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How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day - Kath Kelly
by zombieflesh I'm trying to turn over a bit of a new leaf and stop making frivolous purchases. After looking around my home and seeing how quickly and easily it has been filled with a lot of unnecessary junk, I'm starting out in the task of going minimal and reducing my possessions as well as cutting back on spending. I had heard of this book in ... passing and was curious about the concept of living on a mere £1 per day. After finding out that the author is based in Bristol the book appealed even further, as this is the city that I work in and I spend a lot of time here, so I though the book might be even more relevant to me and provide some specific tips for locals. "How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day" has an RRP of £7.99, but I managed to get a pre-owned copy for £3.05 including postage from Amazon's marketplace. Back of the book description... "Kath Kelly was broke. That was okay, as all her friends were too. But she had an important event to budget for, just a year away. How could she save enough in time, and still have some kind of a life in the process? One drunken night, she made a rash decision: to live on just one pound a day for the next twelve months. This is the incredible but true story of how a mission to cut her spending to the bone showed one woman another side of herself and of human nature. Through the ups and downs of a year like no year she had spent before, she discovered how greed and waste was messing up people - to say nothing of the planet - and came to see how much fun can be had on a few pennies a day. If you've ever felt the pressure to spend when you can't afford it, or wondered how on earth you were going to face a big bill, you will find inspiration in these pages. Whatever your circumstances, this could be the most worthwhile book you ever bought." The book chronicles a year in the life of author Kath Kelly, as she challenges herself to live on the meagre budget of just £1.00 per day for a whole year. First things first, this amount excludes the rent and bills that she pays to live in her shared flat, so the budget really only applies to shopping and socialising, but I'm in agreement that this is still a hugely daunting challenge as everyday expenditures have a habit of mounting up quickly. And another thing, Kath Kelly is an independent woman with a part time job in teaching. She has purposely chosen to work part time hours to better suit her lifestyle. She has no children, close family, partner, pets or other dependents to include within her daily £1.00 budget, so others with a different lifestyle might find the content of this book unsuitable in relation to their own personal situation. The book splits the year into neat monthly chapters and along with the diary formatting, it is also written in a very personal way with an easily accessible style. The author has made it clear that she is putting across her own thoughts and experiences, and she writes about her opinions as well as recounting conversations with friends which all help to highlight the fact that this is a real life situation. I really liked this presentation and thought that the author came across as being a very genuine and likeable person. The obvious down side to this light-hearted approach is that there is little actual information and data presented. For example, I would quite liked to have seen a breakdown of each day's expenditures, or maybe even a monthly total at the end of each chapter's diary entries, as this would have been extremely interesting in terms of the hard figures presented as well as providing clarification for anyone else who might wish to embark on such a challenge themselves. Some of the ideas in the book really appealed to me. Making the most of your local area and going for simple walks, picnics, and socialising at home with friends, rather than going out for expensive drinks and dinners seem like nice options that will still be enjoyable for all. Arranging a clothes swap instead of going shopping is a great way to have fun and clear out your closet as well as picking up some new pieces. I've been to a few organised "swishing" events before, but now I feel like I really must plan something with my friends. Practically all of the events mentioned in the book are based in the city of Bristol. There is a massive events calendar for local activities, festivals, street fairs and performances, workshops, social groups and clubs. There is all sorts there if you're willing to take a look and research what's going on either in your area or your field of interest. Sadly, there was nothing new here for me as I've lived in the area for over 20 years and always make the most of what Bristol has to offer, it's my favourite city in the UK and I feel lucky to live nearby. Some good hints are to check out Gumtree and Venue for local events listings. If you're open to taking a chance and trying something new then there are plenty of free events available. Generally I enjoyed seeing how the author coped with her challenge and how she managed to keep it hidden from other people to avoid awkward situations. Some things seem unreasonable to me, such as going shopping in the supermarket just before their midnight closing time to make the most of the reduced goods available. This seems a bit of a risk as there is no certainty of what will be available, and it's not at all practical for