Only if you work outside the centre of London. May be dodgy anywhere in the South East or the M4 corridor, but pretty trivial in the Midlands or Up North.
If you're willing to go up to half an hour commute anywhere outside the City is probably manageable, or anywhere outside the South East if you want your apartment somewhere nice to live.
If you're willing to commute for 60-90 minutes each way you can get very rich very fast by working in the City. You wont need a big apartment though, you'll only be in it to sleep.
Well, at 260 per year this clearly isn't the way the thousands of Indian contractors are getting into the country.
I supported Brexit and immigration was a factor in that. Nonetheless I'm very comfortable with this visa letting in so small a number of genuinely skilled people, even though they're actually competing with me for jobs.
Basic math requires starting with accurate numbers.
I've seen 200k passengers quoted - I think you'll find 75k is the number left unable to return home, you're ignoring the ones that failed to fly to their destination in the first place.
Shit, you think the 1000 impacted flights only had 75 passengers each?
It's not a high-holiday season which means rebooking people is not costly
No, just half-term week, one of the few chances for families to go away for a week without hitting the punitive costs of school holiday travel. Oh, and a week starting with a bank holiday, allowing people to get a week off for just four days of holiday allowance.
For every 300 intercontinental passengers BA rebook on existing flights they save close to $200,000 just on fuel costs
Assuming those existing flights had spare capacity, and assuming you're spending $200k per flight on fuel costs - which sounds about twice the amount it should.
But don't forget those long haul flights also incur nearer £600/ticket refund costs and â400 compensation, so rather higher than the very modest estimates I used.
"The media" I've seen numbers from 15million - 250million. It's hardly a source to base a business decision on.
No shit. I'm not basing a business decision on it though, merely highlighting that it's very credible to suggest that this is going to materially impact on what ends up in the annual report.
200,000 impacted passengers, lets assume a mere £100/ticket, that's £20m straight up. Throw in the £2-300 cancelled flight statutory compensation and already you're hitting £70-80m.
That's ignoring claims for meals, hotels, the knock-on impact of seating many of these passengers on future flights, reputational and brand damage..
You think Google has a single HR database? You think the HR database includes details on experience in previous jobs at other companies? You think the HR database contains actual take-home pay information? You think the HR database tracks hours worked?
And yet.. nobody can find evidence of wage gaps within an employer.
The internet should be full of examples. There should be dozens or hundreds just from the Fortune 500 companies alone.
Yet.. there isn't. There are isolated individual cases. There is bullshit about total career earnings, or comparisons between contact centre staff and board members.
Fuck this shit. I'm bored with it. I get paid less than my peers and I'm doing something about it: I'm quitting and getting another job. I'm not bitching about the fact that one of them is a different skin colour or that another is female, I'm doing something constructive about the situation.
Sadly all jobs require social skills and anybody that wants to pursue a career beyond programming kind of needs them.
There are also significant differences in how Aspergers impacts people. Some people can mask their social skill gap, others are defined by it. A support group I used to attend had people present that could barely function in society - they had council appointed carers with them.
So although it may not be preventing you achieving success and being happy, it is recognised as a disability and that does grant a level of protection under UK law.
As an example, a lady with Aspergers has asked her employer to grant her permission to use the disabled toilets so that she doesn't have to cope with the noise of the hand dryers in the female toilets. In UK law that's considered a 'reasonable accommodation' and can make a massive difference to her quality of life and ability to contribute at work.
That was my instinctive response too. The 500 hours work sounds relatively high too, their worse-case scenario should be pulling data from a few different payroll systems and doing some merging, creating a pretty view and printing it out.
That 500 hours apparently costs $100k is fucking laughable. Google's fully-loaded staff cost is $200/hour? Really? Fucking hell.
One grandparent didn't work. With 8 kids, she was kind of busy. One was a cook in a cheap restaurant. One worked in a bakery, then drove a bus. Don't know what the other one did; he was retired then died.
They didn't get out of work benefits, they didn't get tax credits, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have a telephone or a television for a long time.
They did get council housing. My mother's parents lived in the same house throughout her whole life though, they couldn't afford to do anything else.
