Even still, the median US worker is unlikely to earn 4-5 weeks of paid time off during a year. The lowest quarter of wage-earners are as likely as not to have no vacation leave entitlement at all (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs2.t06.htm) [56% with paid vacation, 44% without].
28 days, though 8 of them can be the standard public holidays, leaving 20. It's pro rata for part time employees, and often given as cash to people on temporary contracts.
You can be socialist (in the European sense) and Capitalist at the same time.
Just like capitalism doesn't have to be Laissez-faire, business knows best, let them do what they want. So Socialism doesn't have to equal Communism.
The labour movements of which you speak, often formed political parties, in the UK that was the Labour party. Industries were nationalised, employment rights were given, the NHS was founded. Nevertheless the economy was fundamentally capitalist.
I suggest you go read the history of labour movements across Europe, where they came from, what political parties they begat, what figures brought them support and so on.
European countries are fundamentally social-democratic. Have a look at the etymology of that term.
When I was a kid, my parents had a three-week vacation every summer, and one week in autumn and one in spring. I never managed that, but that's partly because I get too antsy when I'm away from home for more than two weeks, and partly because I'm my own boss. But it's still completely normal in the Netherlands.
Sure, a very good point. But the people in the UK probably get the same type of non-arbitrary days off. For comparison, I'm more interested in the ones employees can use at their discretion.
Surely you're just trolling the majority users of this site? UK's vacation minimums dwarf the grand total of zero in America. Granted 10 days per year is fairly standard amongst most careers in the US.
The website is American and in America 10-15 days is pretty typical for regular people. In my apartment building the staff have to work public holidays and get 10 days vacation. So yes 28 (+ public holidays!) is very generous.
It's 28 days including holidays so if you take into account golden week and the week around the new year and all the emperor "birthdays" et. it is not that bad. Also in Japan 10 days is the minimum, many workers get more days as they get older.
Mismanagement. They must have been fairly confident about getting that emergency loan, and when the deal fell through they had no plan B. Just lock the doors and walk away.
If I hear that they were bought out by some vulture investment fund like Bain Capital/KKR a couple of years ago I won't be surprised at all.
Because you can't fly aircraft when you're bankrupt, and the funds to repatriate people are pooled by the industry, not retained by the individual failing travel company.
The challenge with a statement such as this is that it's stated like it's a natural law ("you can't fly aircraft when you're bankrupt"), rather than the result of a particular set of legal structures in a particular country. In the US, for example, you can certainly fly aircraft if you are undergoing a so-called "Chapter 11" bankruptcy (designed for reorganization.)
Think it through; there is a constant stream of vacationers, all booked in advance. How long do you continue to operate while not taking new bookings? You're losing money every day and you literally cannot fly planes around without cash.
Also, the UK handles bankruptcy very differently than does the US. You can't just continue to operate for months/years. This is why they paid into the fund which was created to insure against this exact issue for decades.
It literally does reach that point overnight - they’re told they’re bankrupt and that’s it the operation shuts down. If they said they thought they might go bankrupt so weren’t going to fly more passengers out then that would cause the bankruptcy immediately, so wouldn’t put anyone in a better position. There is no wind-down time with this process, they’re just done.
Thomas Cook was not a classic American-style travel agency, separate from the airlines; their specialty was all-in-one package trips, largely on chartered aircraft and with leased hotel rooms, etc.
So, for the American context, think of what happened when ATA Airlines went bankrupt: 10k people were stranded, most of whom had to pay for new tickets to get home on an airline that hadn't declared bankruptcy with planes in the air.
They can't. They were required to pay into a fund to insure their customers against a collapse, and the British government repatriated the customers using money from that fund.
> Meanwhile the U.K. is, like the rest of the world, getting warmer.
I'm yet to speak to someone who doesn't look at me like I've got 3 heads when I mention this as a possible reason not to go abroad. I even mention our recent heat waves. Nope, doesn't register. Hot = abroad.
I mean, if there's data to say otherwise, I won't deny it. Just find it funny.
I think part of what's happening there might be that what you describe as "hot = abroad", on closer consideration, would actually expand to "hot and not raining = abroad".
Global warming might be delivering "hot", but it hasn't been delivering "not raining". So this might be connected to the discrepancy you've noticed between the language of climate change, and people's opinions about the weather.
I've certainly spoken to people who've tried to tell me that increased rainfall is the reason why they don't believe global warming is occurring, presumably because: (a) they conflate warming with "good weather" (for some definition of good weather), and (b) they're not well acquainted with how the water gets up in to the sky in the first place.
Summer 2018 the UK got so little rain all the grass in our parks went yellow. I personally took a domestic vacation because the weather was too good to miss.
I've made an increasingly conscious decision to give up flying. I never really liked the flying itself (well waiting in airports) but every year my family go to some random bit of the UK, and all have been nice holidays, it helps that I'm not one for sitting on the beach, and I don't like it too hot to do anything. I won't rule out doing a trip of a lifetime, but compared to a package holiday to Spain, Greece, Ibiza. Britain can hold its own.
