Unless you mean caloric intake in the sense of long-chain starches, etc. that are undigestible by the human body. I'm guessing these don't figure in to the daily calorie allotment.
Yes that's part of what I mean. I'm not sure how the daily calorie allotment is arrived at. Ultimately, I don't think it really matters and I'd assert that, with modern diets and environments, psychological and physiological factors have a far greater influence on weight than mere thermodynamics.
Fiber intake (which ideally should be relatively high) prevents absorption of a percentage of fats and carbohydrates. It suppresses appetite and regulates insulin levels, thus reducing total caloric intake. In a high-fiber diet, up to a fifth of all fats are passed directly through in excrement. Fiber promotes regular bowel movement and thus decreases transit time. The fiber itself is undigestible. The website I was getting the "50%+" figure from was unsourced so it probably exaggerated, but add in fermentation of gases and urine losses, and it's possible for a large portion of caloric intake to pass out of the body undigested.
When I eat less I get very hyper and adrenalized and my productivity goes up. Eat too much and I slow doooowwwnnnnnn
I'm guessing you work in a rather confrontational job. My personal theory is that humans (males especially) have evolved a mechanism whereby glycemic deficit induces psychosis which spurs hunting-like activity that leads to food procurement. Protein-rich foods (the product of hunting) regulate insulin levels and prevent this glycemic shock.
Waking up in the morning after 6-10 hours without food would trigger this mechanism. So those who excel in more confrontational hunter-gatherer type jobs would tend to work better in the morning when they are "hungry".
Attorneys, soldiers, stock-brokers seem to work better in the morning and this correlates with high levels of androgens. Those in more contemplative professions, information technology, the sciences, tend to work better at night and have higher estrogen levels.
Micahel Pollan talks about this stuff, how 100 years ago everybody was thin and it was easy. Now everybody is highly educated and we are all fat. All very counterintuitive.
I'll even go one step further. I imagine the modern western diet of sugars and fats has contributed directly to rise in IQs. Sugars are easily metabolized, high-energy, and go straight into the blood stream. Fats have been shown to have a beneficial effect on the brain. Thinking requires quite a bit of energy. A disproportionate portion of your body heat is expelled through your head. Evolving a stable store of calories, and utilizing easily-metabolized, high-calorie foods, likely helps to maintain mental acuity over the course of humans' extremely long development period.
Weight is a function of dozens of factors, not the least of which are diet, exercise, and genetics. Mental state is a huge factor, since fat storage (likely) evolved as a response to environmental stress. Even little things such as gut bacteria and ambient temperature affect weight. And diet and exercise are not anywhere near as simple as "running X number of minutes a day" or "eating Y number of calories per day". What you eat and how you exercise are much more important than how much or how little.
I haven't done the calculations in a while, but people here have. I seem to recall the results being something on the order of, to provide all the energy for an average city for a few seconds, you would have to lift the equivalent of all the buildings downtown a mile into the air. We use massive amounts of energy.
Note that this is exactly what pumped hydroelectric storage does. But it is extremely limited.
And this is basically a perfect example of how central bank meddling makes us all worse off. Small firms responding to the market and engaging in actual innovation threaten large, established corporations. Stock indexes fall. The "economy" collapses. The FED goes into damage control mode and starts printing money to hand out to their friends: the large, established corporations. Small firms and start-ups don't receive any of this free money. Large firms use this taxpayer money and the inflationary power of the FED to catch up to their smaller competitors by making incremental changes to existing production lines. The small firms go belly-up. Oligopoly is maintained. The newly unemployed die from lack of healthcare or are sent to get shot at in some unnecessary foreign war funded by their taxes and the same banks that put them out of business. Everything goes smoothly until a new generation or flood of immigrants precipitates resource shortages which incentivize the rise of new, innovative start-ups and begins the "business cycle" all over again.
The reason we continue to have economic growth is because people continually invent new products and services for others to buy.
And what theoretical basis would anyone have for assuming this will continue?
There was no market for iPhone UI designers fifty years ago. There's no market now for teledildonics.
Yeah, an expanding market for selling shiny objects and productivity enhancers to overworked young people doesn't equal economic growth. That was kind of my point.
Furthermore, I was speaking specifically to the realities of the US economy. I haven't postulated any conspiracies, just the basic legal framework under which American's work. You're obviously just trying to explain the orthodox theory of economic growth based on technological improvement. Yawn. I'm sure that's completely accurate in a market free of force or fraud, but that's not what anyone means when they speak of the US or even the global economy.
