> Yes, and 5K€ would be even better, too bad that on the other side (the firm income) prices are de facto capped, so it is not possible to pay more the workers, margins in this field are really thin.

I'm just saying that if you really need employees and you can't hire them for 3K and, for whatever reason, you can't hire more junior workers and train them, the only option you have left is increasing salaries.

> Cannot say how much they are effective in other countries, but I can tell you that in Italy these programs in practice rarely succeed in making even a dent in unemployment numbers, for a number of reasons.

In Italy these programs don't succeed because the Italian conceives only 5 professions: the priest, the mayor, the notary, the doctor and the lawyer. Everybody else is an "employee" (if you ask some Italians in Italy what they do for a living, half of them will reply "impiegato", which means "employee") that could be replaced by the first rando walking through the door. So when you go to the employment office ("ufficio di collocamento" in Italian, "job center" in the UK), you are offered random courses that are not related to anything you have ever done or studied, because, if you are not a priest or the mayor, then you could be writing software or driving trucks or making pizzas and nobody would know the difference. A friend of mine, after losing his job as a network administrator, was sent to a pizzaiolo course, then he was half-trained as a fire fighter, after that he did something related to shoemaking and finally he decided to move to his mother's village where he can live with 200 euros a month. Needless to say, he still can't make pizzas or climb ladders.

In the past I've worked in a training center in Italy. The courses where quite expensive by the Italian standards (5-6K for 6 months), but all students received a grant from the local municipality or the region that paid the full tuition fee (for reasons that I won't explain, the tuition fee matched the grant exactly). Almost all students found a job within a few months, that in Italy is an exceptional phenomenon. So the system may work. I concede that our students were selected and that the human material that attends a programming or a networking course is not the same that would attend truck driving training.

If you have a family it’s probably 4x. 65-70K in Berlin are roughly equivalent to 200K in London.

In the article it says that he’s not going to pay for the driving license, so the part where he says he’d like to keep the worker for 2 years is missing (I was referring to that as indentured labor).

Said that, if you can’t find workers, you are not paying the market clearing salary. Maybe now you have to offer 4K€ for 4 days of work.

Proposing that the state pays for these licences is not that insane, it may address a market failure. Many countries, Italy included, have similar programs to help the unemployed find a job.

I have similar concerns on go routines. The good thing is that in practice 99% of microservices in line-of-business applications don’t need concurrency, so go routines don’t cause too many problems.

> It is not the UK only, here in Italy there was an entrepreneur (in logistics/transports) who was not finding drivers that pointed out how (for a number of reasons, possibly all of them right) to get nowadays a truck driving license (for TIRs) is very costly (both in terms of time and of money, if I recall correctly something like 6,000-10,000 Euro) and there was the issue on how he could pay in advance the costs but there was apparently no legal way to recover them (by keeping a part of the monthly pay of the worker over a "fair" period, I seem to remember 2 years), as it had happened to him that as soon as the candidate drivers would get the driving license they would resign and find work in another company.

This is peak Italian entrepreneurship. This guy invested some money in training and then went on TV to play the martyr because he can’t retain employees. Instead of doing the right and most obvious thing, that is paying market salaries, he complaints that indentured labor is no longer legal.

Real incomes in the UK are still less than what they were in 2007. That’s unique to the UK, as far as I remember.

> "It's not a business" sure, then wonder why companies are managing ever more properties and private renters prefer renting it through AirBnb

Managing an Airbnb is a business, it requires the flat to be cleaned and functioning and you are practically out of business after N bad reviews. Besides, I’d be surprised if you could make any money with an Airbnb in the UK more than 20 minutes away from Westminster.

> I think there are points in protection but not being able to evict a tenant because you want an apartment for yourself (and no, in practice it can take even as high as 5 years) is simply ridiculous

What is ridiculous, and I’m saying this as somebody who owns their home, is that families with children can be evicted with just 2 months of notice because they asked for repairs or because the landlord wants to test the market. This happens every day in the UK and the situation is so bad that even the current government had to acknowledge it.

It is just civilised that evicting somebody may require a lengthy process, depending on who this person is. Can a family with a disabled child find a new home in 6 weeks?