I've found an inverse correlation between supposed touristyness and what I actually enjoy, so I don't rule out those countries, but it's getting to the non touristy parts of those countries, when all the flights are to tourist destinations.
The article abdicates the responsibility of Thomas cook itself. It's clearly not solely an issue of external factors (althemoreso those factors were predictable). TC has financial troubles for a decade now. It known to be in a dire situation the past few years. And yet it was allowed to sell unrealizable packages to hundreds of thousands of people. Now their collapse costs a fortune to the UK taxpayers and probably even more to the thousands of businesses in the european south that are damaged. It's a little rich to pretend it was all inevitable
Yes, it's costing the UK not much less than if they had bailed out the company and forced some restructuring. (Yes, that way lies the potential for moral hazard)
TC pays the hotels and its contractors in arrears. TC ships a huge number of Brits to Greece every year. There are reports of hotels demanding payment from the travellers themselves given TC won't now be paying etc. They also employed directly/indirectly a great many people around Europe.
The C.A.A are covering all costs to hotels. Mainly through the ATOL fund. The CAA have already reached out to those hotels who have been kicking people out.
So no, it’simply not true that any Greek hotel will be left out of pocket from this.
It's not so easy. Reportedly TC has not being paying (some?) hotel bills since June. Even if a fund (Britain), insurances (Germany) and whoever might be responsible in various countries pays the outstanding bills, how will their hotel business continue?
If there were 600,000 TC tourists out in the beginning of this week, there is capacity for 600,000 tourists in 3 weeks, in 6 weeks and so on. Winter might always be a bit less busy, but it's obvious that economies in the holiday countries will lose a lot for many months to come. Much more than Britain or any of those companies where the tourists come from.
Yes. Let's calculate on the conservative side and say they would have spent about an average of $800 on hotel, food, local attractions, souvenirs, etc. That's about half a billion to the local economies. Not all of that is a loss for the 600,000 out right now, and some future vacationers might re-book, but plenty of them won't have the money to pay again or decide not to spend it, and simply wait until next year for their next vacation. I wouldn't be surprised if the losses went to a full billion or so.
I'm not sure what the long term costs of "moral hazard" would be, but I've also never bought it as the bogey man some make it out to be. I simply don't think that many executives would steer their company in a direction that is more likely to lead to insolvency just because it might get bailed out. Not when it also means they lose their job in disgrace along with a lot less in compensation than they would have made if the company stayed solvent.
Yes, in the long run it might cost more than the nominal sticker price of bailing them out. But losing their contribution to the economy may also cost more in the long run. I don't know which is greater, but it seems reasonable that it might be as good to have a policy of intervention. Somewhat like what is done with banks & the FDIC providing both assistance in securing customer money and at the same time a very orderly unwinding of the business, often restructuring & take over by another party. That might be better than letting it crash into insolvency at full speed.
But honestly I don't know: I don't think there's an easy calculation here, and probably it's best for a country to take these things on a case by case basis. I think it's reasonable to not bail out TC, but I also think the alternative could have a rational basis as well.
> Now their collapse costs a fortune to the UK taxpayers.
Does it? Grant shapes (secretary of state for transport) said most of the money to sort this mess has come from the ATOL fund rather than tax. And if that doesn’t cover it then the money from asset stripping TC will be used to pay back customers.
So I’d be interested to know you've got that from.
"This is in addition to an expected £100 million bill to return Thomas Cook passengers to Britain" - it might be true, but I just don't understand where they are getting that number from. When Monarch Airlines collapsed, repatriating 110k passangers cost £16.3M - but somehow repatriating 150k tourists is going to cost over £100M here??
In response to #2: Thomas Cook had its own airline with its own fleet of aircraft. Surely some of the fund could be used to keep that fleet and its pilots employed and operational to bring the people back? No need to charter anything then.
Not specifically. The article indicates changing market preferences for travel, digitisation of agency functions, emergence of low cost carriers and market disruption in airbnb as the underlying causes.
Although they may have had 150k stranded customers it seems they were left with a low yielding segment selling products the market didn't need.
Once bankruptcy is inevitable it's a mad rush from creditors to secure assets. The net effect is your "bankrupt" as soon as it appears inevitable regardless of whatever timeline you would have planned.
Further continuing to trade after your insolvent is a form of creditor preference. In most cases your customers become just another creditor upon bankruptcy. This is of course illegal.
Insolvency law already allows for some creditors to be higher priority than others.
Some would say the people who are in a foreign country and owed a flight home should be the highest priority creditors. And if operating a flight is the most efficient way to pay that debt....
Giving customers higher preference would indeed be possible if agreed ahead of time. But it would increase borrowing costs as bond holders would now be subordinate. Don’t expect it to happen unless a law mandates it - consumers don’t have enough bargaining power.
In the case of this bankruptcy preferring customers would be changing the rules after the game had started. Even if you did it a bankruptcy judge would be in his rights to claw back the cost from the consumer.
