems difficult to have enough bottled oxygen to deorbit yourself, but maybe doable.

The MMU backpack units on the space shuttle had a total delta v of ~30 m/s. You need about three times that amount to deorbit from ISS. So imagine you need 3 MMUs give it take worth of expendable propellant oxygen, and you can do it. (The MMUs used nitrogen, but for this purpose oxygen is pretty much the same.)

After you deorbit, you will of course burn up on re-entry with no heat shield. But it might be conceivable to design a personal heat shield surfboard.

You could also avoid the whole burning up things by braking a lot more during the deorbit maneuver. But instead of 100 m/s, you need to slow down by more than 7000 m/s. That’s quite a few more MMUs worth of gas. But if you do that, then you’re essentially making a free fall jump from space, which has more or less already been demonstrated.

Edit:

To address the linked article in some way: each astronaut on the station has a dedicated seat on a capsule to come back down in an emergency. Usually, it’s the same space capsule you came up on, but not always. Those are maintained ready to go at all times, and the astronauts can be back on the ground in 60 minutes whenever they need to. These spacecraft can be operated to splashdown by astronauts alone with no ground assistance, if needed.

The statutory penalty in the US is on the order of $100,000 per infringement. “Statutory” means that the number is written into the law, and the aggrieved party doesn’t have to establish or prove actual losses.

I still believe the genocide Joe stuff was only heard strongly because it was pushed by the professional Russian troll farms. I know there are several real people on this platform that may hold the same opinion. But they’re not nearly as loud after election day.

I feel like he missed a solid opportunity to use the word “geometers.”

Pro tip: EU membership comes with its own defense pact among just the EU members. Whether you join NATO or not.