Hawksworth titled his 2008 paper on the subject: “Dude, where’s my oil money?” We don’t have any new hospitals or roads to show for it: public sector net investment plunged from 2.5% of GDP at the start of the Thatcher era to just 0.4% of GDP by 2000. It is sometimes said that the money was ploughed into benefits for the miners and all the other workers Thatcherism chucked on the scrapheap, but that’s not what the figures show. Public sector current spending hovered around 40% of GDP from Thatcher through to the start of the banking crisis.
So where did our billions go? Hawksworth writes: “The logical answer is that the oil money enabled non-oil taxes to be kept lower.” In other words: tax cuts. When the North Sea was providing maximum income, Thatcher’s chancellor, Nigel Lawson slashed income and other direct taxes, especially for the rich. The top rate of tax came down from 60p in the pound to just 40p by 1988. He also reduced the basic rate of income tax; but the poor wouldn’t have seen much of those pounds in their pockets, as, thanks to the Tories, they were paying more VAT.
What did Thatcher’s grateful children do with their tax cuts? “They used the higher disposable income to bid up house prices,” suggests Hawskworth. For a few years, the UK enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime windfall; and it was pocketed by the rich. The revolution begun by Thatcher and Reagan is often seen as being about competition and extending markets. But that’s to focus on the process and overlook the motivation or the result. As the historian of neoliberalism Philip Mirowski argues, what the past 30 years have been about is using the powers of the state to divert more resources to the wealthy. You see that with privatisation: the handing over of our assets at knock-down prices to corporations and supposed “investors”, who then skim off the profits. The transformation of the North Sea billions into tax cuts for the wealthy is the same process but at its most squalid.
Compare and contrast with the Norwegian experience. In 1974, Oslo laid down the principle that oil wealth should be used to develop a “qualitatively better society”, defined by historian Helge Ryggvik as “greater equality”. Ten oil commandments were set down to ensure the industry was put under democratic control – which it remains to this day, with the public owning nearly 70% of the oil company and the fields. It’s a glimpse of what Britain could have had, had it been governed by something more imaginative and less rapacious than Thatcherism.
via Dude, where’s my North Sea oil money? | Aditya Chakrabortty | Comment is free | The Guardian.
23 Tips from Famous Writers for New and Emerging Authors | Aerogramme Writers' Studio
“Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.” ― Paul Theroux
via 23 Tips from Famous Writers for New and Emerging Authors | Aerogramme Writers’ Studio.
Remembering Rain Man: The $350 Million Movie That Hollywood Wouldn't Touch Today – Hollywood Prospectus Blog – Grantland
Johnson went on to produce a broad range of projects, including the Chronicles of Narnia films, Breaking Bad, Galaxy Quest, and Lance Hammer’s self-distributed drama Ballast. But looking back, he says a studio wouldn’t produce Rain Man today. It wouldn’t play to a broad enough audience, they’d say. The historical data doesn’t support its success.
“I go to pitch movies all the time and they say, ‘We love you, but know we’re not interested in dramas.’ If it won’t travel, if it’s too American, they aren’t interested. You point to a movie — ‘Look at how Argo did!’ — and they’ll [just] say it’s the exception that proves the rule.”
Making Rain Man — through a writer’s strike, and defined by non-commercial subject matter — was not easy. Still, Johnson says it never is.
“A lot of my contemporaries complain that [making movies] is harder than it ever was,” he says. “But I maintain that it’s always been hard. It’s just different.”
via Remembering Rain Man: The $350 Million Movie That Hollywood Wouldn’t Touch Today – Hollywood Prospectus Blog – Grantland.
Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg, and 'Lone Survivor' – Grantland
Nonetheless, the very brief debates that go on among the Pashtuns feel refreshingly thoughtful for an American war movie — even if all that these ethnic men are doing is arguing about whether to save or sacrifice a white American. That argument and its outcome situates Lone Survivor within a long history of American movies in which ethnics circle the wagons around an outsider; Mel Brooks made a scathing joke of it 40 years ago this year. These 15 to 20 minutes of Lone Survivor could have been Berg’s entire movie. Instead, they comprise a dismaying set piece that aligns the movie with emptier blockbusters: more unexamined waste. This is Luttrell’s life, but at the movies his life has become another Hollywood ending.
via Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg, and ‘Lone Survivor’ – Grantland.
Ten Popular Diets — Which Work and Which Are Hype?