Do cooks and bus drivers get paid less now, adjusted for inflation? I have no idea. I do know they have a substantially higher quality of life with far greater access to information, entertainment, education, travel and social mobility.
Don't go telling me my grandparents had it easy. Economics aside, one of them lost an eye during World War II and one of them liberated Bergen Belsen. They literally had to fight for a living and coped with it in a way today's youth really should be striving to match.
Well, yeah. I could sell my whole house and it'd be worth a 20% deposit on the smallest house currently on the market in Kensington, with the remaining mortgage payments looking suspiciously close to my net salary.
House prices are insanely high in some places, and just stupidly high in others.
Sure, I'd love everybody to have everything they could possibly need.
Reality is that 'the West' rapidly advanced their own quality of life by exploiting other parts of the world. Now the rest of the world wants to catch up and it means that millenials now need to compare their quality of life with their global peers, not their elders.
I don't see many smart phones in Africa.
The challenge is that the world lacks the resources to give everybody a Denver lifestyle. If millenials want this shit they're going to have to work for it, compete for it and accept that it's not going to be easy.
Blaming previous generations? Sure, if you're a lazy entitled cunt.
The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative
My first mortgage was for 102% of the value of the property and had a 40% higher monthly payment than I was paying in rent.
But I was paying for a single room in a shared house, and when I bought my own property I immediately let out a spare room to a lodger. Suddenly I had my own home, I was gaining equity rather than all my cash going to someone else, and I had higher disposable income too due to the lodger's rent payments more than offsetting the my own 40% higher outgoings.
But yeah, if you want to live alone? It's tough out there. But it was 20 years ago too.
They've levelled off recently in the UK and although Brexit and a general lack of growth in average wages will have heavily influenced that, there's a limit to how many people can actually afford a house at their current price.
The market's been kept buoyant by foreign investment and buy-to-let purchasers but I'll be surprised if that's enough to keep prices going up.
Personally I'm hoping prices crash. I'd be delighted if houses dropped to a third of their current value. Although then people would be able to afford them again, demand would rise and prices would follow...
People are spending a third of their net income on rent, so saving is tough enough to start with. Add in property prices at five times gross wages, that's a hell of a lot of cash to try and save upfront.
Taking a mortgage and going into debt becomes financially responsible. That huge rent payment suddenly starts translating into equity and although sure, I've paid 15% more for my house due to interest than had I bought it in cash, I've also saved the house's purchase price in rent payments since I bought it. So basically for 15% more than I would have paid in rent I now own outright a whole house.
It's also gained substantially in value through that period, but that's kind of irrelevant. If I sold it I'd use all the extra cash buying a new house anyway so the net gain only matters when I get dementia and need professional care.
The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money
The working class can not sensibly be summarised as having a single attitude to money. My grandparents were thrifty and stayed out of debt. My parents managed it, some of their siblings did not. I managed it, my sister wouldn't know a fucking savings account if you opened it for her and paid your own salary in.
One of my cousins had a job once. She didn't like it, hasn't worked since, has no intention of ever working again. Another cousin works two jobs covering 80 hours a week to keep his family fed and sheltered.
Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys.
In four months time I'm going to be jobless. I'm also going to reduce my monthly outgoings to a third of their current level, by cutting out the meals out, the coffee shops, the premium TV service, the random shit I buy from Amazon.
Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...
Turns out I'm better at maths than you. But I don't look down on 'Millenials'. I don't even look down on people that can't properly manage their finances, because on average people are quite stupid.
I do look down on fuckwits bleating on about "It's all the Boomer's fault. Generation X let us down. I must have the iPhone 9, I couldn't possibly live without it"
Take some fucking responsibility for your own life for once.
If I took your house and car away, your pensions / salary, your healthcare, and any other source of finance or wealth, and replaced it with a car from mom and dad, a $50,000 student loan debt (at 10% interest), and a minimum wage budget, would you still make ends meet????
Yes, of course I fucking would. I'd start by getting a job that pays more than minimum wage, selling the car and replacing it with a pedal bike, refinancing so that I'm not paying 10% interest and tracking you down to kill you for stealing everything I have.
