first economy i'm very much a first principles kind of guy. so when you boil down an economy you find two main inputs. human labor. and energy. which can come from oil coal natural gas hydro pv wind csp geo etc. energy consumption has stagnated and jobs have disappeared. and guess what. the economy shrunk. obviously things are more complicated than that. but not much. people are leaving the job market because they don't want to sell their labor for the wages currently being offered. many are living off benefits and savings. which is great for as long as you can do it. one way to get people back to work is to take away the benefits. though to get elected you have to promise the opposite. another way is to increase the offered wage. in effect, we need to make businesses hungry for labor like we made people hungry for food. but different. cause for businesses we want to increase the supply of everything except labor. specifically, energy. and here we have two choices: coal and nuclear. until we make a focused effort to expand one or the other, our economy will continue to stagnate. case in point, china brings online a new gigawatt coal burning power plant every 10 days. their economy is growing. ours isn't. course choosing coal means we're willing to tear the tops off of mountains. a known evil. or we're willing to boldly venture into a nuclear world. an unknown evil. and apparently unacceptable. sigh. timmer for president.  ¶ 8:00 AM