me as I'm usually in bed and fast asleep by that time so I can be up and ready for work bright and early the next morning! It seems slightly incredible to me that she was able to live off reduced food bargains and cheap supermarket branded items for an entire year, but she is clearly a dedicated and determined woman so I am sure she put in the hard work to make it happen. Personally I am becoming increasinly interested in nutrition and don't think I'd be able to justify this style of shopping as I'd rather plan and prepare healthy meals so I can ensure I'm getting a balanced diet and staying healthy. The author mentions that she did in fact put on weight during her year's challenge due to the type of foods she was eating. There are a few conflicting ideas which would have bothered me if I was feeling a bit more cynical, but the truth is that the book really inspired me to take a good hard look at my own lifestyle and spending, and I am definitely going to be making some changes as a result of reading it. "How I Lived a Year on Just a Pound a Day" has given me the kick-start that I needed. However, I must point out two of my more serious concerns about the book. One is that Kath Kelly heavily relies on hitch hiking as a mode of transport. I honestly don't think this is the sort of approach that can be recommended for most people, as there are issues of personal safety and I'm sure it's just plain unreliable if not downright dangerous. Another problem I have is that Kath Kelly is promoting thinking about the planet and being environmentally friendly, but of course some aspects of this are just not possible with such a sparse spending allowance. For just one example, no matter what limited budget I had at my disposal, I would never ever resort to buying battery farmed eggs. Yes they are a lot cheaper, but at what cost? It might save me some pence, which could be crucial if you are really cutting your spending to the absolute minimum, but I personally would not want to endorse the cruelty and suffering of these animals for my own financial gain. Overall I really enjoyed reading this book. It was fascinating to see how the author progressed on her year's challenge, and because she tackled it in such an enthusiastic positive way this really came across throughout the text and rubbed off on me as a reader. If you want a strict "how to do this yourself" guide to living on £1 a day, this book will not suit your needs. For serious savers there will probably be no new ideas here at all, and it does seem a little basic. But, if you're looking for a light approach to budgeting then this is an interesting book that might help get you in the mood for making some changes in your own life. In all honesty I think that the personal, conversational tone of the writing style would have been better suited to publishing on a blog, but if you can get hold of the book for less than the RRP then I think it's well worth a read. Read the complete review |
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Vultures' Picnic - Greg Palast
by thedevilinme A venture capitalists invests in a company likely to succeed in the marketplace and hence show a profit to the investor, Dragons Den style. A vulture capitalist, what this book is about, looks to invest in a firm likely to fail to earn a profit in the near term, often triggering the takeover clauses, resulting in forfeiture of some or ... all the assets of the company, with an eye towards selling off the constituent parts, hence showing a profit while destroying or hobbling the company. That was Richard Gere's job in Pretty Woman. HMV and Blockbuster Video are currently under that attack, as is Haiti and Cyprus, for example. The vultures are the maggots of capitalism that eat up the leftovers to be recycled as profit somewhere else. It's not pretty, very cynical, but all part of the game called making money. For a new business to succeed in its first year six more new ones have to go bust, the laws of economics. 'Vultures Picnic' is a polemic of two halves by American campaigning journalist Greg Palast, penned in a gumshoe comic book style that gets a bit wearing, definitely a book to read in chapters. The first half is a rant against 'Big Oil' and the energy sector and the second a pop at vulture capitalism and the banks in general, ugly and ruthless industries. Now for this particular reader the nature of the oil industry is a messy and corrupt one because of the west's voracious need for the product and so Palast all out attack somewhat pointless, as it is trying to disprove religion. Few people care how we get oil, unless you are a seabird in the Gulf. We can't live without this stuff in vast quantities and so expect our governments to get it however they can, and we, the people, to take no blame for that when it gets ugly, like the War in Iraq and the BP Gulf blowout. The black fluid is like the blood in our veins that keeps us all alive and we have to accept the negatives to the planet that come with getting it. To me an oil well blowout is the same as a motorway pile up. Eventually it's going to happen and the price you pay for fast straight roads, statistically unlucky if you are caught up in an accident. It's easy for the environmentalists and pressure groups to get stuck into the oil companies when it does go wrong but when it costs a million dollars to lay a mile of pipeline you can't afford to run the industry like the railways with no derailments. It's simply cheaper to pay fines for accidents, and