Notices by Ian Betteridge (ianbetteridge@social.vivaldi.net), page 2

And then, to complete the insanity, Thatcher privatised the industry generating the revenues that were funding the whole operation. The British National Oil Company (BNOC) was privatised in two phases in 1982 and 1985.

The government could afford a long confrontation with the miners because it had both the fiscal cushion and an alternative energy supply. Without North Sea gas, a miners' strike long enough to threaten power generation would have been genuinely dangerous to the government's survival.

Oil revenues were used to cut taxes for business and the wealthy and to fund benefits during a wave of industrial closures. The oil money paid for tax cuts at the top and the benefits at the bottom. Despite Thatcher’s reputation as a prudent manager of finance, no money was set aside for the future.

And of course the government freed itself in stages from all its equity in BP: 51% state ownership in 1977, down to 46% in 1981, 31.5% in 1983, and fully privatised in 1987.

BNOC was created by Harold Wilson's government in 1975, specifically to give the British state a direct stake in North Sea extraction rather than leaving it entirely to private multinationals like BP and Shell. It was our equivalent of Norway's Statoil, established around the same time.

Norway kept its equivalent. And that is why Norway has the money to subsidise EVs to the point where it barely needs oil for cars, and we do not.

Labour built the institutional architecture to capture public value from a public resource; Thatcher dismantled it, took a short-term cash payment, and handed the long-term revenue stream to private shareholders.

@BashStKid It was for the greater good of the smaller number.

I am VERY tempted to write another long post about how the decision in the 1970s not to establish a Norway-style sovereign wealth fund in favour of simply using the oil money to prop up finances at the time, has done more damage to the UK than any other decision in history. LONG THREAD, SORRY.

I think that “I have no mouth and I must scream” should be compulsory reading for everyone making a product with AI

Great stuff from Comment is Freed today.

https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/the-split-screen-war?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Zen fascists will control you: https://www.ianbetteridge.com/zen-fascist-wi/

In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either.

I think this post has been in my drafts folder for about three years, occasionally being reworked, and finally – FINALLY – I've finished it. Joni Mitchell, Jello Biafra, and Peter Thiel all feature. Warning - it's REALLY LONG.

https://www.ianbetteridge.com/zen-fascist-wi/

@chris Thanks! It's not too bad to be honest -- whenever I go to an event (in this case MWC) I always come back with a bug. This one has confined me to the couch rather than bed, which will do for me.

I've spent the past 24 hours with a horrible cold. It's now got to the point where the cough is (as they say) "productive".

Weirdly, I actually like this stage.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.

https://www.therage.co/persona-age-verification/

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116114302610914873

Yeah, this. Repeat after me: the job of a reporter is not to breathlessly repeat whatever crap comes out of techbros mouths. It’s to investigate it, and report appropriately.

And this is why you don't let billionaires - or any company - own platforms.

It's real, folks.

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/technology/sf-billionaires-march-founder-revealed-derik-kauffman/article_1842be47-58a5-430c-b322-dff8910aa98f.html

Lockdown mode is great, and one of the reasons I would still recommend Apple products if you're handling sensitive data, sources etc.

https://www.404media.co/fbi-couldnt-get-into-wapo-reporters-iphone-because-it-had-lockdown-mode-enabled/