The idea of rail is that you have rail that goes near your home so you can access it by non-motorised means of transport. Erm.. you know, walking.

However conservatives did the opposite. Closing most of the local rail lines down (then privatised the rail companies). There's a reason so many streets in Britain are called "Beechings Close", it refers to the Beeching report which started the consolidation of rail lines.

That being said, I doubt this will get very far in the UK or Europe as we tend not to let techbros do whatever they want regardless of laws or consequences. Especially for the UK where most local streets have no centre line and parked cars on both sides. Autonomous cars seem to be failing on nice, wide, straight, well marked American roads, I'm already laughing at the idea of them getting stuck in the first pothole they encounter on your average British residential street.

Official response from Techbros:

lololololololololololololololol.... we'll pay you like we pay taxes.

Message ends.

Erm... you're half right...

It is a horribly overused marketing buzzword but it does have a meaning. AAA is a financial term more than a gaming one, it refers to lowest possible credit risk so when applied to projects tends to indicate the highest possible budget. In layman's terms, AAA games had a metric shitload (0.76 imperial fucktons) of money thrown at them. It isn't an indication of product quality, only project budget although marketers like to pretend that it somehow means that it means the game is a crack glazed hotcake and will sell like it... Which we've seen many AAA games fail to do in recent days.

Marketers have tried to introduce "AAAA" but no-one has listened except to make crass jokes like "fuck it, we're going straight to 9 A's" (and I do love a well crafted crass joke).

Quite, it won't be long before someone figures out how to fake it.

The answer to cheating has always been a moderated server with a decent mod. Cheating is a social problem rather than a technological one, so it requires a social solution.

Companies like EA, Take2, et al. won't care that this will be broken in short order as they don't really care about supporting a game beyond the time it takes to release the next iteration.

And it's too late.

My current gaming boxen is coming up to 5 years old, so I'm using Man Maths to justify building a new one early in the new year. With the new boxen I have two emphasis, 1. at least 4 M2 slots as that seems to be where cheap storage is going and 2. Linux compatibility. Most, if not all of my current steam Library is gold on Linux and/or Steam Deck. So that just leaves the games I have on GOG and my ancient non-steam games. Steams compatbility layer seems pretty good so that means my next gaming boxen is going to be configured for dual boot _with_ an emphasis on Linux.

Had you said this when I was building my last gaming boxen, I'd have called you mad (well actually wishful thinking).

VPNs, browser extensions and the fact the websites just don't care means that it's all a bit pointless.

Yep, this will just make more business flee the US as the political situation deteriorates.

However enough people still believe that people other than Americans will somehow be paying for this. During the last set of Tarrifs before TACO chickened out, we had American customers asking if we'd adsorb the 15% tariff and were surprised to here "LoL, no" in a stuffy British accent (we also have a Glaswegian who can produce something even more colourful). He didn't bother storming off in a huff as he knew the only other places to get these items were from the EU (specifically Belgium or Germany, amazingly enough things we export from the UK tend to be made in other developed economies) which were subject to even higher tariffs

BTW, the UK was subject to an additional 10% tariff, that was on top of the 5% duties that Americans already pay for this particular product.

If enough people resist, they'll change the laws to make resistance a crime.

The US is already in a police state as enough Americans have accepted concentration camps, illegal detention, illegal deportation, deployment of the national guard against protesters, et al. Nor the arrest warrants for political opponents in Texas. Hell, you've got enough people defending this shit.

It's a bit late for civil resistance as they'll just demonise you as agitators on television (which they control, having cancelled Colbert) and say that enforcement was justified. Denounce anyone against them for their lack of patriotism.

You're pretty much at the point where you're hoping for a military coup as that seems to be the most bloodless option. Maybe a cabal of military officers will decide the constitution is more important than following orders.

First they came for the illegals, but I did not speak out because I wasn't an illegal.
Then they came for the immigrants, but I did not speak out because I wasn't an immigrant.
Then they came for the Liberals, but I did not speak out because I wasn't a Liberal.
Then they came for the Democrats, but I did not speak out because I wasn't a democrat. Then they came for me and there was no-one left to speak out for me.

What will happen first is that things in the US will get expensive. Long before the shortages, shortages will be a result of people not being able to afford medication, food and fuel.

This will be good for the 1% in the short term but whilst wealth does not "trickle down", poverty certainly "trickles up". Ironic that the huge advantage early US industrialists had over Europeans is that they knew that they needed their workers to be able to afford to buy what they produced in order to make money.

And Britain has to avoid the same thing with Nigel Farage.

If we cant avoid that horrible frog-faced pitfall we, as a nation, deserve to die.

Elemental lithium does, but LiC5H3N2O4 is a salt, and, as I understand it, is not particularly reactive.

My chemistry knowledge is almost nonexistent, so all of this could be wrong, but here's what I think: Mercury is less reactive than lithium, so it won't take its place in a single-replacement reaction. Mercury is insoluble, so no double replacement, either. It's a salt, so no acid-base reaction. So unless a lithium salt somehow catalyzes oxidation of the elemental mercury, I wouldn't expect any reaction.

But again, my chemistry knowledge is almost nonexistent, and this is from my skimming a few Wikipedia articles, so I could be very wrong.

Of course, we're talking about the intersection of chemistry and biology here, so there's always some possibility that some cells in the brain might release some other chemical that reacts with the salt and releases elemental lithium for use by the brain, and that the resulting elemental lithium could the form an amalgam with the mercury and effectively aid in chelating that mercury, but I wouldn't think the odds are all that great.

The odds are way better that it is some fascinating situation where whatever cells are responsible for removing the plaques become less effective without an adequate supply of lithium, and the plaques then end up sequestering the lithium, creating a vicious circle.