First of all, this is in no way protectionism. Those funds were forcibly extracted from US taxpayers. There's no reason the recipients of government funding shouldn't be limited to US corporations or individuals. The concept of economic protectionism in a free market has no relation to government expenditures of tax monies.
Furthermore, even if it were protectionism, the US has obligations to it's own citizens over foreigners. Protectionism is written right into the US Constitution, and helped to build this country into the world power it is today.
How about in exchange for a lifetime of paying taxes and contributing to the economic productivity of their employer, their country, and the human population in general?
Obviously we're referring to the United States, here. So overall I'd say that the record of US taxpayers and workers over the last, say 80 years is extremely average. The bad parts might have been worse. The good parts could have been better.
The government is obviously a complete disaster. Growing up in a country with the history of the US and supporting such a monstrosity in any way shape or form is a mark against them all. I don't need to go into it. We all lived through the last eight years. Some didn't. Some of us are better off for it. Many aren't. And from what I gather, the last eight years were bad, but not untypical.
Many of their employers have fled the country with valuable capital, sold out American jobs abroad, imploded in fraud, or abandoned capitalism completely and ponied up to the government for support. Many others are fonts of technological improvement and beacons of progress for the world. Overall, the good outweighs the bad. American enterprise is still the engine of the world economy, by hook or by crook.
This is a generation that has brought the US closer to fascism and socialism than almost any other, all while waving flags in an orgy of pseudo-patriotic bullshit that would make the Third Reich blush, and a country that has killed nearly as many of it's own citizens as foreigners. And considering the number of foreigners the US has killed, this is quite a feat. We are become a nation that continually pisses all over the rights of not only the world, but it's own citizens, against which this generation has lifted not one finger. If Freedom dies to thunderous applause, it will be in the US.
America remains a country of unmatched promise and unparalleled idiocy. It would likely be so without the US government or it's corporations. It might even be better. So, all in all, I maintain that being an average citizen working for an average employer supporting an average government in a place like America is a crime worthy of punishment rather than an accomplishment worthy of reward. Doubly so for anyone who expects the sweat of his countrymen for the trouble.
Yet another glaring flaw in his brilliant plan of becoming completely dependent upon others he intends to force to care for him for absolutely no benefit to themselves.
the government has the right to list the citizens, because such listing is (get ready now) "not punitive" because the government isn't the agent causing the listee problems. It's the other citizens, businesses, etc. doing it, you see.
I'm as much of a Laissez-Faire, free-market guy as anyone, but by now most Americans who are paying attention should be thoroughly convinced that corporations are now an arm of the government. It's time someone brought that fact to the attention of the courts.
do you really think the expense to provide medical care for the majority of the elderly is actually going to exceed the cost to feed, clothe and house them?
Healthcare accounts for 17.6% of GDP. Social Security is only 4.4%. So, yes, much much larger, even considering any fictitious "savings" postulated by replacing a free market with government healthcare. In reality, of course, as government subsidizes healthcare more and livespans continue to increase, both the costs of Social Security and healthcare will increase.
By your logic we don't have to worry about any of this because perfectly designed robots will eventually take care of all of us.
Well, we would if there were any incentives for such a thing. Unfortunately there aren't. Government doesn't incentivize technological innovation through full-employment policies and entitlements. It incentivizes pointless make-work and reproduction.
What's even sillier is how you have this image of limitless medical technology in the near future, yet you're convinced that it will only prolong the lives of "worthless" and "drooling" elderly. If these advances are so great, why would we still have these incapacitated elderly?
Because having government provide healthcare by force "in perpetuity" (your words) provides no incentive for improving quality of life, only it's extension.
They could support themselves.
Why would they work at all? They're retired because the elderly already own 90% of everything and receive the majority of government benefits.
Honestly, no, I don't think it's ridiculous for someone in the modern era, in a first world country, to expect health care in perpetuity.
This is seriously one of the most idiotically short-sighted and uninformed comments ever posted to Slashdot. It stands as a testament to why the West is doomed to failure, and completely deserves all the death panels and totalitarian government that is headed our way. I am in absolute awe of the fact that it has been modded up.