It makes zero sense that lenders, who agreed to take on some risk, are allowed to steal money from customers who paid a product they never received and never decided to take on risk.
You take on the risk when you pre-pay for services you haven't yet recieved. By law you are also a creditor just like a bond holder.
Similarly when you eat at a restaurant and pay at the end the restaurant is providing you credit. Most people don't think of it this way because the transactions go smoothly and the distinction is irrelevant. But it does affect what rights you have if something were to go wrong.
> You take on the risk when you pre-pay for services you haven't yet recieved.
There are perhaps cases where this is true, when purchases are informed the the sketchy financial state of the company in advance and have the information necessary to assume the risk. It is ridiculous to assert that regular customers, who are purchasing an Airline ticket in the standard way that almost every, has done due diligence and should be treated the same as creditors who are given detail financial information.
> Similarly when you eat at a restaurant and pay at the end the restaurant is providing you credit. Most people don't think of it this way because the transactions go smoothly and the distinction is irrelevant. But it does affect what rights you have if something were to go wrong.
I think most places consider "dine and dash" a crime. You go to jail for theft because it is not a loan. Do you know of any jurisdictions that actually treat this as a loan?
The fact the consumer didn’t do any due diligence doesn’t change the situation. Perhaps the situation should change - but somebody has to lose when promises can’t be fulfilled.
As for dine and dash there is a difference when there is no intent to pay. If somehow between when you ordered and when it came time to pay you declared bankruptcy then the resteraunt is SOL. The short timeframe just means its very unlikely you had intent to pay.
For bankrupt companies you will see attempts to limit future expenses (i.e. cancelling employee trips etc) but the fact that there is a continual stream of transactions makes it much messier. It is fraud if the company racks up large numbers of unusual expenses just before bankruptcy is declared.
> The fact the consumer didn’t do any due diligence doesn’t change the situation.
It is the reasonable expectations that differ. Customers are not expected to ask for (and will not be granted) financial information or proof of collateral. It is completely unreasonable to give those customers the same level of risk as creditors who are expected to ask for (and receive) such information.
> It is fraud if the company racks up large numbers of unusual expenses just before bankruptcy is declared.
So when a company does not currently have the financial ability to fulfill a purchase (say without obtaining a government bailout), how is it not fraud to sell a product and collect money without informing the customer of that risk?
> As for dine and dash there is a difference when there is no intent to pay.
I'd like to see you try telling your waiter "I'm a bit tight on money right now, you'll have to wait for next month for me to pay my bill." Let's see if they call the cops and you get arrested. Your argument is rather ridiculous.
If you announced that you were going to go bankrupt in the future, your creditors and investors would bail, making you immediately bankrupt. There’s no way to ‘wind down’.
But we don't have Chapter-11-style provisions in the UK. If we did, you could effectively wind down or restructure a company. But we don't. So you can't.
In the UK if you know that are you insolvent (and knowing that you are about to be insolvent is effectively the same thing as knowing that you are insolvent) then it's illegal to trade. Using your last bit of money to do something like fly people home is illegal - it would be defrauding other creditors who have higher priority to be paid off.
Sure, the tone of what I was responding to was that it was impossible to do things differently. Kind of like an American explaining why universal healthcare is impossible.
Having bankruptcy at all is an attempt at making a situation full of inherent conflict more orderly and less disruptive, so it isn't obvious why one must execute its provisions in a disruptive manner.
Well, if you stop doing business suddenly, it seems very plausible that will negatively impact the value recoverable by the creditors, so why should everything stop immediately?
In the US they would have filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11[1] and continued to fly while they worked out a restructuring. Most of the major airlines in the US have done this in the recent past: United in 2002, Delta in 2005, and American in 2011. UK bankruptcy law is different and doesn’t give companies this option.
They were insolvent, at which point they are not allowed to trade. There's a specific offence of trading whilst insolvent.
The CAA brings all the UK customers home as near to on schedule as possible under ATOL rules. Not sure how other nations play it out.
There was talk after Monarch's collapse a couple of years ago of permitting an exception in the insolvency rules. Specifically to allow the use of the collapsed group's aircraft and pilots. No more was every heard of it. But it was Chris "failing" Grayling as Transport Secretary, so hardly surprising the initiative failed.
As uncertain as UK governance and Chinese international trade relations have been recently, they might be excused for thinking anything could happen in the space of a month.
Part of the niche they where in have seen margins and bottom lines decline for a long time.
Airlines focusing on the budget segment has been going out of business for years. Is Norwegian next in line?
If the European airlines keep going out of business we might see airlines from outside of Europe operating intra-Europe flights. Maybe an Emirates flight from Paris to Marseille or Qatar Airways flying Stockholm-Helsinki?
They aren't really an airline, that's just part of the business.
Foreign airlines aren't generally allowed to operate intra-EU flights (something Brexit is disrupting, many British planes have been registered elsewhere in the last year or two).
Bankruptcy in the UK is significantly different than in the US where companies often continue to operate under Chapter 11 in a way that may not be noticeable to customers. The UK as far as I know doesn’t offer such protections.
