Cities and disease

Continuing on my last post, I have more info on Venezuela. Recently economist and credit agencies have "diagnosed" that this Oil rich country is suffering from Dutch disease. Economist and disease doesn't go together, right? Apparently Dutch disease is one of the crazy misnomers that I came across, which actually is an economic phenomenon. A country suffers from Dutch disease when large quantity of natural resource is discovered which leads to industries related to this resource to flourish. At the same time other economic activities like agriculture and manufacturing are affected badly. This phenomenon was names so because the discovery of giant Groningen gas field in the Netherlands lead to expansion of oil and gas industry at the cost of other sectors especially manufacturing. Such a scenario leads to increased dependence by the country on single sector and any volatility related to this sector will greatly impact this country. Venezuela, which gets about 95% of its export income from petroleum, is severely affected by plunging oil price in last one year. As a desperate measure the president bit the bullet by raising auto-fuel price by 6000% by removing the government subsidiary. Raising price have been a very sensitive issue in Venezuela; the last time they did it there were huge protest and some rioting incidents, forcing the government to revert back to low pricing regime.      

Moving further north of Dutch to Stockholm (Sweden) , and further south of Venezuela to Lima (Peru) leads us to conversely related psychological phenomenon. Stockholm syndrome is when a hostage feels empathy or sympathy towards their captor while Lima syndrome is when the captor feels empathy or sympathy towards their hostage. During a bank robbery in Stockholm, the bankers who were held hostage for 6 days became emotionally attached to the robbers. They were so bonded to the robbers that they refused government assistance and even defended the robbers. Lima syndrome which is exactly the opposite was named after an incident in Lima's Japanese embassy related function. Almost 600 people who were attending the function were trapped but soon more than half of the people were released. 

Venezuela, the US and "recirculating oil"

Last week I came across a funny news piece that Venezuela is importing large quantity of petroleum from the United States. In fact Venezuela was one of first bulk consumer since the US lifted it's forty year old oil export ban last month. It is funny because Venezuela sits on top of world's largest (largest? from when?) oil reserve. It is even funner because United States is one of the largest importer of Venezuelan oil.  So why is this funny cycle happening?

Before we actually get into it, I was frankly surprised to know that Venezuela has the largest reserve of oil in the world. I knew Venezuela was part of OPEC but never thought it could displace Saudi Arabia from the top position (which was the case till recently as can been seen in the graph below). The graph shows a sudden spike for Venezuela, which propelled it well past Saudi Arabia. Similar spike can also be observed for Canada which suddenly jumped to the third position from nowhere. Of course both of this spike are due to the same reason i.e. economic viability of heavy oil/oil sand extraction. In mid/ late 2000s the Alberta oil sands (of Canada) and Orinoco oil belt (of Venezuela) were adjudged economically viable due to high oil price and technological advancement.

Coming back to the funny cycle, this is also due to fact that Venezuelan oil is extra heavy in nature. It is so viscous that it cannot be pumped through pipeline easily. This is the reason the lighter oil from US was imported and used to mix with heavy crude of Venezuela. US being closer than any of the other big source of light crude, the Venezuelan companies lost no time to take advantage of US oil export ban being revoked. This is despite Venezuela and US does not having friendly political relationship.

[Courtesy:  Plazak - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28090611]

Antonov, no more!

Last week, Ukraine government announced that, it has decided to liquidate the legendary aircraft manufacturer and transfer the remaining assets to the national company Ukroboronprom. I read this article reported in RT news website and was bit saddened. Anatanov, as you might be aware, is the manufacturer of ultra large aircraft and (of course) the largest ever built airplane, the An-225 Mriya.

I first saw this plane in a Discovery channel (if I remember right) program which showcased some of the largest airplanes. Leading the list was the gigantic An-225. Designed to carry the Soviet Buran shuttle orbiter, it can carry roughly three times the payload as an Airbus A380 can carry. Size wise too,it is roughly 50ft  longer than Airbus A380 and also 30 feet wider. This gigantic machine was true symbol of Soviet engineering  Only one such model was built, the second model halted half way during production, due to lack of funding and interest from developers.

Though this is big news, it is not as surprising as the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has escalated. The direct reason is obvious. However the conflict has also cost the Ukrainian government economically, which has forced the government to rethink about it's asset.
             

Black beauty

When I started blogging some 8 years back, all my blogs were with black backgrounds. Even though I liked black color, there was bit more that influenced me in this decision. There is a website blackle.com which is technically a google search engine with all BLACK theme. The idea behind this website was black screen needs less electricity compared to color screen. Since as a naïve student I wanted to as much as possible to save planet earth, I decided to use a ALL black theme. I also had the following note in my blog explaining my decision.

"U might b wondering y everything so BLACK over here. It might not b as beautiful as one would like but I`m doing my bit to save planet earth!! (Technically black screen consumes far less energy than a bright colorful screen.).U can do your bit too. Try using energy-saving www.blackle.com (search engine powered by google)."

However, with the years, I realized that not all "black" themes saved energy. Also I realized that not many people visit my blogs to make any savings significant. And in order to make my more blogs pleasing and relevant, I decided to move away from black themed blogs. Coming to main reason for writing this post; I wanted to archive the original note before deleting this. I couldn't think for better way than this ;).