If you want to lose fat in 2014, how about we do it together? I need to work off some Danish butter cookies.
Last year, the Lift team helped me test The Slow-Carb Diet® with 3,500 readers. The result: 84% of people lost weight and the average weight loss was 8.6 pounds over four weeks. Many people lost more than 20 pounds. This didn’t surprise me, given the case studies of people who’ve lost 100+ pounds.
Working alongside UC Berkeley, Lift is now launching the largest study of popular diets ever performed. You can choose from 10 different diets (Paleo, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc.), and the study includes control groups and a randomized trial. The Slow-Carb Diet is one option.
via Ten Popular Diets — Which Work and Which Are Hype?.
It's Time to Take Mesh Networks Seriously (And Not Just for the Reasons You Think) | Wired Opinion | Wired.com
But the Real, Often Forgotten, Promise of Mesh Networks Is…
Yet beyond the benefits of costs and elasticity, little attention has been given to the real power of mesh networking: the social impact it could have on the way communities form and operate.
What’s really revolutionary about mesh networking isn’t the novel use of technology. It’s the fact that it provides a means for people to self-organize into communities and share resources amongst themselves: Mesh networks are operated by the community, for the community. Especially because the internet has become essential to our everyday life.
via It’s Time to Take Mesh Networks Seriously (And Not Just for the Reasons You Think) | Wired Opinion | Wired.com.
Busy isn’t respectable anymore.
Busyness actually restricts professional performance and limits mental capacity. With plenty of recently published psychological and biological evidence of this, Kreider seems to capture it well in the previously cited Busy Trap when he says,
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice. It is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
Busy often keeps us from the finer things in life. Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a time, the sensation is not sustainable long term. We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of the rat race and more time actually living. Or as Seneca says in Letters from a Stoic, “There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living, and there is nothing harder to learn.”
via Busy isn’t respectable anymore..
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person | Cracked.com
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better PersonBy David Wong December 17, 2012
motherfuckers. Yeah! LETS DO THIS.”Do what?” you ask. I DONT KNOW. LETS FIGURE THAT OUT TOGETHER, MOTHERFUCKERS.Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, youre thrilled with your life, and youre happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day, friend, this article is not for you. Youre doing a great job, were all proud of you. So you dont feel like you wasted your click, heres a picture of Lenny Kravitz wearing a gigantic scarf.Via Upscalehype.comFor the rest of you, I want you to try something: Name five impressive things about yourself. Write them down or just shout them out loud to the room. But heres the catch — youre not allowed to list anything you are i.e., Im a nice guy, Im honest, but instead can only list things that you do i.e., I just won a national chess tournament, I make the best chili in Massachusetts. If you found that difficult, well, this is for you, and you are going to fucking hate hearing it. My only defense is that this is what I wish somebody had said to me around 1995 or so.
via 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person | Cracked.com.
Anxious Youth, Then and Now – NYTimes.com
Today’s young adults are constantly rebuked for not following the life cycle popular in 1960. But a quick look at earlier eras shows just how unusual mid-20th-century young people were. A society in which people married out of high school and held the same job for 50 years is the historical outlier. Some of that era’s achievements were enviable, but they were not the norm.The anxieties that 19th-century young people poured into their New Year’s diary entries are more common. Americans considered young adulthood the most dangerous part of life, and struggled to find a path to maturity. Those who did best tended to accept change, not to berate themselves for breaking with tradition. Young adults might do the same today. Stop worrying about how they appear from the skewed perspective of the mid-20th century and find a new home, a new stability and a new community in the new year.
via Anxious Youth, Then and Now – NYTimes.com.
Direct your anger at the greedy rich, not the Wolf of Wall Street film | Sadhbh Walshe | Comment is free | theguardian.com
The same week the movie opened, the very week the birth of Christ, the original champion of social justice, is celebrated, our God fearing GOP-led congress stripped 1.3 million Americans who have been unable to find work of their unemployment benefits. If there were ever victims who needed some attention shed on their plight it is those who lost their jobs and can’t find another one thanks to the recession brought about by the outrageous greed and barely legal (and sometimes not legal at all) behavior of the “too big to jail” financial institutions and those who run them. By comparison guys like Belfort and Prousalis, who at least did some prison time for their crimes, are small players.
via Direct your anger at the greedy rich, not the Wolf of Wall Street film | Sadhbh Walshe | Comment is free | theguardian.com.