I'm from Denmark (which, admittedly, I understand is on the lax side of things as far as Europe goes), but I can't see what would stop you. If you want to close your company or office for strategic purposes, you just say so and fire the people as per the terms of their contract, which'll mean three months notice in most cases. Same with cutbacks, you can just do it. You can't fire someone without notice or for no reason, but "we don't need this work to be done here anymore" is of course a perfectly valid reason. At least that's my impression.
> fire the people as per the terms of their contract
That's not possible in much of Europe. For example, in Ireland, you can't fire someone without cause, regardless of notice period. If the position is being made redundant (and you can prove it, which in this case, where you're moving the role to a different country would be easy to do), then you can let them go, but you have to pay them a statutory severance payment (as well as anything else specified in their contract).
EDIT: There might also be a language barrier going on with the terminology here: when I read the word "fire" in this case, I generally take it to mean "to be dismissed from the role for cause".
I don't really think you're contradicting me? If you, as a company, want to get rid of a group of staff because you think you're spending too much money on wages, you phrase that in a more palatable way, probably involving the word "strategic", and you give them what they're owed according to their contract. That sounds very straight-forward to me.
The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot. And sure, it's easy on companies if they're able to just put a post-it on the door one morning that tells your now former employees they can go home because you don't want to pay them anymore. But I don't think what you're describing can reasonably be termed "not possible".
EDIT - Point taken about the terminology. I'm talking about any sort of "you won't be working here anymore" situation.
> The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot.
Spaniard here. It's possible, it's just more expensive: the employer has to pay them the salary for the next 15 days --so it's like: "you will be fired in 15 days, but you must go home now"-- and the mandatory compensation for the years worked (33 days per year worked, up to 2 years compensation).
"The thing that's possible in America and arguably not possible in Europe is to just show someone the door on the spot."
It's only sort of possible in America. If you are laying people off (for economic reasons, not cause) then federal law requires 60 days notice. This is enforced civilly however, so if a company is going bankrupt they may ignore it because there will be no one left to sue.
An employee laid off that way will be eligible for unemployment benefits, which is a form of insurance payout, not public assistance. What we don't require is severance. Most companies that are not going away will do something like 1-2 weeks severance pay per year of service because they want people to not sabotage anything on the way out and for new employees to continue to be willing to work for them, but it's legal to just pay people for time worked and give them the boot.
See my edit, I think this is just a confusion of terminology. I wouldn't really refer to someone whose position being made redundant as "getting fired", there's very different procedures to be followed and it has very different implications.
>I'm from Denmark (which, admittedly, I understand is on the lax side of things as far as Europe goes), but I can't see what would stop you.
Same in Austria, which has a very un-European business-friendly approach to terminations. You can fire anyone anytime without a reason, unless your company is big enough and has a unionized worker's council willing to stand up to terminations and ask for precise reasons (usually factory style jobs).
But no SW companies usually do, so you can get terminated on the spot for no reason, with you taking your notice period as garden leave without the employer having to pay you with severance or any other compensation. It's pretty similar to the US in this regard.
Well for one, you'd have to actually pay the employees in Denmark per the contract. They can't just not pay. If they don't pay they'll be declared bankrupt by the workers income insurance(lønmodtagernes garantifond) and the owners will be last in line to get anything. As a counter example see Twitter where employees still haven't received their three month severance.
Yeah, it's the same in Norway. You need justification to fire an individual employee, but it's not hard to close down your entire business, do cutbacks etc. for business reasons. It doesn't seem unlikely that it's much harder to do this in southern europe though.
i totally agree re: the smoothest flying experience. the takeoff is so long and smooth you almost don't realize that you're up in the air. it was sad to learn that airlines were trying to get rid of it.
The landing surprised me too. Super soft compared to smaller planes.
I once landed in Johannesburg on a A380 Air France from Paris and the airport was in thick fog. You could not even tell we touched the ground. The captain made the announcement after landing that it was his very first time letting the plane land in itself... you could tell the excitement in his voice :)
Fog basically means no wind or turbulence. So, smooth landings would be expected and easy. More challenging would be lots of cross wind, wind shear, and turbulence. The plane basically has to land at an angle and then yaw to straighten out at the last second all while constantly correcting for changes in lift and vertical speed. So you are shaking around the plane and passengers quite a bit.
A rough landing is actually considered a safe landing when the conditions are not ideal. A smooth landing means flying the plane close to stall speed. So close that it gently touches down with barely any vertical speed left. You don't do that when there's any risk of wind shear causing very sudden and extreme drops in air speed of tens of knots. If that happens you drop below stall speed and basically the plane drops out of the sky. If that happens low enough, you crash and die. It's extremely unsafe to do anything else than plonking it down decisively under such conditions. That means a larger vertical and horizontal speed and eliminating airspeed via the shock absorbers instead of floating over the runway. That's what shock absorbers are for. As long as the plane doesn't bounce off again, it's all good. Bouncing is dangerous though because now you are slow and stalling.
I missed the actual takeoff on my one and only 380 flight. It was truly exceptional. 747 may have more character and history, but 380 may be more comfortable.
If you sit in the forwardmost section of the cabin far ahead of the engines (possible to do in economy on the A380), the pin-drop silence (by airplane standards) combined with the long and slow takeoff makes the moment of lift totally surreal.
I think the guy next to me panicked because he thought there was engine trouble and we were going to overrun.
In Spain we had a very strict lockdown (not as strict as the Chinese but still) between March-May 2020 and still over 4k cars were sold that month. Which at the time I thought it was an extremely high number considering everything that was going on (link in Spanish): https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ventas-de-coches-...
I think the China lockdown situation is a magnitude more extreme (at least based on accounts from people in lockdown there on Twitter).
People are not allowed outside of their units (only a couple per building to pick up deliveries). People testing positive are forced to centralized areas and some have to abandon pets (which then are either getting killed or starving and killing each other in the streets).
Chinese lockdowns are more like martial law style curfews . You cannot go out for almost anything at all.
There are no customers who can go to the dealership, no employees who can sell cars and manage dealerships. Non essential business are not allowed to run at all.
This article title is written to imply that demand has fallen, that is not the case, it is operationally near impossible to make a purchase and take delivery. People still want /need cars and many can still afford to get them .
The pent up demand (with losses due to changing economic conditions) will come back when things return to normal.
These old farts couldn't even sign in to Facebook without technical support. Do you think they understand even a glimmer of the technical ramifications of their proposed law? Usually when laws like this fail for technical reasons, they try to compensate the embarrassment by hammering harder with the penalties.
They know exactly how to do it. They can just hire people on this board, and in two years you'll barely remember when you could visit a website without an Apple/Android phone linked to your Real ID.
"The first step is inevitably to raise money from dumb/ignorant investors who couldn't care less about your startup: that would be the government / unemployment benefits in France / tax-incentivized angel investors in the UK."
I have seen many entrepreneurs who just kept repeating step #1 for years. They would hop from one startup accelerator to another, joining as many government grant programs as possible (Startup Chile et al.) without ever really building an actual business.
There's one particular case I know of someone who managed to get more than $300,000 in grants in just a couple of years.
