This year’s winners include an Economics Prize awarded to the executives of Icelandic banks “for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy” and a Peace Prize awarded to the scientists of Bern, Switzerland (the city where Albert Einstein devised his Theory of Relativity, no less) who discovered full bottles of beer do less damage in a bar fight than empty ones.
That’s right, not even China wants Hummer. Ouch. (via The Null Device)
The rather interesting blog The Map Scroll has a post on Why We’re Fucked, that is, the world’s humungously uneven Balances of Trade.
You already know the United States owes a lot, China is owed a lot, however the true story lies here, in a per-capita account balance map. Americans and Australians, still not surprisingly, consume a real lot more than they can afford, but who else? Iceland, also not surprisingly is a black hole of deficit, but then come Greece, Spain and good old Portugal. Whaa? Us Portuguese spending far more than we can? No way, I’m sure we earned all those German automobiles with hard labour!
N’o Procrastinador Profissional lanço-me contra o fenómeno do trabalho não remunerado ‘oferecido’ aos licenciados.
- A rant against the no-pay internships that constitute 80% of job ‘offers’ for young people with college degrees here in Portugal. You can attempt to read it. It’ll seem funny even though it isn’t.
The Boston Globe’s Scenes from the Recession photo gallery. The above image, by Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters, is of an abandoned construction site in Warsaw, Poland, but it could well be of an abandoned site in northern Portugal - an uncannily similar scenario.