It’s not just the US where they do this but other countries in Europe also. The U.K. govt are looking into doing this for aviation as the US model was brought up in the commons when discussing Thomas Cook.
I'm not sure the article truly gets to the key points of why they went out of business. The travel industry in Europe is still growing, Brits are making more foreign trips than ever before.
The real problem was that the holidays they were selling weren't making Thomas Cook any profit. The holidays needed to be competitive against online travel agents with much lower wage costs. By booking with Thomas Cook, you could get an experience where there were more staff on hand to help you, but actually people didn't value this and hence weren't prepared to pay more.
The real nail in the coffin for Thomas Cook was their huge liabilities and huge concerns about their business viability so of course they were paying huge amounts of interest. Lenders were only lending to them on the hopes that they could collect enough interest rather than repayment. They were hoping that other parties (such as governments) would make cash injections such that they could profit. Everyone knew that eventually the debt would catch up with them, no one would want to be left holding the bag and the company would collapse.
The only reason Thomas Cook's balance sheet didn't look horrific was because they had assigned the brand a goodwill value of over £2.5 billion in 2018 which they wrote down to £1.4 billion after the first half of 2019. This was clearly a huge over-estimate as I doubt anyone will be paying much to purchase their brand now!
>assigned the brand a goodwill value of over £2.5 billion in 2018 which they wrote down to £1.4 billion after the first half of 2019. This was clearly a huge over-estimate as I doubt anyone will be paying much to purchase their brand now!
That's not what Goodwill is. Goodwill goes on the balance sheet when you acquire a company for more than book value.
I am not familiar with the details of their business.
But I assume they got the goodwill into their balance sheet by typical mismanagement:
1. Their markets are shrinking
2. Instead of shrinking company operations to adapt, they buy even less successful competitors for an overprice, so goodwill in the balance sheet
3. Not unsurprisingly integrating the not so successful competitor into the company is not so successful, employees are demotivated abd business suffers even more
4. Now a company with growing costs operating on a shrinking market gets even less profitable
I don't claim healthily shrinking a company to adapt to a shrinking market is easy. But I'm sure it must be doable. Looks like business management largely fails in this discipline.
>But I assume they got the goodwill into their balance sheet by typical mismanagement:
Virtually every company will have a market value greater than their book value. So any company that buys other companies will have goodwill on their balance sheet. Google, for example, has 18 billion dollars worth from all of their various acquisitions.
Take a company like Nest for example. They had assets like patents, infrastructure, cash, accounts receivable, etc. If you add those all up and subtract their liabilities you get a book value of 100 million, as a totally made up number. Google comes along and buys them for 3.2 billion dollars. The transaction, from a book value perspective, has 3.2 billion in cash going out from Google and 100 million dollars of assets coming back. That looks like Google paid 3.2 billion for 100 million in assets, or in other words, just lost 3.1 billion dollars of value. To prevent that goodwill is added to the equation. The books have Google paying 3.2 billion dollars in cash for 100 million in assets and 3.1 billion in goodwill. Now Google paid 3.2 billion in cash for 3.2 billion in assets and it doesn't look like they lost value.
More than a quarter of their profits were being used to pay interest on loans taken out after years of decline.
The management seem to do a good job of diverting attention from the debts but the company was seriously badly managed, it was only a matter of time before it went bump.
That's not to mention the 2006 Carbon Monoxide poisoning incident which meant people like me resolved never to use the company again.
Well he misses mention of the £3.1bn of debt before its collapse. Nor that while high street travel agents were busy declining fast Thomas Cook, fifteen years after we all discovered lastminute dot bomb[1], they bought Co Op Travel and their 750 shops. They lost their prestige image in the 90s as they were firmly playing in the discount package space.
Doubling their high street shop network in 2016 seems to be sheer lunacy.
That page appears to be about 100K, so I think it would probably have taken at least 15-20 seconds to load on dial-up? Probably back in the day you would have been swearing at how bloated it was.
I worked for a newspaper around the period this article was published (~2000) and we had a strict 120kb limit per page, aiming more for ~90kb, for the exact reasons you suggest.
Yes. Granted more people were on dial-up, but while the promise of an AJAXier web was one that felt faster, the effect in practice has been one that feels slower, if anything. There was a brief golden age in which, if one had broadband, the web was very fast using entirely static or server-rendered pages, which are considered in modern dev folklore (hilariously, to those who've seen both at work) to be slow. [EDIT] just the server rendering is considered slow or old-fashioned or somehow inefficient, I should clarify—I don't think anyone's nutty enough to think static pages are slow.
