[Peakoil] Great Little line

[Adrian Whitehead]

A great little line from a webpage I was reading...

http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=soviet_lessons

"Soviet money ceased to have value, since there was so little that could be
bought with it, and people still felt skittish around foreign currency.

Luckily, there was a limited supply of another sort of currency available to
us. It was close to the end of Gorbachev's ill-fated anti-alcoholism
campaign, during which vodka was rationed. There was a death in my family,
for which we received a funeral's worth of vodka coupons, which we of course
redeemed right away. What was left of the vodka was placed in the trunk of
the trusty old Lada, and off we went. Each half-liter bottle of vodka was
exchanged for ten liters of gasoline, giving vodka far greater effective
energy density than rocket fuel.

There is a lesson here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should
stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical
resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and
relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash."

 
Adrian Whitehead
Project Officer
Conservation Council of the SE Region and Canberra
P: 6247 7808
F: 6248 5343
M: 0417 545 846