And even that is probably less likely than that the sequestration-induced lithium shortage merely exacerbates the mental decline caused by the shortage of properly folded amyloid proteins, and the reduction in plaque in the mouse model has some other root cause related to how they produced Alzheimer's-like symptoms in the mice, in which case this treatment would only slow the progression in humans, rather than reversing it.

Large-scale double-blind human studies are the only way to really know for sure.

My recollection is that the amount of mis-folded amyloid isn't a strong indicator of cognitive function; rather the existence of adequate amounts of properly folded protein is. If you're producing more, then you can have more of the bad stuff and still have enough of the good stuff to feed your neurons, basically. That said, larger amounts of mis-folded amyloid probably increases the rate at which the normal amyloid protein misfolds, assuming this is a prion situation, so there's likely some correlation there, but it still ends up being dependent also on the rate of production.

How lithium fits into that framework, I can't imagine, unless maybe lithium is somehow both required for the machinery to clear out the plaque and being sequestered by the plaque.

Wait a minute. I just noticed something in the abstract that I missed on the first reading. They showed a reduction in plaques. The 2015 study showed no impact on CNS biomarkers. So apparently the specific lithium salt chosen might actually be critically important (or that effect might happen only in mice, or the presence of the biomarkers may not be correlated with the amount of plaque in the way that one might assume, or...).

I'm looking at the abstract of an article in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease from 2015 that did a meta-analysis of placebo-controlled human trials of lithium in Alzheimer's patients that showed a statistically significant reduction in cognitive decline (albeit only barely significant at the 95% CI) from lithium supplementation, with approximately zero AEs.

It's not surprising that a mouse model study would support what human studies have already demonstrated, though I guess this is interesting in that it is presumably a larger study and more controlled than any meta-analysis would be.

One neat thing about this story is that the lithium salt that they chose (chosen because of its comparatively weak amyloid binding) is lithium orotate, which is commonly available over the counter as a dietary supplement from a rather large number of companies. If you have Alzheimer's and want to try it, there's literally nothing stopping you.

Disagree. Conservatism can be twisted into that by people with an agenda, but the core principles are none of those things.

For example, in theory, having a government body like DOGE is potentially a fiscally conservative idea that would have been a good idea if implemented correctly by someone apolitical, rather than incompetently by someone with a political agenda. Such an organization could:

• interview people across the government to figure out shared needs that can be solved by a single vendor with a larger contract instead of multiple vendors with lots of smaller contracts
• figure out areas where increased automation can free people up to do more useful work and hire companies to build that automation
• hire companies to build new cross-functionally useful technologies that can cut costs across multiple departments (e.g. designing new shared HR and payroll systems)
• commission studies on government social programs to determine which ones are cost-effective and which ones are giant money pits
• propose alternatives that serve the same needs, but are expected to provide better results per dollar spent
• commission studies on changes to tax code to determine how effective they are at achieving the desired fiscal goals, and recommend changes that would increase revenue while minimizing the negative impact (e.g. increasing capital gains taxes above some annual threshold)
• dig deeply into government contracts to determine whether money is being spent effectively, providing a truly independent analysis to limit departments' ability to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy and throw good money after bad at failed projects

And so on. Note how exactly none of these things is what DOGE is actually doing, and exactly none of these things has anything to do with hate or cutting services or making things worse for anyone. They're also a long way from anything that either party is trying to do.

More to the point, if done correctly, reducing waste and bloat can make everyone's lives better by freeing up resources that are being squandered on failed approaches that folks are afraid to touch out of fear of being branded racist, anti-science, not caring about the elderly, or hating whatever group those failed approaches were trying unsuccessfully to help, so that those resources can instead be spent on programs that *actually* help those same groups.

But doing that requires an entirely apolitical group that is largely immune to meddling from Congress or the leaders of the executive branch. It almost needs to be a separate branch of government entirely.

Those are the sorts of things that I think of when I think of true fiscal conservatism — spending money to find inefficiency and improve it, spending money to understand problems of government in a cross-cutting fashion and fix them, etc. in an effort to reduce unnecessary spending that takes money away from doing other things. The hard part is preventing "We don't like this, so it is waste" sorts of thinking, or "These programs don't benefit us, so they're wasteful", or other hallmarks of faux conservatism.

Meh. Fiscal conservatism can make sense up to a point. For example, charging high enough taxes to not run up the debt is a fiscal conservative position that makes sense.

Unfortunately, what we're seeing is the political right using conservativism to mean "targeted cuts to things that Democrats like", which is fiscally irresponsible, because the budget becomes a yo-yo, states don't trust the federal government to pay its bills, budgets get blocked because nobody can agree on anything, credit ratings go in the toilet which makes debt cost more to incur, etc.

The real fundamental flaw is that Congress even has the power to do this. Congress should either have no power to specify the budget for specific functions of an area of government (granting money in bulk to a department and letting the department decide how to spend it without interference) or should be required to grant money to specific programs in separate bills, voted on independently (not as part of a giant budget bill).

And for specifically funded items, the bills should guarantee automatic funding increases each year, and define a minimum wind-down period as a percentage of the program's duration, e.g. 20% of the program's duration or so, rounded up to the nearest year, so that a program that has been around for under 3 years would have a one-year wind-down period, a program around for 58 years (CPB) would have a 12-year wind-down period, etc.

It is absolutely reckless and fiscally irresponsible to allow Congress to suddenly shut down government programs that have been around for decades, regardless of the reasons for doing so, regardless of what the program is, regardless of literally any other factors, and we badly need a constitutional amendment to prevent Congress from ever being able to do things like that in the future.