Economic Situation

I am not sure what is going to happen in the next five to ten years, any more than anyone else, but I think that we can all agree that it won't be pretty. I really enjoyed this article that offers useful tips from the economic collapse in Russia. The article was written by Dmitry Orlov, who maintains a blog here: cluborlov.blogspot.com . I'm off to read his blog, get a donkey, and learn to do something useful in an economic crisis. Place your orders for golden candleabras at www.HempelStudios.com.

Teaser quotes:

"All sorts of silly things were happening [in the 1990s]. Professor Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. "

"One final transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that's what the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even when it's loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed it the Wall Street Journal. "

"Justice will once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department."

"Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite annoying nevertheless. A homeowners' association might, say, want give you a ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a hill that you don't own, without first getting a building permit, or some municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic ¬ you know, little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still wear military and police uniforms, for old time's sake, then they probably won't give you that ticket or seek that court order. "