With a stable population, which demographers expect to happen within the next century
Social Security was predicated on a growing population, and that didn't happen. It's completely bankrupt and headed for collapse. Who could possibly be dumb enough to build another (even larger) system predicated on the same type of assumption? There's no reason to believe that we can predict population growth over decades, let alone generations. What if fusion turns out to be impractical? Renewable energy hits some fundamental limit? Warfare, terrorism, the singularity? The population could completely collapse and it's completely absurd for literally one of the most selfish generations in the history of mankind to attempt to place the burden of that risk on future generations for the sake of extending their own lives a few extra years.
when you are old and worthless and drooling, are you going to gladly give up your healthcare?
My healthcare? How in the hell could it possibly be considered mine? You're proposing to have the government extract healthcare by force! Medicare recipients who live to be 100, let alone 120, come nowhere close to paying enough to cover the cost of their care. It is not their healthcare to be "taken".
Where on earth did you get the idea that there's no technological limit?
Because there is simply no theoretical limit, and the course of technology is to expand to it's theoretical bounds. Organs can be grown and transplanted. Hormones can be synthesized and replaced. The only limit is available resources and the labor to exploit them. You are the one proposing to extract those resources and that labor by force, so as far as I'm concerned you have the burden of at least proposing some practical limit to that force.
Otherwise you should reasonably expect that force will be met with force and no one's health will be improving because of it.
You don't seem to understand that there is no technological limit to the extension of human life. The practical limit to a person's lifespan then becomes the amount of work and resources that you are able to expropriate in order to support this endeavour.
So, again I ask: where the hell do you expect to find those resources and how do you intend to expropriate them? How many generations do you expect to fall for this ponzi scheme before it collapses?
Why is endless growth impossible... The solar system contains a mind-bogglingly huge amount of resources we could use
When we hit the limit of the resources available on Earth, the global economy will contract and billions of people will die before even a small fraction of them are able to escape to exploit resources available elsewhere in the solar system. Look at Europe prior to settling the Americas: poverty, disease, warfare. It wasn't called the dark ages for nothing.
Republicans have decided that they aren't actually against welfare state or government spending, they just want it to go to religious groups instead of scientists and social workers.
The problem is that the current president has shown no signs of reversing damage that the last administration had done and is starting to add more things which may or may not be bad on top of that.
Personally, I'm just glad that now ideological liberals get to watch in abject horror as Obama whizzes all over their principles in the same way that ideological conservatives spent most of the last eight years cringing at everything that Bush did.
Perhaps it will help to lessen the "us vs. them" mentality and help them to realize that the far left has more in common with the far right than either have with the middling, selfish, incompetent "center".
Honestly, no, I don't think it's ridiculous for someone in the modern era, in a first world country, to expect health care in perpetuity.
Then you are a complete blithering idiot.
Who in God's name do you expect to provide you with this health care? In exchange for what? Where do you expect to find the resources to keep billions of worthless drooling incapacitated elderly people alive indefinitely?
Are you confusing growth in the money supply with growth in economic output or, more accurately, standard of living?
I'm leaning more towards the conclusion that, in the US at least, the reason economists believe we can have exponential growth is that population grows exponentially (as long as basic needs are met) and that there is no longer any true market for labor. Young people are afforded no guaranteed income or capital upon reaching adulthood, and forced to work in order to survive. Between them, the Treasury and the Fed have seized the power to expropriate wealth and devalue the money in order to maintain "full employment" and an unlimited supply of wage slaves. Government rewards reproduction and punishes saving.
Basically, if we scatter our resources to the wind in a futile attempt to maintain growth against the basic laws of physics, that should properly be accounted as a loss. Instead it just creates more jobs for future generations to have to pick up the pieces and "create" new wealth which is then added to the future GDP.
Absolutely true. For the vast majority of students, education in the US is depressingly narrow. I started out in high school taking seven different classes each semester. It was great. By the time I graduated, the state legislature had decided that, since the dumbest students couldn't manage to gain a basic grasp of English and math in twelve years of public schooling, no one should be allowed to take more than four or five. College was even worse. Instead of students merely being ignorant of other subjects, they actively hated the people outside of their major or college.
A few years back I met a credit union manager who didn't understand the concept of continuously compounding interest. I had to explain it to her. She basically didn't believe me that I didn't have an advanced degree in economics or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you mean caloric intake in the sense of long-chain starches, etc. that are undigestible by the human body. I'm guessing these don't figure in to the daily calorie allotment.
