I suppose this is true in some abstract sense, but not in companies of any reasonable size when it comes to hiring. There are lots of things that are firmly set company-wide, like the type of health plans offered and the company contribution, that are pretty much non-negotiable. Not knowing this makes you look naive or runs the risk of just confusing the hiring manager/HR.
A good example of non-negotiable, while traveling overseas, for one particular company, I was just randomly doing an expense report - and noticed there was a "medical" line-item in my expense report, that I figured I would use for cough-drops that I had purchased. Finance of course went ballistic, because the policy against expensing anything with that line item was absolutely forbidden (which begs the question as to why it was available in the first place).
Here is the thing - the company would have zero difficulty with me asking for a $100/day per diem while traveling for months on end, instead of doing expenses - that was negotiable. But there was absolutely zero chance of getting a $7 bag of cough-drops allowed as a medical-expense. Non-negotiable.
That medical line is not in air quotes. Not "medical", but medical, generally for emergency out-of-pocket expenses associated with urgent medical treatment occurring as a result of the business trip, immediate care due to travel-related or trip-related incidents. Not for pre-existing health, and not for cough-drops.
(The thing is - when doing expense reports - it usually was pretty random which line-item you grabbed for some things - there were two or three categories that might make sense. Not so with that medical line item).
How is this by accident? He was specifically looking for datasets for this purpose and found a good one, then loaded it into a program to find man-made structures.
There's a huge difference between when we know how an organ system behaves in a particular circumstance vs. when we don't. Take, for example, the hepatic function in biogears: https://github.com/BioGearsEngine/core/blob/trunk/projects/b... If you know all the constants and how the liver reacts to a given stimulus, then sure, you don't need to test anything out in vivo. But the reason we do experiments is that we don't know how the liver will react in a given circumstance, so we can't rely on known equations to tell us the answer.
I also think that while there are circumstances where animal models are not helpful, those tend to make the news because they are the exception rather than the rule. There are many, many diseases where animal models were critical for figuring out at least where to look for human disease processes. In addition, a lot of the issues with mouse models are not due to the fact that mice are inherently a poor substitute for humans, but that the models (the specific genes mutated) were a poor mimic of human diseases. For example: "Measurements of gait and grip strength showed that their muscle deficits were in fact mild, and post-mortem examination found that the animals died not of progressive muscle atrophy, but of acute bowel obstruction caused by deterioration of smooth muscles in the gut." [https://www.nature.com/articles/507423a]
> If we had stayed on the Adams curve, we would be consuming 2-5x more energy than we do today. For the US, that means that GDP per capita today would not be the current amount of $65k, but $100k-$200k. It is a catastrophe that we don’t have more energy: We should be much richer.
I'm sorry, what??? Correlation != causation. We have become more energy efficient, and it does not follow at all that cheaper energy will increase our GDP by 2-3x.
It's a bit strange that the author doesn't mention the population projections published in The Lancet a few years ago (https://www.thelancet.com/infographics-do/population-forecas...). They note a lot of the problems with the UN projections, which include the modeling but also include other factors, like the effect of female education. In the few years since their study came out, their numbers appear to be more accurate than the UN approach of assuming fertility ends up at 1.69 everywhere.
I had a strongly negative emotional reaction to the ad. Dwelling on crushing musical instruments, kids' toys, books, sculptures, and then the paint spurting out at the end into a depressing post-industrial warehouse -- something about it really affected me. It's not like I'm debilitated for the rest of the day, but it definitely makes me feel less positively about the ipad advertised.
Matzah lasagne: use Matzah boards as the noodle layers and use veggies, cheese and sauce. Could use meat as an alternative. Need to soak them a bit first or else use a lot of sauce since the boards tend to soak up whatever moisture there is in the pan.
