The new plutocracy are mainly hustlers, not heirs

“Fat cats who owe it to their grandfathers are not getting all of the gains,” Peter Lindert told me. “A lot of it is going to innovators this time around. There is more meritocracy in Bill Gates being at the top than the Duke of Bedford.” Even Emmanuel Saez, who is deeply worried about the social and political consequences of rising income inequality, concurs that a defining quality of the current crop of plutocrats is that they are the “working rich.” He has found that in 1916, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent.

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Of the top 10 figures on the 2010 Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans, four are self-made, two (Charles and David Koch) expanded a medium-size family oil business into a billion-dollar industrial conglomerate, and the remaining four are all heirs of the self-made billionaire Sam Walton. Similarly, of the top 10 foreign billionaires, six are self-made, and the remaining four are vigorously growing their patrimony, rather than merely living off it. It’s true that few of today’s plutocrats were born into the sort of abject poverty that can close off opportunity altogether— a strong early education is pretty much a precondition—but the bulk of their wealth is generally the fruit of hustle and intelligence (with, presumably, some luck thrown in). They are not aristocrats, by and large, but rather economic meritocrats, preoccupied not merely with consuming wealth but with creating it.

via theatlantic.com

Kevin Smith on willing Clerks into existence: Shit was not manifest, nor was it offered.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith drops wisdom:

I've willed almost all of stuff I've done into existence, and if I can do that, ANYBODY can do that. So start your chatter: talk about what you're going to do. Don't pursue a role, LIVE that role. Like my sister told me, back when I confessed I wanted to be a filmmaker. "Then BE a filmmaker," she said. "That's what I'm saying: I wanna be.". And that's when she gave me the million dollar advice: "No - BE a filmmaker. You say you wanna be; just BE a filmmaker. Think every thought AS a filmmaker. Don't pine for it or pursue it; BE it. You ARE a filmmaker; you just haven't made a film yet." And it sounded artsy-fartsy as fuck, but it was CRAZY useful advice.

A slacker hit the sheets that night, but the CLERKS-guy got out of bed the following morning. So plant the seeds early & take as much time as it requires to will your goals into existence. Keep a few going, you'll never get bored. Expect moments of discouragement, but don't wallow in them.

Remember that if an ass-hat like KevinSmith can succeed at something like film or life, then what the fuck is stopping YOU from doing the same. I was not 'to the manor born'. This shit was not manifest, nor was it ever offered. And just remember that, when you read about some deal or project, sometimes, that's just some bluffy motherfucker trying to change his or her game by willing some shit into existence.

via blog.akash.im

Why Castro never shaves his beard: He saves 10 working days a year

By his own calculation, Castro saves up to 10 working days a year by not shaving.

“The story of our beards is very simple: It arose out of the difficult conditions we were living and fighting in as guerrillas. We didn’t have razor blades, or straight razors. When we found ourselves in the middle of the wilderness, up in the Sierra, everybody just let their beards and hair grow, and that turned into a kind of badge of identity,” the ailing 82-year-old former president reveals in his spoken autobiography: Fidel Castro: My Life, published by Scribner.

“For the campesinos [farmers] and everybody else, for the press, for the reporters, we were los barbudos — the bearded ones. It had its positive side: In order for a spy to infiltrate us, he had to start preparing months ahead — he’d have had to have a six-months’ growth of beard, you see. So the beards served as a badge of identity, and as protection, until it finally became a symbol of the guerrilla fighter. Later, with the triumph of the revolution, we kept our beards to preserve the symbolism,” Castro says.

“Besides that, a beard has a practical advantage: You don’t have to shave everyday. If you multiply the 15 minutes you spend shaving every day by the number of days in a year, you’ll see that you devote almost 5,500 minutes to shaving. An eight-hour day of work consists of 480 minutes, so if you don’t shave you gain about 10 days that you can devote to work, to reading, to sport, to whatever you like.”

via theeastafrican.co.ke