Yes that's part of what I mean. I'm not sure how the daily calorie allotment is arrived at. Ultimately, I don't think it really matters and I'd assert that, with modern diets and environments, psychological and physiological factors have a far greater influence on weight than mere thermodynamics.
Fiber intake (which ideally should be relatively high) prevents absorption of a percentage of fats and carbohydrates. It suppresses appetite and regulates insulin levels, thus reducing total caloric intake. In a high-fiber diet, up to a fifth of all fats are passed directly through in excrement. Fiber promotes regular bowel movement and thus decreases transit time. The fiber itself is undigestible. The website I was getting the "50%+" figure from was unsourced so it probably exaggerated, but add in fermentation of gases and urine losses, and it's possible for a large portion of caloric intake to pass out of the body undigested.
http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/documents/MPB/files/calorie.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietary_fiber#Fiber_and_calories
http://www.springboard4health.com/notebook/nutrients_fiber.html
When I eat less I get very hyper and adrenalized and my productivity goes up. Eat too much and I slow doooowwwnnnnnn
I'm guessing you work in a rather confrontational job. My personal theory is that humans (males especially) have evolved a mechanism whereby glycemic deficit induces psychosis which spurs hunting-like activity that leads to food procurement. Protein-rich foods (the product of hunting) regulate insulin levels and prevent this glycemic shock.
Waking up in the morning after 6-10 hours without food would trigger this mechanism. So those who excel in more confrontational hunter-gatherer type jobs would tend to work better in the morning when they are "hungry".
Attorneys, soldiers, stock-brokers seem to work better in the morning and this correlates with high levels of androgens. Those in more contemplative professions, information technology, the sciences, tend to work better at night and have higher estrogen levels.
my guess is that what's going on is that people spend the vast majority of their calories maintaining body temperature.
For a healthy individual, the majority of their caloric intake should end up in the toilet. So, no.
Micahel Pollan talks about this stuff, how 100 years ago everybody was thin and it was easy. Now everybody is highly educated and we are all fat. All very counterintuitive.
I'll even go one step further. I imagine the modern western diet of sugars and fats has contributed directly to rise in IQs. Sugars are easily metabolized, high-energy, and go straight into the blood stream. Fats have been shown to have a beneficial effect on the brain. Thinking requires quite a bit of energy. A disproportionate portion of your body heat is expelled through your head. Evolving a stable store of calories, and utilizing easily-metabolized, high-calorie foods, likely helps to maintain mental acuity over the course of humans' extremely long development period.
Weight is a function of dozens of factors, not the least of which are diet, exercise, and genetics. Mental state is a huge factor, since fat storage (likely) evolved as a response to environmental stress. Even little things such as gut bacteria and ambient temperature affect weight. And diet and exercise are not anywhere near as simple as "running X number of minutes a day" or "eating Y number of calories per day". What you eat and how you exercise are much more important than how much or how little.
I haven't done the calculations in a while, but people here have. I seem to recall the results being something on the order of, to provide all the energy for an average city for a few seconds, you would have to lift the equivalent of all the buildings downtown a mile into the air. We use massive amounts of energy.
Note that this is exactly what pumped hydroelectric storage does. But it is extremely limited.
I see burger flipping in your future.
And this is basically a perfect example of how central bank meddling makes us all worse off. Small firms responding to the market and engaging in actual innovation threaten large, established corporations. Stock indexes fall. The "economy" collapses. The FED goes into damage control mode and starts printing money to hand out to their friends: the large, established corporations. Small firms and start-ups don't receive any of this free money. Large firms use this taxpayer money and the inflationary power of the FED to catch up to their smaller competitors by making incremental changes to existing production lines. The small firms go belly-up. Oligopoly is maintained. The newly unemployed die from lack of healthcare or are sent to get shot at in some unnecessary foreign war funded by their taxes and the same banks that put them out of business. Everything goes smoothly until a new generation or flood of immigrants precipitates resource shortages which incentivize the rise of new, innovative start-ups and begins the "business cycle" all over again.
mentally masturbating about colonizing other bodies.
Never really thought I'd say this, but I'm beginning to think all that porn might be affecting the US scientific community.
The reason we continue to have economic growth is because people continually invent new products and services for others to buy.
And what theoretical basis would anyone have for assuming this will continue?
There was no market for iPhone UI designers fifty years ago. There's no market now for teledildonics.
Yeah, an expanding market for selling shiny objects and productivity enhancers to overworked young people doesn't equal economic growth. That was kind of my point.