Also images were much, much smaller, both in terms of pixels and amount of compression applied, using large images that weren't content was heavily discouraged, and no-one used auto playing videos. To the extent that sins against bandwidth were committed it was mostly with Flash, which we all complained about and which is now reviled, but which was in fact generally way less abusive, confusing, and performance-destroying, than what gets done now in the name of "modern UX". Pages were much smaller, devs were much more sensitive to markup bloat. The worst we had on that front were WYSYWG-made pages (Frontpage, for example) but they've got nothing on the kind of attribute bloat and huge JS payloads one sees now (and the JS in particular can keep on allocating memory after its text is loaded into memory then parsed into even more memory, with predictable results on resource use and page load times)
Latency, thanks to all those dozens of third party JS, font, tracking and other service calls, seems to be what we completely lost. Just about nothing feels instantly snappy any more, even if overall the page completes pretty quickly - for a Web 2.0 version of pretty quickly. :)
I remember many years ago, when a 16 MHz 68030 Macintosh was somewhat usable, but old and slow, by the standards of the day.
I had read how, when the 68000 came out originally, it was considered to be a "minicomputer on a chip", while the 68030 was anticipated to be a "mainframe on a chip".
So, I was unable to viscerally appreciate that perspective, until I ran the original MacPaint, which was extremely optimized for the 8MHz 68000 in the original Mac, and then I was amazed at how fast the 68030 was.
I had the Amiga, 68000 at 7.09 MHz (PAL, NTSC ran a teeny bit faster). Both Mac and Amiga gave fully featured, incredibly low latency GUIs. They might think a bit after the click, but compared to a modern GUI, oh so snappy.
Windows, OSX, X with whatever Windowing never get close to that instant tip of your fingers response. I miss low latency responses.
Well, I wouldn't make such a categorical statement about latency. I remember an early Amiga word processor that had an unbelievably laggy and slow UI, such that it was basically unusable.
The Mac mouse pointer was always responsive due to interrupts, but that didn't mean that what you clicked on was.
However, the thing that I hate most about the modern web and similar UIs is that they reflow or otherwise move the content you are looking at after you click and before the click is mapped to an element, so you don't get what you click or tap on. This is absolutely unforgivable in my opinion, and absolutely not a matter of degree or grey areas unlike most of the things people complain about.
Amiga's pointer was a hardware sprite, so that always stayed responsive. Was more thinking of the OS's themselves rather than within applications. You could certainly get Amiga to slow down in the apps, particularly if you were programming it badly. As it generally only redrew when needed and managed layers and viewports pretty well, getting it that laggy would have taken effort. :)
Took years after I abandoned the platform for serious use for Windows not to always be more sluggish, and get dramatically worse when under load. Course by then I was on '040 comparing with Pentium something.
That was the high bandwidth page for those with an OK connection! The Beeb used to have a low bandwidth text only version of every page, but those weren't preserved - the text link will now bring you back to that page again.
Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL was either in very early roll out or pre-roll out hype - so nearly everyone waiting on exchanges to be converted. Techies probably had BT Highway, a dual 64k ISDN link. That always seemed really fast, and way faster than many of today's bloatware sites now feel. Insane page and JS weight with dozens of third party calls every page came later. Early broadband, before pages grew to over-compensate for that bandwidth was delightful!
Downloads and Dial up could feel sluggish, especially when you hit the sites being "clever and disruptive" with Macromedia Flash (not many yet), or a site that didn't know how to do thumbnails or image optimisation (quite a few. Usually pages with little 10x10 icons that were really 1024x768 images etc). :)
Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. I think I had a symmetric 1Mb/s, but would experience slowdowns during peak hours (nowhere near dialup).
View source reveals two tiny scripts and one small css, which is much better than the typical bloat of a modern website that has heavy reliance on various frameworks.
It doesn't call out to Google Analytics, or any of the social buttons. It's a classic static page, although even this manages to load a bit of javascript.
I can understand going out of business. I don't understand how it happens so suddenly from one day to the next to the point where people had no way to get home. Like, when those people booked their vacations, or even when they departed on their vacations, Thomas Cook just had no idea that they wouldn't have the funds to complete their trips? Do they just not look at their accounting statements and bank balances or something? How does something like that come as a surprise?
Look at things from the perspective of a CEO who knew his only chance to save the company (and his annual bonus) was to gamble all-in on getting a government bailout.
From that perspective, wouldn't you want to make a bankruptcy as messy as possible?
The UK has different bankruptcy laws than the US. Once you declare bankruptcy, that's it: all your accounts are frozen, all your employees go home, the company's assets belong to the courts.
It's similar to, but even worse than a chapter 7 bankruptcy. I don't why their system is the way it is, but that's how it works.
... and in the future you will look to this experience as having been VIP, because in the future you will check-in naked , shackled to the floor with a hole in it so that you do not do anything untoward to others and the robot crew. The hole is to avoid the constant toilet trips necessitated by the crappy food . If you travel cattle-class you will get your cloth back in a basket , mixed together with the cloth
of similar classed passengers. You will be allowed to re-dress once getting thru airport security , which involves getting taken apart and put together again by the intern of the day.
