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.

Is there much of a difference between limiting your number and duration of breaks, and clocking you in/out while you run to the bathroom?

Yes; there is a huge difference. Limitations on breaks must be reasonable, and employees must be allowed to bathroom when they need to: for example, the employer can't say you don't get to use the bathroom or can only do once or twice per shift. Limits can be applied, but there are limits to the limits. Generally employers are not interested at all as result in accounting for every little break you take as a result and would only start to notice If you are taking several breaks an hour. On the other hand; employees who are sick or have medical conditions such as Crohn's or IBD may need access to the bathrooms several times per hour, and the law is that employers must accommodate.

The key thing to understand is that an hourly rate of pay is for time the employee spends for the employer - Not amount of time the employee is actually completing useful work. If you are required to be available or be somewhere or do something, then you are on employer time, and that includes time you are there waiting for access, or waiting for the employer's process to allow you work, But it also times While you are there that you are on the job but incidentally require a temporary relief or pause due to your human needs and bodily functions.

This is just in the same way that If you are on an assembly line - the employer Can't pay you on a micro-timeclock which only counts up while you are touching a workpiece. The employer has to pay for All time you are occupied and not free to be at home, or wherever you wanted to be due to the employer.

those practices would be in the in the same school as wanting paid for the commute to work.

Employers probably ought to be required to pay for the commute, but due to historical reasons they don't generally
for ordinary employees traveling from home to the office. The employer only has to pay when the commute is between
two work locaations (from one office to another).

Similarly the Employees also get hit again, because the government treats your expenses spent on commuting
that you have to pay to get from home to work and back, as still a part of your income.
It is a bit strange that your commute expense dollars are treated as income by the government, at the same time as those dollars are necessary to earn money, and the employer does not pay you specifically for taking that commute, either.
It's an illogical situation that has been entrenched by traditions.

One of my biggest tools I use is "dreaming the solution". It's a strange thing. I
I've used it to grok solutions to very complex problems. The wife has become used to me bolting upright in bed... "Fixed another problem, hon?" It's not something I control, but it is doing WFH. (half my work is WFH) -- So, if I was paid for time worked, Is that time I needed to be paid for? It isn't an instant process either. It's like running a computer overnight to do computation intensive work.

You technically are not working when at home off hours outside employee supervision just coming up with ideas on your own, unless the employer has written a very distinct arrangement with you into a contract.

The hourly wage system is not really designed for such kind of workers if dreaming the solution is serious work.

A comparable profession would be research professors. Coming up with Ideas and Inspiration in your mind is a necessary precondition to do the work, but you are not paid to come up with ideas in your head --- you are paid for completing and publishing works. Completing the task of turning ideas into a viable Tangible product or solution of some kind is what the system compensates for - not ideas in the head, but the time and ever spent either applying them, communicating, or writing them down.

As for that which you don't write down or document in a tangible form.. How can you even prove work was done if asked to make a showing?

Is it illegal if you are salaried? Or how about if you have to take a dump? Or if I think about a problem while eating dinner?

Salaried exempt is a fixed amount of pay per pay period regardless of the number of hours, so they aren't part of this discussion.
You dont' get extra pay for working more than 40 hours doing the same job as you do during regular hours, And they can't pay you less for working fewer hours one day either.

As a salaried worker.. there is no such thing as "clock in" / "clock out time", so it's an unrelated matter. If your employer reduces your pay for a difference in hours less than not working a whole day, then they lose the Overtime exemption.

Clocking out to use the toilet, sip coffee, answer the phone for non-work items, patting the dog's head.

They cannot. Many retail employers would do this with their minimum wage staff if the law allowed it.
This is also Illegal. Federal law prohibits deducting pay for breaks under 20 minutes; even if the employee was persuaded to agree.
Federal law states that breaks less than 20 minutes must be paid. The break has to exceed 20 minutes before the employer may clock you out.

Employers are required to pay for all time spent on breaks less than 20 minutes. The only thing they can do is track or limit your number and duration of breaks.

Employers: Cannot require clocking out for short breaks: It is illegal to dock pay for breaks under 20 minutes

Employers: Cannot impose unreasonable restrictions. That includes things such as not letting employees use the bathroom, or forcing them to take 20 minutes... locking bathroom doors and actions that cause delays, etc. Must allow restroom use as needed per OSHA rules / ADA rules in some situations. An employer cannot require bathroom breaks to be at scheduled times, either.

Melodramatically complaining about a 0.1ms

You have to know it takes much longer than 0.1ms to receive the SMS text messages containing a token.

