Comments by "Schnitzel_Stephan" (@stephans1990) on "How Money Works" channel.

The Dutch Government in recent years bought several high value paintings from the Rothshield family for our national art gallary for a total of over 100 million dollars. Paintings that were first just hanging in a person's bedroom in his secondary home in Paris. I would say this shows that they are not exactly short for money!
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For some reason the algorithm thinks I'm loaded and I get advertisements for Bentley, yachts and private jets. I still wonder why it think I can afford any of that, but it's at least more pleasant to look at than scammer commercials.
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With regard to "downtime" on the job, work from home has really been a blessing for that. During times of low work volumes me and my coworkers would just "work from home" meaning that are laptops are standing open so we look online on Teams and we can respond to any incoming requests, but we are really just doing stuff for ourselves. Also, nobody notices when I take a 2 hour lunchbreak and still quit at 17:00.
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Not only fake, some gangs genuinely crippled their children because a crippled child can count on more sympathy and therefore more money when begging on the street.
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@Gr3nadgr3gory true, I heard many of them just have several credit cards with their assets as collateral. Especially people who own a young, growing company may be millionaires on paper, but barely have a penny in the bank.
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I really like Patrick Boyle's view on this when he was interviewed by the Plain Bagel; It really pays more to focus on your day job and work extra hours or work towards additional education or a promotion.
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Speaking as a government financial consultant myself; I don't agree with what is stated in this video. In my opinion, the reason that consultancy is so lucrative at the moment is primarily that most senior government employees are quite old and don't know shit about new technologies. They also lack competitiveness in today's job market to hire young talent that could potentially help them modernize since the consultancy companies offer better career opportunities. Therefore these government agencies have no other choice then to hire these same guys they would have liked as their new employees, as external consultants at a much higher fee in order to help them modernize their IT infrastructure and improve their efficiency. They also hire these consultants in the hope that they might be tempted to leave the consultancy firm and join them as a manager after their contract is over. Every interview for a consultancy assignment includes the question "would you be willing to come work for us at the end of your assignment"?
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Crappy overpriced products existing purely off an extreme marketing campaign have always existed (Red Bull, Herbal Life, most designer cloth brands). Same as brands that revolve purely around one individual's image. It's just that social media has made this possible for more people.
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Nobody in practice actually uses the term Investment Banker btw. I have brief experience as a sell side analist (specialization being European Real Estate). I would say our weeks were more like 60 hours but could become more during stressful periods like with a marketplacement or IPO. However, if these things went well, the bank would treat us to a "wild party", meaning a dinner at a high end restaurant and a VIP table at a popular club.
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As a Dutch person I always wonder why people make such a big hassle of reporting their taxes. It takes me less than 15 minutes, once per year to report my taxes. And for my girlfriend it's even simpler because she doesn't own a home.
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Being an accountant, I can fully understand how many corporate control and compliance policies look like BS work to other people. But try and imagine a world without them. Yes, banks have a department housing hundreds of staff members just to meet the compliance criteria set by an organisation who's job it seems to be to make these departments jump trough silly hoops. But many accounting scandals in the past could happen due to lack of such oversight. Scandals that could cost society ten times what it is currently costing us to have these controls in place. The same goes for the second manager who's task it is to verify the inventory count of the first guy (four eyes principle), the form you have to sign to prove you lent and returned a certain tool. It is better to take the additional cost of preventing a negative event from happening, over risking to loose your assets to theft, fraude or just lack of care.
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I have a bad history with giving money to baggers. The last time I did, was when a gypsy woman pinned a flower on me while I was walking trough central London and asked me for a donation for the kids hospital. I obviously knew it wasn't for the hospital, but I was in a good mood and I liked the gesture with the little flower, so I was willing to give her 1 pound. But then she started demanding I would give her at least 50 pounds and was trying to just grab it from my wallet and block me from continuing my path until I was literally about to punch her in her face.
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I don't fully agree with this one. No, cutting down 3 dollars worth of expenses a day won't make you rich. But it's good to think about how much money you are wasting on thing's that don't really contribute to your happiness that much. And for many people this is about more than one cup of coffee. It's about taking a snack at the train station, it's about spending 10-15 dollars on a lunch instead of bringing your own. It's about ordering 30 dollars worth of take out instead of cooking. All these little things add up and when straightening out your finances, it is good to cut down on these cost because combined they can make a difference.
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@susettesantiago5509 The painting was "De vaandeldrager" by Rembrand and it was considered the last masterpiece of the painter that was not in the public domain. That was the reason the Dutch government bought it, to preserve a piece of Dutch heritage.
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The government cannot allocate enough capital by itself. To meet demands, they need a level of financing that only big institutional investors can provide. And they will only invest if they expect to make a profit. On top of that, part of the problem right now is a shortage in labor and building materials, so even if you would start a government fund with 100 trillion dollars to start building new houses, you are still facing a bottleneck, while simultaneously driving up the price of these resources, stalling all other non government funded housing projects and overpaying by 1.000% for the houses you are currently building. And that's not even taking into account how government ran construction companies in the past have proven to be incredibly inefficient and corrupt.
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With regards to contracting work not working in accounting; in the Netherlands contracting work has become the standard in accounting actually. Especially since audit companies have a peak workload from Februari till May during "busy season". Most people I know no longer aspire to be a partner, they aspire to be a self employed contractor.
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@harrybudgeiv349 Nah I still don't understand. People are making this much more complex than it has to be.
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The problem is also that the middle class is so wide, ranging from lower to upper middle class, that potentially 80% of people fall into this. To me, lower middle class means having 1.5 income (husband works in a skilled labor job, wife works part time or in unskilled labor) owning a small house with a mortgage in a not too shabby neighborhood, having a second hand car that's still in okay shape, being able to take the kids to go camping in France or Spain for 2-3 weeks in the summer and despite living on a budget having no real money issues. Where I would define the upper middle class as a double income household where both partners are starting to make career in a highly educated field earning a reasonably high income (75K-100K), living in a semi-detached house in a "good" neighborhood/suburb. Having two cars, one being a high spec middle class SUV or perhaps even an entry level model of a premium brand (preferably electric and driven as a corporate lease), going skiing in winter and on vacation to another continent in the summer and having enough budget to afford anything except for insanely luxury things (like a Patek Watch or a Ferrari).
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@Charonic Correct and correct. And that's why the cycle continues.
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I fully agree that we need to find a way to lower the load of tasks that don't directly contribute to patients, imagine a world where we take away all the things you mentioned completely; if you gave out a prescription for heavy painkillers without registering this in a national database, what is to stop this person from abusing his illness to stop by six more doctors to get more prescriptions to sell them on the black market? Or if you have no mandated requirement to keep your knowledge level on par, what will happen to doctors who think their weekend is better spend playing golf? The problem is that if we don't do these things, people might take advantage of holes in the system, potentially costing us more than the current situation.
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@counterflow5719 that would be an argument to increase the control and therefore the bureaucracy.
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Within the next 30 years the boomer generation will for the most part die out and transfer that wealth to the millennial generation. That house your parents once bought for 250K can easily be your 1mln retirement funding.
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@majo3488 Again, you don't comprehend how big this fund would need to be, it would exceed the value of the United States government and it will only further disrupt supply and demand. We have social housing here in the Netherlands and the waiting list for a house can be up to 10 years at the moment, leaving no alternatives in the private sector since they cannot compete with the social housing corporations.
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@Wololoo88 Yes, I know plenty of people who will use an autoclicker or start a fake teams meeting so the status will stay on "occupied". But in reality nobody is seriously looking at your status all day.
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