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.

I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

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.

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

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.

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

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?

Fuck no, and Fuck you. the only thing that turns one misogynistic is a low iq.

That's true, but if you understand their goal, you can, sometimes use it appropriately to achieve you're aims. You just have to understand their thought process and run books.

Yeah it sucks, you want to be mad at HR, but they didn't decide the policies. So you want to get mad at your boss, but they direct you back to HR. Its a classic, no one is responsible for unpopular things tactic.

You know they won't spring for the good chatbots. I just did a couple chat bot sessions for support, and they were awful. Can't disclose what I said without doxing myself. But they literally have one job, but they don't know how to do that. Instead they want to direct you to sales. which makes as much sense as trying to boil the ocean to bake a potato.