makin me want to go full carnivore for a while

you're doing the Lord's work

Yes, it’s cancer - metastasizing using fiat sugar as fuel

I’m interested to know what any energy-industry people might think of this, pros and cons.

Yup

I just started an account to post regularly about money and economics topics. Follow if you want to get better educated about that.

In an ideal free world, all licensing would be abolished. It is nothing more than a government granted monopoly given to keep competitors out. Even in something so important as medical care it does more harm than good.

The fact that in recent history it has morphed into not only a monopoly privilege, but a censoring mechanism, is just another reason why it should never have been started in the first place 

I agree. The reason that bitcoin is so transformational is that it will allow the world to get back to having a standard non-debasing measurement of value so that the all-important price system can allow economic calculation to finally actually be efficient. 

The Fiat dollars flooding the world over the last 50 to 100 years have distorted the market and caused misallocation of capital in ways that no one can even measure. While we have had technological progress during that time, just imagine how much more progress we would’ve had if the progress had been built upon a substrate of sound money, it’s crazy to think about 

They currently have power, and therefore think that they are unassailable in their correctness. But hundreds of years of economic scholarship, which they ignore, reveals them to be simpletons.

They press the same debasement button on the keyboard of their economic power over and over again, not knowing the repercussions of what they’re doing other than that it’s keeping them in power and able to do whatever they want. And they don’t even realize that they are actively destroying civilization.

They are a self-important cancer trying to maintain their power. Humanity needs them displaced and extinct

Thanks Jeff - I just started an account teaching austrian economics and the rational moral case for freedom; I am trying to provide the change I wish to see in the world

Why study economics? isn't it just boring crap for the nerds in college? No!

Economics is the science of human action - of how humans interact and form functioning societies and ultimately develop civilizations. Ignorance of it is a major reason for many of the idiotic governmental policies we see today; promoting as they so often do actual anti-civilizational outcomes.

"What makes the science of economics necessary and important is the fact that while human life and well-being depend on the production of wealth, and the production of wealth depends on the division of labor, the division of labor does not exist or function automatically. Its functioning crucially depends on the laws and institutions countries adopt. A country can adopt laws and institutions that make it possible for the division of labor to grow and flourish, as the United States did in the late eighteenth century. Or it can adopt laws and institutions

that prevent the division of labor from growing and flourishing, as is the case in most of the world today, and as was the case everywhere for most of history. Indeed, a country can adopt laws and institutions that cause the division of labor to decline and practically cease to exist." -George Riesman

Their response to this, and the last several, natural disasters has been obviously compromised by corruption and cronyism, all natural consequences of centralization of power into a large bureaucracy.