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Comment by Lockyy | Hacker News Reader

Is this surprising? People have been crying out about the effects of privatisation for years. When basic services mandatory for modern human life like water, ISPs and energy are privatised you end up with funds that could end up going towards investment or towards funding other public services are instead funnelled out towards shareholders.

The generational wealth the UK had in the form of North Sea oil passed off to private interests for their own profit rather than used for the creation of a sovereign wealth fund like the ones Norway has is a perfect example of the sort of backwards situation you end up in. That oil could have been used for the benefit by every member of the UK public and instead is used only for the benefit of the few while the public suffers under outrageous energy and cost of living increases.

edit: added missing word, "has" after Norway

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Is Scotland benefitting from it somehow?

Truly astonishing that nothing like the Norway model was done. Those oil reserves could’ve transformed the country, surely?

Well parts of Scotland are. As arethuza said, in the North East of Scotland saw some local benefit. A few people became very wealthy, and many people hopped up one or two social classes through the jobs that were created (and bought nice cars + homes, sent their kids to nice schools). But it wasn't anywhere near the sort of multi-generational wealth that Norway built up.

Shetland managed to do a little bit better and built up a pretty sizeable fund (something like GBP20k/resident), but I'm not super familiar and don't know what they do with it.

The North East of Scotland around Aberdeen certainly did benefit from the oil and gas industries. However, I doubt if this made up for the collapse in heavy industries elsewhere in Scotland.

ISPs are not mandatory for human life.

I didn't say human life, I said modern human life. At this point, and especially considering the recent pandemic and the lockdowns that lead to large swathes of the public having to work from home, internet connections are a non-optional component of participation in society. Especially as more and more services go digital only, for example bank branches closing in favour of online only services.

However, you're right that ISPs aren't the right target, open infrastructure for the network to operate on is closer to what I meant.

In the UK a lot of NHS trusts now require you book doctors appointments via the internet.

The majority of UK government services now push you to self service via the internet.

At this point life in the UK without an internet connection would be very difficult and in some cases fatal.

I don't think that is true. The biggest consumers of health care are the elderly and many of them (possibly most) don't have the ability to navigate online services.

Then book a doctor's appointment at a library, café, or if you truly have to do it at home a neighbour would surely spin up a hotspot for you in the 5 minutes it takes if it's a dire emergency.

Someone with no home connection to the Internet is still way ahead of anyone in the 20th century, where you often needed to travel in person to various government offices throughout the year for things that can now be trivially done online.

People "need" ISP's for entertainment purposes.

No, but internet access is a requirement for many mandatory interactions with the government and various service providers so even if you can breathe without internet access you're going to be doing so from a cardboard box. Unless you want to lead a normal life you are not able to live without internet access in many developed countries. Bit by bit all alternative pathways to interact with parties that you have to interact with are phased out.

They will be before long, in the seemingly inevitable cashless society with nearly all retail done online

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