Life and death on a superyacht
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I am dumbfounded how the normal people can just celebrate it, and dream that they too can one day become one of these billionaires.
And yes, while it is true, that some people can truly rise from rags to riches, or create a computer program that can take over the world. For the majority of us, the odds are not in our favor. You can work hard, or work smart all your life, but you will never become rich.
It takes money to make money. There is no truer maxim than that.
These people live the life of luxury and pleasure, while the rest of us can barely make ends meet. And I'm not talking about the programmers, but rather, the other people that aren't blessed to have well paying jobs.
Sometimes, I think that there should be a legal limit on the amount of wealth that someone can accrue.
But even this doesn't solve the problems that our society is facing. It doesn't solve the homelessness. It doesn't solve the expensive housing crisis. Or the student loan crisis.
Meanwhile, for the rich, life is great. Technology is abundant. Money just makes more money. Opportunities are plenty, if you have the right connections.
Anyways.. back to the grindstone. When I become a billionaire, I'm going to buy myself a super yacht too.
Too often than not that's the form of wealth equality we see. So we need to keep low wealth equality while give enough incentives to people to raise the total wealth of the society, and that is a much harder problem to solve .
Billionaire level wealth aside, amassing a few million over the course of a lifetime isn’t as difficult as people think, it just requires discipline.
Live well within your means and invest your saved money in assets consistently, compounding and time will do the rest.
Most rich people get there slowly, and don’t appear to live a rich person’s lifestyle. Conversely, a lot of people who appear rich have little accumulated wealth.
If you’d like to know more, Have a read of “The millionaire next door” and “I will teach you to be rich”. They changed my outlook on what being wealthy meant, and I’m now putting thousands onto my net worth every month in a automated way.
Lucky you. A lot of people I know don't even make thousands per month. They make less than $2,000 after taxes. With this, accumulating millions isn't possible, not even slowly. And even these people are way better off than other's who barely make $1,000 or even less.
Of course there are big problems with saving 10% of so little, and your retirement account could be even more at risk in a financial emergency, but in principle retirement works up and down the income ladder.
[0] https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/pubeducation/c...
This is basically impossible for reasons explained here:
https://voxeu.org/article/suprasecular-stagnation
I'm old enough to recall the boom of the 1990s. Me and my professional friends were constantly invited to come to seminars about investing. All the mutual funds were trying to convince us to invest in the stock market. At that time, the stock market was booming, so it was easy to believe that investing in the stock market was a legitimate way to become wealthy.
All of the pitches recited the same set of numbers: we could invest in low risk mutual funds and get 12% returns, or we could invest in high risk mutual funds and get 16% returns. It was explained that when we were young we should prefer high risk strategies, and as we got older we should prefer lower risk strategies.
Then the crash of 2001 happened. Nasdaq took 10 years to come back to life. The stock market was flat for many, many years.
Around 2003 we started getting invitations to seminars that taught us how important it was to invest in real estate. We were told that the value of homes had never gone down, in all of USA history. It was the safest investment, and had significant returns.
Then the crash of 2008 happened. My friends who had bought homes were underwater. Even as recently as 2015, I still had friends who owed more on their homes than the homes were worth.
These notions that it is easy to get stable long term returns has not been born out by my experience, or the experience of any of my professional peers.
Our actual experience was very well described by the Bible:
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."
The money you do invest can generate a return, which when re-invested compounds. Yes, this happens very slowly at first, but over the course of many years gets you towards your thousands per month.
I don’t have thousands left from my 9-5 job every month, but my assets (accumulated over years) work for me, and I just add what I can to that money making machine.
The difference between the top 1% and top 0.1% is in itself absurdly large.
Your Existence or presence alone creates money making opportunities, and in some cases you are effectively beyond the law.
Talking about millionaires is like talking about your friends who are rich lawyers in the same breath as Bill Gates.
It’s the difference between the moon and Saturn.
If you save up like a squirrel, you don't get the benefits of being wealthy, even if you are. And how rich are you really if a bit of consumption would significantly reduce your future consumption capacity?
I would argue you're not really rich if you can't just spunk money on whatever you feel like. And no, changing your desires to desire less might be just as satisfying (in fact I try to do that too), but it's not being rich, in the sense people ordinarily mean.
[0] http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q1/money-only-b...
Do you think if everyone in the US just made different choices everyone would be millionaires in a generation? No? Then your advice doesn't work.
Without a massive increase in productivity, the only way someone can be a millionaire is if other people are poor.
And a lot of luck.
[edit: spelling]
On the other hand after about a day or so and the novelty wears off it starts to seem a little "creepy" in a Stepford Wives/Get Out/etc kind of way... On a couple of occasions I was so uncomfortable I literally pulled someone aside and said "Come on, level with me dude. This isn't real. You don't really talk like this." In most cases they would respond with something along the lines of "Sir, I'm sorry but I don't know what you're referring to". It never quite rang as genuine but I couldn't help but wonder if the staff is trained or programmed.
I know some people/families/etc who have never experienced lodging, accommodation, service, etc at any lesser level and it made me really wonder how aware they are of the bubble they're in (and how strange it really is).
Probably the closest comparison I can make are the well-known rules for Disney employees. Every employee on Disney property is essentially in costume and portraying a character, whether they're in a physical costume or not - to the point where every employee is referred to as a "cast member".
These brands have their systems, procedure, and process down to the point where virtually no personality or individualism is expressed by individual staff. Excellent for service and experience, but as referenced in my original comment, it can kind of cross over into "uncanny valley" territory and get unsettling.
