My wife and I have gone on 20+ cruises since selling our own small cruising sailboat 25 years ago. We have decided “never again.”
The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated. Twenty years ago, it seemed to us that we would see off duty room stewards and other crew going ashore with their friends, and getting some down time. I know this is subjective, but over time, it seems like giving workers much needed down time stopped happening.
Then fast forward to the present time, my wife and I just don’t want to take a chance getting on a ship because the current new corona virus is so much worse than the Nora virus, which used to be what you worried about on ships.
The very real bummer though is this: there are many hundreds of small ports around the world where people rely on extra income from ships disgorging passengers who spend money. A young engineer in Yalta Ukraine told me that he augmented his income as a scientist from tourist related activities, and it was important income for him.
Yes, the cruise industry should go away, but there will be collateral damage.
It's not subjective. Having worked on a cruise ship 25 years ago: It was always somewhat exploitative, but it's gotten much worse over the years. Yes, you could use your one day off a week to go ashore. More importantly, you weren't yet asked to do two jobs at the same time.
By now, a lot of cruise workers work 12-16 hours a day. Staffing/passenger has decreased. That one day "to go ashore" often goes to just sleeping for once, doing laundry, and various mandatory all-hands drills. So, yes, down time is vanishing. And the pay hasn't improved significantly.
But it's still a field that allows especially people from low-income countries to make more money than in their home country, so that too will fall under collateral damage.
>allows especially people from low-income countries to make more money than in their home country
It seems strange to want to eliminate someone else's best employment opportunity simply because it isn't up to your standards.
If you were to take your business to another cruise line that provides workers better working conditions, I could see that, but is not going on cruises entirely really the best way to improve things?
> It seems strange to want to eliminate someone else's best employment opportunity simply because it isn't up to your standards.
"simply because it isn't up to your standards" is the reason for all labor laws - OSHA, child labor, etc.
We shouldn't treat those born in poverty differently than those born into wealth - and it seems like a tiny step to require cruise ships to treat their workers well.
>We shouldn't treat those born in poverty differently than those born into wealth - and it seems like a tiny step to require cruise ships to treat their workers well.
And neither do they. Their offer of employment is valid for rich people too.
If groby_b were arguing for bans on cruise ships, I could see your objection. But they are perfectly free to spend their own money in different ways.
Perhaps they would use the money saved on cruises instead to buy more cheap goods from China and Bangladesh? Those factory workers benefit from demand for their wares, too.
>The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated.
I read somewhere that the main reason these cruise ships, including those owned by well known US companies like Disney, won't register their ships under the American flag is so that they can avoid US labor laws, I don't know if this is true but it sadly wouldn't surprise me.
It's true. You could still use cheap foreign labor and provide decent working conditions under flag of convenience, but it's the fierce competition that really forbids it. These massive cruise ships have become part of mass tourism. People look at the price first. If the price is 5-10% above competition without better service, it does not work as a business.
It's the non-caring consumers that enable consistent bad treatment of workers in the large scale. People like OP who stop are the only force besides enforcing tighter labor laws in the blue waters that can fix this.
Then there are billionaires in their yachts treating cheap labour as animals just because. That's just cruelty for fun.
The problem is, people who stop are not an effective force for fixing this, as they effect good actors equally as much as bad ones. To fix this with consumer pressure, you need consumers who still buy cruises, but discriminate based on how well the workers are treated (and are willing to pay the premium for good treatment).
And then cruise ships are by faaaaar not the worst offenders in abusing flag's of convienence. They are under the most scrutiny so, having passengers on the ship 24/7.
Labour laws, environmental and safety regulations, and numerous other requirements. "Flags of convenience" are a race-to-the-bottom Gresham's Law dynamic, also referred to as "the law of competing standards":
That blog post is misquoting a version of Gresham's law that's not actually true.
For 'bad money' to drive out 'good money', you need some force that compels sellers to accepts 'bad money' the same way they accept 'good money'. Because otherwise sellers will natural only accept the bad money with a discount or even refuse outright.
You can see that in action in many black markets around the world, where people use American dollars because their local currency is 'bad'.
> Those examples show that in the absence of effective legal tender laws, Gresham's Law works in reverse. If given the choice of what money to accept, people will transact with money they believe to be of highest long-term value. However, if not given the choice and required to accept all money, good and bad, they will tend to keep the money of greater perceived value in their possession and to pass on the bad money to someone else.
The full and proper qualification, as concerns money, is given in the first 'graph of the essay:
"Whenever coins containing precious metals have been used along with base metal coins of the same denomination, both legally accepted as tender, the bad coins have driven the good coins out of circulation."
(Emphasis added.)
The key is that within a given monetary system, "bad" and "good" coin have the same social or statutory (whichever effectively governs) exchange value.
This is not the case in a black-market exchange where U.S. dollars displace local currency, just as it was not the case in the early post-revolutionary United States where commodity currencies (often pelts or grain), or foreign denominations (Spanish "pieces. of eight" reals or English pounds) displaced the much-derided "continental dollar".
The black-market currency does not face the same nominal exchange rate as the inferior currency, but instead has an independent (and almost always far more stable) exchange value. So long as the black-market currency is generally exchangeable for goods and services generally required, and the official currency can be readily obtained for transactions in which. it is mandated -- say, payment of national taxes, you'll see a preference for the black-market currency.
This balance point may be further shifted by mandates that, say, retail, payroll, and banking transactions be in the official currency. In most regions with a substantial black-market role, institutional trust and regulatory and statutory compliance are low enough, and often the true underlying dysfunction, that their role, and hence effective monetary compliance capacity, are effectvely nil.
For what it's worth, I've been exploring Gresham's Law and related dynamics for some time:
not just cruises. nor just leisure and touristic activities either. tons of jobs have similar working conditions. and tbh, i am not sure avoiding or banning these activities is the solution.
i mean, we are not throwing our smartphones away yet, are we?
