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Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

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Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#271

Post by immibis »

ryandrake wrote: post #152
immibis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're talking about the obvious racial segregation: the white people are to be treated like kings, and the brown people are there to do the treating.

I don't really see how doing a little shopping when the ship comes into port or while staying at a foreign resort equates to being treated like a king because of your skin color. My wife is from what we might call a developing country. When we go back to her home city to visit family, we'll occasionally go out to a store or eat at a restaurant, and while there, we're served by... brown people! Which makes sense becau…

The fact remains that there is a pattern of brown people being made to serve white people's every whim. When brown people take cruises to white people countries as often as white people take cruises to brown people countries, then it's excusable with "of course there are brown people in a brown people country" but when it mostly only happens one way around, that's a sign of how our society operates.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#272

Post by giantg2 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #234
giantg2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of agree. Like who is so important that their peer or superior can't handle issues if they're out? How do leaders see their business surviving if the person they're calling gets hit by a bus? But at the same time, it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default.

> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy. But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being work…

You have a separate team for on-call? Never need to do off-hours elevations? That sounds wild.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#273

Post by Diesel555 »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #153
consumer451 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years ago, Key West built enough extra sewage treatment capacity to process sewage from the many cruise ships which visit the city. There was a plan to require all ships to discharge and pay for treatment so that sewage was not dumped 12 miles off-shore, which is only 3 miles past the reef. Captains get a bonus for fuel savings, so they tend to dump as soon as it is legal. The cruise industry threatened to remove Key…

Big economic blocks like the EU and the US should force the cruise ships to operate sustainably and not pollute the literal sh*t out of the port cities they stop at.

"We should properly tax/negate negative externalities" in accordance with microeconomics. It's at the core of basic economics and both conservative and liberal economists would agree with this statement. It's a well studied field. The problem is policy. I often post this, but I really wish microeconomics was a required course in high school or primary. I find it to be one of the least understood of the well-established fields, and one that matters when we get older and vote or debate on these topics.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#274

Post by bl0b »

dleink wrote: post #231
bl0b wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it is a complete bastardization of the phrase. The genz/alpha version is a noble form of asceticism, while the 'original' meaning is more a hedonistic indulgence without regard for consequences to yourself or others.

I think they both share the "disregarding consequences" part.

I don't see it.

What are the consequences of, for example, staring at the live flight map and only the live flight map for a 7 hour flight [1]? Sounds boring as hell but you're not going to like bore yourself insane

[1] https://www.goal.com/en-us/lists/erling-haaland-raw-dogs-7-h...

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#275

Post by Diesel555 »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #154

Great - more air pollution from bunker fuel fumes at port cities! Big economic blocks like the EU and the US should force the cruise ships to operate sustainably and not pollute the literal sh*t out of the port cities they stop at.

"We should properly tax/negate negative externalities" in accordance with microeconomics. It's at the core of basic economics and both conservative and liberal economists would agree with this statement. It's a well studied field. The problem is policy. I often post this, but I really wish microeconomics was a required course in high school or primary. I find it to be one of the least understood of the well-established fields, and one that matters when we get older and vote or debate on these topics.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#276

Post by School-Cotton »

giantg2 wrote: post #272
School-Cotton wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy. But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being work…

You have a separate team for on-call? Never need to do off-hours elevations? That sounds wild.

Obviously on-call is an exception. That would fall under “rare and planned in advance”.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#277

Post by ghaff »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #182
chasil wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work. Peers had a habit of calling me for non-critical, non-production problems. The worst was Mardi Gras, where I'm on Bourbon Street for Fat Tuesday, and my operations head calls me with an analyst on the line and burns fifteen minutes with a problem that turned out to be development coding. My phone did occasionally explode with voicemails and texts when I got back to…

This is a fading benefit. The ship I took this summer had free Starlink connections powering their WiFi. It wasn’t great for calls and they blocked video, but texting was possible. (You had to be careful though because they also exploitatively ran a mobile cellular microcell that charged insane data roaming fees, which meant you had to be very careful about when you turned on roaming.)

Never tried doing a Zoom call, but the trans-Atlantic crossing I did in the the spring, I didn't pay for video streaming but Starlink at $20/day was pretty good for Internet generally. Was tempted to unplug but I didn't. Kept my phone on airplane mode the whole time.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#278

Post by JKCalhoun »

nullstyle wrote: post #84
JKCalhoun wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all-inclusive resorts... And these have zero appeal to me as well. As someone who road trips all across the U.S. with the wife, the highlights have of course been the serendipitous ones.

There’s a different kind of serendipity that comes with Cruise vacations as opposed to road tripping, but it’s still very much there. Furthermore, I can’t really have a road trip experience with 16 people in my travel group; If we want to be together, we’ll be stuck, packed into a van. I can have a great cruise experience with a group that size on a cruise or at a resort. I say this is someone who had taken multiple…

Love to do the motorcycle road trip some day.

But I don't even have 16 friends so that will never be a problem. As the kids left the nest it has become just thew wife and I. We're a duprass.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#279

Post by ghaff »

lostlogin wrote: post #233
robotresearcher wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because the US is so sprawling that trains lost out to planes there. Almost all of Europe is accessible in a day on a train. Only planes can do that in the US. So the US trains don’t have their costs amortized over a large fraction of business travel as well as vacationers.

> Almost all of Europe is accessible in a day on a train. Only planes can do that in the US. The US isn’t that much larger, I don’t think this argument holds. The geography and locations of population centres seem more of an issue.

Yeah, NYC to Chicago is about 18 hours over a continental divide. You do out west and things get even further. Outside the Northeast corridor and a few other city pairs, train trips are pretty long in the US.

I've been tempted to do at least part of one of the long distance US train routes but I think I'd get pretty bored, I'm guessing the food isn't very good, and I've spent a lot of time out West.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#280

Post by ghaff »

t0mas88 wrote: post #109
scarab92 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s times I want to explore, and there’s times I just want to do nothing. Cruises are good for when I want to do nothing for a while.

> Cruises are good for when I want to do nothing for a while. I've never been on a cruise, but for me renting a beach house does the same. Sleep, eat, watch the ocean from the beach and do totally nothing. Camping with friends also does it. Let all the kids play together, just sit and watch, doing nothing. When I was a bit younger I would have considered "doing nothing" hell on earth, but with a busy life it's good t…

I did a trans-Atlantic crossing earlier this year. There were a lot of interesting entertainment options and good food--and I had plenty of time. Not something I would routinely do as a travel option but given flexibility and the need to get across the ocean in some manner as part of another activity definitely something I'd consider again.
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