Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Not according to Kim Kardashian.

Motorola/IBM too, same time period. I talked to the head of their chip division at the time. POWER (not PowerPC) was doing investigation into vertical chips.

Mind you, this guy also told me there would never be a chip faster than 2Ghz due to thermal limits so...yeah.

As holder of the domain aardvark.co.nz I can already feel the benefit.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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Sometimes experimentation is the only thing standing between you and certain death. None of us would be surviving cancer if not for patients being experimented on.

Beyond terminal illnesses, the regulatory burdens should be very high and not lowered because something shiny and new comes along.

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

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Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

Russia is testing nuclear delivery systems like their new "Skyfall" missile. But they're not testing warheads. Now, in fairness, Trump is very old, quite possible senile, and not terribly bright so it's entirely possible that he doesn't understand the difference between Russia testing a missile and Russia testing a bomb. But his order is making news because, as written, it's calling on the United States to resume the live-fire testing of nuclear weapons and we stopped doing that in (off the top of my head) 1992.

If Trump is trying to go tit-for-tat with a rival over nuclear weapons testing it's basically North Korea. China hasn't shot one off since 1996, Russia stopped before us in 1990.

Both China and Russia are suspected of having run clandestine tests in the 2000s but if US intelligence has more than a suspicion they're playing it close to the vest.

Testing of nuclear weapons among the major nuclear powers tapered off with the end of the Cold War and the international norm against testing creates a real disincentive to test, even in well contained, underground scenarios.

Back when testing wasn't so taboo the United States had a HUGE advantage in terms of the measurement and recording of test data. That advantage stemmed from computing advantages which have since ebbed. Normalizing live testing gives Russia and China an opportunity to catch up with that data and modeling advantage consequence free. "The US is testing, so we should too."

Trump isn't leaning into testing because Russia or China told him too -- he's just a vainglorious blowhard who likes the idea of setting off nuclear weapons -- but this nevertheless benefits American adversaries a great deal more than it benefits the United States.

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.

I didn't say I had a problem with it; I was just stating that it's very commonplace and it has nothing to do with 'renter's mentality' as it happened when purchasing a home (this is the 4th home I've purchased in my lifetime).

There are plenty of "retroclones" out there, like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, Dark Dungeons, etc. are just re-implementations of the various OD&D, 1st/2nd edition, Rules Cyclopedia, etc. rulesets, all downloadable.

I'm not aware of the newer stuff (3rd ed or newer, I guess they are not 'retro' enough.), but the older stuff is good enough to get the framework for interesting play.
There's also Dungeon Slayers, whose basic rules are downloadable.

A person with a 'management' title has no theoretical limit to the top end of their salary. Everyone else does.