but the phrasing of "who pays for the increased schooling times?" is a good one. i think "debt" can be a decent way to conceptualize the cost and repayment of training someone. feels evil to say, but viewing people as firms you can invest in and expect returns upon. you know not all loans will be repayed, but hopefully they'll average to a profit. (risk management etc.)

student loans are. a decent example. the government/private enterprise gives money to pay for education, then this is repayed, providing a financial incentive for paying for someone else's longer schooling timelines. firms investing in training can be viewed as an extension of student loans. but then ah, there are countless stories of how debtor/creditor relationships can be exploited. indentured servitude etc. there are a lot of complications coming to mind. also "altruistic" people who give without expectation of repayment. or the divide between like, communal vs individualistic cultures. (individualism, i argue, encourages the formalization of debt, as opposed to a more communal culture where the expectation of repayment is informal.) you could do math on how many people pay vs how many people benefit, who is the biggest stakeholder, etc.

but i am on my lunch break and need to get back to my work. good article tho. good topic to bring up.

truly ab initio methods involve figuring out electronic properties from scratch like ionization energy or bandstructure. the real issue is that we dont have exact relations for the exchange and correlation terms. we can know the kinetic energy and charge screening, but we dont know how the electrons are interacting with each other. generally the xc term is treated as a function of electron density or its gradient (see: lda, gga, meta-gga) but there are so many different ways to approximate that. different models are good for different applications also, like transition metals vs organics. and then theres the issue of basis sets (most people use gaussian basis sets that have been tuned over many years but theres also plane waves and finite element methods) which can also change results. and even once u have a decent approximation of density you can try perturbative methods (GW family, delta scf i count also) to try and improve the approximation. i am rambling and typing this on my phone. essentially yes, but often calculations are a little inaccurate. but more accuracy has a higher computational cost, which makes it hard to run larger simulations. tradeoffs of engineering. hope this was coherent.

i hate rationalists because it's like. you cant logically reason your way out of this one buddy. the system is far too complex for rationalism to work. sometimes its easier to just align with the groupthink and focus on other things you deem more important. hanging out with friends vs spending all day in your room teaching yourself about tribal relations in central africa so you can have your own unique opinions on us foreign policy.