Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Greece introduces the six day work week

dw.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 162 posts

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#111

Post by robocat »

cyberax wrote: post #97
stavros wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those low-wage tourist-oriented businesses are making crazy high margins and paying workers peanuts. Beaches keep getting gobbled up by multimillion-euro hotel complexes (unconstitutionally) so they can make money hand over fist by taking advantage of public property (with the appropriate kickbacks to the local politicians), while the local economy benefits minimally from whatever minimum-wage jobs are created in the…

> Those low-wage tourist-oriented businesses are making crazy high margins and paying workers peanuts. They are really not. I looked into this in 2019, when I was making a backup plan to get an investor visa in the EU. You can buy a hotel business in Greece for basically peanuts, but it is almost impossible to make _any_ profit without resorting to shady tactics. That's also why large chains can move in so easily. Th…

https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/tourism-satel...

Shows profitability for tourism around 20% in New Zealand - although that's on the back of some pretty crappy service jobs.

Elsewhere in the report it implies that the government makes more than 20% (15% sales tax GST, plus other taxes).

I'm not a huge fan of tourism as a sector because it's so cyclical and paid service to tourists is often unpleasant. Although tourism is likely better than some other export earners... But tourism is a more significant earner for Greece: ouch.

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#112

Post by bryanlarsen »

aaomidi wrote: post #93
marcusverus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

That number makes absolutely no sense considering how much more basic stuff like housing is now. Income going up does not actually mean anything without taking into consideration that people are less likely to be able to buy a house now than 50 years ago.

That is an inflation adjusted number

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#113

Post by cyberax »

stavros wrote: post #100
cyberax wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those low-wage tourist-oriented businesses are making crazy high margins and paying workers peanuts. They are really not. I looked into this in 2019, when I was making a backup plan to get an investor visa in the EU. You can buy a hotel business in Greece for basically peanuts, but it is almost impossible to make _any_ profit without resorting to shady tactics. That's also why large chains can move in so easily. Th…

I'll trust your analysis, but how do you explain the extremely high prices nowadays? I went to a beach yesterday, and they wanted 75 EUR to rent an umbrella and two beds for a few hours. That's three days' wages for a Greek, how is this a low-margin business? Opex is minimal (basically bar staff), Capex is minimal (a bunch of beds and umbrellas), where's all the money going? Maybe it's only hotels that are low-margin…

The answer is very simple: corruption.

Umbrella business owners are likely paying off the local government and/or organized crime to keep competitors off.

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#114

Post by asdfasdf1 »

solarkraft wrote: post #82
imiric wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers. You keep working the same hours to make your bosses more money, when you could be working less instead. This income gap has been widening since the 1970s[1,2]. [1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide... [2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

This is true (and a problem worth debating). But it would intuitively suggest that the total amount of work to do would reduce. Instead, somehow, we have always found new stuff to do in the past.

new stuff = worthless meetings, powerpoints, emails & pretending to look busy

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#115

Post by rvense »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #112
aaomidi wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That number makes absolutely no sense considering how much more basic stuff like housing is now. Income going up does not actually mean anything without taking into consideration that people are less likely to be able to buy a house now than 50 years ago.

That is an inflation adjusted number

But the cost of housing has inflated more than the cost of potatoes.

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#116

Post by sircastor »

dualogy wrote: post #69
ses1984 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like making coffee. Cleaning my bathroom seems like a better benchmark.

Totally agree, with all this attention to "smart devices" in recent years I wonder where my consumer-sized flying de-duster mini-drone or something like that is? Sure the floor's sorted even with a 100%-non-smart robo-vac (and thusly, a flyer could just wipe or blow the dust down to the ground instead of any complicated gathering acrobatics), but the ground's just approx. half of dust-prone surface area..

I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately. Humans are good at arbitrary judgements like “this is dusty”.

It suffers the same kinds of problems as robotic pooper-scoopers, and even self-driving cars.

Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#117

Post by sircastor »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #91
ses1984 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like making coffee. Cleaning my bathroom seems like a better benchmark.

> Cleaning my bathroom seems like a better benchmark. Unclogging pipes full of toilet paper, pee and shit (I have to do that once in a, thankfully, rare while) is mine. The robots must be able to go in the garden, find the manholes, verify where the pee and shit are clogged, and fix it. When do we have that? P.S: every time I couldn't fix it myself, I called a company specialized in that sort of thing. Interestingly…

> Just as the new automatic registering of 18/26 y/o people for military only concerns men.

I think the people who want to protect the draft have a vested interest in not introducing equality here. Namely, their constituents have a particular mental model of how the world should be. They want to maintain that illusion.

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#118

Post by readthenotes1 »

solarkraft wrote: post #82
imiric wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the gains from increased productivity have been reaped by executives, not workers. You keep working the same hours to make your bosses more money, when you could be working less instead. This income gap has been widening since the 1970s[1,2]. [1]: https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide... [2]: https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

This is true (and a problem worth debating). But it would intuitively suggest that the total amount of work to do would reduce. Instead, somehow, we have always found new stuff to do in the past.

I play an MMO and people in Europe regularly tell me that they are playing at their desk or in meetings.

Given the number of people I've seen you spend more time on chat and social media instead of work task I would say that we have found more new ways to not work while getting paid.

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#119

Post by dualogy »

sircastor wrote: post #116
dualogy wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree, with all this attention to "smart devices" in recent years I wonder where my consumer-sized flying de-duster mini-drone or something like that is? Sure the floor's sorted even with a 100%-non-smart robo-vac (and thusly, a flyer could just wipe or blow the dust down to the ground instead of any complicated gathering acrobatics), but the ground's just approx. half of dust-prone surface area..

I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately. Humans are good at arbitrary judgements like “this is dusty”. It suffers the same kinds of problems as robotic pooper-scoopers, and even self-driving cars. Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?

> I think the problem is largely determining “dustiness” of a given space, and cleaning it appropriately.

Not needed. Like a robo-vac running frequently: they don't pick up _every_ single grain of dust perfectly during one given run. You just run them often enough they keep the floor "undusty enough". Or trimming beard / head at x mm every y days, not every hair is a perfect x mm at all times but the repetition / constancy makes it close enough.

> Would you solve with compressed air or a motorized feather duster?

Intuitively, probably the latter?.. But engineers working on such a thing would probably be best off prototyping and validating in both directions and with endless parameterizations =)

Re: Greece introduces the six day work week

#120

Post by EasyMark »

giantg2 wrote: post #2

6 days used to be normal generations ago, and still is in many parts of the world. Perhaps we're just in a golden age that's about to end.

Perhaps the majority should stop letting a bunch of elites tell it what to do? They only have the power we let them have.
Post reply on HN