Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

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zbigi
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

Anybody interested in geo-arbitrage due (taxes and CoL reasons) should take a serious look into Eastern Europe. Taxes can be very low here. For example, right now I'm paying (on a ~$150k income) a total of 17% for income tax , state health care and state pension - it could be made lower with some legal tricks but I don't bother. I've heard Romania is lower. Ukraine was also much lower, but for now it's obviously out of the picture. It really looks like the states around here are in some kind of competition against each other - my tax rate was lowered twice in the past 4 years.

sky
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by sky »

Do you have any concerns about being negatively impacted by the war in Ukraine?

ertyu
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by ertyu »

sky wrote:
Fri Aug 12, 2022 9:28 pm
Do you have any concerns about being negatively impacted by the war in Ukraine?
imo central eastern europe do not need to worry. so far nato has been quite clear about wanting to keep the hot action on UKR territory. The Balkans/Greece + Spain/Portugal should worry. That's where the refugee waves are likely to hit.

zbigi
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

sky wrote:
Fri Aug 12, 2022 9:28 pm
Do you have any concerns about being negatively impacted by the war in Ukraine?
Not directly, it looks like the Russian have serious troubles in Ukraine and invading additional countries (esp. NATO ones) is the last thing on their mind at the moment. It could be even argued that Poland so far is benefitting from the war, because we're hosting 1.2 million Ukrainian refugees (mostly mothers with children), and our biggest problem mid-term is the society getting old. So, if a fraction of these families decide to stay in Poland, it would improve our demography.

So, I'm more worried about the overall impact on EU as a whole. The cutting off of energy (esp. gas) can send EU, and esp. Germany into recession, and Germany is largest consumer of Polish exports, so that would mean recession here as well.

Long term, being neighbors with Russia is never good, but this war has shown to Western countries (esp. France, Germany) what EE countries knew all along, i.e. that Russia is still about conquest and they absolutely cannot be trusted. Sweden and Finland are joining NATO now, there's a consensus about getting off Russia's fossil fuels, and there's increase in military spending, and in general countries are starting to think about military threats more seriously. So, in general, things don't look that bad. The biggest positive factor is perhaps Russia's demonstrated level of incompetence [1], which means that mounting a defense, even without large US backing (who knows what the next president's foreign policy will be), is very realistic.

[1] Let's not forget that Russia's greatest victory, i.e. defeating the Nazis, happened largely thanks to US shipping ungodly amount of resources into the USSR. It was basically Russia's blood and US' money that won the war. Now, it's the opposite, where there's an active embargo and some of their higher tech weapons cannot be fully utilized because they lack the foreign-made spare parts etc.

sky
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by sky »

Thank you, I appreciate hearing your perspective.

xmj
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by xmj »

To add, one noticeable effect in Eastern Europe is how tight the real estate markets for small / affordable housing has become. Whereas 2020 and to some degree 2021 a lot of formerly Airbnb-rented apartments came to market and rents took a dive, that by now has overcorrected.

suomalainen
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by suomalainen »

zbigi wrote:
Wed Aug 10, 2022 3:16 pm
What's also interesting, the people in Poland don't largely have "hobbies" per se. They may putter around in the garden, constantly fix their old (and only!) car or go fishing, but they rarely think of it as their official hobby, as people in the West do. I suspect the Western approach may be a fallout of the protestant work ethic, where even the things people do for fun have to fall under something that can be framed in terms of productivity ("he's working to get better at his hobby").
Love the perspective, thank you.

zbigi
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by zbigi »

suomalainen wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 10:23 am
Love the perspective, thank you.
To follow, here one's video by an American who got tired of living in LA, moved to Poland, and describes the differences in people he saw:
https://youtu.be/paeB2hWGSus?t=509

His perspective is that people in LA are intensely competetive, materialistic and shallow, while people in Poland are much more generous, family- and friends-oriented and unconcerned with status. I haven't lived in the US so can't comment on that part, but I often feel that a lot of Polish people are almost as if from some pre-capitilistic, pre-competetive "tribe" which only recently got discovered. I wonder if in 100 years we will all become neurotic, status-oriented assholes. Certainly the largest cities seem to go in that direction already.

guitarplayer
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by guitarplayer »

I think this could be due to the traditionalist attitude of the society (blue society). Tradition is in place of status, and the consequences of not adhering to it can be parallel.

