If you ask linguists, a hobby is a term for activities done for personal satisfaction, rather than monetary rewards or income. Engaging in a hobby allows a person to expand knowledge, skills, and experience, and to establish contacts with other people interested in the same hobby. For achievements in a hobby, a person can receive awards from like-minded individuals or from the broader community, but its foundation is personal satisfaction. However, if you ask economists, a hobby can indeed be a good business project, which can not only generate income but also initiate changes in certain industries. Enthusiasts have always pushed the world forward, mainly out of love and hobbies. Thus, a hobby can be a job, but a job that we do with pleasure. And if it also brings profit, the possibilities are endless. That is why Ksenija Puškarić writes in this week’s topic about a hobby as a business.
The first of 15 new aircraft from Croatia Airlines was presented a few days ago, and this was the reason for Antonija Knežević to talk with the CEO of the largest Croatian airline Jasmin Bajić, who could not hide his satisfaction with this exceptional event for the company, which he believes will mark a turning point in its operations and help it spread its wings towards new destinations and more profitable operations. The project to renew the entire fleet of the national carrier gains even more importance considering that the pandemic severely harmed the aviation industry, as well as the fact that Croatia Airlines has been recapitalized multiple times due to losses.
Although it was met with a vivid confrontation of digging through containers, and it must be admitted that eggs and tomatoes were expected in some places, the news of the self-raising of officials’ salaries by 60 percent overnight wore off with the first ‘fruitful’ Olympic Games and ‘social media’ disputes about successful/unsuccessful peaks of the season, depending on who interprets whose data. And there is something to the fact that officials’ salaries have not changed for years, so the public has shown a full range of understanding for the hardworking echelon of politicians whom no one has ever asked about results anyway. After all, for results to be measurable and interpretable, there must be some criteria, scale, threshold of comparability. Which, of course, does not exist in the homeland. However, before we start digging into possible or at least desired criteria, it is good to see how others do it. Gordana Gelenčer wrote about the increase in officials’ salaries.