I get the impression commercial air travel isn't that bad, but it's not great. Cruse ships get away with it by using workers from developing countries. Airlines pitch it as "travel the world" and a lifestyle, so there are a lot of people who want the job. It's like software in the video game industry.
Shipowners try to avoid all sorts of stuff... labor law, environmental laws, taxes, etc. The only US flagged ships are ships that transit between two US ports.
There's beneficial owner who may or may not be easily known. They register the ship in Panama or Liberia. The officers are usually from a western country (depending on the owner or the purpose), crew from a place like Philippines or Indonesia. Some of the customer facing staff may be from a western country as well.
> The only US flagged ships are ships that transit between two US ports.
And that's only because of some really archaic, protectionist laws that are driving up logistics costs for American businesses and keep freight off the waters and on the roads.
I agree with what you are saying, but want to clarify the example a bit. Yalta is in fact in Crimea, I believe most people there would ask you to not call their land part of Ukraine (note: this doesn't mean I believe that annexation was a good idea). They probably don't have cruise ships there, most tourists are from Ukraine and Russia. If Russians won't be able to go to Turkey this summer (almost sure) but will be allowed to go to Crimea (we'll see how that goes…), this major part of Crimean economy might be actually in better shape than before.
To me modern cruises are one of the most egregious cases of late-stage capitalism:
The original idea is sound: visit multiple destinations on a mobile hotel!
The drive for value is acceptable: make the mobile hotel as fun as the destination with decent restaurants and entertainment
But the inevitable result is catastrophic: increasingly gigantic ships that cram customers and attractions in, cost-cutting measures that harm the environment, exploitation of port towns
Before the virus hit, they seemed quite popular with paying customers and people were signing up to work for them voluntarily.
You might not like it, but that doesn't make the business catastrophic. (I'm not really in the market for a cruise either.)
(The main way you could help cruise ship employees would be to give them better outside options. Eg by opening up migration to rich countries more. Or by otherwise improving the economy of the places they hail from.)
Just because there are articles on the internet doesn't make it a plain truth. I don't make a habit of searching for what the working conditions are for every person I interact with.
Do you care to address what my comment clearly intended to articulate, specifically that if you care about something like how companies treat their employees it’s worth the small effort to do some background research? I’m not sure how that’s outrageous or smug.
Do you feel that there are no limits in this regard?
Is it not ok to care about such things and factor it into decisions made as a consumer? Why is this a hot-button issue?
As stated in my replies elsewhere it was a poorly worded comment. I think it’s not outrageous to suggest that if you care about something e.g. how well companies you do business with treat their employees then it makes sense to do cursory research about that. I don’t think that’s smug or outrageous. Mentioning the word ethics was a mistake.
Jeeze guys I didn’t carefully word my comment. Sorry to imply that there exist absolute morals. Not my intention. Now do you all think that the converse is true? Is it ok to do business with someone no matter what? Is there any limit? Why the outrage at my suggestion?
I would guess the downvotes are because you're saying that people who don't investigate the working conditions of everyone they interact with don't "have ethics", as if that were some kind of binary state.
Yes but your comment comes after I have posted clarification on my initial poorly worded comment.
Given the added context it is clear that I didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort. I don’t think a charitable interpretation of my comments is that I have some primitive notion of ethics as a binary property.
As someone who used to love flying and relied on it for income, family, etc, but stopped as I learned how much it polluted, pleasantly surprised to find how much my life improved without it, I read articles on the cruise industry as applying to flying. Ticket costs don't cover the costs of cleaning their environmental damage. Few people could afford it if they had to pay for that damage.
In the case of contributing to pandemics, flying spreads viruses incredibly effectively. Boats trap a few thousand people at a time. Flights bring the virus to population centers of tens of millions in hours.
For the time being, people associate flying with seeing loved ones and making money, so they associate not flying with never seeing their moms or losing their jobs. Experience shows the opposite. The more people fly, the more dispersed their families, so the less they see loved ones. Flying forces companies to fly people everywhere.
I predict the vitriol people are starting to show for cruises will eventually make it to flying, however hard to conceive today.
is this controversial? the existence of cheap cross-country flights makes it much easier for people to move to the best location for their profession and fly back home to see everyone for easter and christmas (or whatever your big two holidays are).
People moved across oceans and continents for careers back when those moves took months. Being able to go back and see family is a perk that's moved its way down the income latter with the advent of cheap air travel but I don't think it's making or breaking anyone's decision to relocate or at least not in numbers large enough to matter.
People will move far away for their careers regardless but if the cheap long distance transportation exists then people will use it. The people who are working in one city and taking a flight back home every weekend are statistically nonexistent. The people who moved across the country and take a plane back a couple times a year to celebrate as major holiday or something are far more numerous but those people would have still moved without the cheap airfare.
You make such a confident-sounding blanket generalization across all human behavior that goes counter to everything I have ever experienced that I don't even know how to reply to this comment.
Do you honestly not believe that people take ease of access to their loved ones when deciding where to work? I've had countless conversations with people talking about how they chose jobs to be closer to family. Transportation lets you convert the spatial metric of "closer" to a measure of time and cost instead. If flights double in price, that means seeing family half as often, which can easily make the difference between choosing job A over job B.
We have millenia of proof to the contrary, to your anecdotal evidence.
People move away primarily for economic benefits.
No single mass migration in history of humanity has ever happened "because people wanted to be close to their family".
If you want anecdotes: I know hundreds of people that have moved away from their families and only a few that moved back after being elsewhere. (Literally about half of my graduation year at university have moved away) Most people I know, that moved, see their family back "home" only once or twice per year (summer vacation + winter holidays).
