Power Outages, Writing, and Farm Subsidies

I went to bed this morning at 4am after finishing the article “The History of the Market System” between midnight and noon. I woke up at 7:30 to take Erin to class, and then came back home. I checked to make sure the search engine spider was still running on my laptop and then went back to sleep until 1pm.

I woke up and began the day by calling Jim Minschew from Wachovia. He’s the sales rep for our merchant account and gives me a daily account of the new reason why our merchant account has yet to be approved (not his fault, just strange policies of underwriters). I then called Aaron about picking up a couple desks so we could re-arrange the office.

About 3:00pm, in the middle of a game of NBA Jam on the SNES simulator on my laptop, the power went out. Hurricane Isabel had been ranging outside all day and finally made us lose electricity.

I called Erin and asked her if I could come over to her dorm. She said sure so I gathered up all the frozen food we had and my computer and a few books and went over to Ehringhaus South, avoiding downed trees and being wary of intersections with dead stop lights on the way.

There, I watched the news for a few minutes and then started work on the book. Between 5pm and 11:30pm, I wrote “How The Market System of Today Works: Economics 101 for the Aspiring Entrepreneur”

I am glad I got this article as well as The History of the Market System out of the way. I’ve been meaning to write both articles for a year now.

After I finished the article, I said goodnight to Erin, cooked two Chicken Pot Pies in the oven, and began work on the next section of the book, The Important Role of the Entreprenuer. I finished this section and then began to do some research on international trade.

I spent about an hour from 2am to 3am, researching about the problem of farming subsidies in the EU and the US. I’ve been against these for so long. It is ironic and sad how Europe and the U.S. the two biggest backers of free trade, provide subsidies of $320 billion per year to their farmers. This makes no sense from the standpoint of comparative advantage, which I spent 4 hours writing on earlier tonight.

Check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3198113.stm
and http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/242.html when you get a chance.

Well that’s all for tonight. I’m about to get to sleep. Staying over at Erin’s dorm tonight. Hopefully power will be back on at my place by tomorrow/later today. I have a lot of work to do in preparing for Josh’s (Broadwick’s new marketing intern) arrival on Monday.

- Ryan