The Sly Cooper Trilogy +/- Thieves in Time

This is incorrect. You just can’t switch manufacturers easily if you’re stable on one. But that’s not a brand vs generic thing, that’s an any manufacturer to any-other manufacturer thing. Same with warfarin, narrow-therapeutic index antiepileptics, etc.

No idea unfortunately, but definitely not to release pressure. You don’t get air in your brain, it’s all fluid. Outside of the hospital, all the drains drain to somewhere internal, usually the abdominal cavity

Am doctor. Outside of very rare and specific causes of headache, no this wouldn’t fix anything, just put you at risk for infections.

Am a doctor, this wasn’t actually a migraine and is not how migraines happen. Shunts are placed for elevated intracranial pressure, which can occur for a number of reasons, and do cause headaches. But it’s a very uncommon cause of headaches and a shunt will not fix your actual migraines or tension headaches.

Cellular insulin resistance is the definition of Type II diabetes

Body-bag ice cooling has actually been pretty common practice across emergency medicine for some time. Legit body bags (clean ones obviously) are purpose built to be watertight and hold an adult human, and they’re easily accessible to hospitals. It’s a very effective and affordable method for controlling hyperthermia

Statistically? Cancer or heart disease.

It’s not that we don’t use mode, there are definitely times mode is used. It’s just that mean (and median as well) contain a lot more useful information about distributions that we often care about. For a normal distribution mean, median, and mode should all be identical. So why do we use mean? Because mathematically, the mean is what underpins the formula for the normal distribution, not median or mode, and when you’re talking about doing math with normal distributions mean is the thing to talk about (along with standard deviation).

We use median a lot too, you probably just don’t hear it called median very often. The median is useful in non-normal distributions, and it defines the 50th percentile, so along with the 25%-ile and 75%-ile you’ve got your quartile distributions. We use these all the time to talk about grades in schools, or when we talk about home prices distributions in a given area, or salaries within a given field.

We use mode too, again just by a different name most of the time. Any time you’ve asked “what’s the most common blank” you’re basically asking for a mode. When we talk about “average” income in a country, we’re usually actually talking about median or mode. Favorite animal? Answered as a mode.

You have to use the right statistical tool for your question: unfortunately English doesn’t do a good job of conveying this without math jargon.

All of my encounters with individuals who feel liberal arts are useless and STEM is the way seem to, at their core, feel that way because of earning potential, and I’ve never heard one of them bash Econ/finance/investment as a career path. But 🤷‍♂️

Then no, I don’t agree with this specific implementation of the system, at least the second half. I do think more productive/effective workers should be compensated more. But being a good engineer does not make you a good manager, and the issues associated with promoting an excelling worker into management (a job requiring a substantially different skill set) are so common there’s a name for their inevitable failure, The Peter Principle

I didn’t say it did, but I am a citizen of the USA and the vast majority of my cultural experience and knowledge, and therefore what I can intelligently comment on, are centered on the US.

Well you need to clarify further then. Are you saying we should make the best scientist the president, or the person with the most aptitude for politics and rule to be president? I don’t see how this is functionally different than what I said.

If I was guessing, in general, I think people who advocate for a pure meritocracy in the USA feel the world should be evaluated in more black and white, objective terms. The financial impact and analytic nature of STEM and finance make it much easier to stratify practitioners “objectively” in comparison to finding, for instance, the “best” photographer. I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy. But I’m no expert.

As a general rule, yes. People who are able to better perform a task should be preferentially allocated towards those tasks. That being said, I think this should be a guiding rule, not a law upon which a society is built.

For one, there should be some accounting for personal preference. No one should be forced to do something by society just because they’re adept at something. I think there is also space within the acceptable performance level of a society for initiatives to relax a meritocracy to some degree to help account for/make up for socioeconomic influences and historical/ongoing systemic discrimination. Meritocracy’s also have to make sure they avoid the application of standardized evaluations at a young age completely determining an individual’s future career prospects. Lastly, and I think this is one of common meritocracy retorhic’s biggest flaws, a person’s intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance, which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.

You’re generalizing a specific phenomenon, and incorrect. Acid-base reactions only very rarely produce gases. The reactions produce heat and water, only in the case of bicarbonate being a base is a gas produced. This is because carbonic acid forms, which spontaneously decays into carbon dioxide. This is not a universal acid-base phenomenon. Soaps should not cause fizzing with vinegar.

It’s so funny because it is criminal activity for regular non-corporation people. Transferring assets to family/hiding assets for the purposes of declaring bankruptcy but not losing the assets is illegal. Functionally identical to what is going on here, except they’re somehow transferring the liability instead of the assets.

I’d be honored to be Mr. Shadowheart

Can’t tell if we’re agreeing or disagreeing. Companies should totally be able to hire on short-term contracts. But it should be clear that it is a temporary contract from the start, not a bait-and-switch from long-term employment to hire-and-fire.

I mean if the only way they’re gonna have jobs is through predatory hiring practices that could leave them fired and without severance, then yeah. Because if the company is planning on hiring these younger workers for the long-haul, then this shouldn’t be a significant change. I think overall national policy should discourage unnecessary high-turnover and predatory hiring. I’m sure there will be situations this is still unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean we have to endorse it by way of law/policy.