Energy Deficiency

I'm depressed. And I don't even read the Daily Mail (at least not
unless it has a classic DVD I must have, but will never watch). It
certainly doesn't help that the nature of our work here at Junkk.com
involves trawling through masses of information and opinion from
every worldwide media source imaginable. Thanks to these it becomes a
toss up if we'll get to the end of the day before being consumed by a
climatic catastrophe, bird flu, Iranian nukes or pillaging and raping
footballers.

But my more immediate concerns surround mathematics, and if you end
up agreeing with me by the conclusion of this piece, you can at least
be reassured that I wasn't too terrific at it and hence may be wrong.

I have already broached the inescapable fact that, while the earth's
surface area is finite, there has to be a collision point in the
future between this and the expansion of our population and the
demands of each individual's needs throughout their lifespan.

And it is the individual which again concerns me in playing with my
sums again.

Because there are fewer and fewer people 'making' (I have to put that
in quotes as it's a broad definition) anything useful.

Yet the numbers of people 'feeding' (ditto) off them, and in fact
dependent on them for their existence, is growing exponentially.

So I'm afraid I just can't make the numbers add up.

As an example, some very nice working colleagues in the charitable
sector have just found that money they were promised (and spent) on a
worthy project has basically been sucked into a black hole as a
result of the quango that was to disseminate the money creating a sub-
quango, with the net result (I'm guessing) that a bunch of money was
consumed in the creation of this new entity. Now each quango is
pointing at the other as the reason for the shortfall, with the
result of course of the amount not being honoured.

Where is it going to end? We have legions of folk meeting,
researching, administering, assessing, reviewing, legislating,
policing, fining, taxing, building offices, creating empires, going
to courses, giving time off, ticking boxes, meeting targets, paying
salaries and guaranteeing pensions... but who the heck is going to
pay for this? In the short term I just mean financially, but in the
longer term simply by creating useable resources that these ever-
multiplying drains consume every second?

It doesn't really matter if our various future challenges are natural
or man-made, but we're the only race currently in much of a position
to do anything about them.

So by my assessment of the numbers, the most urgent efficiency we
need to address is in how we deploy our own energies. Make something,
or at least make it better.