Economy Size Geek

i finshed photo shoot for my alumni magazine. We ended up recruiting mini to hold a flash. just another day in accounting

I have been working on a larger post about oil, but it isn’t coming together the way I want it to. So in the interim, I figured I’d share a little piece of history I learned last week.

I was listening to a Russian scholar on NPR. He was asked if Reagan deserved all the credit he has gotten for defeating the Soviets. The scholar said absolutely! The surprising part was how he explained that.

I’m a child of the cold war, I lived in Russia, and spent a lot of time studying its history (though like all history it tended to ignore the most recent stuff). So I assumed that what he meant was - Reagan built up an amazing army and stock pile of weapons. The Soviets were forced to do the same to keep themselves “safe”. The process of spending all that money on guns with little left over for butter (economics reference for 2 points) was the main reason for their down fall - right?

Well this guy had a different answer. He said that Reagan sent top people to Saudi Arabia. This was shortly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Americans knew that the Saudis were unhappy about the invasion, so the Americans suggested a course of action to the Saudis.

Basically, the way the Soviet government was able to buy stuff from other countries was all funded by natural resources. Russia is flush with them - it is the advantage of being such an unbelievable land mass. The big funding source was - you already know where this is going right - oil. So the Americans convinced the Saudis to pump out a lot more oil. This would depress the price and cut the Soviets off from being able to fund anything let alone a war that wasn’t going well. Sure the US would benefit in the process from the cheap oil, but that was just a side effect/bonus.

That is apparently exactly what they did. The scholar said that documents have recently come to light showing where Gorbachev was telling the Politburo - “The treasury is empty”.

First of all - this is just an interesting story in and of itself - but here is the question:

If the Soviets, who were flush with oil, were destroyed by cheap oil - Will the US economy, which doesn’t have any where enough oil, be destroyed by expensive oil?

Ok so I have a VoIP phone. I moved to a new provider from Vonage about 8 months ago. In the process of porting my number over I ended up with two phone numbers. The one I ported is my real number, but the VoIP account came with an original number that I never used.

We started getting really strange calls on that unused number almost immediately. At first, I was forwarding it on to random restaurants (By random I mean local Pappa John’s) mostly because I was annoyed at the constant calls in the middle of the night.

I stopped that and just forwarded everything to voicemail. Since I needed to troubleshoot a login problem today on the phone, I checked the box. 46 messages! Most of them last about 5 seconds, but a couple of them were longer. I don’t know why I find them amusing, but I figured someone else might as well.

The lost daughter

Did she just say Possum Kingdom?

Where do I send that contract?

As a note - these are not the absolute originals - I removed all the last names and phone numbers used in the message. I’d hate for these people to get a bunch of random Internet phone calls - since I know exactly how annoying that is :)

Enjoying a pad thai at thai siam. i got 3 of 4 stars and i’m tearing up right now just sampling it while it cools down.So awesome!

Found a classic indy pinball -playfield looked terrible but the flippers where in great condition

Stellar Pizza in Seattle knows how to serve up a fine pizza. it is all made a little better by a half liter hoegaarden on special and a little smiths on the the sound system

I wasn’t able to hook up with the brewmaster for my day of training, but i did manage to make it to astoria (where they filmed the goonies) for some fine sampling at the public house

Time for a little break from the road trip. What better way to refresh than a big honking strawberry banna bubble tea. i womder if there alcoholic versions of bubble tea out there?