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

Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 385 posts

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#171

Post by have_faith »

retube wrote: post #40
have_faith wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't looked at the data but I imagine foreign tourists mostly go to London and a few venture out to nearby hotspots. People within the UK seem to be branching out to every half-beauty spot we have in every corner of the Isles.

Clearly you have never been to Oxford, Bath, York, Edinburgh, Lake District, Cornwall etc etc which are teeming with visitors from the US, China, Japan and many other countries during the summer...

I've been to most of them but teeming isn't a word I'd really use. They're also the most obvious hotspots outside London, I was mostly attempting to make a point about all the 2nd-tier and 3rd-tier locations that are currently very busy with UK staycationers.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#172

Post by moreira »

Veen wrote: post #160
moreira wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did exactly that this year - went from £1050/mo for a 2-bedroom flat in the south to £375/mo for a 2-bedroom house with a back yard, in the North East. You can get anything you need delivered these days, including groceries, and I’m within walking distance of a train station if I need to head to an airport or go anywhere bigger. It’s seriously worth considering.

I was looking at rental prices in County Durham and Northumberland, largely because that's where I lived when I was a young kid. My partner was initially convinced they were some sort of scam because houses are so much cheaper than we are paying down south. We could rent a three-bedroom detached with a decent chunk of land for less than we pay now for a two-bedroom end terrace with no garden.

Oh the house prices. I’ve gone from looking at £250+K houses and thinking I’ll never be able to afford one on my own to “I’m buying a house in the next 12 months”. £5K deposit (not even joking), a 3 year mortgage (which will end up costing about the same as my rent down south) and I’ll be set.

I looked at Durham as well, and when it comes to buying, if I spot a good one there, that’s where I’ll go for sure.

The town I live in is nice, quiet, the people are super friendly, there’s literally no downside if you’re a remote worker.

These places aren’t a scam, they just don’t have high paying jobs available, but that isn’t a problem if you come with your own job.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#173

Post by api »

Pxtl wrote: post #77
mschuster91 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Real estate is so ludicrous we need quite a bit of inflation to make it reasonable again. Alternatively, we could invest in rural areas and other left-behind areas ("flyover states" in the US, Eastern Germany in Germany). Right now, the infrastructure there is flat-out unable to sustain quality modern human life unless you're Amish and fine with travelling on horseback: no high speed internet, no public transport,…

That sounds like a recipe for suburban housing sprawl, which is what you get in North America when people start moving en masse to a rural area, and it's expensive on infrastructure and unsustainable from a climate perspective.

I am no longer convinced that urbanism is categorically better for the environment. Here's why.

First of all, consider direct energy consumption. A suburban or rural home can probably get >50% of its energy use (including cars if they are EVs) from solar power directly off its own roof and property. This is year round in the sun belt and at least 2/3 of the year elsewhere. Batteries are getting cheap enough that home load leveling or even fully grid-free homes are now approaching middle class affordability.

EVs are now 100% practical as replacements for gas cars even in rural areas. I have a 200 mile range Nissan Leaf which was very affordable and would suit me just fine even if I lived way out in the exurbs or countryside, and they're building fast chargers everywhere where I live (Ohio) even along highways in the country. The next generation or two of cars (or a Tesla today) might even drive me to my destination, allowing me to read on the way the way I did in the subway when I lived in the city.

Secondly, the vast majority of your land use and probably more than 50% of your energy use is not direct. A huge fraction of your energy use is in the embodied energy of the products that you purchase and their transportation around the global supply chain. An even larger fraction of your land use is in farming and resource extraction to support you and your lifestyle.

Where you live changes none of that. A cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the city has exactly the same footprint as a cheeseburger or laptop purchased in the country.

In fact, I can see a future where dense cities are actually worse due to being harder to power with renewable energy. To power a dense city you might have to gather a lot of renewable energy from far away, which means more transmission infrastructure and more transmission losses. If we shifted to local farm-to-table eating patterns food in the city may even have more embodied energy due to a longer supply chain to get it there. Then consider that city dwellers eat at restaurants more and restaurants waste a lot more food than cooking at home usually does. (Seriously... look into how much food most restaurants throw away!)

Cities are hands-down superior to suburbs and the country in a fossil fuel powered world. In a post-fossil-fuel world it's very debatable.

Last but not least, we new urbanists (Gen-X and younger) have discovered that big cities are real estate cartels that make it impossible for the middle class to accumulate wealth. That's already pushing people away. For young people today I would recommend not going to a high cost of living city for any reason other than to level up your career and then leave. Big cities used to be fun centers of art and culture, but that's being driven away by real estate hyperinflation. I'm seeing more and more cool stuff happening in small towns across the country where creatives are settling so they can afford to live without spending >50% of their income on rent.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#174

Post by dageshi »

swarnie wrote: post #107
vxland wrote: post #87

Europe has evaded classical market economy by importing more people who'd work for lower wages at the slightest hint of any labor shortage. Pre-immigration such people would be called scabs. Now that you have Brexit, raise the wages. That's why people voted for it in an unusual recognition of their self-interests.

If you fancy annoying people go to a UK subreddit and claim Brexit was about workers rights, workers compensation and was humanitarian issue to help those most in need. Hilarious results will follow.

Only masochists go near that sub, it's pretty much the most miserable place on the entire internet.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#175

Post by nly »

imtringued wrote: post #159
zpeti wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. 20 years of lower and lower interest rates, meaning higher and higher mortgage amounts have driven up prices into oblivion. Either these prices are inflated away or there is a collapse. There's not much else you can, UK housing market is so far from market reality that it's a joke. And ironically the more you create policies like lower deposit amounts for younger people, or subsidised mortgage payments, the m…

>Agreed. 20 years of lower and lower interest rates, meaning higher and higher mortgage amounts have driven up prices into oblivion. The falling of interest is purely market driven. There is no government intervention there. Interest rates have been falling for a long time, far longer than 20 years and the reason is pretty simple. There are people out there who do not spend their money. The interest rate simply moder…

> The interest rate simply moderates between saving and investment.