If I turned back the clock on you so that you were 22 again, and made all of your friends forget who you were, and took away your social skills (because you try growing up in a Social Media world and see how good your social skills are, then realize that society expects something other than text speak and no-one will help train you correctly no matter how much money you give them), wanna bet you'd get a job easily????
Sounds exactly like the position I was in at 21. I went out and got a job based on my skills, which I can assure you did not include anything remotely involving the word 'social'.
no need to worry about H-1B visa abusers or foreign investors that push the locals out of the housing market
Oh, you poor precious darling. All these problems that impact you and your age group, and it's all the fault of the old people.
Here's a fucking clue for you: immigrant workers depress wages for everybody, and if you think student debt is crippling wait until you have a mortgage or children of your own to pay for.
Foreign investors pushing you out of the housing market? Try being 50 and unable to afford your own home, or to move from the one you did buy because the costs of selling and buying a new one would force you to downgrade severely.
You clearly haven't fucking worked it out yet but life sucks, you have to work hard if you want luxuries, and I'm fucked off with paying stupidly high taxes to cover an education that clearly taught you fuck all and then bail you out when you can't manage your own life.
Yes, we millennials buy some stuff that is for entertainment.
Here's my final fucking clue for you: The people I went to university with had fun, found multiple forms of entertainment, left university with manageable debt levels, cleared them, worked hard and didn't waste all their cash on luxuries. Shit, my friends were all late 20s or early 30s before they did things like owning a car, eating meals in restaurants more than once a month, living in a house that didn't have three strangers sharing it, taking holidays abroad.
Now you maybe realise why we're lacking in sympathy for your hedonistic inability to fucking save any of your income, and completely refusing to let you blame us for it.
I don't have kids, and my friends' kids are pretty much all self-sufficient educated capable people.
I can write to complain about the 'everybody is a winner!' bullshit in schools, the switch in curriculum and attainment measurement that's fucked over an entire generation of boys, the focus at university on feelings rather than proper academia, but no cunt listens.
I can't invade peoples homes and stop them brainwashing their fuckwit offspring into their particular flavour of suicide bombing cult. I can't walk down the street slapping every parent I see failing miserably to control their children. I'm sadly just not allowed to pick up twelve year-olds and throw them into the sea so that their peers learn about consequences.
Sure. Add in the coffee bill, at $15/week. Lets throw in the leased car, call that $300/month. Maybe a meal out each week, on the cheap, so another $10.
There's $6k/year and we haven't even touched the entertainment costs, holidays away from home, fashion and other luxuries.
The phone might only be $660/year but add it to everything else, suddenly you can save $50k in five years.
Sure, you can't anymore do what I did and buy a house, pay the legal fees, buy furniture, move in, decorate and replace the soft furnishings for a total of £150 outlay but $50k goes a long way and if you need more, wait another 2-3 years.
A 20% down payment where I live is the the same as the national average wage - before tax. Given I don't live in London, that average is above average for my area.
I think it's reasonable that people will struggle to save that amount of cash. Shit, I don't think I've ever been in employment and had a year's gross salary in savings at the same time and I own my home outright.
Could I do that? Yeah, if I dropped my living standards back down to my student days I'd save around 3/4 of my net salary. I'd also end up quitting my job due to the stress so it wouldn't really help anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you work outside the centre of London. May be dodgy anywhere in the South East or the M4 corridor, but pretty trivial in the Midlands or Up North.
If you're willing to go up to half an hour commute anywhere outside the City is probably manageable, or anywhere outside the South East if you want your apartment somewhere nice to live.
If you're willing to commute for 60-90 minutes each way you can get very rich very fast by working in the City. You wont need a big apartment though, you'll only be in it to sleep.
Well, at 260 per year this clearly isn't the way the thousands of Indian contractors are getting into the country.
I supported Brexit and immigration was a factor in that. Nonetheless I'm very comfortable with this visa letting in so small a number of genuinely skilled people, even though they're actually competing with me for jobs.
Basic math requires starting with accurate numbers.