I hope I'm not being pedantic when I point out that the existence of cheap flights isn't the same thing as taking them. I will accept that the existence of cheap flights causes more air travel. I will not accept without evidence that the act of traveling via air leads people to having more dispersed families.
I don't think anyone is implying that you as an individual flying causes your family to spread out. although if you spend most of the year traveling, your relatives might start to wonder what the point of living near your primary residence is. I can see how you might interpret the wording from the original post as saying that, but it doesn't really make sense that way.
the point is that, when it's affordable and normal to fly great distances on a yearly/monthly basis, it causes people to spread out a lot more. then you end up with a chicken-egg scenario where people "need" cheap flights to see their spread out families, but the cheap flights also enable them to spread out further while still seeing each other.
I think it's not that simple. Flying to see your family is always more costly than being close to your family, even when flights are "cheap". What causes people to want to move? What causes people to be ok paying the cost?
choosing where to live is always a tradeoff between many competing factors: proximity to family, intrinsic appeal of a particular area, job opportunities for you and your partner, the list goes on.
odds are, you didn't happen to be born in the optimal location for your desired career. if you can get paid $20k more on the other side of the country and a flight home costs $200, you might find it pretty tempting to move. if the flight cost $2000 or you had to drive for three days to get home, it would be a lot less appealing for people who value seeing their family.
I don't understand how it's so hard to see that cheap flights make a big difference at the margin.
You are implying that there are a lot of people that are on those margins. There's simply no evidence of that being the case.
In fact - the drastic rise of living costs in economic centers indicates that people will take that move, even if that trip back is several hundred dollars and takes many hours.
And yet Europeans roared across the Atlantic in the millions when it took >1 month to sail. Europeans colonized Australia and New Zealand, even further away (~250 days), and only about half the total number of people on board the First Fleet were convicts, the rest went along because it was their job or their choice.
I hate NYC and yet I recognise that it's the best location for fast travel to Europe... I travel back home about 2 times per year, though.
But implying that travel accessibility is the primary reason is absurd. If I had a good job offer from a company in LA - I would still take it. Even though my travel time to my mother would double(11 to 22 hours)
None of those were casual journeys the way a flight home for Christmas is. For colonists, it was generally the one long-distance trip they would make in their entire lives. In the glory days of the great trans-Atlantic liners, the only people who used them regularly were the very rich.
Casual journeys are still an expensive thing to do.
Do you think a median family in US can afford a short trip to Miami, planned even a month in advance?
Could be: I had a parent just move as they transitioned to a retirement, fixed-income budget and needed to live somewhere with a lower cost of living. A big factor in the choosing where to settle was ease of travel back to where other family is located. They ultimately chose somewhere very close to a large airport that had frequent low-cost (sub $100) round trip tickets back back & forth.
I'm curious because I'd also like to take steps to lower my carbon footprint. How do you travel for vacations? Do you only take local ones? And also how about people that you want to see in other areas of the country/world?
The answer no one wants to hear is that no words can convey what one learns from just committing. I'm in my fifth year and I haven't been able to convey to anyone the mindset shift. It's like trying to describe hearing Beethoven's ninth in Carnegie Hall, except bigger and better. What words can you use?
Whether you go on a cruise or not, it’s essentially impossible to live a modern life and not have a net negative effect on the environment. The marginal damage done by existing plus going on cruise vs. just existing is infinitesimal.
>The marginal damage done by existing plus going on cruise vs. just existing is infinitesimal.
Depends on your definition of "just existing". I can't claim to live in a way that's very good for the environment, but I do try to limit meat consumption, purchases of new goods etc. Most online calculators for carbon footprints give me a ~8 ton yearly Co2 equivalent. According to [1] a cruise from Southhampton to New York (one way) is ~4.5 tons per person, so that would be a whopping 50% increase for me, and more than double if I did a return trip. That's just the Co2 emissions too, so not factoring in the various ocean-polluting effects (also mentioned in [1]).
I doubt it. It's impossible to calculate how much damage one does to the environment, but the single biggest cause for extra fuel use (which correlates almost perfectly with environmental damage) is living in non dense environments since all the mass required for living has to be moved that much further.
I don't think it's possible for anyone, even a well off individual, to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does to society as a whole, since mass transit is no longer feasible, which means density is less feasible, and it causes a whole chain reaction of extra fuel use.
> It's impossible to calculate how much damage one does to the environment, [...]
You can use approximations.
> I don't think it's possible [...] to offset what living in 1/4 acre or more lots does [...]
Sure, dense living has a smaller footprint.
But individuals can still buy enough offsets. It's just going to be more expensive.
You can also get more creative with your offsets. For example, I could try to find two people who are currently living sparsely and convince them with a bit of money to move to a dense neighbourhood. That would more than offset any personal decision to live in a sparse neighbourhood.
(Slatestarcodex had a similar idea about eating meat: just bribe other people to become vegetarian, if you are worried about your net impact but still want to eat tasty, tasty meat.
Obviously, normal well-adjusted humans don't take kindly to trading in such indulgences.)
Public transportation is not something you can dump on others. Everyone is using it, or no one is since you simply can’t design infrastructure for both at the same time. You can’t have surface streets for cars and optimize them for pedestrians and bicyclists. And obviously people will choose cars as who wouldn’t want the comfort and privacy of their own vehicle, so the upper class in society won’t be participating in the public transportation, which also has predictably negative effects on the politics of it.
This is one example of something you can’t offset.
Singapore for example does just fine having both private cars and public transport.
Germany also has both reasonable public transport and good accommodation for private vehicles. You can totally find some people who are on the margin between the two and could be persuaded either way relatively easily.
But even granting that part of your argument, I don't see how you can't offset it? You could either be non-specific and just buy enough carbon offsets. Or if you want to specifically offset public transport use, just bribe some people to move to place with better public transport.
Politically, you can’t even spend the funds on public transport if it will disrupt private cars (roads would need to be removed and made smaller).
