More than 1k Dutch residents plan to throw rotten eggs at Jeff Bezos' superyacht
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
If it flies, floats or <censored>, rent it.
Koop een boot, werk je dood.
translates loosely to :
Buy a boat and work on it will be a deathmarch.
Except in Duch, it rhymes.
(incidentally work/werk have cognates in German and Scandinavian languages too, but only as nouns (Werk, virke, verk etc.), hence the shift to "arbeid" in the Norwegian version; and "buy"->kjøp or e.g. German kaufen is extra odd, with English having retained a Germanic form while the others inherited a latin loan-word; yes I know this is a total digression...)
> Best yacht is your friend's yacht.
One was racing and had many 1st place finishes too. Both sold out all floating assets.
Most likely you tell your PA to organise it.
But otherwise there seem to be a few companies making large custom yachts - you can see them in some seaside towns. The most obnoxious "we'll build anything for cash" I've seen was Sunseeker in Poole, UK (see https://maps.app.goo.gl/TCcRnqkCFKWLY6WF8) - they have a large number of multi-deck absurdly big boats on display all the time.
> than some inconvenient boat on the water
The inconvenient yacht designed to your desires and containing any equipment you want, that you hire the crew and a good chef for and just say where you want to get on / off? Yeah can't imagine enjoying that either ;)
A friend used to be an electrician for a company building such yachts. Good money!
Ah, you’ve just never visited Costa Smeralda :)
One of the most beautiful places on earth, but the hotels are terrible and will still charge you over 10k euros a night. The only way to enjoy good quality accommodation and service is to go on a yacht.
(Also a wonderful place to visit with a tent or perhaps a small sailboat, just stay away from the hotels and most local restaurants unless you want to pay 300 euros for a pizza)
The big problem I had with Costa Smeralda was that despite the outrageous price tags, I was staying in a marriott room that would’ve gone for 200€ anywhere else. Eating a 300€ pizza that would cost £15 in central London.
It wasn’t like Courchevel, which carries similar price tags but also feels truly special.
From what I understood the Costa Smeralda properties only survive because of very old money folks whose parents were going there every year since before WW2. Besides me the youngest customers were in their 60s, there won’t be any left once they die off.
Perhaps the rumored Aman property will change this? I don’t know.
At least the yacht guarantees that the experience will be exactly what you wanted, even if you pay through the nose for it. It’s a portable ultra-luxury hotel you bring with you.
You can literally buy lightly used smaller cruise ships substantially cheaper than most super yachts - the cost is in customized expensive interior and in operating the thing with a large crew, not in the "bare" ship structure per se.
They're attractive to some exactly because the barrier to having one is far higher than for a luxury penthouse, to the point that the biggest ones are known by name and recognisable wherever they go because there are so few of them.
So basically think having your posh penthouse, but moving it around the world.
>See, the power of owning a magnificent yacht like that is in how you’re telling the world that you’re beyond buying and selling. You have more money than there is money to have. You’ve transcended. There are no frontiers left for you on dry land
It does make for a nicer headline though. Also, probably only 7 people will actually show up.
Bridges like this can be "easily" dismantled. (If it's the same build/material/architecture as the in Alphen aan den Rijn.
Then along comes Mr. Rich Man with his exorbitant needs and suddenly these promises have all become worthless. It's a matter of principle; people are fed up that the rules never seem to apply to the super rich and everything and everyone has to make way for their demands.
This is about 'de Hef'. Nearby though.
Would you rather he bought the boat from a company in another country? Remember, buying luxury yacths is not the same as taking precious resources out of a country, and he doesn't decide the salaries of the ship builders.
Also, I find it rather suspicious that none of these articles are actually discussing the technical implementation and potential issues facing that. What real risk does opening the bridge present?
We all live in bubbles, there are always things that seem huge on social media that nobody walking down the street cares about.
In the end Dutch people tend to be pragmatic and I suspect it will be dismantled again, but we will see. At the same time, there is a strong sense of societal fairness and that being rich shouldn’t be able to buy you exceptions. In the meantime it is a real discussion that is happening, not anti-billionaire propaganda that no actual citizens care about.
For what it’s worth, it didn’t go off the previous time without a hitch, it ended up being covered with scaffolding for over a year I believe. That was where the promise to never do it again originally came from.
My guess, informed by nothing other than my own cynicism, is that the Rotterdam city council will use the manufactured outrage to extract more money from Bezos to dismantle that bridge.
