The traveling salesman needs to leave home first. His quota included too many cities, so he's still waiting for a solution.

I wish AI would take away the jobs of Slashdot editors. AI would be less likely to post duplicate Slashvertisements.

No, not really. I give money to a lot of companies whose business practices I don't particularly like. That's the problem with such a small number of companies having such solid control over a market. If you don't do that, you won't have a cell phone, Internet service, electricity, etc.

Arguably I don't anymore. My mom watches it all the time, so she has a real subscription. I just do an add-on plan. When they took away my basic plan by force, I dropped my personal subscription. And I'm positively giddy every time I think about the fact that that their decision to be excessively greedy pushed me into a plan that pays them even less, gives me better picture quality, and is still ad-free.

I get dinged when I haven't signed out my mom's account at my house on the other side of the country, even though I'm an add-on household for that account.

Also, my mom got dinged when she stayed out here for a while, even though obviously she wasn't using her account from back home. She ended up in a state where she couldn't watch Netflix at all until I got home and helped her fix it.

Their algorithm sucks, and is arguably elder abuse for profit's sake. F**k Netflix.

The original comment made a false claim. You reject the explanation of why it is false by asserting that the actual problem is a different, non-falsifiable, behavior. That's not good-faith behavior.

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.

National Security Letters are not magic fascism tools. They're subpoenas, so they can compel disclosure of "non-content" information -- but not order Nvidia to take actions like adding things to its products.

And if Nvidia refuses, the government cannot "legally just take them over now". They would need to take Nvidia to court, and those proceedings would bring a huge spotlight to the government's requests.

This is why the best thing we can do as a country is steer him towards things like trashing the rose garden and building a ballroom, to distract him from things that would do more damage. To that end, it is critically important to rage against those things so that he'll think he's "owning the libs" by doing them.

The current plan is 2031.

We can probably keep ISS going indefinitely by jettisoning the one failing Russian station component and connecting the remaining pieces together. Alternatively, we can jettison the entire Russian portion of ISS and keep it going even without Russia's permission, because the one "Russian" component that is actually critical was paid for entirely by the United States back when Russia had no money.

The only thing bringing it down is politics.

The annual operating costs for both systems (the one on the satellite and the similar hardware on ISS) are about $15 million total. The cost to launch the satellite was $750 million. You'd have to kill the budget for half a century to pay for the launch. Of course, I have no idea how much of that was the satellite and how much of that was the launch cost, so SpaceX might bring that number down considerably, but still, a $15M budget is lost in the noise of the federal budget, or even NASA's budget.