Even the mention of more density or less road for people’s private cars will cause a public outcry that will shut the project down. And it takes years if not decades to construct public transport, so that political will has to run through multiple elections.
What are you objecting to? I didn't say to build more public transport in places that don't want it.
My proposal was about changing what people do on the margin. And assuming that we can offset behaviour anywhere on the globe. Ie that you can get more people in Germany on public transport to make up for your sins in America.
(Btw, buses don't need much of a change to the road layout.)
Look around bud. How many people do you think are taking significant steps to minimize the damage they do?
We act like eating a little less meat or buying a Tesla is the equivalent of a the Nobel Peace Prize but it’s just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Let’s get real and enjoy this ride while it lasts.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted because very few people take the steps that actually reduce environmental damage such as not flying anywhere, living in small residences in dense urban areas, and dramatically reducing driving.
Which to me clearly show the truth of your comment. You can swap out all the plastic bags for cloth bags and buy a Tesla and spend an hour sorting your trash every week, but taking that flight for a honeymoon to Tahiti or living in a suburb and driving everywhere negates all of it and more.
I agree with your claim that "everybody is doing it wrong"...except that I think your conclusion just ends up being the same fallacy as everyone else's. Specifically, you can't assume a flight to Tahiti does or doesn't negate plastic bags or whatever.
The only realistic and honest way to assess overall impact is put a number on your total consumption. There are a million ways that can be skewed, but averages don't vary as much as you think - as an overall reality check, if you make and spend your $50K salary every year, that is going to be the order of magnitude of your environmental impact. Mostly, someone who consumes $500K worth of stuff is going to have 10x the impact, and someone who consumes $5K will have 1/10th the impact. How you spend it is second order.
This attitude will never catch on, because people feel, innately and through socialization, that misers are bad, "bean counters" are bad, simple but difficult solutions are bad, and focusing on specific actions, symbols, in-groups and out-groups, is what drives normal social activity and fulfillment.
The psychology of "saving the environment" reminds me a lot of dieting for people who struggle with their weight, or budgeting for people who live paycheck to paycheck. It's the total that matters, not the parts, and yet it's very difficult to approach it any way other than piece by piece.
> The only realistic and honest way to assess overall impact is put a number on your total consumption. There are a million ways that can be skewed, but averages don't vary as much as you think - as an overall reality check, if you make and spend your $50K salary every year, that is going to be the order of magnitude of your environmental impact. Mostly, someone who consumes $500K worth of stuff is going to have 10x the impact, and someone who consumes $5K will have 1/10th the impact. How you spend it is second order.
I’d like to think it was this easy, but I don’t believe it is. A Manhattan apartment costs a million dollars or more, but that person can use public transport to get around. Someone in Arkansas lives in a suburb of Little Rock and drives 30 miles to work one way every day in a pickup truck they don’t need and uses fuel costing $1 per gallon or less. And their house cost $200k.
I wouldn’t be able to say the person in Manhattan is causing an order more environmental impact, especially when our world doesn’t price in externalities of fuel use at all for most of the population.
Well, I wrote "consumption" for a reason. It's arguable that Manhattan real estate is valuable largely due to the land value, and land is an asset that isn't really consumed.
Externalities are a cop-out. There are always externalities, but they're just used as an excuse for special pleading. If you average a large amount of consumption, the amount of oil per dollar, and the externalities of burning it, are going to be fairly consistent. The type of consumption is dwarfed by the amount of consumption; that's the claim I'm making. It's not that the "environmental choice" isn't better all else being equal, but it doesn't make up for hardly any consumption as a percentage. If you're not saving significant money as a percentage with your choices, you're not improving your lifestyle significantly.
Yep, people really want to feel like they’re doing their part when they’re really as much a part of the problem as the people they look down on.
I’ve never lived in an apartment bigger than 600 square feet, have never driven a car, don’t fly, eat a plant based diet, and will never have kids. We’re about a generation or two from a total disaster and everybody wants to think tiny insignificant changes are enough. Glad I’ll be be long dead by then.
Look at you, person doing more environmental damage than 80% of the people on the planet, looking down on others at the 85th percentile.
I fly maybe once a year, avoid red meat, and live in a dense neighborhood. I'm doing more environmental damage than most people and I've made my peace with it.
Ofcourse they did, Carnival Cruise Lines is littered with controversies. Just like the almost yearly fine they need to pay for all their dumping on the sea. This is a horrible company in a lot of ways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_Cruise_Line#Controver...
My wife and I took a cruise for our honeymoon back in 2006. Carnival was very attractive since we were recently out of college and their prices were so cheap compared to everyone else. But just a little digging showed me they don’t take care of their ships, staff, or guests the way they should. Glad we didn’t choose them, and never will.
I took the family on the Carnival Triumph years ago for a first-time cruise. It was okay and we had fun - but we had nothing to compare it to. A few years later we went on a Disney Cruise... we won't be going on Carnival ever again.
We also noted that the Triumph was the ship that a few years ago had that engine fire that disabled power and left them adrift for days with toilets overflowing into cabins and no hot food available.
Carnival cruises are cheap, but the risk of suffering a trip disaster - possibly with health consequences - is just not worth it.
Thanks for linking this propagandistic PR puff piece. Long on opinion, short on facts, and likely pushed by a cruise industry association. It's a helpful reminder of how media works today.
I love how they get one "expert" to say something and that's suddenly a news story.
> "I think there's extremely low risk of getting novel coronavirus on a cruise ship," said Dr. John Lynch, who has specialties in infectious disease and travel medicine at University of Washington School of Medicine.
Not only that, even if he was right, it was an irrelevant point. Sure, if you take all the people going on cruise ships at the time, most didn't get coronavirus. but as with all of the precautions being taken, none of this is solely about personal individual health risk, but also about risk to others. So, yeah, individual risk was probably low, but some people would get it, and spread it to others as they traveled, and then spread it some more when they got back home.
