Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, but Kept the Party Going
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
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.
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.
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 industry should create a mark that represents and enforces a minimum of worker treatment, but doesn't appear to be as imaginative as Starbucks.
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'.
Wikipedia has a lot of detail and background. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law
> 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.
Have a look at https://web.archive.org/web/20130317073119/http://eh.net/enc... as well.
"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:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=gresham%27s+la...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
It's a military style mandatory entertainment camp with a lot of retail, and very little space.
They are incredibly deceptive and exist solely to extract money from you (I'm talking about Carnival here)
"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.
And neither do they. Their offer of employment is valid for rich people too.
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.
Are you suggesting there is a causative relationship between flying and having a dispersed family?
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just buy as many carbon offsets or similar as necessary for your existence to come out net positive.
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.
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.)
This is one example of something you can’t offset.
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.
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.
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.)
You can do some finance to calculate the present value of the income stream needed to offset the expected impact of all your progeny forever.
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]).
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/dec/20/cruises.green
This Inc. article describes some of my early results: https://www.inc.com/joshua-spodek/365-days-without-flying.ht...
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?
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.
Check this story from CNN on Feb 13th titled "Why it's still OK to take a cruise amid the coronavirus outbreak"
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/cruise-safety-coronavirus...
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.
1) The WHO is/was too cozy with China
2) The WHO is/was against facemasks
but
3) China and other Asian countries set an example of using facemasks which Westerners should do too.
These aren't exactly necessarily precisely contradictory things, but put them together and they make the anti-WHO narrative feel wrong and forced.
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.
Per contemporaneous linkers, it was a video titled "How to protect yourself while travelling(22:44)"
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
>the "allow people to sue China" agenda.
Maybe that is a very legitimate agenda.
https://www.news18.com/news/world/in-german-town-of-gangelt-...
Having read that titular essay, I have no desire to ever go on a cruise.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...
Criminal charges are a necessary stopgap against market failures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_on_D...
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.
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.
They are ecologically damaging dumping their waste in the oceans and at mooring points, their anchorages causing incredible seabed degradation.
The companies that own and run them register in tax havens and avoid responsibility for the safety of staff, passengers or the communities they use.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
Absolutely.
>Delivery people? The barista at the Starbucks nearby?
No.
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...
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.
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.
So Burger Corp makes and sells burgers so cashiers and cooks are included, but the people you hire to paint stripes in your parking lot are not.
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).
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).
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.
As an aside, every mentor I've ever had that has started a tech consulting firm has advised me against starting one.
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.
Also the FAANGM companies also use a lot of low paid contractors.
Is that really a point worth making?
Was 10x not 100x.
I’m sure they wouldn’t be able to remain profitable if they had to raise labor costs by more than 10x.
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.
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?
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.
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.