> Today, a flight from the U.K. to a city on the continent can cost the same as or even less than an (overpriced) train ticket from central London out to the airport
The article is a nice read, but it fails the answer the question in the headline. If a company has a huge business and it's shrinking by a couple of percent a year, does the company unavoidably go bancrupt? I don't think so. There are plenty of successful businesses with a smaller customer base. The problem is mismanagement, corporational slowness, lying about the facts, creative if not illegal bookkeeping etc etc. Best demonstrated by the fact that management has got multi million bonus payments during recent years.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadDoes the UK have a reputation for generous vacation days? I never knew that - I thought it was pretty standard 28 days here.
The median number of vacation days for most categories of workers is about 15 (https://www.bls.gov/ncs/ebs/benefits/2017/ownership/private/...).
I'm actually surprised that many part time employees are given paid time off at all.
And there's the rub: it's expected over here.
28 days, though 8 of them can be the standard public holidays, leaving 20. It's pro rata for part time employees, and often given as cash to people on temporary contracts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...
The reason? That most vilified of ideas: socialism.
Just like capitalism doesn't have to be Laissez-faire, business knows best, let them do what they want. So Socialism doesn't have to equal Communism.
The labour movements of which you speak, often formed political parties, in the UK that was the Labour party. Industries were nationalised, employment rights were given, the NHS was founded. Nevertheless the economy was fundamentally capitalist.
European countries are fundamentally social-democratic. Have a look at the etymology of that term.
20 days minimum + 8 days public holidays.
If I hear that they were bought out by some vulture investment fund like Bain Capital/KKR a couple of years ago I won't be surprised at all.
Also, the UK handles bankruptcy very differently than does the US. You can't just continue to operate for months/years. This is why they paid into the fund which was created to insure against this exact issue for decades.
So, for the American context, think of what happened when ATA Airlines went bankrupt: 10k people were stranded, most of whom had to pay for new tickets to get home on an airline that hadn't declared bankruptcy with planes in the air.
I'm yet to speak to someone who doesn't look at me like I've got 3 heads when I mention this as a possible reason not to go abroad. I even mention our recent heat waves. Nope, doesn't register. Hot = abroad.
I mean, if there's data to say otherwise, I won't deny it. Just find it funny.
Global warming might be delivering "hot", but it hasn't been delivering "not raining". So this might be connected to the discrepancy you've noticed between the language of climate change, and people's opinions about the weather.
I've certainly spoken to people who've tried to tell me that increased rainfall is the reason why they don't believe global warming is occurring, presumably because: (a) they conflate warming with "good weather" (for some definition of good weather), and (b) they're not well acquainted with how the water gets up in to the sky in the first place.
I've found an inverse correlation between supposed touristyness and what I actually enjoy, so I don't rule out those countries, but it's getting to the non touristy parts of those countries, when all the flights are to tourist destinations.
So no, it’simply not true that any Greek hotel will be left out of pocket from this.
If there were 600,000 TC tourists out in the beginning of this week, there is capacity for 600,000 tourists in 3 weeks, in 6 weeks and so on. Winter might always be a bit less busy, but it's obvious that economies in the holiday countries will lose a lot for many months to come. Much more than Britain or any of those companies where the tourists come from.
I'm not sure what the long term costs of "moral hazard" would be, but I've also never bought it as the bogey man some make it out to be. I simply don't think that many executives would steer their company in a direction that is more likely to lead to insolvency just because it might get bailed out. Not when it also means they lose their job in disgrace along with a lot less in compensation than they would have made if the company stayed solvent.
Which is to say that it is in fact costing the UK very much less than a bailout.
But honestly I don't know: I don't think there's an easy calculation here, and probably it's best for a country to take these things on a case by case basis. I think it's reasonable to not bail out TC, but I also think the alternative could have a rational basis as well.
Does it? Grant shapes (secretary of state for transport) said most of the money to sort this mess has come from the ATOL fund rather than tax. And if that doesn’t cover it then the money from asset stripping TC will be used to pay back customers.
So I’d be interested to know you've got that from.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/taxpayer-faces-huge-bill-...
1. Monarch just flew EU. TC also does Cuba; Mauritius; Barbados, USA, India
2. Because of the 737MAX mess, there’s fewer available seats on other airlines and there just aren’t idle charter planes available.
All except 5 were leased from 38 different companies:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thomas-cook-grp-investmen...
Not likely, there'll be a line of higher priority creditors before them.
See for example: https://www.franciswilksandjones.co.uk/site/our_services/com...
(Customers being unsecured creditors.)
So the reason they collapsed is because their cost structure wasn't aligned to serve the volume of business they conducted.
Although they may have had 150k stranded customers it seems they were left with a low yielding segment selling products the market didn't need.
600K if you include people from other countries.
Further continuing to trade after your insolvent is a form of creditor preference. In most cases your customers become just another creditor upon bankruptcy. This is of course illegal.
Some would say the people who are in a foreign country and owed a flight home should be the highest priority creditors. And if operating a flight is the most efficient way to pay that debt....
In the case of this bankruptcy preferring customers would be changing the rules after the game had started. Even if you did it a bankruptcy judge would be in his rights to claw back the cost from the consumer.