The issue that I would have with the advice, whether or not it was obvious that the virus was a huge deal at the time, is that whether you get it isn't going to be an independent probability. If there's an outbreak on the ship, everybody gets it, regardless of what the overall odds are. I'm not sure why, but that seems psychologically more concerning to me. Kind of like the risk of a plane crash vs. a car crash.
It looks like that author primarily stays in the shitty listicle category of journalism. To me CNN and other publishers should be more careful of what they publish if they want to be 'known' for their journalism standards and reputation.
The article is being published by a "reputable" online news source. Regardless of whether or not it is truthful, if you saw a CNN article saying it was still safe to cruise, wouldn't you think about it?
I could absolutely see people being persuaded that taking a cruise was safe if they saw it on CNN. Personally, I wouldn't be caught dead on a cruise ship, even before the pandemic, but that's just me.
I did, however, fall for the "masks aren't necessary for the general public" line that the CDC was pushing for a while. I was doubly stupid, because I had a small stock of N95's from the recent California wildfires that I didn't even use. I'm now wearing one every time I go out other than to walk my dog. Fortunately, I have not (yet) had symptoms of the virus, and I hope I can avoid it for as long as possible, because I have mild asthma and a heart murmur, and don't really need any more cardiorespiratory issues.
That was because there wasn't enough supply for medical personnel because everyone was buying them up like toilet paper. And while it "worked", it wasn't enough. Also, we didn't know enough about asymptomatic carriers which is why they switched directions and were recommending you make them out of t-shirts and elastic, etc.
Nonetheless, I had already purchased the masks last year, and was persuaded not to wear them by the CDC, because I was asymptomatic. I haven't bought any additional N95 masks in months, so I wasn't a part of the lack of supply problem. Luckily, I haven't developed symptoms yet, but I would say the CDC's "guidance" was rather misguided.
Sure, CDC/WHO misinformation. Why do you think Asian tourists are regulary wearing face masks while on vacation? Because of the SARS, MERS and H1N1 outbreaks.
3. Mainly Korea, Japan and HK. Not sure about Taiwan or mainland China.
Anti-WHO narrative? The WHO failed to do its job warning earlier about the severity of this crisis and issuing guidelines that would have helped contries and people prepare. Their current leadership should at least resign at this point.
I don't really see why this article matters that much. Don't get me wrong, with hindsight we can see that it was bad advice, but I think people overplay the effect the media can have.
The only way that cruise ship travel was going to be meaningfully reduced in mid-February was if Carnival cancelled cruises and gave refunds. Maybe the government should have forced their hand, I don't know. But people spent thousands on those cruises and even if CNN had posted an article on Feb 13th entitled "Don't get on a cruise ship right now" I don't think it would have made a huge difference given people's financial investment and the advice from the government that everything was absolutely fine.
> the following morning, John joined about 200 other passengers in the ship’s Broadway-style theater for a lecture on Clint Eastwood movies. “I’m surprised they’re even letting this event happen,” he whispered to a nearby friend. “This is a big crowd.”
Says the guy attending the event!
This is what gets me about so much of the coverage. Most of it revolves around "look at all the foolish people around me!" and is completely oblivious of the fact that they're also participating in the same thing.
Looking forward to the inevitable legislation limiting lawsuits / damages related to Covid. Irony factor: it'll come from the same congress members who are now pushing the "allow people to sue China" agenda.
>Irony factor: it'll come from the same congress members who are now pushing the "allow people to sue China" agenda.
I think it will work something like this, the cruise ships are insured, the insurers will settle these cases and then the insurers will recover against China/Chinese owned assets.
We did Carnival few years ago. It was a first for me. My wife and her family went on multiple vacations like that. Do not get me wrong. Our time was pleasant. That said, I talked with some of the workers there and it is no wonder the cruises are as cheap as they are. Cheap labor will do that. I am genuinely curious if the more expensive variations rely less on tax avoidance/evasion ( whichever was the legal one ) and cheap labor.
Nothing at these corporations changes until both executives and low level minions get charged with felonies, and taken to trial. They must be deposed, brought to stand. Simply settling by paying the equivalent of x days of profits is not justifiable anymore.
I'm usually not one to complain about this, but may I ask why me admitting that I thought of a carnival event rather than a cruise line I haven't heard of before makes people want to downvote my comment?
The 'misreads' are usually dead ends to discussion unless qualified back to original topic. I would not consider downvotes here personal, they simply steer the conversation to remain on track.
Lines like "kept the party going" make me think of David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and sound right on brand for a cruise line.
Having read that titular essay, I have no desire to ever go on a cruise.
The good side: the ships allowed us to have the data about COVID-19 that could not be otherwise easily obtained. One could hardly invent better "experiment setup" with the real people.
But some "experts" however decided to ignore the existence of that data, and even as it was already available in Wikipedia, continued to spread the claims (which are even now repeated!) that "we know too little about this disease to do anything, so better not doing anything before we do some 'random testing'."
Cruise ships are giant floating cities that travel the world. They are engineering marvels. You constantly see them in science fiction except in other settings, because they are amazing.
A diamond is an amazing rock, but just a rock at the end of the day, with an industry selling something it's not.
You're X is probably made from the same "terrible industries" as either of those example. That is a global issue around poverty which leads to the environment, nothing particular to those industries.
There will have been a lot of specialized infrastructure and resources to find that diamond and then refine it into a ring, but really, just because something is an engineering marvel means it's not terrible. If I built the most advanced baby smacker, capable of targeting and smacking babies from orbit doesn't mean it's a good idea.
All told cruise ships seems like an excellent example of modern wastefulness, polluting more than all the cars in Europe and serving no real purpose to justify their gross excess.