For businesses perhaps, but this doesn't happen much at the personal level. Most people will save in cash, rather than invest, even if interest rates are zero or negative. Most people are risk adverse.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/2bcd4367-ef4c-4d1d-a69d-df2126b0f...

> While the annual ISA tally showed high levels of saving, most of the money went into cash ISAs, which offer low rates of interest and could leave savers vulnerable to rising inflation.

> Some 300,000 new subscriptions went to stocks and shares ISAs, compared with 1.2M new subscriptions for cash accounts.

So that's only ~20% of savers investing in to stocks in the most tax efficient way possible in the UK, even when the Bank of England base rate is at 0.1%

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#176

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

nicoburns wrote: post #93
boldslogan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the political will here is kind of weak...the voters who own housing dont want their asset to decrease in value and wont vote for politicians who want to force investment into industry, versus the renters who do. I am not sure what to suggest...

Medium term I think this political will will change as fewer an fewer people Can afford housing

Probably not in the UK, as the house-owning population are much older and tend to vote Conservative (the current governing party).

Young people are already screwed, and unless they all show up to vote in marginal constituences (unlikely) then they'll continue to get screwed, unfortunately.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#177

Post by antattack »

Reason077 wrote: post #150
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage rises without solving the housing issue is only going to raise house prices further. There's a bunch of potential solutions, but no-one directly benefits from them in the short term. Any attempt to fix it will be met with sob stories about old ladies in multi-million dollar homes being "forced out of their homes". So we'll all just sit and watch as things slowly spin out of control.

> "Wage rises without solving the housing issue is only going to raise house prices further." House prices aren't that tightly linked to incomes. House prices are more strongly influenced by interest rates and availability of credit. And, of course, supply/demand fundamentals (ie: population change vs. number of housing units in an area).

Home prices could be linked to wages through renting. I have often seen mortgage loan monthly payment compared to monthly rent as a reason a buy instead of renting.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#178

Post by Levitz »

mmarq wrote: post #85
tomp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof is in the pudding: "we can't find local workers willing to work for these low wages so we'll import them from abroad". A lot of EU immigrants come to London to work in tech/finance because they offer higher wages than pretty much anywhere on the continent (I was one of them). But the working class is pretty far removed from the effect of professional-class immigration. The UK has many other structural probl…

> The proof is in the pudding: "we can't find local workers willing to work for these low wages so we'll import them from abroad". Everywhere in world there are labour shortages, because we just ended lockdowns 3 months ago. In other places they are blaming the shortage on the young being lazy or on unemployment benefits, with the same scientific rigour. So I’m still waiting for a proof (not a pun or an anecdote) tha…

>So I’m still waiting for a proof (not a pun or an anecdote) that immigration reduces salaries.

And what would that be? A study linking both while accounting for every other factor? I don't think it's even possible to do such a thing.

>Which means that EU nationals living in the UK earn more than the locals, so they can’t be driving salaries down. Unless you hypothesise a fantasy counterfactual where Jack deChav, who’s now an underpaid bartender, would have become a software developer and would be earning 6 digits if only Carlos de Perros, S/W developer from Malaga, didn’t steal his job.

There is competition even in software development, it doesn't take anyone to be a bartender for competition to cause a wage drop, moreover the reality is way more stark when you look at jobs that aren't as cushy as software development. A Spanish waiter is probably used to lower salaries and is probably more dependent on his job than an English one that has a support network in his country, his chances to unionize are also lower. We see it all the time with immigrants from low income countries.

I can imagine how immigration can lead to economic growth and salary growth as a result, but I find it impossible that the race to the bottom caused in low-income jobs is worth for them at all, if anything the economic growth is caused by this low-cost labor.

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#179

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

moreira wrote: post #172
Veen wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking at rental prices in County Durham and Northumberland, largely because that's where I lived when I was a young kid. My partner was initially convinced they were some sort of scam because houses are so much cheaper than we are paying down south. We could rent a three-bedroom detached with a decent chunk of land for less than we pay now for a two-bedroom end terrace with no garden.

Oh the house prices. I’ve gone from looking at £250+K houses and thinking I’ll never be able to afford one on my own to “I’m buying a house in the next 12 months”. £5K deposit (not even joking), a 3 year mortgage (which will end up costing about the same as my rent down south) and I’ll be set. I looked at Durham as well, and when it comes to buying, if I spot a good one there, that’s where I’ll go for sure. The town…

It's only a problem when you need to change job (this is why I haven't done this).

Re: Job vacancies surge past one million in new record

#180

Post by pjc50 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #162
Reason077 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Wage rises without solving the housing issue is only going to raise house prices further." House prices aren't that tightly linked to incomes. House prices are more strongly influenced by interest rates and availability of credit. And, of course, supply/demand fundamentals (ie: population change vs. number of housing units in an area).

I wasn't making a claim about what impacted house prices the most. If I was, then I'd say a system where the government basically gives you free money/tax breaks if you buy a home, is the root cause behind the things you mentioned which then drives house prices. The point is, without fixing that issue, you can't solve it by wage rises. People who don't even want homes are buying them, either as outright investments t…

> the government basically gives you free money/tax breaks if you buy a home

Such as? MIRAS was abolished 20 years ago. Homes are arguably under-taxed (no US style property tax), but that's not really a "break".

Post reply on HN