Anyway it doesn't matter if it's 0.1ms or 8 hours. Wages are required to include all time spent on work-related activities required by the employer,
and rounding of times can only be performed when the system is both reasonable and does not consistently disfavor the employee.

Consistently shaving off a second of an employee's compensated time per day from when they are working is still an unlawful thing worthy of liquidated damages, and it will add up to numbers given enough days.

if you knew the terms for which you're being paid why did you stick to the job longer than say 4 to 8
Because you need money for you or your family to survive, possibly. And it may take you MUCH longer than 8 weeks to successfully obtain a replacement role that is any better.

It doesn't matter.. It is illegal for the employer. Not the part about waiting for Windows to boot, but failure to start the work clock including the time when the employee's duties start -- which includes all time taken for all necessary preparations required by the employer (including time for security checks, boot, etc), even though it is before they can start taking calls or working on their assigned tasks.

Notable point: If you are a US citizen they might seize the device but you WILL be admitted into the country - a citizen cannot be denied entry.

If you don't cooperate with the search.. In theory you will be allowed entry as a citizen - probably yes - you just may be inside the US but in jail: without the property, and potentially you could possibly be on your way after a few days in detention -- Or possibly longer due to additional things officials are going to find to charge you with in retaliation for said noncooperation.

What if you don not have the codes for let say a company device?

I'm sure you could explain that to customs most likely, And they would probably let you go, but the device stays behind with customs until they can get into it. They will just hold the property as potential contraband until someone from the company calls and provides them access to search the contents of it.

A company with trade secrets does not allow them to be stored at rest on a laptop being flown overseas -- you probably have to acesss your work data through an online user interface.

So a reboot before going to places like customs etc can defeat these tools

Customs would be an example of an agency that does not need something like Celebrite for routine searches.. only in extreme cases would they.

If you power off your phone or reboot it or have it locked going through customs: Customs holds you at the gate and requires you to provide the passcode to unlock the phone or laptop. If you fail to provide the passcode: they seize the device, and you at the border. If they demand to search it: You aren't getting across the border through customs, and you aren't getting yourself or your property released, until you provide them with the keys.

I think the power consumption of your property and its thermal signature would be dead giveaways?

They are not. The thermal signature show you are using power. You can be running ASICs in order to train LLMs. Or you could be switching the ASICs over in your spare time to start cryptomining. And the thermal signatures don't indicate your own activity. The point is those are your own private and activities, and while they should be interested you are powering industrial-scale computing gear.. the actual Output you are getting from crunching the numbers should be irrelevent and not be a legitimate matter for government inquiry.

That would be akin to trying to permit an Industrial facility to manufacture plastic kids toys but not plastic adult toys. I.E. Massive government overreach.

On the other hand; It is understandable if the power infrrastructure cannot handle industry, and therefore All new private industrial facilities will be prohibited; based on how they are operating, and not what the data they produce is going to be used for.

What was actually damaged/destroyed

The damage was Additional revenue-generating opportunities normally enabled by AWS were lost.

For example: If because of an outage your Ecommerce website is down for an hour -- there is a certain volume of sales: Revenue opportunity: which you lose.
You calculate that loss by using past data to estimate your expected revenue during the particular hours of the day times the number of hours that you were down leading to an estimated number and dollar sales volume lost.

Given that the outage was claimed to be in Eastern US, why did I suffer multiple service outages in Idaho?

Clearly bc you used services that dependent on the affected network.

US-EAST-1 outages also have a way of cascading to the other sites, because it's the most populated region with the largest amoutn of resources.
When East-1 has issues.. the other regions will receive a huge volume of additional load. They had EC2 launch issues, and throttled ---- slowed down new launches deliberately; likely because every other customer in the US-East-1 region attempting to deploy instances into other regions due to the outage impacting their east-1 resources. This surge in activity in other regions caused by customers attempting to shift traffic around to get past East-1 outage has a chance of causing major network degradation across all regions.

the correct accusation is: "you shouldn't outsource your critical business infrastructure to a huge megacorp that can survive without you."

Perhaps you should not, but most businesses DID NOT and Will not build a resilient in-house infrastructure that provides nearly the average uptime as AWS.

For example.. 99% of companies' -- even large corporations' internal Email the whole company relies on would typically be on a single MS Exchange 2016 server. You would have a hard drive crash, and the server would be down for days while the backup restores.

Before you start complaining that companies shouldn't outsource critical business Infrastructure... I think you should take a study on what exactly that infrastructure looks like Not outsourced.

The in-house schlop is in general more susceptible to outages, but of course it has the advantrage that your outage will typically not happen at the exact same time as a thousand other corporations' outages.