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Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

tynan.com

281–290 of 322 posts

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#281
post #54

Having been of a few cruises, I'd like to point out a few things: 1) Listed prices generally DO NOT include gratuities. Low level cruise employees like the cleaning crew, cabin stewards, waiters, cooks, etc. are paid ridiculously low wages, because cruise ships are registered to countries like Panama and the companies do not need to adhere to U.S. standards. I don't recall offhand, but for a 7-day cruise the "automat…

He says room service is "free", which suggests that he's not tipping. Someone pointed out down thread that this guy's a pickup artist ( http://www.pualingo.com/pua-profiles/herbal-tynan/ ), which is empirically correlated with "asshole", which in turn is correlated with "does not tip".

Author of the post, confirmed asshole, here. In most cruise ships you do not tip for anything until the end, and it is a flat rate. Enjoy.

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that this "tipping culture" is not that prevalent outside the US? In many countries, especially in Europe, service and stuff is paid market wages, and there's no reason to tip by default, just when you are extremely satisfied with the service. Does the fact that I didn't know about "tipping culture" when I was first time in the US makes me an asshole?

Tipping and basic etiquette (particularly involving dining) is one of the fundamental bits of culture everyone should research when traveling to another country. If you are in the US and received good service, but left crappy or zero tips then yes, you definitely leave a negative impression of yourself. Nobody will understand why you left a bad tip or just think "oh, he's a foreigner, he doesn't understand." They wil…

Tipping etiquette is far from basic and almost downright intimidating. Even when I thought I had tipping at restaurants under control, I then lived in fear of embarrassing myself not tipping people in hotels and I'd stayed in a dozen hotels before I suspected that the maid cleaning the room expected a tip! Once got caught without change in a bathroom in a club in Hollywood and was so embarrassed that I handed over $10 foreign currency to a guy who handed me a towel - insane on every level.

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#283
post #15

OK, I have to be that guy. Barcelona to Casablanca is not a "transatlantic cruise". Anyway, interesting idea if you can live without internet. Technically speaking, if you're in international waters (and not a US citizen, which is a long story), you won't even owe taxes on the work you do aboard.

Original author here... I wrote the post in transit between those ports. On cruises you go to a lot of ports... this particular one ends up in Florida (Florence to Florida, with 8 stops or so)

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#287

Wow, I don't think this would have ever occurred to me, but it's genius! I can go from London to San Juan in 14 days, for about £32 / day. That's cheaper than life at home. Think I'm gonna book myself a cruise soon Edit: Just exploring this guy's blog, and it turns out he's Herbal from "The Game" - an excellent book if you've not read it.

Tynan is an all-round bad-ass, and most of what he writes is worth reading.

Thank you!

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#288

I wonder if Tynan would be as gung ho about working on cruise ships if he didn't happen to be launching a cruise deal aggregator site

Yeah... this is my 12th cruise or so now. I really love them. For a while I was going twice a year pretty regularly. The cruise aggregator started as a way for me to find the best prices (because cruisehotsheet.com went down), and I decided to try to make money with it to fund access to better cruise data.

Also... I didn't post either of these... did one of my 2 minute cruise-internet email checks and was pretty surprised to see that I was on the front page twice.

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to say that you're not reacting particularly well to being "negged". is this usual outcome?

> not reacting particularly well What makes you say that? He's not the one throwing names around. What would constitute "reacting well" in your book? Agreeing with you?

Agreeing with me about what?

All I'm doing is pointing out that being "negged" just seems to be making him quite defensive and angry. I thought that having his self-esteem be reduced should make him more sexually appealing and available - but that doesn't seem to be happening.

Re: Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location

#290
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" How did we do it before there was such great online help like StackExchange?" Books. And if you were lucky you would buy 2 or 3 so you could triangulate something that didn't make sense. At least that is what I did. Also plenty of trying and iteration. Try this. Try that. For hours on end. (Not sure by your question if you had done this or were just asking btw.). When I bought a Unix system (mid 80's) it came with…

I hear you, and that's how I learned. :-) But I find it much tougher on the topics I'm learning today. Perhaps it's because the old stuff is hard wired because it needs to be, but I keep less of the new topics in long term memory because I can outsource that storage to Google?

I keep searching for stuff and finding old blog posts of mine I wrote after the first time I solved the problem...
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