Hard times

It seems Dmitry Orlov has written a new book "Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects", in which he predicts "The bailouts you see can be viewed as ever bigger doses of morphine for a patient that's not long for this world".
A year and a half ago, Dmitry and his wife Natasha sold their apartment in Boston and bought a sailboat. The boat is appropriately a sharpie named Hogfish. The idea is to live debt free in Boston Harbor. With solar panels and six months of propane Dmitry and Natasha are living in their self-styled survival capsule. Dmitry, a native Russian has lived in the U.S. for 34 years. A former software engineer, he now works for an advertising agency, walks to work, rides a bike for errands and doesn't own a car or television. Natasha is slowly buying into the idea.
Dmitry expounds on how to survive on the margins, speaking of the bourgeois live-aboard: "She must look like a proper yacht, and not a shanty boat or barge, because she must give coastal property owners no reason to complain to the harbormaster about the ugly thing spoiling their precious view.
"She should give the impression that she is sailed by people of obvious quality and distinction, of the sort that snooty coastal property owners might want to invite over for gin and tonics and to catch up on the goings on in San Tropez."
Dmitry plans to establish a trading network along Lake Champlain for transporting farm goods from Vermont to New York City. He says "We don't have a long wait before sail based transport is the only option."

You go, Dmitry!

In a recent article, by a leading American economics theorist, the producing nations which have economies in the black, such as China and Japan need to increase their consumption to bail out the consumer nations who have squandered their savings. It is their obligation, in fact and we (America) should threaten to impose trade restrictions on those countries "when the economy improves". So, those who save their money and protect their currency owe it to the world economy to spend their savings and save us from our folly? Is this ludicrous, perverse or simply desperate? Or am I the one who's MAD?

Prepare to live aboard, for the flood cometh.


pictured: the dugout canoe Snookwis.
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