I've seen 200k passengers quoted - I think you'll find 75k is the number left unable to return home, you're ignoring the ones that failed to fly to their destination in the first place.
Shit, you think the 1000 impacted flights only had 75 passengers each?
It's not a high-holiday season which means rebooking people is not costly
No, just half-term week, one of the few chances for families to go away for a week without hitting the punitive costs of school holiday travel. Oh, and a week starting with a bank holiday, allowing people to get a week off for just four days of holiday allowance.
For every 300 intercontinental passengers BA rebook on existing flights they save close to $200,000 just on fuel costs
Assuming those existing flights had spare capacity, and assuming you're spending $200k per flight on fuel costs - which sounds about twice the amount it should.
But don't forget those long haul flights also incur nearer £600/ticket refund costs and â400 compensation, so rather higher than the very modest estimates I used.
"The media" I've seen numbers from 15million - 250million. It's hardly a source to base a business decision on.
No shit. I'm not basing a business decision on it though, merely highlighting that it's very credible to suggest that this is going to materially impact on what ends up in the annual report.
Well, do the basic mathematics.
200,000 impacted passengers, lets assume a mere £100/ticket, that's £20m straight up. Throw in the £2-300 cancelled flight statutory compensation and already you're hitting £70-80m.
That's ignoring claims for meals, hotels, the knock-on impact of seating many of these passengers on future flights, reputational and brand damage..
"The media" are quoting estimates of £100-150m, which is where my 10% came from - e.g. http://www.thedrum.com/opinion...
Early estimates peg this at a fraction of a percent of yearly net profit
The numbers I've seen quoted are closer to 10% of their annual profit.
That's not a trivial sum.
Individual cases are hardly the massive discrimination at scale that keeps being described.
On the flip side, 2400 requests to an AG to investigate sounds notable.
I don't know how engaged people in the US are with their AGs though so maybe that's just a couple of hours worth of inbound email.
You think Google has a single HR database?
You think the HR database includes details on experience in previous jobs at other companies?
You think the HR database contains actual take-home pay information?
You think the HR database tracks hours worked?
I don't.
And yet.. nobody can find evidence of wage gaps within an employer.
The internet should be full of examples. There should be dozens or hundreds just from the Fortune 500 companies alone.
Yet.. there isn't. There are isolated individual cases. There is bullshit about total career earnings, or comparisons between contact centre staff and board members.
Fuck this shit. I'm bored with it. I get paid less than my peers and I'm doing something about it: I'm quitting and getting another job. I'm not bitching about the fact that one of them is a different skin colour or that another is female, I'm doing something constructive about the situation.
Sadly all jobs require social skills and anybody that wants to pursue a career beyond programming kind of needs them.
There are also significant differences in how Aspergers impacts people. Some people can mask their social skill gap, others are defined by it. A support group I used to attend had people present that could barely function in society - they had council appointed carers with them.
So although it may not be preventing you achieving success and being happy, it is recognised as a disability and that does grant a level of protection under UK law.
As an example, a lady with Aspergers has asked her employer to grant her permission to use the disabled toilets so that she doesn't have to cope with the noise of the hand dryers in the female toilets. In UK law that's considered a 'reasonable accommodation' and can make a massive difference to her quality of life and ability to contribute at work.
Aspies are not a legally protected class.
They are in the UK. It's a learning disability.
That was my instinctive response too. The 500 hours work sounds relatively high too, their worse-case scenario should be pulling data from a few different payroll systems and doing some merging, creating a pretty view and printing it out.
That 500 hours apparently costs $100k is fucking laughable. Google's fully-loaded staff cost is $200/hour? Really? Fucking hell.
One grandparent didn't work. With 8 kids, she was kind of busy.
One was a cook in a cheap restaurant.
One worked in a bakery, then drove a bus.
Don't know what the other one did; he was retired then died.
They didn't get out of work benefits, they didn't get tax credits, they didn't have the internet, they didn't have a telephone or a television for a long time.
They did get council housing. My mother's parents lived in the same house throughout her whole life though, they couldn't afford to do anything else.