Before we blame the cruise lines, the fitness clubs, the airlines, the ski resorts, the buffet restaurants ... lets remind ourselves that it is not a job for random companies to access the seriousness of potential pandemic virus. They have to, they should, rely on what the authorities say and the rules they lay out.
The health authorities are the only ones who have the full picture and a chance to assess this.
That the CDC according the article blames Carnival cruises really is not a good look.
In their defense, February was a very confusing time for the virus, and it’s easy to look back in hindsight judgement.
For example, on Feb 24 Pelosi was in crowded Chinese New Year celebration in China town urging people to “come down”. They were still calling the China travel ban “racist” and “xenophobic” during this time. Trump was bragging about 14 cases and saying we have it under control.
People just really weren’t grappling with the seriousness of the situation. Now we all know, and we’re eager to blame different people and institutions. Not only that, but politicians are trying to rewrite their own histories. Don’t let them do that.
Another direction could be a mid six figure baseline salary and the rest of their compensation in the form of stock that vests 2% each year. Now they'll really be interested in the long term health of the company, even needing to make sure it ends up in good hands after they leave. The biggest problem with these kinds of schemes is that there's always going to be some other company that will still use large quarterly bonuses for their compensation package, which most CEOs will take instead.
I'm somewhat fond of the idea of a maximum ratio between the highest and lowest earners in a company, maybe 10:1. So if new employees are started at $50k, the max remuneration for any individual would be $500k. This provides an incentive to raise salaries at the bottom.
I would apply this to all forms of payment. So if the CEO gets stock, they would be eligible to receive 10x whatever they give to their lowest level employee.
This idea comes up a lot, and, while I like the principle, there's a silly loophole that would need to be closed up somehow. The way I've heard it presented is like this: say you have a company, Burger Corp, where the lowest level cashier is a minimum wage earner making ~$15k per year. That would mean that Burger Corp's CEO could theoretically only be making ~$150k per year, right?
The way to get around it is to have all the low level employees be employed by Burger Corp Crew Members Inc, and all the executives be employed by Burger Corp Executive Services Inc. If the lowest level employee of Burger Corp Executive Services makes $500k, then that means the CEO could make $5M. BCES then contracts with BCCM to actually staff the stores.
I'm not sure how much of a problem this would actually be, but it does cut against the spirit of the idea of limiting CEO pay. I'm also not sure what the best way to close this loophole would be that also preserves the spirit of the rule, but the lesson here is that people will get around any arbitrary rule like this quite easily. That's actually how we ended up with CEOs having fairly low actual salaries (IIRC, Jeff Bezos takes a salary of around $80k, and a number of CEOs take $1 salaries), and the rest of their comp in stock -- an IRS rule change at some point (I believe in the 80's) is what brought on this trend, which still continues today.
I think having both the companies owned by the same people would come under quick scrutiny, and the companies would quickly move to finding someone to pay for a "service" for all their low-paid worker needs.
So you'd end up with Burger Corp being executives like you said, and then hiring Service Company X to do all their cashiering and burger-flipping and janitorial services. They'd be owned by completely different people, and Service Company X might even service multiple companies much like many temp staffing agencies today.
Attempting to stop this would also kill most existing janitorial services among other things, and it'd be really hard to regulate.
In the end, things move around, but they don't really change.
Exactly. The only fundamental difference, even if the companies have different ownership, is one of accounting. I don't think there's any way to prevent this kind of structure from emerging, either.
Ah, but Burger Corp Executive Services doesn't sell burgers; they provide strategy and direction (and other "executive stuff") to a company (Burger Corp Crew Members) that sells burgers.
To counter the next potential fix that comes up after this usually: suppose BCES also provides "executive services" to "Really Good Burgers, Inc." (and a few other "burger" companies).
As long as you can show the courts that it's a legitimate business relationship and the executive company has no equity stake, board positions, or other influence on the burger company. If the contract for executive services isn't bid on by other unrelated providers, then it's going to smell like bullshit to the courts.
Contracting out things like janitorial and facility maintenance services (basically the same workflow as what you're describing) is how BigCos get to make grandiose claims about how all their employees make at least X. The people making less don't work for them, they work for the facilities maintenance, catering or administrative staffing firms that bigCo hires to provide those services.
For the third world counties they hire from those are great wages. By the standard of anyone reading this it isn't of course, but when you don't have options it is good.
Not so much "contractors," in terms of actual, physical people, but a split corporate structure where the management company contracts out staffing to the company that actually does the non-executive running of the business. See my sibling comment.
Should Microsoft include janitors and good service workers who have long been outsourced, if they were ever employees at all? Security guards? Delivery people? The barista at the Starbucks nearby?
This sounds like a law that would the courts would have a hard time enforcing, because companies and their employees depend on a wide variety of resources these days.
The starbucks is in a Microsoft building though, so why not? The delivery person only goes between microsoft buildings, so why not? Can we game this by getting rid of food services on campus (everyone has to go "out" for lunch), and by ensuring that all deliveries transit through non Microsoft property?
>Can we game this by getting rid of food services on campus (everyone has to go "out" for lunch), and by ensuring that all deliveries transit through non Microsoft property?
Sure, but I'd still fine you if I was a judge.
Like in copyright law that gets abused by copyright trolls, we need more laws that punish attempts to break the spirit of the law, even if they nominally follow the letter...
Put it this way: if I'm a tech company building a new campus and I know that I'll have to average food service workers salaries into our stats, why put food service on my campus at all? And if I decide not to put in food service, it having not existed before anyways, how is that breaking the spirit of the law? Do we have some kind of thought police going around figuring out if people make decisions for the "right" reasons or not? Sounds like 1984 to me.
Tons of companies already outsource entire departments to 3rd parties like HR, customer support, IT, warehousing, transportation, accounting, janitorial, building maintenance, cafeteria staff, etc. It would basically be the same thing but on steroids.
