seRioUsLy?

im taking this class on social problems which is ever so depressing, but this is not the point of which i seek to convey. the other day i was reading a chapter entitled: war, terrorism, and the balance of power. the following is an exerpt relating to the monetarial costs of war:

"Each dollar bill is about 6 inches long. If you laid a million of them end to end, you would just about cover the distance from Los Angeles to San Diego. A billion dollar bills would take you around the equator four times. If you laid the dollar bills of today's defense budget end to end, they would circle the earth more than 1,800 times!" (Henslin, 2008)

upon further pondering of the above information my thoughts were not on the atrocities that this paragraph contains but were instead centered around the question of who in the world has the time to come up with facts like these? i mean textbooks are drenched with datum such as this that have to take so much time just to come up with a way to frame it. who does this? is there like a paid position, perhaps entitled "fact framer" or something in which the job description is merely to come up with crazy ideas with which to relay information? i mean, who gets the final word in the above mentioned paragraph on whether to stretch the dollar bills around the earth or to the moon and bacK? and why couldn't they have painted a word picture with quarters? furthermore, if there is a specific job such as this out there, what qualifies you to attain it? do you have to have a math background? or a creative background? perhaps physics? i don't know, it just seems like a complete waste of time to me, which would equate to a complete waste of money if they are actually paying somebody to come up with this stuff. i think that if the authors of this text had simply given the defense budget's total, id have been great with that. it needed no further explanation as far as im concerned and has only led me to an incredible waste of time thinking about these things. it is however, ironic that my opinion centers on what a huge waste of time this seems to be, and yet ive found the time to blog about it...hmmm