It also wasn't uncommon for people in low-ranking jobs to be asked if they'd like to swap places with their clients and practically fall over themselves to say no. As one of the cleaners at a world-class London hotel said, she doesn't earn as much in a year as her current guest earns in an hour, and the bed does look comfy, but at least when her work is done for the day she won't need to be surrounded by security guards before she can even leave the building.
In WestWorld the androids say "That doesn't look like anything to me." Art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art.
My grandfather had a nanny/servant, who had to do whatever the spoiled brat asked for. The result was a person, who automatically assumes that all other beeings have not meaning or intent and are in dire need of beeing pupeteered.
Its the sort of disgusting human beeing you regularly find to be CEO. Its one of the reasons they are also so fascinated with art- because art can not be created by pupeteering- as they are usually quite unimaginative.
This varies widely around the world. I lived with an international student who was definitely from an upper middle class family but not a billionaire by any means; the family had several household staff, and that was just a normal luxury in the way that an American family might have a dishwasher.
What the f are you talking about
We’re completely creeped out by the toilet assistants that no one bats an eye at.... And you’re the country where some states won’t let you pump your own gas
Steve jobs and David foster Wallace is seen as outsiders, to claim they represent the attitude of Americans is absurd
I miss German, "fuck you, give me your order", wait service.
Presumably that would not have been as true on the family yacht.
In contrast as a teenager I worked the register at a convenience store in NYC for less than minimum wage selling cigarettes and lottery tickets to the poorest people in the city. At the time "convenience store clerk" was the most deadly job in the US and I really thought I wouldn't live to be an adult. There was also an 11 year old boy who was employed at that store for 25% of minimum wage (not a typo). The boy worked from 5AM to 7PM on Saturdays and was kept in the basement where he used a razor blade to prep magazines and newspapers that didn't sell.
If you had given any of us a chance to work on a yacht, cross the Atlantic, and leave with a few $Ks in savings, we would have taken it even if the survival rate was 50%. And especially if people would still be writing about our deaths years later. Even now, I doubt the death of a convenience store clerk would make the local news.
When your employer is a holding company in Cayman Islands, operating a ship flying a flag of convenience from some random country, located in yet another random country, expectations are limited... who would an accident be reported to?
But why would you assume they are especially unfavorable? People crew all kinds of boats, big and small. Many do it for fun, on their own boats, in places where law enforcement is barely present.
"People sometimes get hurt on boats", sure. This fact doesn't stir much outrage.
The author says things that sound factual ("Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace") based on zero evidence ("with union leaders believing working on superyachts to be more dangerous than life on oil rigs").
Note that believing in something doesn't make it so and it's journalist's job to verify data behind believes when they use them to make strong claims like "Accidents, injuries and deaths are also commonplace".
Sadly, Guardian failed to do so, opting for lazy quoting that gives air of legitimacy to unsubstantiated "believes".
It's not like it would be hard for the author to do the math.
According to https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work... oil rigs are not even in top 25 most dangerous jobs.
The article claims there are 37 thousand jobs on yachts.
25th most dangerous job ("heating, air conditioning and refrigeration mechanics and installers") had 8.4 fatalities per 100k workers per year.
That's 3.1 fatalities per 37k workers per year.
The article found 3 deaths per 18 years, which is 0.17 fatalities per year.
That's 16x less deaths than in 25th most dangerous job and 288x less than the most dangerous job.
I'm sure they don't know about all the deaths and we can argue about not all jobs on the yacht being equally dangerous but the safety margin in those calculations is pretty big.
The data doesn't support the claim that those are particularly dangerous jobs.
The oil rig death statistics are also difficult to interpret. In the UK, for example, there was one offshore oil death last year (per the HSE). Because it's a small industry, there's massive year-to-year variation in per-hundred-thousand rates. The Piper Alpha disaster in the late 80s had 167 deaths, which overwhelms those years where little goes wrong - but only if you look at the statistics over a longer period than 1 year.
The article specifically mentions how the yachts move from port to port, have their ownership hidden, and constantly change flags, to avoid taxes and to avoid giving the legal protections their workers would have if they were employed on land. Where even the death of a crew member is shrugged off.
This is article is about callousness.
It’s a stretch to blame that on the owner of the boat. He could have been drunk and climbed scaffolding to get back into his apartment.
I don't see, however, how's boat owners are responsible for this except hiring slightly wrong people to manage and command their expensive property.
I guess I would have to ask that magic yacht designer to design one that had double the normal crew quarters so that they didn't have to work doubles.
Your employees and you are the team. You hunt together, you win together, you celebrate together. You may know the name of a waiter, but you don't have the same relationship with them, right?
I equate more to the nanny we have now -- she's only here about 15 hours a week, but we chat all the time, I know all about her family, and I've seen her engagement video.
Also, you should know your chef’s name after a couple of months at sea. That seems like basic humanity.
If I was their employer I would.
Are they trying to spin it as something negative? Why the hell would you intrude into a private and family matter of a person you most likely have talked to only a couple of times in your entire life.
This was 20+ years ago so a little more cutting edge than same would be today.
we have had the International safety mangment code for decades.
They havent, these yachts need to be seen crewed and vetted the same level as commercial shipping.
The real problem, unlike commercial shipping yachts dont really have a reason to exist and attract a certain type of person.
Most of the accidents described would have been prevented if commercial code was in place and adhered to.
Maritime labour convention for rest hours??
Not to put to blunt a point on it, the owners pay alot not to care. Theres not a bottom line.