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fiby41
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by fiby41 »

Found this article called Quit Your Job https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ar ... ob/382402/

Qazwer
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Qazwer »

‘The Man Who Broke Capitalism’ by David Gelles is an excellent review of Jack Welch’s impact on employment which I think this thread highlights.
@riggerjack summarizes it well I think - short term financial incentives created a situation that is sub-optimal but unfortunately understandable from the perspective of those who benefited in the 1980’s and 1990’s. They have retired rich from reshaping the labor/corporate compact.

jacob
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by jacob »

Posts deleted.

Lets stay on topic and off politics.

Laura Ingalls
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Laura Ingalls »

jacob wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:36 pm
I have noticed that the favorite protest of the youngest generation (Z?) is to be (appear) always tired or sleepy. Showing up pretending to be barely awake. This GenX finds dealing with that infuriating. It's probably good I did not become a professor. Being tired is the last vestige of personal autonomy for children whose helicopter parents have preplanned their career and interfered with their lives since before kindergarten.
I think there is some truth to that. Selective mutes generally have been traumatized by bossy control freaks too.

But as someone that worked with younger Xers and Millennials as high school students tired, sleepy, and passive aggressive is also some of the developmental stages too. My own offspring slunk around the hallways with his hoodie pulled up and called the Dean of Student’s “bruh” instead of Mr. Stickupass. He still wears a hoodie to work but not pulled over half his face. He is smiling and pleasant now and but still calls his coworkers and supervisor “bruh.” It’s a peer relationship now. They don’t want to be Mr. Stickupass.

I have a sibling that has worked with doctoral candidates in engineering for the last 20 years always says they are great workers just don’t schedule anything before 9 am.

suomalainen
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by suomalainen »

jacob wrote:
Sun Aug 07, 2022 12:47 pm
Employers were the first to recognize that working smarter [from their perspective] meant treating employees more like cogs that could be substituted and hired and fired at will rather than a lifelong contract as a "career worker". What we see increasingly is employees catching up to this and---being rich enough---they start treating the employers similarly, only doing the minimum to stay employed while applying their energies, focus, and meaning elsewhere.
I, for one, think this is a great development. Or, not really a development, but a more broadly recognized phenomenon. At one place of employment, years ago, the open secret was that there were two career paths - the try-hard-and-get-promoted path and the clock-in-and-do-your-job path. One was obviously looked down on by the other, but I think it went the other way as well (with perhaps an overlay of envy on some level). My attitude now is that an employer pays me for a job. That is the employment contract. I do my job, and I do it well. But I shirk from all of these "committee" assignments and similar "corporate citizen" bullshit. If that's what they expected from me, that's what they should have explicitly put in the job posting. I am paid in explicit dollars, not in implicit recognition or meaning or other such nonsense; I only satisfy explicit expectations. Employers can take their passive-aggressive implicit expectations bullshit and shove it up their asses.

Of course, when the job-market-leverage pendulum swings the other way, my lips may get tired sucking all that bullshit back out of there. But so long as the seller's market reigns...

7Wannabe5
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I think part of the reason that employees have "caught on" that at-will employment is a two-way-street is that technology has made it easier. The gig/contract employment market works almost exactly like online dating, and I have even witnessed high school drop-out teenagers very easily manipulating it towards their own self-interest, because it only takes about 5 minutes of effort and a smartphone to quit a warehouse job that pays $12/hr for one that pays $14/hr.

