I am very sorry to hear that. I hope you have some positive developments on that front.
For what it is worth, here is the Stack Overflow page with two open positions. They say London (where there is a new permanent office) but remote would be available to the right person.
I'm outside USA, and the tax thing is simple: I send you an invoice, you send me money. Nothing more, nothing less. No insurance problems, or different law issues.
As for the conferences, I attended some, I was even presenting on some. I learned nothing, as most of the stuff I had already known. Currently I learn from books. Usually from algorithms, and math ones. This is the kind of stuff you won't find on conferences. Btw, many conference videos are available on youtube, so going there to learn is IMHO not the main reason for a conference.
Heh, I recall when a funny manager asked my team about an estimation. We agreed on a year (exactly something like 12-14 months). Then he went to his managers, sold the project with 6 months deadline, and was quite happy.
The outcome was simple: his estimation was good, the team was lazy.
