alexbogd

"No one asked, What might Icelanders want to do? Or even: What might Icelanders be especially suited to do? No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called "hidden people" - or, to put it more plainly, elves - in whom some large numbers of Icelanders , steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, "we couldn't as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." The other, more serious problem was the Icelandic male: he took more safety risks than aluminum workers in other nations did. "In manufacturing," says the spokesman, "you want people who follow the rules and fall in line. You don't want them to be heroes. You don't want them to try to fix something it's not their job to fix, because they might blow up the place." The Icelandic male had a propensity to try to fix something it wasn't his job to fix".
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Это из статьи в Vanity Fair лихого Майкла Льюиса, статья называется "Wall Street on the Tundra". Книжку эссе авторов Vanity Fair о кризисе "The Great Hangover", кстати, всем горячо рекомендую. Льюис, конечно, ради красного словца никого не пощадит, но в фантазировании про эльфов замечен не был. Кстати, я не знаю, как там с поиском чертей, но вот что у нас тоже чинят не то, что надо, это факт. Как в анекдоте про заморскую электропилу и российских мужиков.

В общем, Евросоюз и еврозону стоит поздравить с будущим участником. Отличный пациент для безумной больницы :) Хотя, сколько там населения в Исландии? 320 тысяч? Беспокоиться нечего - прокормят.

Some twelve years ago, I was planting potatoes in a village called Synyatkino, in Vladimir Oblast. It was a ridiculous enterprise - planting potatoes, weeding them, battling with Colorado beetle, then garnering the crop, transporting it some 300 km westwards in a hired military-style Ural truck and finally trying to store it till the next spring in a cramped Moscow apartment.

Of course, being Moscow-born and relatively well-read kids, my three brothers and I were unable to produce a good crop. Moreover, we were lazy and we hated the whole process. But we were poor. We were raised by a single mother and a grandmother at a very difficult time. So potatoes were essential for our survival.

Then came many successes, but nothing came easily to us. I managed, as two of my brothers did, to enter the Moscow State University. Shortly after graduating, I was offered a job as a correspondent in Greece. My brothers worked hard, surmounting many obstacles in their lives. Now we are all facing overwhelming problems because of the world economic downturn.

We were not quite expecting this crisis to come so quickly after only a few good years. But having seen severe crises before, we are now somehow prepared. We have seen our parents stripped of all their savings for at least two times in a decade and now it is not a big shock to see our almost non-existent savings evaporate. Remembering very well such things as $10 children's allowances or $15 state scholarships, we have been taught not to rely on the government. But most importantly, even in a worst-case scenario, being forced to return to our potatoes, an absolute nightmare for us, would only be a decade-deep drop in our careers. For an average Greek, it would be a two-generation gap, for an average American - a dip of at least four generations.

So does it mean that we are prepared to plant potatoes once more? No, I do not think so. Are we Russians more resilient in the face of this crisis? Nope. But yes, we have started right from the very bottom, and this could help, at least psychologically.