We would have to put some laws in place to keep executives from hiring the majority of employees as contractors, but this seems doable. CEO compensation is out of control in the US. We pay way more for executives who don't seem to be anymore talented than their European counterparts. They just have access to a similarly sized but much easier/homogenous (in terms of regulation, language, culture) market.
Deliberately dense? 20K vs 100K is 5X difference. 100K vs 100M is … quite a bit more than 5X.
The executive suite has absconded with almost the entirety of the company's wealth, in almost every industry. Engineers are simply 'necessary evils' who haven't been outsourced yet. And curiously, seem content with 0.1% of what the executives say they need to simply to sign our paychecks.
The minimum wage contractor working in the cafeteria is not making $20K nor is the average salary of a software engineer in any major city in the US only $100K. The average salary of a software engineer at a FAANGM is far more than $150K
FAANGM salaries aren't representative of the average software engineer's salary. Software engineering compensation is bimodal much like in the law field. There are a few making $300k+ (mostly in Silicon Valley, New York, and Seattle) and a ton making $60-130k.
Minimum wage if you actually get paid for 2080 hours a year (doubtful) is $15080/year. There are many cities where senior developers are making more than $150K a year - including Dallas, Atlanta, etc.
Also the FAANGM companies also use a lot of low paid contractors.
The original comment that I replied to was I'm somewhat fond of the idea of a maximum ratio between the highest and lowest earners in a company, maybe 10:1
Would you also be okay if software developers or whatever industry you were in capped salaries where the highest paid employees were only allowed to make 10x what the lowest paid employees made?
What if “employees” also included outside contractors that worked for the company (cooks, janitorial services, etc)?
What if “employees” included all of the invisible foreign workers that exclusively manufactured for your employer?
I would be fine with it _iff_ pre-existing wealth were redistributed.
As it stands, the idea that my own salary should be restricted is asinine in a world in which someone else starts out with >10M. All you achieve is cementing inequality forever.
if the CEO is also a major shareholder (maybe they're also the founder), they don't actually need salary or bonuses to make huge amounts of money from the business.
this can also create a perverse incentive for the salary structure. the CEO's pay is maximized by maximizing the lowest salary in the company. the easiest way of doing this is to pay everyone 1/10th of the CEO's pay. depending on the size of the company and the existing pay disparity, this could make most of the employees worse off than they were before. it might be better to target median or mean compensation instead, although you could probably find pathological counterexamples for these approaches too.
Larger companies would just give their employees raises in order to be able to increase executive salaries, and smaller companies couldn't afford to compete with that. Your suggestion would further increase the dominance of large companies.
Make a law that all contract work must be above $X amount and put some process around it. Hiring individual contractors for low skilled work should be onerous, expensive or both. Do something. We shouldn't simply accept that anything we do will be circumvented and not try at all.
One of my possible choices for a future career path is to go into consulting full time. I'm sure this is a common thought here on HN.
Prohibiting small contract work sounds like an excellent way to prevent that sort of thing from ever happening. It would severely stunt the ability for tech workers to leave traditional employment to found a small consulting firm (usually composed of "just them", or perhaps a them and a couple of former colleagues) while simultaneously entrenching the concept of a large, established firm.
In short, it would make it much more difficult to transition from "employee" to "business owner" in our industry. That strikes me as a terrible idea.
That is definitely a great way to kick start automation initiatives. Making janitors really expensive to hire means that you either have highly paid (less likely) or janitor robots (more likely). There are lots of opportunities for this in food service as well. This would have a huge side effect of accelerating the robotics industry.
That's a great point. Many people will find that the market doesn't value their labor much at all, so we should tax automation as well. We can use the funds to provide income to displaced workers.
We will get there eventually, it is unavoidable...labor is rapidly losing in its value proposition vs. capital.
The minimum wage puts a bottom on the level of human labor the economy can support. This isn't a bad thing, it pressures people up the labor value chain ($5/hour jobs don't exist, you better be able to do a $10/hour one), and it forces companies to constantly improve productivity to match (e.g. through automation). However, if you move the line too fast, productivity improvements will eliminate lower level labor too quickly, causing problems for society. Artificial restrictions on labor will only cause those things to accelerate unless we tax robots as people (as you propose).
As with all things, reasonable people determine what is reasonable. There is a strong element of peer review in this, with reasonable recognizing each other as peers and showing at least some deference to some kind of agreed upon norms, if not about facts, at least about methods of gathering and evaluating facts. A refusal to respect those methods will generally cause reasonable people to view you as unreasonable. This might sounds elitist, but any process involving any kind of peer review necessarily involves people respecting certain approaches to information, while disrespecting other approaches.
Who are the "peers" to a CEO of a company the size of Carnival that will be making the "peer review"?
Will anyone be willing to take the job at the price this peer review will be setting?
There's a wide range of possible answers to those interrelated questions. I don't have one particular answer in mind. Just pointing out that as nice as your post may sound at a conceptual level, fleshing it out in detail is decidedly non-trivial.
The heads of giant charity’s or government agencies have in similar jobs with vastly less compensation. The idea you can only find people at 50m/year because nobody would do it at 10m/year is ridiculous.
You've filled in a lot of blanks in a way quite different than I would fill it in. But I'm not really talking about those blanks; I really am talking just about the questions I posted. Who are these "peers"? What are they going to decide is "fair"?
If someone is offering 50m/year then surely the most qualified candidates would compete for that job and treat the 10m/year offer as a backup plan. Meaning you wouldn’t get the best people. As for governments and non-profits: they don’t get the best people, either, unless those people are personally motivated by the mission in a way that is unlikely in a commercial setting.
