111–120 of 144 posts
It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I've just launched https://www.fourdayweek.io/ (shameless plug)
Growing up in Spain, I am currently living back here after living over 14 years in Germany and spending most of my working life there. I am half Spanish and half German and have a good perspective on both mentalities in general. In my opinion the problem in Spain is definitely the mindset towards work and the way it is perceived. Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social live. I…
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Real estate rarely goes down, outside of a total bubble deflation. People just hold onto it longer, unable to profitably sell, further trapping others in a cycle of rent. The current bubble will drain money from producers to the value-empty mortgage sector for decades.
Your model that people can afford to hold onto an asset with maintenance costs forever seems like it can't be true. It's possible for your primary residence, but that's because homes have a use - you can live in them. If you're using it and paying the mortgage then it doesn't matter if you're underwater. Anyway, this can be solved by waiting for them to die, and in the meantime building more houses with more efficien…
As for new builds, much of that money is held by the large rental companies and needs them to transfer out of the rental space, which they won't do until the market looks sane. Maybe not as long as waiting for people to die, but still painful.
What a trap we built by trying to make our residences an investment.
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Real estate rarely goes down, outside of a total bubble deflation. People just hold onto it longer, unable to profitably sell, further trapping others in a cycle of rent. The current bubble will drain money from producers to the value-empty mortgage sector for decades.
Real estate rarely goes down, outside of a total bubble deflation. Detroit, Baltimore, Camden would like a word with you and your theory that housing never goes down.
> outside of a total bubble deflation.
Detroit is rare, and Detroit's bubble popped hard at the same time as real-estate in general.
> “The only red lines are that we want to see a true reduction of working hours and no loss of salary or jobs.” And there it is. (The proposal is the government pays a fraction of this for a few years before sticking the companies with this.) It's basically just a minimum wage law but written the other way. This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society…
" If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour." If you pay people more, then you can. Basic Henry Ford.
It also only worked because he had a huge first-mover advantage and wasn't facing price-pressure from competition. His grand plan could have bankrupted him in a week if the market hadn't been right for it.
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> Of course you will downvote me... Maybe they're downvoting you because they are also Spanish, they know who Rajoy is and what he did, and what effects a pandemic produces on your economy regardless of the party in the government.
> regardless of the party in the government I certainly do not miss Rajoy, but I whole-heartedly believe that a social-communist government is possibly the worst alternative to get us out of this hole. We need jobs, a lot of them, not only in the public sector, and I think that our current government is tremendously ill-equipped for this task. Has anyone noticed how members of the government rarely, if ever, talk abo…
Why is that? We said we needed a new labour law so you can lay off people at no cost, because they said that was the reason the unemployment rate was so high here in Spain. And we did it. And we still have the very same law, nobody is changing it. They also didn't raise taxes very much, in fact not as much as Rajoy did when he took office.
Instead, I think one of the reasons our economy is so vulnerable is because we are so much dependent on tourism and also there seems nobody can innovate and create a business other than a restaurant. But this is hardly our current government's fault.
(Of course, calling this government "communist" is a joke in poor taste, but people from outside Spain may believe this country is the new Soviet Union).
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The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits. But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.
The argument about increased productivity is a fallacy. Only the primary and secondary sectors have a long track record of increased productivity, in services on the other hands -which represent an ever growing share of the working population in western countries- productivity has been stagnating for multiple decades (in some industries it's actually receding, thankfully compensated by the few industries that have go…
This is so because when salaries in productive industries start to rise every other sector also has to raise wages to attract any worker at all, which in turn raises prices. It's also why coffee is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in Podunk Idaho. It's not because baristas in California are more productive, it's because the region is richer and you can't buy your freshly brewed latte from China or India.
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Aren't fewer workdays better for employment, because more people can be employed? I'm guessing it's more complicated, but is there some clear tendency?
Part of the complication if the enormous taxes and bureaucracy involved in companies hiring workers, it's a real pain for start-ups and smaller companies. I will give you one concrete example: companies in Spain with more than 50 workers must carry out salary audits to avoid gender discrimination [1]. These and other perverse incentives keep many companies from growing, which in turn hurt the economy and reduces dema…
If you're a micro-company, you can probably get away with paying each employee cash, or via B2B payments.
Once you reach any reasonable scale, you have to formalise those contracts.
This is a problem across the EU, apart from areas like the UK and Scandinavia which don't have payroll taxes (where interestingly tech seems to be flourishing).
Growing up in Spain, I am currently living back here after living over 14 years in Germany and spending most of my working life there. I am half Spanish and half German and have a good perspective on both mentalities in general. In my opinion the problem in Spain is definitely the mindset towards work and the way it is perceived. Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social live. I…
I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, the UK, and in short stints in the US, and some of what you say resonates with me. In particular: > Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social life This is just one manifestation of what's more generally a very poor work culture, in what amounts to a giant, self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. Management often lacks professionalism, salar…
Does anyone who's lived there for a while have any insight on why tasks that I could accomplish in the US in 12 weeks take like 5 years in Spain?
Why is every form and document and signature and approval process seemingly arbitrary? Why is the person you need for the next step always on vacation?
Is there some kind of a system where 5 people are drawing a salary for a job that 1 person could do, so they all mutually agree to do it as slowly as possible?
I just don't get it.
Many people already work 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 day weeks. Many of these people's schedules would not be affected by these laws. The only point of these laws is to see what what happen if you enforced them systemically en masse. If you don't do that, you are exactly where you started which is a few people having this privilege but not everyone.
And most of the potential rewards as well as potential consequences are only going to expose themself when the policy is enacted en masse. Like of course the few people you give the privilege to are going to happy. I don't really think that was up for debate. The question is is what effects will it have on the broader economy and running a trial with .05% of the population tells you nothing about that.