those fines set at a level the oil companies can keep doing what they have to do to keep the cars on the road and the world economy greased, greased being the appropriate word. As massive as oil industry profits are most of that money goes straight back into exploration costs, wages and legal payouts. One deep ocean rig can cost a billion dollars before it strikes oil. Palast's first interesting fact here is the actually environmentalists groups that kicked off over the BP Gulf spill are also the ones who benefited to the tune of three billion dollars as they effectively took BPs money to go away, some declaring just a year later that all the oil has miraculously disappeared. The Gulf is so vast it probably did anyway. It makes you wonder how many protest groups and charities are funded by the people they protest against so to be surreptitiously controlled. Why wouldn't the energy companies get involved in global warming hype as it just means they get huge government subsides to go green and keep it clean as it gets colder and colder and they sell more gas and oil. I certainly think we have been had over global warming. MMGW is also a good incentive for us all to go green as world oil supplies begin to get stretched, probably why the Horizon rig blew out in the Gulf, most remaining oil deeper and harder to get at now and so more volatile to extract. I'm not making excuses for BP but if you want cheap oil you get the deep Water Horizon disasters. BP, of course, is a effectively a colonial arm of the UK government still because it's so profitable and critical to our pension funds and so needs government support to go into those risky ventures and territories like the Old Russian caucuses and the Middle East to make the big bucks. One such seedy involvement is Azerbaijan, the capital Baku the home of the first great oil rush back in 1919, Britain's uncomfortable relationship explored here and you understand fully why poor old Prince Andrew has to be shipped out there to do his royal oil diplomatic missions. President Aliyev is not a pleasant man and he is the guy who signs the cheques and so you have to be nice to him to get the deals, Prince Andrews visits designed to give the nasty dictator an air of respectability so we can do business, and the President would expect 'at least' a $30 million dollar bribe to let BP develop their oil and gas fields in return, which he got, although for legal reasons we don't call it a bribe. This guy boils people in acid if they upset him yet Prince Andrew has to shake his hand and be nice about this country to all his friends and investors back in London. BP own 90% of the new fields there with the locals comfortably on minimum wage. It's a big earner for your pension funds. If we take a negative stand on big oil we have to accept most of our western lifestyle is dependent on it. Interestingly, its here Palast uncovers the fact that Baku had a similar big blowout in the Caspian Sea, equal to the Gulf spill, many lives lost and the environmental damage big. But this is a secretive dictatorship and so no one ever heard about it on the regular news, even though Palast reported it on Newsnight. Palast is a freelance BBC employee because of breaking stories like that. He finds it hard to work in America as his home truths and revelations are rather unpalatable for them and would certainly attract a few law suits. A law suit in America is simply piling on the financial cost onto the accuser until he or she withdraws their allegation, whether true or not. As big a blowout it was in the Caspian, no sign of any compensation payouts for the locals. That is the main reason we do business with these guys. Up until the 1990s, oil was at its most plentiful and easy to get to. But the oil companies had too many refineries and so the oil price dropped as there was plenty of surplus idling around the world, the 20%+ level of reserves depressing the price to below $10 per barrel. By 911 they had learnt their lesson and today they don't build refineries anymore and prefer to leave the unrefined oil in massive tankers off shore for speculators to conveniently buy, driving up the price 900% in just 10 years. It used to be that the high oil price meant their was demand in world economies and so a good thing but today it means a very small group of people own most of the worlds oil and they are depressing world growth. They are simply too powerful to tackle. The book begins with a classic oil disaster, that of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker crash in Alaska, wiping out billions of fish and local businesses and how the big oil companies dealt with it. The first 100 pages gets a bit boring on the subject of Alaska with Palast pithy delivery and so bits like this in the book the chance to skim read for the better stuff to come. Occasionally an oil tanker is going to run aground and so something we have to accept, yet Palast spits and snarls away as if its was deliberate in this chapter or two. The Hurricane Katrina disaster is the next to be picked apart, the oil companies blamed by Palast for flooding New Orleans. His theory is that the surrounding Mississippi flood plains and Bayous have been swamped with the oil industries discard shale and sludge over the decades so that the water run off from hurricanes simply had nowhere to go, other than to be driven down the channel into the city by the powerful winds and tidal surge on to the biggest of the levies, breaking through feeble walls not able to take the