I’m not sure I quite understand your point, but what I do understand seems like the exact opposite of my experience.

We were required to fire a certain number of rounds through the gun I worked on to satisfy our training requirements. Let’s say it was 100/year.

We planned to fire 20 per quarter in the first 3 quarters of the year and then the remaining 40 as close to the end of the year as possible.

That way if we actually needed to use the gun for something “real” we were less likely to go over the allotted amount.

In fact, in all the budgets we had, never going over was hugely important. So was never being under which is maybe what you are referencing. In all of our budgets we would always pinch every possible penny for the first 3 quarters and then make sure to spend exactly 100% of the budget in the last few months of the year.

But this phenomenon isn’t exactly unique to government.

This is how it worked when I was in the military. We had an annual requirement to train anyways and any time we did something like this (we sunk an abandoned fishing vessel) we counted it as training. So sure, it seemed expensive when analyzed the way this post did it, but that money was already allocated and spent and not doing it wasn’t going to save money.

See, it the “up” part in the first sentence you have all wrong. There is no up. Showing the earth with the North Pole as up is merely convention. It would be just as correct to flip it over and have the South Pole at the top (as viewed while standing on earth). We put the solar system “flat” with the planets orbiting in the direction they do only as convention, there is no up or down in the absence of gravity.

Think of it like this. Up is always pointing away from the center of earth. Down is always pointing towards the center.

Yep, my takeaway was anything smaller than a hamster you can just toss in the freezer and later revive in a microwave and anything bigger you can’t. So single cells or small groups of cells seems pretty trivial.