So by that reasoning, LeBron James (who earns a salary of $37 million) isn't a better basketball player than Maurice Harkless ($11 million); he's just "motivated by power and money". I wonder how you would take it if someone offered you a small fraction of your current salary and suggested you were "motivated by money" if you didn't accept it?
Are you also arguing that it's fundamentally impossible for any business executive to be as valuable to a business as LeBron James is to the Lakers?
If I were paid a tiny fraction of what I make now I wouldn't be able to feed myself. Someone making 50 mil vs 10 mil is able to take care of all their human needs either way. I'm motivated to make the money I do by my desire to stay alive. But this 50 mil vs 10 mil argument isn't in a vacuum. It's 50mil vs 10mil for them versus $7 an hour for those at the bottom. People motivated to take those salaries when that kind of inequality exists aren't exactly looking out for the greater good.
I'm arguing that the people who actually make the things and provide the services that make companies valuable are the workers at the bottom. The CEOs at the top are really good at squeezing every last drop of productivity out of them for minuscule pay and benefits, and trashing the environment whenever possible. That's the skillset of a psycho/sociopath. These people tend to do things like, I don't know, keep knowledge about the possibility of a deadly virus outbreak on a cruise ship from passengers.
That assumes the difference between the 50m person and the 10m person is worth 40m. Sports teams for example actually pay those kind of salaries, but individual teams don’t just blow unlimited budget on a tiny number of the most expensive players for each position.
As to the pool of most qualified candidates, it’s company specific. The ideal CEO for Microsoft is different from the ideal CEO for Boing.
A reasonable person is the peer of a reasonable person just like a researcher who is careful in their methods is the peer of another researcher who is careful in their methods. But how do you know who is careful in their methods? The only researchers who really know who are the researchers who are careful in their methods are the researchers who are careful in their methods. They recognize each other, but they cannot necessarily communicate what they know to the larger public. This is peer review. To protect peer review as it applies, in a practical sense, to specific professions, we normally follow a complex social process whereby institutions are established with the express goal of transferring knowledge from the older generation to the younger generation. The institutions themselves are subject to a separate process of gaining or losing the social capital necessary to be seen as legitimate in the task of transferring the knowledge. The institutions are entrusted with the task of gatekeeping the professions, weeding out a large number of people who might want to join the profession. However, the institutions themselves are not seen as able to force someone to recognize someone else as a peer, except in a superficial and prima facie sense. Actual peering is done between peers, and no institution can control it. In that sense, peering is the absolute opposite of democracy. It is a social process of a particular elite, who may not be seen as an elite by anyone but themselves. (Albert Einstein may or may not feel that Werner Heisenberg is a great physicist, and vice versa, Michael Jordan may or may not regard Kobe Bryant as a great basketball player, and vice versa, Isaac Abendana may or may not regard Jacob Abendana as a great Sephardic scholar, and vice versa.) The gatekeeping performed by the institutions is a first step towards establishing a peer group, but the gatekeeping does not itself establish the peer group. Only the peers themselves do that, in their own private thoughts, which no one else might agree with. Likewise, with reasonable people, though there is no institution gatekeeping the overall group of reasonable people, so the process is even more intensely personal than it is among the recognized professions. Yet people outside the peer groups do understand actual achievement, so occasionally members of each peer group develop public recognition, and then they go public with their own private ideas of who is a peer. This can influence who non-peers think of as peers. If Michael Jordan said that Kobe Bryant was his peer then few people would be surprised, but if Jordan insisted that Karl Malone was his peer, a few non-peer people who had previously disrespected Karl Malone would then re-evaluate the career of Karl Malone.
Further, if you price cap a CEO companies will just make a new position. If you price cap all employees, companies will just make multiple companies and have the leader work multiple jobs. People love to complain about loopholes, but it's feel good legislation ideas like this that empower the people willing to manipulate the system in the first place. If your legislation allows the manipulators to make the most money, you're effectively saying that's what you value the most in society.
A 4 star general in the US Army makes something like $300k a year in total compensation. From a value of labor perspective, it’s hard to fathom that the Carnival Cruise Lines CEO is worth $12M annually on the basis of ability. Clearly a premium is being paid for something.
Since society worships at the altar of shareholder value, public companies should be required to release data justifying how compensation maximizes shareholder value.
For a cruise line, it obvious how paying some filipino able seaman poverty wages advances shareholder interest. And obviously the CFO likes the idea of having line workers from third world countries with limited rights whenever possible. But it’s unclear what the value of the $12M CEO is. What is the expected performance of a $1M CEO?
The Royal Navy used to have adverts that said that as a the Captain of a UK Trident sub you could make £100K a year (mind you this was a few years ago) - my genuine reaction was "I don't think that's enough".
NB UK nuclear weapons don't have permissive-action locks - they don't need any code from HQ to be able to launch or for the warheads to work. They are completely under the control of their crews so being the captain of one of these subs is quite a responsibility.
Even if we set aside the question of whether or not this is a desirable outcome, I can think of exactly one instance where it has happened. Based upon your reference to the guillotine, I assume you're thinking of the same one.
I would also note that even the French Revolution didn't exactly turn out as the instigators had wished. Instead of egalitarianism, they got "la Terreur" and decades of violence.
The thing that has put us off the last few cruises is realizing how workers on the ships are treated. Twenty years ago, it seemed to us that we would see off duty room stewards and other crew going ashore with their friends, and getting some down time. I know this is subjective, but over time, it seems like giving workers much needed down time stopped happening.
Then fast forward to the present time, my wife and I just don’t want to take a chance getting on a ship because the current new corona virus is so much worse than the Nora virus, which used to be what you worried about on ships.
The very real bummer though is this: there are many hundreds of small ports around the world where people rely on extra income from ships disgorging passengers who spend money. A young engineer in Yalta Ukraine told me that he augmented his income as a scientist from tourist related activities, and it was important income for him.
Yes, the cruise industry should go away, but there will be collateral damage.