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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

#301

Post by protocolture »

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.)

We used to run an exploitative cruise ship terminal internet cafe where people would pay dollars for access to minutes of like, yahoo and msn messengers so really nothings changed.

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

#302

Post by protocolture »

chasil wrote: post #47
icegreentea2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruises hit a spot of: * All the fun and "not thinking" of an all-inclusive resort (though obviously only if you pay for the drink packages) on land * Generally cheaper than all inclusive resorts on mainland USA (I'm not as familiar with Europe) * Competitive on pricing with all inclusive resorts in the Caribbean/Mexico * Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico * Get to skip out out of the overt semi-coloni…

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…

My sister in law brings her work phone everywhere and then finds the spot in the house with no signal and just leaves it there for hours on end. I can see it.

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

#304

Post by tekla »

msrenee wrote: post #82
frognumber wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Regulation is non-existent in the cruise industry. You shop for the venue with the most lax regulations of the ≈200 countries in the world. * The equivalent is insurance. Insuring a $2B ship carries pretty good due diligence. A ship simply failing is rare. Of course, ship insurance doesn't care about employee rights, safe food, medical care, or other things one might expect to keep people safe. It's about protectin…

>Welds are quite strong -- it just extends the metal. This is especially true when the baseline quality of the metal is not high. This is not the case at all. A weld almost always weakens the base material. And you don't just use whatever steel is the cheapest to build a ship. You use what is appropriate to the use case. There are cheaper and more expensive options within that category, but you make it sound like you…

Welds weakening the base metal is a myth that is disproven literally day 1 of any welding course. There are metals that don't like the heating and will weaken, but if the weld breaks before the base metal, someone fucked up real bad.

Of course shit welding can cause weakening of the material but thats true of everything. Anything that is worth welding that also is important will use metals that have strong welding properties that make the weld stronger than the base material.

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

#305

Post by mrkandel »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #282
jillesvangurp wrote: post #38

Cruise ships have a huge ecological impact everywhere they go. They burn colossal amounts of fuel, they produce lots of toxic exhaust, sewage, etc. A lot of destinations for these things don't exactly have a lot of regulations for any of this either. Just flying to your destination and staying in some nice place is arguably both better for the environment and probably a lot more enjoyable depending on your tastes. No…

> Cruise ships have a huge ecological impact everywhere they go. The sheer size of these things is hard to comprehend. I'm on vacation at the fancy french riviera and the billionaire's superyachts, when on a bay next to a cruise ship, look like tiny miniature toys. It's just wild. The cruise ships are not just three to five times longer, they're also, way, way, way taller than the superyachts. You see a cruise ships…

It's a boat - is it really worse than flying?

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

#306

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #49
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A cruise company is incentivised to say things like depreciation are less than they are, so the company's numbers look better than they actually are. Additionally, it's very rare for a company to own a ship for its entire lifetime. The way they calculate depreciation now is based on resale value. I wonder what happens to that in a world where interest rates AREN'T negative in real terms anymore...

How long does this supposed fraud take to show up? Carnival and Caribbean have been doing business for decades, and Norwegian has been public since 2011. Surely, it would have impacted the bottom line by now at at least one of those 3 businesses.

> How long does this supposed fraud take to show up?

Estimating things is non-trivial.

It's not fraud for your depreciation estimate to be off by a few percentage points.

Banks regularly set their loss provisions artificially low or high to smooth earnings.

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

#307

Post by lowkey »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #268
lowkey wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I co-founded a smart LED lighting company well over a decade ago and we considered this market. It seems like the potential applications might make this viable now. Cruise ships are a tiny market when compared to all the dead commercial office space in downtown cores that people wish to convert to residential but can’t because of lack of sunlight and similar reasons.

That's cool. How did/would the technology have worked?

There are some other implemenations listed on this page. The trick is to make sure the light rays are parallel as if coming from an infinite distance like the sun. To create the blue sky effect the easiest way is to pass the light through soapy water like in this video posted above https://youtu.be/6bqBsHSwPgw?si=fWO5-pYa6kPYKLZO

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

#308

Post by sojournerc »

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.

The new "Icon of the Seas" mentioned in the article runs on LNG (propane), but it's definitely the exception. I saw it this winter and it doesn't have any of the black/brown exhaust other cruise ships have. Hopefully all new ships go that way, and old ones are refit.

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

#309

Post by lupire »

chasil wrote: post #254
NBJack wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That certainly sounds like an express lane to burnout. Please take care of yourself, and consider the implications of peers who think it's OK to call you at these times. There are a lot of ways to say "no" without saying it.

I am within three years of retirement, so the problem will soon solve itself.

As we age, we start to think about legacy.

Yours could include teaching your company to respect vacation time.

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

#310

Post by lupire »

msrenee wrote: post #55
School-Cotton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just not answer your phone while on vacation?

Presumably because of pressure from superiors. If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. If you're simply unable to receive communications, that's just the way it is. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

How does someone know you are in cell range?

Why do you care what that wage thief thinks?

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