Also throwing eggs at the boat just makes work for some poor souls who will have to clean it. The boat is designed to withstand the ocean, it can get wet and be washed.
This whole thing is so silly, I'm compelled yet embarrassed to comment.
How about not wasting obscene amountd of limited earth resources on just one man?
> Something went wrong.
> (404 page not found)
There seems to be quite a few people talking about the article, but I'm seeing nothing?
Here's a link that works: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-superyacht-dutch-...
An obvious solution would be to built it without the masts, move it somewhere closer to the sea and add the masts at the end. This seems far more sensible than removing a bridge.
It’s obviously not impossible to transport the boat to the sea.
> This seems far more sensible than removing a bridge.
Opening up the bridge is trivial, just look at it.
There’s little chance they won’t open it up, as that’d just screw the local industry by placing a permanent limit on what they can build inland of the bridge.
Instead they will most likely find a reasonable solution to safely and quickly dismantle the bridge and put it back together. This isn’t a hard problem to solve, and a lot of money is at stake.
Procedures to get these ships out include dismantling structures (as seen above), deepening the river by digging up soil, and backing up the river. The last two procedures have severe impact on wildlife and sometimes farmers whose fields and pastures get flooded.
Compare your life relatively to his. PERCENTAGE RATIO wise, you probably did as much bad as he has. Assume you did 10% really bad things in your life. And Jeff did also 10% bad things.
But the other 90% wow!!! (And your life too!!!)
Millions of jobs overall. Thousands of jobs directly and indirectly to build, furnish, secure and staff that yacht. Countless kids of those families. The ability for you to order anything and have it delivered to almost any part of the world in a few days.
Families taken out of poverty. Jobs for those who don't have them. Amazon AWS that touches the internet for almost everyone worldwide.
Those Dutch citizens should swallow those rotten eggs.
(Loved and visit The Netherlands, don't get it twisted).
Whatever, I'll definitely lose karma for this one. Don't care.
I don't.
Anyone can screw others at a massive scale, luckily people mostly don’t.
I mean, if the whole arsenal is parking a car and causing a traffic jam, it ain't much.
And how many of these did he steal out of people's previous places of employment ? E.g. small retail shops, book stores, etc.
Also there is quite a stark difference between employment and meaningful employment. I wouldn't consider being a tiny part of someone's megalomanic daydream a fulfilling place to be.
Lets be realistic, it's super unlikely that the shipyard would've ever brought this up with Bezos directly.
We should all be making omelettes on the seat of luxury.
Feel, at least, a little humanity.
Use google translate if you don't speak spanish
Google for all it flows were the first with amazingly good search, first very good web based email and first very good maps with turn by turn navigation. It saved me and all of Europe so much time and money I don't think the whole of EU budget with all of the programs would ever come close to it.
Those companies offer tremendous value for hundreds of millions of people in Europe every day. Honestly I would rather have the whole German economy with their polluting cheating cars and idiotic EU programs that got snatched by grant seeking industries at the cost of bigger taxes for real business go bust than Google or Amazon.
I am still waiting for an EU company to come up with anything remotely as useful.
We Europians love to brag about superior values and about culture. (Have to ignore how we got there) If we build all those things ourselves (which we didn't) they would be a better fit.
The Chinese have their own eco system with that dictatorial control over content and the slave labor which doesn't line up with our values but they do have their own thing. The US system of tracking and data mining ur mum for purposes of drone strikes also doesn't really tickle our fancy. Platforms that can kill off your business whenever they like in a "sucks to be you" kind of way is not really how we want things to work in Europe. If any stereotype can be had we are more of a "does what it says on the can" kind of people.
Very brave of you!
How does the GP reflect a typical american mentality? How does that differ from a typical European mentality?
How is he wrong?
People are bitching about his yacht and moving the bridge and I’m saying you should be fucking thankful he’s building it in the Netherlands.
When Bezos spends billions in the Netherlands building a new yacht, those are real jobs putting real food on people’s plates.
No doubt they’ll be be happy to hear how the country has “dobe just fine”.
Again, another citizen willing to cost a fellow citizen their job. Very brave of you!
I'm sure you have something more intelligent to say despite being HN's most prolific shoeshine connoisseur.
Not all people are wealth maniacs.
The 2017 government promised to not dismantle it anymore, but 2022 government seems to disagree. The important part we're missing are the risk assessments from engineers involved in the project.
