They have had a plan for it, from the very beginning. Big-budget space projects like ISS don't get anywhere without a wrap-up plan. ISS is in LEO, and its mass contraindicates moving it into a graveyard orbit. Conventionally, stuff in LEO gets de-orbited; same thing happened with Skylab in '79.

Longer - fifteen, closer to twenty years. It took this long for there to be one or two companies that they could be sure wouldn't just cut and run (especially given how cutthroat the aerospace industry is).

Conventionally Point Nemo is the target.

SpaceX's track record for orbital insertion definitely had something to do with that. When last I knew, N-G didn't have its own launch facilities (that might've changed in the last few years but I doubt it).

Probably jet lagged, too. A lot of pre-prods are worked on during the flight home from a conference and after one gets home when they can't sleep.

Also, they have to follow Swiss law if they want to stay in business.

Generally speaking, if the oligarchs don't think you'll be useful to them, you don't make it far enough up in the food chain to be considered a candidate. They don't play the game of "Maybe this person will do what I tell them once they're in office," they play of the game of "Only people I know will do what I say will get onto the ballot."

The political machine does terrible things to people who are at least somewhat fundamentally good.

I lived and worked inside the DC beltway for ten years. They don't care. The stuff they worry about is so far removed from our everyday lives it doesn't even register.

We care about stuff like getting to work on time, covering rent, and not yelling "This is all bullshit!" during daily standup. They care about getting a position paper from a lobbyist summarized to read in the car on their way to a meeting (they tend to be one or two hundred papers in length and can serve as general anesthetic) and making sure that some other person on the same committee will vote the way they agreed ("You back my $foo, I'll back your $bar").

As a rule, if you have Money you can hire folks that do all of the drudgework for you. For example, a secretary fields all of the requests for meetings, looks at your calendar, comes up with a couple of possible time slots, and negotiates the time and place.

We're cleaning up our living room as crash space again for folks leaving red states.

Hardware in cars, like hardware in computers drifts in configuration over manufacturing time. Some cars from a manufacturer might have some granularity of tracking that earlier units off the line didn't. Toyota does this with their Camry hybrids, for example.

I've had this happen before on some weird systems. Unplugging and replugging the keyboard woke the keyboard back up.