Similarly when you eat at a restaurant and pay at the end the restaurant is providing you credit. Most people don't think of it this way because the transactions go smoothly and the distinction is irrelevant. But it does affect what rights you have if something were to go wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XebF2cgmFmU
There are perhaps cases where this is true, when purchases are informed the the sketchy financial state of the company in advance and have the information necessary to assume the risk. It is ridiculous to assert that regular customers, who are purchasing an Airline ticket in the standard way that almost every, has done due diligence and should be treated the same as creditors who are given detail financial information.
> Similarly when you eat at a restaurant and pay at the end the restaurant is providing you credit. Most people don't think of it this way because the transactions go smoothly and the distinction is irrelevant. But it does affect what rights you have if something were to go wrong.
I think most places consider "dine and dash" a crime. You go to jail for theft because it is not a loan. Do you know of any jurisdictions that actually treat this as a loan?
As for dine and dash there is a difference when there is no intent to pay. If somehow between when you ordered and when it came time to pay you declared bankruptcy then the resteraunt is SOL. The short timeframe just means its very unlikely you had intent to pay.
For bankrupt companies you will see attempts to limit future expenses (i.e. cancelling employee trips etc) but the fact that there is a continual stream of transactions makes it much messier. It is fraud if the company racks up large numbers of unusual expenses just before bankruptcy is declared.
It is the reasonable expectations that differ. Customers are not expected to ask for (and will not be granted) financial information or proof of collateral. It is completely unreasonable to give those customers the same level of risk as creditors who are expected to ask for (and receive) such information.
> It is fraud if the company racks up large numbers of unusual expenses just before bankruptcy is declared.
So when a company does not currently have the financial ability to fulfill a purchase (say without obtaining a government bailout), how is it not fraud to sell a product and collect money without informing the customer of that risk?
> As for dine and dash there is a difference when there is no intent to pay.
I'd like to see you try telling your waiter "I'm a bit tight on money right now, you'll have to wait for next month for me to pay my bill." Let's see if they call the cops and you get arrested. Your argument is rather ridiculous.
In the UK if you know that are you insolvent (and knowing that you are about to be insolvent is effectively the same thing as knowing that you are insolvent) then it's illegal to trade. Using your last bit of money to do something like fly people home is illegal - it would be defrauding other creditors who have higher priority to be paid off.
Having bankruptcy at all is an attempt at making a situation full of inherent conflict more orderly and less disruptive, so it isn't obvious why one must execute its provisions in a disruptive manner.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11,_Title_11,_United_S...
The CAA brings all the UK customers home as near to on schedule as possible under ATOL rules. Not sure how other nations play it out.
There was talk after Monarch's collapse a couple of years ago of permitting an exception in the insolvency rules. Specifically to allow the use of the collapsed group's aircraft and pilots. No more was every heard of it. But it was Chris "failing" Grayling as Transport Secretary, so hardly surprising the initiative failed.
As uncertain as UK governance and Chinese international trade relations have been recently, they might be excused for thinking anything could happen in the space of a month.
Many of those people aren't really stranded, they'll have their holiday as planned and the CAA will fly them home at the end of it
As new passengers aren't starting their holidays there's a rapidly decreasing number of people to fly back
Airlines focusing on the budget segment has been going out of business for years. Is Norwegian next in line?
If the European airlines keep going out of business we might see airlines from outside of Europe operating intra-Europe flights. Maybe an Emirates flight from Paris to Marseille or Qatar Airways flying Stockholm-Helsinki?
Foreign airlines aren't generally allowed to operate intra-EU flights (something Brexit is disrupting, many British planes have been registered elsewhere in the last year or two).
The real problem was that the holidays they were selling weren't making Thomas Cook any profit. The holidays needed to be competitive against online travel agents with much lower wage costs. By booking with Thomas Cook, you could get an experience where there were more staff on hand to help you, but actually people didn't value this and hence weren't prepared to pay more.
The real nail in the coffin for Thomas Cook was their huge liabilities and huge concerns about their business viability so of course they were paying huge amounts of interest. Lenders were only lending to them on the hopes that they could collect enough interest rather than repayment. They were hoping that other parties (such as governments) would make cash injections such that they could profit. Everyone knew that eventually the debt would catch up with them, no one would want to be left holding the bag and the company would collapse.
The only reason Thomas Cook's balance sheet didn't look horrific was because they had assigned the brand a goodwill value of over £2.5 billion in 2018 which they wrote down to £1.4 billion after the first half of 2019. This was clearly a huge over-estimate as I doubt anyone will be paying much to purchase their brand now!
That's not what Goodwill is. Goodwill goes on the balance sheet when you acquire a company for more than book value.
But I assume they got the goodwill into their balance sheet by typical mismanagement:
1. Their markets are shrinking
2. Instead of shrinking company operations to adapt, they buy even less successful competitors for an overprice, so goodwill in the balance sheet
3. Not unsurprisingly integrating the not so successful competitor into the company is not so successful, employees are demotivated abd business suffers even more
4. Now a company with growing costs operating on a shrinking market gets even less profitable
I don't claim healthily shrinking a company to adapt to a shrinking market is easy. But I'm sure it must be doable. Looks like business management largely fails in this discipline.
