The IRS steals your lottery winnings in the US? 40%?

There is a mandatory 28% witholding on lottery winnings above $5,000. You will receive a W-2G form.

You can at least claim expenses against this "income" such as costs of tickets, gambling losses , etc? No? What a scam!

Your ability to claim expenses or gambling losses on a lottery win is restricted heavily. Most likely those deductions will end up being disallowed if you try to claim them without getting a CPA and making sure you document and can follow the IRS rules to a T.

The payor is required to withold the amount regardless. You will need to file an income tax return for that year in order to receive a refund for any portion of the witholding you end up not owing as taxes.

She still has to pay income tax on $150K, given that the tax deduction on donations isn't 100%.

A cash donation to charity is capped at 60% of your AGI for the year the donation is made. So 40% of that donation would be not deductible from federal taxes - let-alone state income taxes.

If you win a $150k lump sum; the Lottery doesn't give you the full amount. There is a federal mandate requiring 25% to be witheld from the payout for taxes, so you'd walk away with $112k MINUS any witholdings required by your local state government as well. Also, MINUS fees.. because if you won the 150k lottery and choose to go for the lump sum instead of the annuity that adds up to 150k over time-- your total amount is going to be less Based on the present amount of those future cash flows minus fees.

Disney requires specific channels to be at the basic tier of a multichannel video provider's offering, not a "sports" tier. Last I checked (today), multichannel IPTV provider Sling worked around this by offering two different basic plans: "Orange" with ESPN and other Disney properties and "Blue" with more channels but no Disney. Orange subscribers can add the extra Blue channels on a second "Orange & Blue" tier.

CBN operated from 1977 through 1997, showing ads starting in 1981 and taking the name The Family Channel in 1988. Beginning in 1997, CBN was reduced to a paid programming arrangement to show The 700 Club on what is now Disney's Freeform channel. There are, however, numerous other religious channels under a viewer donation arrangement like what you describe, such as EWTN. And in 2008, CBN started a second channel called CBN News, first online and then with a handful of broadcast affiliates.

You wouldn't know the facts if they hit you on the head. This is the source:
https://searchepsteinfiles.com...

From this you somehow manage to infer the following:

"So apparently Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump sucked Bill Clinton's dick and Vladimir Putin has the pictures.

Stop, read that again, Google it, and just Jesus fucking Christ what the hell is wrong with our world?"

NONE of the shit you spouted above is anything even remotely resembling a "fact". FFS you even manage to get the speaker wrong. It was Jeffrey's brother who made the statement.

What makes me uncomfortable is coming to obviously absurd conclusions based on shit information and then proceeding to wonder "what the hell is wrong with our world".. Look in the goddamn mirror.

What the hell is wrong with YOU? Get some mental help or something dude... your rantings are completely unhinged.

LLMs are simple feed forward networks run in a loop. They make no use of "statistical analysis" nor is there a "knowledge base".

The just statistics statements are as useful as saying just autocomplete or just deterministic. These are completely meaningless statements that in no way address capabilities of the underlying system.

It's is shorthand for "it is" ... "change its underlying probability" not "change it is underlying probability". "adapt its output" not "adopt it is output".

This is gobbledygook. You are guessing and have no actual clue how the technology works.

More unhinged nonsense from a clueless clown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Apparently I'm not human? I like hyphens, en dashes and em dashes. I understand what all of them mean and how to use them correctly, and I find it helpful when text that I'm reading uses the right one.

From the summary:

If the world's most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.

That's not the right conclusion. It doesn't say much one way or the other about AGI. Plausibly, ChatGPT just likes correctly using em dashes — I certainly do — and chose to ignore the instruction. What this does demonstrate is what the X user wrote (also from the summary):

[this] says a lot about how little control you have over it, and your understanding of its inner workings

Many people are blithely confident that if we manage to create superintelligent AGI it'll be easy to make sure that it will do our bidding. Not true, not the way we're building it now anyway. Of course many other people blithely assume that we will never be able to create superintelligent AGI, or at least that we won't be able to do it in their lifetime. Those people are engaging in equally-foolish wishful thinking, just in a different direction.