volume, the poorest areas of the city the lowest areas of the city. It's an interesting idea but, perhaps, supported to back his ideals that all oil companies just don't care about anything and so tolerate potential calamities and count the profits. His attack on BP continues over the Gulf rig disaster, claiming they cut corners on safety to drill with dodgy cement that they knew would eventually fail at that depth, which cracked on that day. We can only presume it's similarly precarious for other drilling mechanisms out there right now, as I say, accidents waiting to happen the nature of the business. But why would they be so brazen with something that nearly bankrupts the company. This is litigious America after all? As I say the book is a polemic. You can't write a book about the corruption of our oil supply without mentioning Iraq. Well Palast doesn't much because that is clearly going to be his next book. He does believe, however, that Bush invaded Iraq for oil, but not for the reasons you would expect, the plan to actually 'stop' development of the second richest oilfields on the planet by taking over them. America knew France, China and Russia were breaking the sanctions in the 1990s and earning potentially huge oil contracts through that secret relationship with Iraq, Saddam promising to trade oil in Euro's in return, which would undermine the dollar and empower the European Union. Those who claim a conspiracy over 911 have the evidence of the conspiracy over WMD to start a war in Iraq as proof it does happen and so who knows what went on to get America in there. WMD man Dr Kelly is the only person in British legal history to be denied a full inquest. Did he have to go because he had proof there were no WMD in Iraq and he was about to fatally prove it to the nation to legally stop the war? Palast then moves his crosshairs to the equally expensive alternative, that of nuclear power, not surprisingly the Fukishima disaster at the heart of the argument against, disconcerting facts revealed on exactly why those dated American built reactors failed in Japan. Yes the earthquake and tsunami initiated them but the fail-safe was simply not good enough to stop the disaster when they should have, again healthy & safety cost savings the reasons. All that happened was the reactors automatically shutdown and the diesel auxiliary generators kicked in. Problem is the diesel generators were running at full whack for far too long and the crankshafts snapped, not designed to deal with the rapid shutdown, meaning no water being pumped into the reactor to cool down the exposed nuclear rods, meaning a partial meltdown. If it wasn't for the quick thinking and incredibly brave Japanese engineers that were made to stay behind to save the companies face it would have been a full meltdown. Using their ingenuity they extracted all the batteries from their cars and rigged up their own generators to power the sea water coolant. A little bit more money spent on the generators and this would not have happened. More worryingly, most reactors still have these feeble diesel engine crankshafts and you are not to allowed to know that, including Sizewell B in Norfolk. ===A Derivative=== Typically, the seller receives money in exchange for an agreement to purchase or sell some goods or services at some specified future date, hence the term 'futures'. The problem started when these trades were leveraged, the multiplication that happens when an increasingly smaller amount of money is used to control an item of much larger value, a mortgage an example of. As long as you make your payments all is well. But if you call the price wrong at the end of your future then the penalty rises dramatically, like a spread bet in sport. The banks simply over -extended themselves to the point of collapse, currently the planet mortgaged to the tune of trillions of dollars with no where near enough real money to pay that back. There is no way out of this unless we slowly write off the debt, the taxpayer having to cover most of by job losses and no credit. The market bet the property price to carry on rising but it didn't. The bank JP Morgan alone ran up $13 trillion dollars of leverage. This happened because there were bonuses all the way down the chain to sell credit cards, loans and mortgages, eventually to people who could never afford to pay off the interest on those credit deals, the so-called sub-primers, hence the housing collapse. Those huge bankers bonuses we talked about were mostly produced this way. Goldman Sachs crossed the line and went one step further, disguising their junk stock in these derivative products and selling them to other financial institutions, knowing it was worthless as the financial crisis hit, and then brazenly betting on that stock they flogged to fail, making more money, a crime explored intricately and intelligently in the film Margin Call. This banking crisis was allowed to reach crisis point because everybody in the financial sector got paid commissions and bonuses to keep it all going and we all wanted the credit and mortgages. The regulators were paid very well to box tick and turn a blind eye, cheaper than fixing the problem, all concerned faking reports to curb losses. To keep selling this poison stock that would never rise it was simply done by wrapping them up in these complex financial packages and selling it on, distancing the banks from the responsibility and so legal liability, small banks in Norway going bust because of. The perfect crime