Furthermore, I was speaking specifically to the realities of the US economy. I haven't postulated any conspiracies, just the basic legal framework under which American's work. You're obviously just trying to explain the orthodox theory of economic growth based on technological improvement. Yawn. I'm sure that's completely accurate in a market free of force or fraud, but that's not what anyone means when they speak of the US or even the global economy.
First of all, this is in no way protectionism. Those funds were forcibly extracted from US taxpayers. There's no reason the recipients of government funding shouldn't be limited to US corporations or individuals. The concept of economic protectionism in a free market has no relation to government expenditures of tax monies.
Furthermore, even if it were protectionism, the US has obligations to it's own citizens over foreigners. Protectionism is written right into the US Constitution, and helped to build this country into the world power it is today.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/in_the_know_should_the_government
How about in exchange for a lifetime of paying taxes and contributing to the economic productivity of their employer, their country, and the human population in general?
Obviously we're referring to the United States, here. So overall I'd say that the record of US taxpayers and workers over the last, say 80 years is extremely average. The bad parts might have been worse. The good parts could have been better.
The government is obviously a complete disaster. Growing up in a country with the history of the US and supporting such a monstrosity in any way shape or form is a mark against them all. I don't need to go into it. We all lived through the last eight years. Some didn't. Some of us are better off for it. Many aren't. And from what I gather, the last eight years were bad, but not untypical.
Many of their employers have fled the country with valuable capital, sold out American jobs abroad, imploded in fraud, or abandoned capitalism completely and ponied up to the government for support. Many others are fonts of technological improvement and beacons of progress for the world. Overall, the good outweighs the bad. American enterprise is still the engine of the world economy, by hook or by crook.
This is a generation that has brought the US closer to fascism and socialism than almost any other, all while waving flags in an orgy of pseudo-patriotic bullshit that would make the Third Reich blush, and a country that has killed nearly as many of it's own citizens as foreigners. And considering the number of foreigners the US has killed, this is quite a feat. We are become a nation that continually pisses all over the rights of not only the world, but it's own citizens, against which this generation has lifted not one finger. If Freedom dies to thunderous applause, it will be in the US.
America remains a country of unmatched promise and unparalleled idiocy. It would likely be so without the US government or it's corporations. It might even be better. So, all in all, I maintain that being an average citizen working for an average employer supporting an average government in a place like America is a crime worthy of punishment rather than an accomplishment worthy of reward. Doubly so for anyone who expects the sweat of his countrymen for the trouble.
Yet another glaring flaw in his brilliant plan of becoming completely dependent upon others he intends to force to care for him for absolutely no benefit to themselves.
the government has the right to list the citizens, because such listing is (get ready now) "not punitive" because the government isn't the agent causing the listee problems. It's the other citizens, businesses, etc. doing it, you see.
I'm as much of a Laissez-Faire, free-market guy as anyone, but by now most Americans who are paying attention should be thoroughly convinced that corporations are now an arm of the government. It's time someone brought that fact to the attention of the courts.
do you really think the expense to provide medical care for the majority of the elderly is actually going to exceed the cost to feed, clothe and house them?
Healthcare accounts for 17.6% of GDP. Social Security is only 4.4%. So, yes, much much larger, even considering any fictitious "savings" postulated by replacing a free market with government healthcare. In reality, of course, as government subsidizes healthcare more and livespans continue to increase, both the costs of Social Security and healthcare will increase.
By your logic we don't have to worry about any of this because perfectly designed robots will eventually take care of all of us.
Well, we would if there were any incentives for such a thing. Unfortunately there aren't. Government doesn't incentivize technological innovation through full-employment policies and entitlements. It incentivizes pointless make-work and reproduction.
What's even sillier is how you have this image of limitless medical technology in the near future, yet you're convinced that it will only prolong the lives of "worthless" and "drooling" elderly. If these advances are so great, why would we still have these incapacitated elderly?
Because having government provide healthcare by force "in perpetuity" (your words) provides no incentive for improving quality of life, only it's extension.
They could support themselves.
Why would they work at all? They're retired because the elderly already own 90% of everything and receive the majority of government benefits.
Honestly, no, I don't think it's ridiculous for someone in the modern era, in a first world country, to expect health care in perpetuity.
This is seriously one of the most idiotically short-sighted and uninformed comments ever posted to Slashdot. It stands as a testament to why the West is doomed to failure, and completely deserves all the death panels and totalitarian government that is headed our way. I am in absolute awe of the fact that it has been modded up.