Do cooks and bus drivers get paid less now, adjusted for inflation? I have no idea. I do know they have a substantially higher quality of life with far greater access to information, entertainment, education, travel and social mobility.
Don't go telling me my grandparents had it easy. Economics aside, one of them lost an eye during World War II and one of them liberated Bergen Belsen. They literally had to fight for a living and coped with it in a way today's youth really should be striving to match.
Well, yeah. I could sell my whole house and it'd be worth a 20% deposit on the smallest house currently on the market in Kensington, with the remaining mortgage payments looking suspiciously close to my net salary.
House prices are insanely high in some places, and just stupidly high in others.
Sure, I'd love everybody to have everything they could possibly need.
Reality is that 'the West' rapidly advanced their own quality of life by exploiting other parts of the world. Now the rest of the world wants to catch up and it means that millenials now need to compare their quality of life with their global peers, not their elders.
I don't see many smart phones in Africa.
The challenge is that the world lacks the resources to give everybody a Denver lifestyle. If millenials want this shit they're going to have to work for it, compete for it and accept that it's not going to be easy.
Blaming previous generations? Sure, if you're a lazy entitled cunt.
Shit, you really don't know how to get a return on your investment.
Even at just 3% compound you'd have $211k. The FTSE100 index alone has averaged substantially better than that in the past 45 years.
If you're a millenial, retirement is at least 30-35 years away
Shit, I'm mid-point Gen X and I'm still 30 years away from retirement.
Pensions aren't worth what they used to be and the state isn't handing them out any more.
The problem is that in many places the interest you will pay on a mortgage for the cheapest available home with only 3% down is higher than the cheapest available rental alternative
My first mortgage was for 102% of the value of the property and had a 40% higher monthly payment than I was paying in rent.
But I was paying for a single room in a shared house, and when I bought my own property I immediately let out a spare room to a lodger. Suddenly I had my own home, I was gaining equity rather than all my cash going to someone else, and I had higher disposable income too due to the lodger's rent payments more than offsetting the my own 40% higher outgoings.
But yeah, if you want to live alone? It's tough out there. But it was 20 years ago too.
I'm not sure prices can go up much further.
They've levelled off recently in the UK and although Brexit and a general lack of growth in average wages will have heavily influenced that, there's a limit to how many people can actually afford a house at their current price.
The market's been kept buoyant by foreign investment and buy-to-let purchasers but I'll be surprised if that's enough to keep prices going up.
Personally I'm hoping prices crash. I'd be delighted if houses dropped to a third of their current value. Although then people would be able to afford them again, demand would rise and prices would follow...
That's increasingly hard to do these days.
People are spending a third of their net income on rent, so saving is tough enough to start with. Add in property prices at five times gross wages, that's a hell of a lot of cash to try and save upfront.
Taking a mortgage and going into debt becomes financially responsible. That huge rent payment suddenly starts translating into equity and although sure, I've paid 15% more for my house due to interest than had I bought it in cash, I've also saved the house's purchase price in rent payments since I bought it. So basically for 15% more than I would have paid in rent I now own outright a whole house.
It's also gained substantially in value through that period, but that's kind of irrelevant. If I sold it I'd use all the extra cash buying a new house anyway so the net gain only matters when I get dementia and need professional care.
The working class isn't being lazy or loose with money
The working class can not sensibly be summarised as having a single attitude to money. My grandparents were thrifty and stayed out of debt. My parents managed it, some of their siblings did not. I managed it, my sister wouldn't know a fucking savings account if you opened it for her and paid your own salary in.
One of my cousins had a job once. She didn't like it, hasn't worked since, has no intention of ever working again. Another cousin works two jobs covering 80 hours a week to keep his family fed and sheltered.
Anyone who tells you that is either a rich man that wants to pay low wages and no taxes or one of their lackeys.
In four months time I'm going to be jobless. I'm also going to reduce my monthly outgoings to a third of their current level, by cutting out the meals out, the coffee shops, the premium TV service, the random shit I buy from Amazon.
Spend a few minutes, do the math, and you'll see that. But that would mean confronting some really, really unpleasant realities. It would also mean you don't get to look down on Millennials anymore...