Another reason workers in the U.S. are more likely to job-hop is that health insurance and pensions are no longer strongly tied to long-term employment under corporate feudal lord. The kind of odd thing is that health insurance is now more "state" sponsored while pensions have been made more the responsibility of the individual.

IOW, employees are waking up to the fact that long-term committing to at-will corporate employment is the same sort of bad deal as committing to being somebody's "forever girlfriend" vs. retaining the freedom to maybe have a FWB, a summer lover, and a cozy housemate. However, choosing to "quiet quit" is still kind of dysfunctional for the same reason that it is kind of dysfunctional to let yourself get fat just because you have allowed yourself to be stuck with a weak, dull "forever girlfriend" contract.

theanimal
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by theanimal »

Charles Hughes Smith's blog post today is on Quiet Quitting. He laid out some possible 2nd order consequences that could emerge from persistent attitude of quiet quitting along with continued demographic and macroeconomic trends.
What are the second-order consequences of the global abandonment of the struggle to attain middle-class status and wealth?

Here are a few:

1. There won't be a younger generation with the means or interest in buying all the global Baby Boomers' overvalued assets.

2. Those inheriting their Boomer parents' assets which they assume they can sell at today's bloated prices will be shocked at the decline of the valuation once the massive supply overhang hits the market.

3. Younger generations with little interest in trying to make a lot of money to sock away for a distant retirement will not be funneling earnings into stocks, bonds, real estate investment trusts, etc.

The demand for financial assets will decline, and sellers will find a dearth of buyers. As demand for the vast oversupply of financial assets falls, so will price.

4. As labor demands an equalization of income and power, corporations will be hard-pressed to extract more profits from labor. Profits will be pressured for many reasons, including labor costs.

5. Consumption may hold up better than expected as younger workers spend their earnings on experiences and enjoying life rather than socking away money or devoting it to paying mortgages and property taxes.

6. The sacrifices required to live in high-rent cities--the equivalent of a mortgage--will push younger workers out of high-priced cities, eventually reducing demand and rents.

If cities decay per my forecast, this migration could gather momentum much faster than the mainstream expects.

This doesn't exhaust the second-order effects of the destabilizing inequality generated by hyper-Globalization and hyper-Financialization, and the unraveling of these two forces will generate additional consequences few conventional analysts and pundits anticipate.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct22/qu ... 10-22.html

jacob
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by jacob »

Apparently also a subject at Davos... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/manag ... 1673978678

The question is whether the clueless->loser phase shift is reversible.

7Wannabe5
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

The data from Gallup listed several actionable items that managers can do to help increase employee satisfaction and discourage workers from quiet quitting, such as regular weekly chats, accountability for individual performance and showing workers how their work plays a part in the company’s mission.
:lol:

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Lemur
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by Lemur »

Initial thought is I don't think so... I'm starting to believe the clueless to loser shift may just be the mere end result of world governments trying to manufacture and push out economic growth where its just possible that it doesn't exist anymore given demographic shifts and resource constraints.

The difference now is that the younger generations have caught on to this fact and are no longer buying into the "American Dream" or neoliberal economic policies. I suppose that extends to other Western societies. Still others might believe that the common Westerner is taking their situation for granted (they may see Westerners as spoiled). But we also see the Teng Ping rise in China as well.

From personal experience, the heavy demands of being a project lead on a resource depleted team pushed me forever from clueless to loser; enough to where I changed jobs to make it easier to live life as a loser as I continue to build up savings. I don't know if is possible to go back to clueless anymore at this point. Others have more courage to do this without built up financial capital.

@7Wannabe5

I lol'd too when I saw that. Is the definition of insanity.

ertyu
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Re: Lying flat, quiet quitting, Gervais losers

Post by ertyu »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Jan 17, 2023 1:37 pm
:lol:
I also laughed. Anything but training them, paying them, and showing them they have a meaningful opportunity for growth and advancement without having that mean sacrificing work-life balance

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