「ケイ日記」どっちかというと…

Title: Which would you go for?
by: kei

The beautiful and time honoured tradition of "lieu days" and "sick leave" have been put into place to protect employees. A worker may receive overtime pay or/plus equal time off for each hour worked on certain agreed days such as weekends and Bank Holidays.

代休 か 有給休暇 は労働者の為に実施され、休日に働く時間の代わりに同じ時間休めるのは労働者の正式的な権利になるでしょう。

So the question is this: if you found yourself in a situation where you were entitled to days in lieu and/or paid leave, and taking or not them would mean the difference between being refreshed and burning out needing sick leave, which would you go for?

なので、代休・有休をとってリフレッシュするか、取らないで疲れで倒れて働けない状態で有休を取るか、どっちかというと…あなたはどっちを取りますか？

I've been working without much rest with business travel nonstop since late July, if I don't take days in lieu, I feel like I will collapse and will need to take sick days off. For now I still have another two hours on the bullet train to Tokyo followed by another half an hour onwards to get home. And look it just started raining!

ほぼ半年間ずーっと代休も有休も取らず出張で飛び回ってるんで、そろそろ休まないと限界かも。今日だってまだ新幹線が東京まで後2時間だし、家に着くまで更に30分なんだ。

窓に雨が…

「ケイ日記」Voliatility in Crude

Title: Volatility in Crude
by: kei

From: Economic Times (Reuters), on how India's decision to cut oil subsidies could bring economic stability to the world economy.

Volatility in Crude - how subsidies brought the world down!

Market analysts remain fiercely divided about what caused the doubling of crude oil prices between Q1 2007 (when they averaged $58 per barrel) and Q2 2008 ($124). But three factors were crucially important:

Extensive price controls and subsidies on refined product prices across most of Asia and the Middle East ensured households and firms were insulated from the rise in oil prices. Price controls broke the “invisible hand” and meant regional consumers faced no real pressure to reduce consumption or switch to alternative fuels despite the doubling in crude costs.

The entire burden of adjustment therefore fell on households and firms in the advanced industrial economies. Prices had to surge high enough to force deep cuts in the western world’s oil consumption to offset supply shortages and unrestrained demand growth in emerging markets.

Oil producers were unwilling or unable to materially increase supply in response to soaring prices. In the short term, supply is fairly fixed.

Those producers holding spare capacity (mostly Saudi Arabia) either had the wrong sort of crude (heavy, sour) or doubted that adding additional barrels to the market would make much difference, given inventories already appeared to be at reasonable levels and there was no sign of physical shortages.

Hedge funds and other “managed money” participants built up a (then record) net long position in oil futures and options on the assumption that although prices were already high, they would need to rise even further to “choke off” demand and balance the market.

In particular, many investors seem to have concluded that neither emerging market demand nor crude supply would be very responsive to prices unless they spiked to exceptionally high levels.

The interval between mid-May and early July 2008, when prices started peaking, saw two significant developments which probably convinced many participants the market was turning: China announced huge increases in state-controlled gasoline and diesel prices to take effect from June 20, and Saudi Arabia said at the Jeddah summit in June it would increase output to 9.7 million barrels per day.

By the start of September — well before the collapse of Lehman Brothers brought on a liquidity crisis — crude prices had already fallen almost a third to around $100 per barrel.