Virtually every company will have a market value greater than their book value. So any company that buys other companies will have goodwill on their balance sheet. Google, for example, has 18 billion dollars worth from all of their various acquisitions.
Take a company like Nest for example. They had assets like patents, infrastructure, cash, accounts receivable, etc. If you add those all up and subtract their liabilities you get a book value of 100 million, as a totally made up number. Google comes along and buys them for 3.2 billion dollars. The transaction, from a book value perspective, has 3.2 billion in cash going out from Google and 100 million dollars of assets coming back. That looks like Google paid 3.2 billion for 100 million in assets, or in other words, just lost 3.1 billion dollars of value. To prevent that goodwill is added to the equation. The books have Google paying 3.2 billion dollars in cash for 100 million in assets and 3.1 billion in goodwill. Now Google paid 3.2 billion in cash for 3.2 billion in assets and it doesn't look like they lost value.
The management seem to do a good job of diverting attention from the debts but the company was seriously badly managed, it was only a matter of time before it went bump.
That's not to mention the 2006 Carbon Monoxide poisoning incident which meant people like me resolved never to use the company again.
Without that they could have shrunk or restructured.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/25/thomas-cook...
Doubling their high street shop network in 2016 seems to be sheer lunacy.
[1] For those who don't remember the reference, their IPO didn't go to plan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/business/2000/review/106...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13211120
https://twitter.com/xbs/status/626781529054834688
Also images were much, much smaller, both in terms of pixels and amount of compression applied, using large images that weren't content was heavily discouraged, and no-one used auto playing videos. To the extent that sins against bandwidth were committed it was mostly with Flash, which we all complained about and which is now reviled, but which was in fact generally way less abusive, confusing, and performance-destroying, than what gets done now in the name of "modern UX". Pages were much smaller, devs were much more sensitive to markup bloat. The worst we had on that front were WYSYWG-made pages (Frontpage, for example) but they've got nothing on the kind of attribute bloat and huge JS payloads one sees now (and the JS in particular can keep on allocating memory after its text is loaded into memory then parsed into even more memory, with predictable results on resource use and page load times)
I had read how, when the 68000 came out originally, it was considered to be a "minicomputer on a chip", while the 68030 was anticipated to be a "mainframe on a chip".
So, I was unable to viscerally appreciate that perspective, until I ran the original MacPaint, which was extremely optimized for the 8MHz 68000 in the original Mac, and then I was amazed at how fast the 68030 was.
I had the Amiga, 68000 at 7.09 MHz (PAL, NTSC ran a teeny bit faster). Both Mac and Amiga gave fully featured, incredibly low latency GUIs. They might think a bit after the click, but compared to a modern GUI, oh so snappy.
Windows, OSX, X with whatever Windowing never get close to that instant tip of your fingers response. I miss low latency responses.
The Mac mouse pointer was always responsive due to interrupts, but that didn't mean that what you clicked on was.
However, the thing that I hate most about the modern web and similar UIs is that they reflow or otherwise move the content you are looking at after you click and before the click is mapped to an element, so you don't get what you click or tap on. This is absolutely unforgivable in my opinion, and absolutely not a matter of degree or grey areas unlike most of the things people complain about.
Took years after I abandoned the platform for serious use for Windows not to always be more sluggish, and get dramatically worse when under load. Course by then I was on '040 comparing with Pentium something.
https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/
I’ve read of paragraph long blogposts with 5MB photos resized down to thumbnails ️
Let's see, 2000. Most would be on dial-up, ADSL was either in very early roll out or pre-roll out hype - so nearly everyone waiting on exchanges to be converted. Techies probably had BT Highway, a dual 64k ISDN link. That always seemed really fast, and way faster than many of today's bloatware sites now feel. Insane page and JS weight with dozens of third party calls every page came later. Early broadband, before pages grew to over-compensate for that bandwidth was delightful!
Downloads and Dial up could feel sluggish, especially when you hit the sites being "clever and disruptive" with Macromedia Flash (not many yet), or a site that didn't know how to do thumbnails or image optimisation (quite a few. Usually pages with little 10x10 icons that were really 1024x768 images etc). :)
Cable internet (@home, Cox, or local provider like I had) was much faster than either of those and was available in a lot of places. I think I had a symmetric 1Mb/s, but would experience slowdowns during peak hours (nowhere near dialup).
But not in the UK, which is what the parent comment was about!
From that perspective, wouldn't you want to make a bankruptcy as messy as possible?
It's similar to, but even worse than a chapter 7 bankruptcy. I don't why their system is the way it is, but that's how it works.
- get talked to like I'm a dog by TSA
- forced to wait hours in lines to get through security
- violated by being forced to remove my belt and shoes
Looking at you, Gatwick Express.
The writers don't seem very good at maths. I think they mean 0.61 pounds to the Euro.
Also as to why they went bust the top comment on the previous discussion seems more telling to me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045550
so the majority who are not british are just stranded?