> Low quality building on large sections spread over a vast area. High infrastructure requirements with low population density. It's not good.

This describes perfectly everything built in the UK before 2010.

These are all very minor changes. Yes, agencies can’t steal 100£ from you for each renewal, but they replaced it with commissions.

The tenancy deposit scheme is again a fake solution. Landlords can still block your money for months and force you to accept some deductions (because a fork is missing or the flat hasn’t been “professionally cleaned”). If you are money constrained and don’t have enough money to pay 2.5 months of rent (first month plus deposit), you are forced to give accept your landlord’s deductions in order to move to the next flat.

The German system is exactly what I would be aiming for. We should refuse the notion that renting flats is a business, especially as it’s intended in the UK, where it’s the less taxed than work. In addition, we should tax properties and use that money to cut NI.

Nothing has changed since Thatcher, I was describing a scenario where the UK completes its westernisation process and abolishes S21.

First of all this state of affairs is unique to the UK, in continental Europe this section 21 business doesn’t exist and 99% of the population wouldn’t consider it a thing of a civilized country (because it isn’t).

S12 invalidates half of your tenancy agreement, to be precise it allows your landlord to renege on all their obligations. A window breaks and you want it to be fixed it? Bad luck, here’s your S21 and may the next sucker come in. It may not be a problem for you, but if you are poor and especially if you have a family, you may have to decide between living with broken stuff (that your landlord is being paid to fix) or being homeless. This is not a hypothetical, this is how millions of people live here.

Contracts will be perpetual or will last decades, with rent increases linked to inflation. Tenants will be able to end their tenancies with 1-2 months notice, landlords won’t be able terminate a tenancy unless they have to move into the property or the tenant is not paying rent.

This is how renting works in Western Europe.

I’m not sympathetic at all with this idea.

They shouldn’t have built shops and restaurants because there’s a council estate?

On gentrification, if you own your flat then you have won the lottery, for its price is 8 times what it was 20 years ago. Similarly if you can use the so-called “right to buy”. If you are renting privately, you should get you MP to vote the abolition of section 21, which is an uncivilised law. That should sort out all issues related to people being priced out of the area.

> Unfortunately this is the way of the world. This is a major redevelopment and has cost hundreds of millions of pounds. To do it they take on huge investment, the investors expect a return so obviously they’ve built fancy shops, restaurants etc.

I always wonder what’s the alternative to fancy shops. Is it the usual English high street with store signs made of rotten wood? Cheap minicab companies?

> I understand that there are places where redevelopment has been handled more sensitivity but this area in particular has needed an enormous outlay to convert it such a primate area.

There’s nothing to preserve in that area. It was an industrial wasteland surrounded by council flats and dodgy pubs.

> Hopefully within a few years it will start to gain its own identity and start again.

Hopefully not, hopefully it will develop a new and better identity.

Yes, that area was an obscene wasteland, right in front of that monstrosity on the other side of the river: Churchill gardens.

Before the power station was renewed, the only place with something to do in the entirety of the Wandsworth borough was Northcote road (and 15 years ago not even that).

I don’t use AirBnB because their customer service is shit.

Said that, it’s not my responsibility to ensure the flat I’m renting is owned by a real business that follows all the rules and not by a rando whose cheap hostel is causing havoc in the neighbourhood. That should be Airbnb’s responsibility.

It’s much quicker to ban activities that inevitably lead to undesirable behaviour (such as converting your flat into a cheap hostel and the entire building into a hotel lobby), rather than playing whack-a-mole with all sorts of antisocial behaviour one has to put up with if the apartment upstairs becomes a cheap hostel.

> But it’s fine for your neighbors to make noise throughout the day and night and host (for free) lots of different guests in their spare bedroom?

No, it’s not and that’s banned as well.

> Like these discussions seem so odd because while you could just ban the undesirable behavior there’s some recognition that it would never pass because it’s ridiculous and people move on to banning things associated with the undesirable behavior.

The undesirable behaviour includes the presence of strangers in my apartment block, who are given the key to the main door.

It’s not NIMBYism to expect the apartment upstairs to not become a cheap hotel, where tenants change everyday and there’s noise from throughout the day and the night.