As far as I understand from reading the news, the 2017 promise was mostly given because at that time the local government had left the bridge covered in scaffolding for an excessively long time.
Do you think that because he is a billionaire he must be guilty of tax fraud? Or do you have some actual evidence?
I mean, that's the hope.
That’s a bit ridiculous. Just about everyone does their best to minimize the taxes they pay.
Where would you draw the line? The lawmakers drew one, but apparently you aren’t entirely happy with that.
With mixed results.
For sure everyone does their best to minimise the taxes they pay, but when you are the richest person in the world with some $200 billion, maybe you should be doing silly schemes like charity for tax avoidance.
Heck I tend to minimise my taxes, but often I don't even have such opportunity. The best I can do right now is contribute to my pensions. I'm on a current tax rate of around 50%. Outside that, there's not a lot I can do to minimise the tax I pay. Compare that the rich, who through their lobbying, and their schemes have paid an effective tax rate of around 3% over 5 years.
My statement is ridiculous to the rich, not so much to the rest of the population.
This should have said:
> When you have companies making millions paying less in taxes than the common folk who barely scrape by.
Instead he's buying an obscene super-yacht - which probably has its own regular yacht and a few other ships that come with it - and dismantling a bridge to get it into the water. It is more obscene considering he could likely do all of this stuff without, you know, becoming poor - but it is only the really helpful stuff that isn't getting done.
Local shops sell products multiple times more expensive than Amazon does, so low quality that you have to replace them frequently, limited selection, bad customer service, bad return terms, expensive delivery …
Amazon has been a blessing to customers, and innovated a lot in this space.
I am not sure if I recall this explanation for existence of ultra rich people from PG. Today, a small group of software engineers can build valuable products that scale to millions or billions customers. The return to education and skills is all time high. They become rich, but also make most others better off too. I don’t think we should politicize it, become Luddites, throw eggs, or prefer a lose-lose outcome.
———————-
I see strange comments in this post that don’t make sense. As for the quality of Amazon services, someone comments it’s poor. Fine, it’s an option, you may ignore it. The worth of companies is set by markets, others that apparently find it useful, hence the usage and valuation.
As for taxes, every person or small business I know hires accountants to minimize taxes legally. Tax evasion is illegal, and will be severely punished. There are nation states checking every aspect these big businesses to ensure they operate legally. Modify your tax code if you want (and be prepared for changes in businesses).
I think it’s well known that FAANG’s salaries are amongst highest in the market. These companies are careful, as poor treatment of people will be immediately all over media.
Finally, there is a comment: let’s tax the hell out of successful businesses anyways! Bizarre. Pure jealousy. It will not stop at ultra rich, will eventually engulf everyone and hamper innovation.
How about we dislike those that avoid taxes like the plague, and yet, use all our services to their fullest extent.
How about we dislike those that exploit workers, turned a blind eye, and give a middle finger to most of their workers, and the people?
It's got nothing to do with jealousy, and everything to do with how horrible of a company Amazon is, and how its founder, and until recently its CEO, have let it become a horrible in the name of money.
I don't under people defending the ultra rich. The likelihood of the average joe getting to Bezos' wealth is next to zero. It's ridiculous to defend him despite all the bad he does. Before you say he adds to society by donating money or whatnot (e.g. Bill Gates), you know what works better? A good welfare system for those that need. One that would otherwise be funded partially by the rich's tax money that they love to avoid.
What about those that create wealth? It’s not a zero sum game.
It's not zero sum game because the wealth they create favours the investors. Not the population. The aim of a company is to create wealth for the investors. Not for anyone else.
I'm not sure why it is you're defending the rich in this thread, but your arguments have been overplayed for years.
Business and the economy can function without incredible amounts of wealth concentrated into the hands of a few filthy rich people.
Everyone loves shopping at Amazon, but it annoys them that it makes Jeff Bezos rich.
This is the contention.
I don't see how Bezos adds any value, I legitimately don't.
Back when he was in charge of the company's day-to-day operations, he made a series of decisions that customers really appreciated, even if the employees didn't. These decisions lead Amazon to achieve dominance in many markets around the world.
In our customer-focused economy, rightly or wrongly, this is the definition "adding value". I'm completely on-board with the "work reform" argument that we should incentivise or legislate better conditions for employees (I only employ one person myself, but she is paid very well!), but the idea that good management is worthless and all value comes from labour is laughable.
I don't understand the imperative defense, but I can guarantee you, it sees you as a stone breaker.
That's how sociopaths work.