With a stable population, which demographers expect to happen within the next century
Social Security was predicated on a growing population, and that didn't happen. It's completely bankrupt and headed for collapse. Who could possibly be dumb enough to build another (even larger) system predicated on the same type of assumption? There's no reason to believe that we can predict population growth over decades, let alone generations. What if fusion turns out to be impractical? Renewable energy hits some fundamental limit? Warfare, terrorism, the singularity? The population could completely collapse and it's completely absurd for literally one of the most selfish generations in the history of mankind to attempt to place the burden of that risk on future generations for the sake of extending their own lives a few extra years.
when you are old and worthless and drooling, are you going to gladly give up your healthcare?
My healthcare? How in the hell could it possibly be considered mine? You're proposing to have the government extract healthcare by force! Medicare recipients who live to be 100, let alone 120, come nowhere close to paying enough to cover the cost of their care. It is not their healthcare to be "taken".
Where on earth did you get the idea that there's no technological limit?
Because there is simply no theoretical limit, and the course of technology is to expand to it's theoretical bounds. Organs can be grown and transplanted. Hormones can be synthesized and replaced. The only limit is available resources and the labor to exploit them. You are the one proposing to extract those resources and that labor by force, so as far as I'm concerned you have the burden of at least proposing some practical limit to that force.
Otherwise you should reasonably expect that force will be met with force and no one's health will be improving because of it.
You don't seem to understand that there is no technological limit to the extension of human life. The practical limit to a person's lifespan then becomes the amount of work and resources that you are able to expropriate in order to support this endeavour.
So, again I ask: where the hell do you expect to find those resources and how do you intend to expropriate them? How many generations do you expect to fall for this ponzi scheme before it collapses?
Why is endless growth impossible... The solar system contains a mind-bogglingly huge amount of resources we could use
When we hit the limit of the resources available on Earth, the global economy will contract and billions of people will die before even a small fraction of them are able to escape to exploit resources available elsewhere in the solar system. Look at Europe prior to settling the Americas: poverty, disease, warfare. It wasn't called the dark ages for nothing.
Republicans have decided that they aren't actually against welfare state or government spending, they just want it to go to religious groups instead of scientists and social workers.
The problem is that the current president has shown no signs of reversing damage that the last administration had done and is starting to add more things which may or may not be bad on top of that.
Personally, I'm just glad that now ideological liberals get to watch in abject horror as Obama whizzes all over their principles in the same way that ideological conservatives spent most of the last eight years cringing at everything that Bush did.
Perhaps it will help to lessen the "us vs. them" mentality and help them to realize that the far left has more in common with the far right than either have with the middling, selfish, incompetent "center".
Honestly, no, I don't think it's ridiculous for someone in the modern era, in a first world country, to expect health care in perpetuity.
Then you are a complete blithering idiot.
Who in God's name do you expect to provide you with this health care? In exchange for what? Where do you expect to find the resources to keep billions of worthless drooling incapacitated elderly people alive indefinitely?
Are you confusing growth in the money supply with growth in economic output or, more accurately, standard of living?
I'm leaning more towards the conclusion that, in the US at least, the reason economists believe we can have exponential growth is that population grows exponentially (as long as basic needs are met) and that there is no longer any true market for labor. Young people are afforded no guaranteed income or capital upon reaching adulthood, and forced to work in order to survive. Between them, the Treasury and the Fed have seized the power to expropriate wealth and devalue the money in order to maintain "full employment" and an unlimited supply of wage slaves. Government rewards reproduction and punishes saving.
Basically, if we scatter our resources to the wind in a futile attempt to maintain growth against the basic laws of physics, that should properly be accounted as a loss. Instead it just creates more jobs for future generations to have to pick up the pieces and "create" new wealth which is then added to the future GDP.
Absolutely true. For the vast majority of students, education in the US is depressingly narrow. I started out in high school taking seven different classes each semester. It was great. By the time I graduated, the state legislature had decided that, since the dumbest students couldn't manage to gain a basic grasp of English and math in twelve years of public schooling, no one should be allowed to take more than four or five. College was even worse. Instead of students merely being ignorant of other subjects, they actively hated the people outside of their major or college.
A few years back I met a credit union manager who didn't understand the concept of continuously compounding interest. I had to explain it to her. She basically didn't believe me that I didn't have an advanced degree in economics or something.