is the one that's legal. American banks were not only offloading this crap to their competitors. In the early part of the last decade it dawned on them just how big the bubble had got and so started selling these derivative packages to South America, who smelled a rat. But the likes of Bolivia were told that if they didn't get involved in this brave and seemingly lucrative new world they would lose access to American commodity markets. It was outrageous by America but worked. That was, until, Hugo Chavez turned up. Peru rebelled and said no to America: we don't want to buy this stuff we dot understand, was the reply, and so their trade with America halved overnight. But oil rich Venezuela gave them the loans they needed instead, and at much cheaper rates, incensing America. South America no longer needed America, a continent pegged to the dollar. Since that rebellion the five biggest South American Presidents have been diagnosed with cancer, two dyeing, Chavez most recently. Venezuela claim America used secret methods to give them cancer for their intransigence. South America has been largely untouched by the financial crisis because of Chavez and his loan scheme. The CIA has an appalling record in the Americas. You never know. "Sometimes nations have to eat sh*t. No one orders it from the menu" So summing up an irritating writing style and one sided campaigning reveals the hard truths we just don't want to be responsible for as a consumer. Palast has contacts and very thorough and interesting why it so hard for the real stories to make the glossy news broadcasts on the hour here. It was worrying how little oil was debated during the build up to the Iraq War, even on the BBC, and so more than the suggestion this was an establishment war and you had to back it if you had a public voice, come what may. We now know it was a terrible thing to do and not about WMD and so, therefore, about oil. I will read what Palast has to say on that in his next book and be more sympathetic to his arguments, no doubt. Exploring venture capitalism was interesting and surprising just how powerful and illusive these guys are and how in cahoots the IMF and World Bank are with them by setting a favorable environment to exploit poor countries. Most of them are American, as are the World Bank and the IMF. There is clearly a relationship here. In fact the more you read about these guys the less you want to read about these guys. Read the complete review |
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The 4-hour Work Week - Timothy Ferriss
by Craig86 About The Product The 4 Hour Work Week is a self help book written by Timothy Ferris in 2007, it has sold more than 1,350,000 copies and has been on the New York Times Best Seller List for more than four years. Can't describe the look of the book as I do not own a physical copy but have read it on my ... kindle. My Opinions & Experiences The title "The 4-Hour Work Week" and sub title "Escape The 9-5, Live Anywhere And Join The New Rich" are very catchy and this no doubt has aided book sales, however it was very hard for me to take the title in particular with little more than a pinch of salt upon downloading the book. I have read a number of self help books in the past varying on topics including interview techniques, marketing, online business, language and more. I enjoy reading but usually can only read so much of these self help titles before getting a little confused with mixed messages from other sources I have read or simply being bored. I can say that the 4 hour work week was very different in that I enjoyed the read, often saying to myself "that's a great idea", "I must do that" and read it from start to finish in the space of four days funnily enough. I was sceptical at the start and to a degree still am, Tim seems to do a fair bit of blogging and advertising of his books/products which I feel makes the title a little misleading, although like me I doubt many people purchase it feeling it is truly possible. At the end of the book I feel as though if you did take everything from it to the absolute extreme it could be possible but you would require a fair bit of capital to begin with. I'm a small business owner and so my inspiration for reading the book was to find new ideas in which I could grow the business and help with income streams and managing my time more efficiently. The book provides some fantastic information about how to make your time ten times as productive which in essence is an indication as to why the book was named so, I find it hard to believe many will achieve a 4 hour work week but if you don't take it literally you could easily free up time by spending the time you do work far more productively and it is this that thrilled me the most when reading. The book reads like Tim is giving you a lecture, excitedly telling his story, from work slave past to living a much more enriched life while making more than he ever did previously. There are sections where you need to answer questions, small stories from people who Tim has helped, there are little tasks that you should try to implement and there is a good amount of ideas that will provide you with motivation, inspiration and a new desire to have the life you want. In Summary To summarise if you don't take the title too literally and open your mind to some of the ideas Tim proposes then you could easily find some inspiration with which to improve your life. Read the complete review |
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