Baseball Draft and Zimbabwe
Well, overall a pretty good draft, though I had the 9th position so it was tricky nailing down good pitching. I grabbed 2 of the top 4 shortstops, hoping that I can find a trade partner. My outfield is young and unproven, but if my boyz grow up fast, I’m gonna be very competitive.
I’ve been following the Zimbabwe tragedy for a couple of years - as of this writing, only a trickle of results have been released from the weekend’s voting and, frankly, I would be astonished if there wasn’t blood in the streets.. This country is a man-made disaster; once the breadbasket of Africa and a thriving economy, since Mugabe appropriated thriving farms and gave them to his supporters, the country has undergone a startling transformation. Some factoids taken from Reuters:
- Zimbabwe’s dollar is virtually worthless. The price of a loaf of bread on Saturday [3/29/2008] was about 6.6 million Zimbabwe dollars on the official market but as much as 15 million on the black market. In October last year bread cost 100,000 Zimbabwean dollars, in 2003 around 1,000 Zimbabwean dollars and in 1998 five Zimbabwean dollars.
- Government spending as a percentage of GDP rose from 20.7 percent in 2002 to 53.5 percent in 2006, according to UBS data. The investment bank forecasts it will reach 66.7 percent in 2007. In 1987 inflation averaged 11.9 percent. It surged to an official record of 100,586 percent in January 2008, but economic experts say the real rate is much higher.
- [this is extraordinary:] Average life expectancy dropped from 63 years in 1990 to 37.3 years in 2005, according to World Bank and U.N. figures.