Great journalism: I know Brent and his story with Iceland and the NYT story is a lie, but it is a good pretext to write some words and sell some subscriptions,

Great journalism: I know Brent and his story with Iceland and the NYT story is a lie, but it is a good pretext to write some words and sell some subscriptions, even with some visibility on HN. Brent and Erica love the place, so they wanted to live there for a while and visit around. The only way to get in was to get a working visa, so Brent found a local company interested to hire him part time for some work; if you don't know, he is in the top 3 experts in MS SQL performance tuning and he is doing a lot of consulting and training, so getting him even part time for a regular job rate (not his consultant rate) is a great deal for any company with such need. They don't have any plans to be digital nomads (meaning: work from different places around the globe), Iceland is one and Mexico (where Erica has family) are the 2 places they spend their time when not in San Diego. So he is there not for tax reasons, not to evade US or the US government, but in an extended vacation while they still work as much as needed to justify the visa and to keep their business alive. Most people that are accidentally in this situation don't have a complex problem to solve with taxes, the ones that really do want to avoid US taxes while working abroad have some better sources of information and there are companies that help with that, offering a lot of info and services to get through the process (usually finding you a few good citizenships, more than 1 at a time and giving up on the US one). What is not mentioned is the reverse situation: you are not a US citizen but you pay taxes in US and in another country, like many of my colleagues do. Because we work for an American company and we get a small portion of our income in US, we are taxed max rate (no return, no exceptions) in US and then we are taxed again in our countries, mostly in Europe, even if we don't set foot in US for that income. This is how it works, US is taxing everything it can.