Turns out I'm better at maths than you. But I don't look down on 'Millenials'. I don't even look down on people that can't properly manage their finances, because on average people are quite stupid.
I do look down on fuckwits bleating on about "It's all the Boomer's fault. Generation X let us down. I must have the iPhone 9, I couldn't possibly live without it"
Take some fucking responsibility for your own life for once.
If I took your house and car away, your pensions / salary, your healthcare, and any other source of finance or wealth, and replaced it with a car from mom and dad, a $50,000 student loan debt (at 10% interest), and a minimum wage budget, would you still make ends meet????
Yes, of course I fucking would. I'd start by getting a job that pays more than minimum wage, selling the car and replacing it with a pedal bike, refinancing so that I'm not paying 10% interest and tracking you down to kill you for stealing everything I have.
If I turned back the clock on you so that you were 22 again, and made all of your friends forget who you were, and took away your social skills (because you try growing up in a Social Media world and see how good your social skills are, then realize that society expects something other than text speak and no-one will help train you correctly no matter how much money you give them), wanna bet you'd get a job easily????
Sounds exactly like the position I was in at 21. I went out and got a job based on my skills, which I can assure you did not include anything remotely involving the word 'social'.
no need to worry about H-1B visa abusers or foreign investors that push the locals out of the housing market
Oh, you poor precious darling. All these problems that impact you and your age group, and it's all the fault of the old people.
Here's a fucking clue for you: immigrant workers depress wages for everybody, and if you think student debt is crippling wait until you have a mortgage or children of your own to pay for.
Foreign investors pushing you out of the housing market? Try being 50 and unable to afford your own home, or to move from the one you did buy because the costs of selling and buying a new one would force you to downgrade severely.
You clearly haven't fucking worked it out yet but life sucks, you have to work hard if you want luxuries, and I'm fucked off with paying stupidly high taxes to cover an education that clearly taught you fuck all and then bail you out when you can't manage your own life.
Yes, we millennials buy some stuff that is for entertainment.
Here's my final fucking clue for you: The people I went to university with had fun, found multiple forms of entertainment, left university with manageable debt levels, cleared them, worked hard and didn't waste all their cash on luxuries. Shit, my friends were all late 20s or early 30s before they did things like owning a car, eating meals in restaurants more than once a month, living in a house that didn't have three strangers sharing it, taking holidays abroad.
Now you maybe realise why we're lacking in sympathy for your hedonistic inability to fucking save any of your income, and completely refusing to let you blame us for it.
I don't have kids, and my friends' kids are pretty much all self-sufficient educated capable people.
I can write to complain about the 'everybody is a winner!' bullshit in schools, the switch in curriculum and attainment measurement that's fucked over an entire generation of boys, the focus at university on feelings rather than proper academia, but no cunt listens.
I can't invade peoples homes and stop them brainwashing their fuckwit offspring into their particular flavour of suicide bombing cult.
I can't walk down the street slapping every parent I see failing miserably to control their children.
I'm sadly just not allowed to pick up twelve year-olds and throw them into the sea so that their peers learn about consequences.
What exactly do you fucking want me to do?
Sure. Add in the coffee bill, at $15/week.
Lets throw in the leased car, call that $300/month.
Maybe a meal out each week, on the cheap, so another $10.
There's $6k/year and we haven't even touched the entertainment costs, holidays away from home, fashion and other luxuries.
The phone might only be $660/year but add it to everything else, suddenly you can save $50k in five years.
Sure, you can't anymore do what I did and buy a house, pay the legal fees, buy furniture, move in, decorate and replace the soft furnishings for a total of £150 outlay but $50k goes a long way and if you need more, wait another 2-3 years.
A 20% down payment where I live is the the same as the national average wage - before tax. Given I don't live in London, that average is above average for my area.
I think it's reasonable that people will struggle to save that amount of cash. Shit, I don't think I've ever been in employment and had a year's gross salary in savings at the same time and I own my home outright.
Could I do that? Yeah, if I dropped my living standards back down to my student days I'd save around 3/4 of my net salary. I'd also end up quitting my job due to the stress so it wouldn't really help anyway.