I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

I can't think of a single other country that claims to be civilised that has a tax code so complicated you need vast amounts of software and a high-power computer just to file what is properly owed.

TLDR version: The system is engineered to be too complex for humans, which is the mark of a very very badly designed system that is suboptimal, inefficient, expensive, and useless.

Let's pretend for a moment that you've a tax system that taxes the nth dollar at the nth point along a particular curve. We can argue about which curve is approporiate some other time, my own opinion is that the more you earn, the more tax you should pay on what you earn. However, not everyone agrees with that, so let's keep it nice and generic and say that it's "some curve" (which Libertarians can define as a straight line if they absolutely want). You now don't have to adjust anything, ever. The employer notifies the IRS that $X was earned, the computer their end performs a definite integral between N (the top of the curve at the last point you paid tax) and N+X, and informs the employer that N+X is the money owed for that interval.

Nobody actually does it this way, at the moment, but that's beside the point. We need to be able to define what the minimum necessary level of complexity is before we can identify how far we are from it. The above amount has no exemptions, but honestly, trying to coerce people to spend money in particular ways isn't particuarly effective, especially if you then need a computer to work through the form because you can't understand what behaviours would actually influence the tax. If nobody (other than the very rich) have the time, energy, or motivation to find out how they're supposed to be being guided, then they're effectively unguided and you're better off with a simple system that simply taxes less in the early amounts.

This, then, is as simple as a tax system can get - one calculation per amount earned, with no forms and no tax software needed.

It does mean that, for middle-income and above, the paycheck will vary with time, but if you know how much you're going to earn in a year then you know what each paycheck will have in it. This requires a small Excel macro to calculate, not an expensive software package that mysteriously needs updating continuously, and if you're any good at money management, then it really really doesn't matter. If you aren't, then it still doesn't matter, because you'd still not cope with the existing system anyway.

In practice, it's not likely any country would actually implement a system this simple, because the rich would complain like anything and it's hard to win elections if the rich are paying your opponent and not you. But we now have a metric.

The UK system, which doesn't require the filling out of vast numbers of forms, is not quite this level of simple, but it's not horribly complicated. The difference between theoretical and actual is not great, but it's tolerable. If anyone wants to use the theoretical and derive an actual score for the UK system, they're welcome to do so. I'd be interested to see it.

The US, who left the UK for tax reasons (or was that Hotblack Desiato, I get them confused) has a much much more complex system. I'd say needlessly complicated, but it's fairly obvious it's complicated precisely to make those who are money-stressed and time-stressed pay more than they technically owe, and those who are rich and can afford accountants for other reasons pay less. Again, if anyone wants to produce a score, I'd be interested to see it.

You don't need to simulate all that, at least initially. Scan in the brains of people who are at extremely high risk of stroke or other brain damage. If one of them suffers a lethal stroke, but their body is otherwise fine, you HAVE a full set of senses. You just need to install a way of multiplexing/demultiplexing the data from those senses and muscles, and have a radio feed - WiFi 7 should have adequate capacity.

Yes, this is very scifiish, but at this point, so is scanning in a whole brain. If you have the technology to do that, you've the technology to set up a radio feed.

The Koch Brothers paid a bunch of scientists to prove the figures being released by the IPCC and clinate scientists wrong. The scientists they paid concluded (in direct contradiction to the argument that scientists say what they're paid to say) that the figures were broadly correct, and that the average planetary temperature was the figure stated.

My recommendation would be to look for the papers from those scientists, because those are the papers that we know in advance were written by scientists determined to prove the figures wrong and failed to do so, and therefore will give the most information on how the figures are determined and how much data is involved, along with the clearest, most reasoned, arguments as to why the figures cannot actually be wrong.

...Then there's an inefficiency in the design.

You should store in the primary database in the most compressed, compact form you can that can still be accessed in reasonable time. Tokenise as well, if it'll help.

The customer should never be accessing the primary database, that's a security risk, the customer should access through a decompressed subset of the main database which is operating as a cache. Since it is a cache, it will automagically not contain any poorly-selling item or item without inventory, and the time overheads for accessing stuff nobody buys won't impact anything.

If you insist on purging, there should then be a secondary database that contains items that are being considered for purge as never having reached the cache in X number of years. This should be heavily compressed, but where you can still search for a specific record, again through a token, not a string, then add a method by which customers can put in a request for the item. If there's still no demand after a second time-out is reached, sure, delete it. If the threat of a purge leads to interest, then pull it back into primary. It still won't take up much space, because it's still somewhat compressed unless demand actually holds it in the cache.

This method:

(a) Reduces space the system needs, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon
(b) Purges items the system doesn't need, as dictated by the customer and not by Amazon

The customers will then drive what is in the marketplace, so the customers decide how much data space they're willing to pay for (since that will obviously impact price).

If Amazon actually believe in that whole marketplace gumph, then they should have the marketplace drive the system. If they don't actually believe in the marketplace, then they should state so, clearly and precisely, rather than pretend to be one. But I rather suspect that might impact how people see them.

Don't buy Apple products.

It amazes me how some companies have brainwashed their customer base so hard that they can repeatedly screw them over yet customers will keep buying more. Apple is that.

Bizarrely, it seems a lot of legal and government offices in the US still accept a FAXed copy of an original, but not a scanned/emailed one.

Something that quick won't be from random mutations of coding genes, but it's entirely believable for genes that aren't considered coding but which control coding genes. It would also be believable for epigenetic markers.

So there's quite a few ways you can get extremely rapid change. I'm curious as to which mechanism is used - it might not be either of those I suggested, either.

I didn't see any outrage. If you need to see outrage that desperately, seek help.

Sorry I should have been more explicit:
The only reason I even keep a windows partition around is for gaming,
Everything else already gets done in Linux (actual Linux not WSL) by way of dual-booting at home, and because my work PC has been Linux-only for years, so I already have it covered, thanks.

The only reason i even keep windows around is for gaming,
Everything else already gets done in Linux (actual Linux not WSL) by way of dual-booting.
But with steam doing an increasingly good job with Proton, and Microsoft forcing increasingly clueless shit like this and privacy-raping shit like Recall on users, I'm finally 101% done with them.

Dude are you actually accusing me of being an AI?

Yet another reason to finally delete my windows partition and go 100% Linux only.

Theyâ(TM)re just making themselves irrelevant. There are plenty of other equally good or better virtualisation options out there, including free ones, especially if you're on Linux.