You just know that some dufus at the gym would bring a 10kg steel dumbbell into the MRI room and ruin things for everyone.

No.. this would have to be a locked restricted room where only MRI techs and their clients may access.
However; the equipment is A. Very expensive. Your Gymn is not likely to buy it.

B. Due to the expense.. It is likely that your nearest local Hospitals will guarantee you are not able to obtain the necessary permits in order to protect their monopoly. They've got a huge investment to protect, And they actually have to successfully sell MRIs at those rates to make the return on that investment. Can't have some random additional facility installing one nearby. Guaranteed it would be blocked by the government due to the availability of another provider's location and the lack of public necessity for yours.

If you ban SUVs people will drive converted full sized vans and large cab pickup trucks.

My suggestion is not ban SUVs entirely, but require additional permitting heavily discouraging of consumer use. Restrict who can drive them when and where at what speed, and what for purpose. You may need an expensive permit, And take additional training to certify to a higher class large vehicle driver's license, for example.

Full sized vans and large cab pickups for personal use outside licensed work trucks or delivery vehicles etc would carry same restrictions tied to vehicle size and risk levels.

To deal with the affordability crisis. It doesn't work because if you get hit in one of those by an American SUV you might as well have gotten hit on a motorcycle.

That's a reason to ban "American SUVs" not the Kai cars. One of the flaws in the crash safety rating for personal passenger vehicles is we are only considering how well vehicles protect their passengers, and not how much risk vehicles pose to other vehicles in a crash. We should be banning or limiting the speeds and restricting highway use of personal vehicles that are overweight or pose a danger.

It's a lot of work, and Japanese has a lot of characters.

That they probably use a small subset of, And can have a bot scan their game's text assets for all characters presented in a certain font
and build a font with only the ones used in their existing program.

I don't think UK qualifies as a Western Democracy anymore.

It's historically a representative democracy, but the representation has been corrupted by outside influence, including political parties,
and has thus fallen to despotism.

for the current year but can be carried over for deductions over five years, so the 40% isn't just lost.

Sure.. There are carryover credits for future taxes, but If your income's about average on years you don't win the lottery - say about $20,000 a year for years you don't win the lottery. Your max deduction is only about 8K a year. The charitable deductions can't bring your tax bill below zero, And In that case you will not have nearly enough tax liability over the next 5 years to offset 90K in lost deductions. It is also possible their regular income is so low they Don't ordinarily owe any income taxes every year, or don't owe much, In which case all the deduction is Lost. You do lose the money, unless you are rich and thus have sufficient Income where you would owe tax to be able to take full advantage of those deductions.

It doesn't exactly make sense.. If it's a hardware CPU feature, then you could embed the instructions in your program.

System firmware's function is to manage BIOS components such as peripheral addons and system boot; firmware does not have control over CPU offloads or what CPU Opcodes or instructions can be found in your program code that the CPU will read from your program's memory during the fetch cycle.

The only way they could cause you troubles is if the CPU vendor has specially added some system register flag to the chip allowing your operating system to disable instructions from system mode. But why should Intel want to be complicit in this scheme?

Most likely it is some dumb shit such as possibly shipping Windows drivers or system tables in the UEFI that hide availability of features.

      Also.. if It's a flagship feature of the CPU, and they advertise their product as having that CPU where Intel markets those features, Then it seems like this should be considered a defect under warranty which cannot be overcome without a prominent Disclosure in the product advertising that major Advertised features of the Advertised CPU are Removed and not included..

transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”

I would call this a shit move. Essentially the only reason I'd buy a DiskStation over a cheap-o Mybook NAS or one-off USB disks plugged into the router would be for that Transcoding support. Just bc video codec support is widespread does Not mean all your playback devices support it. The whole point of the feature is to provide interoperability, and I won't be buying any NAS hardware that cannot transcode to all modern codecs.

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.