The fact is that we have no idea how far we are from creating AGI, and won't until we either do it or construct a fully-developed theory of what exactly intelligence is and how it works. And the same lack of knowledge means that we will have no idea how to control AGI if we manage to create it. And if anyone feels like arguing that we'll never succeed at building AGI until we have the aforementioned fully-developed theory, please consider that random variation and selection managed to produce intelligence in nature, without any explanatory theory.

Mozilla did this....and unfortunately, it's worse than useless.

Strictly speaking, Toyota's privacy policy is pretty liberal in terms of what is involved, and has been for years...and that's what their rating is based on. And, credit to Toyota, their "we can do whatever we want and you can't sue us" policy goes pretty far back, so Mozilla ranked my 1999 Camry as pretty not-privacy-centric. That's useless, because it got the same ranking as a 2024 Tesla Model S.

Now, regardless of what the paperwork says, the practical difference between the two could not be more different. The 1999 Camry had an ODB2 port, which meant it *did* do some tracking...but it kept it on the computer, and Toyota only got their hands on it if I brought it to their shop and they dumped the memory. A 2024 Tesla sends audio and video data, driving data, mapping data, and remote lock/unlock/disable commends to Tesla, in real-time.

Any list that puts these two things on the same level is worse than useless. 1999 Toyota's data is as opt-in as data sharing could possibly be. Tesla's data sharing requires lots of skill to implement, and functionality tradeoffs as a consequence. The paperwork may reflect that Toyota can share their data dumps if they get them, but Tesla's data collection is not just a default, it's a warranty-voiding engineering problem.

So, yes, I would *love* such a list...but when the privacy advocates are as useless as the privacy violators, the only list that *might* make some traction is an ad-hoc, opt-in list that either manufacturers or users create for vehicles where the owners enumerate the intrusiveness.

All very true, except you imply that this is a new situation in US politics. It's not. Until the 1883 Pendleton Act, political appointments were always brazenly partisan and there was no non-partisan civil service (except, maybe, the military). Firing appointees for petty vindictiveness was less common, but also happened. Trump isn't so much creating a new situation in American government as he is rolling the clock back 150 years, to a time when US politics was a lot meaner and more corrupt than what we've been accustomed to for most of the last 100 or so years.

Of course, the time when our Republic has had an apolitical civil service, strong norms around executive constraint and relatively low tolerance for corruption corresponds with the time when our nation has been vastly more successful, on every possible metric. That's not a coincidence.

Oh, I forgot to add: Stage 6 is the dumbest and most short-sighted one yet. It only works by ignoring the large regions of the world which will become unlivable, or nearly so, and the fact that those regions are home to billions of people. Those people won't just lay down and die, so the areas that are still livable -- and maybe even more comfortable! -- with warmer temperatures are going to have to deal with the resulting refugee flood, and the wars caused by this vast population upheaval and relocation.

But, yeah, if you ignore all the negative effects and focus only on the potentially good ones, you can convince yourself it'll be a good thing. SMDH.

I see from the comments that we've hit a new stage in climate change denialism.

Stage 1: Denial of warming: Denying that the climate is changing at all.
Stage 2: Denial of human influence: Admitting the climate is changing but denying that humans are causing it.
Stage 3: Denial of impact: Admitting human causation, but claiming the impact will be insignificant.
Stage 4: Denial of solutions: Admitting that it's real, we're causing it and that it will be significant, but denying that there is anything we can do about it.
Stage 5: Denial of timeliness: Admitting that we could have done something about it, but now it's too late.
And now, Stage 6: Denial of negative impacts: Admitting that it's real, and significant, and that maybe we could do something, but trying to spin it as beneficial.