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Comment by icegreentea2 | Hacker News Reader

Cruises hit a spot of:

* All the fun and "not thinking" of an all-inclusive resort (though obviously only if you pay for the drink packages) on land

* Generally cheaper than all inclusive resorts on mainland USA (I'm not as familiar with Europe)

* Competitive on pricing with all inclusive resorts in the Caribbean/Mexico

* Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico

* Get to skip out out of the overt semi-colonial feel of like... a Caribbean/Mexican all inclusive resort. If nothing else, while the crew (ie the people running the ship) are almost certainly going to be mostly south/south-east asian, the staff (ie the people actually supposed to interact with the passengers) are going to be sufficiently multi-culturally mixed to help make all those thoughts fade away...

And let's be real about most Caribbean/Mexican all-inclusive resorts... they aren't always the cleanest, and most people don't leave them except on tightly planned excursions anyways.

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The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work.

Peers had a habit of calling me for non-critical, non-production problems. The worst was Mardi Gras, where I'm on Bourbon Street for Fat Tuesday, and my operations head calls me with an analyst on the line and burns fifteen minutes with a problem that turned out to be development coding.

My phone did occasionally explode with voicemails and texts when I got back to port.

Some of my peers have been forced to take a corporate credit card to pay for internet access on their ship.

Why not just not answer your phone while on vacation?

Presumably because of pressure from superiors. If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy. If you're simply unable to receive communications, that's just the way it is. It shouldn't be like that, but it is.

> If they know you're in cell range and ignoring them, they'll be pissy.

Frankly, I'd be "pissy" if my superiors tried calling me when I'm on holiday and I would have no qualms informing them of that fact.

But then I'm not American.

This is not an "American" thing. I'm American, and I would never, ever, ever in any known universe within the multiverse, bring my work phone with me on a vacation, let alone answer it or do work stuff. And, I would never give anyone at work my personal phone number. Strict separation of work and personal, and never the twain shall meet. We should not accept jobs that keep you on the leash even during your vacation and after working hours, unless on-call is agreed-to part of your official duties.

I mean, vacation is vacation. I've also agreed to do interviews and such if I'm on vacation and it's convenient. I may also have glanced at email from time to time and sent a quick response to something with the proviso that I'm on vacation.

Not intending this to be snarky, but do you not have friends you meet at work? Is it a case of your friends knowing not to call your for work reasons?

A few from past jobs, and they're welcome to call if they want to do personal/social stuff together, but they are not welcome to call because the build is broken or they need me to do a database roll back because production is down.

The implication that it's typical for one's friends to call them on vacation for work reasons is bonkers to me. What kind of friends are those?

It was a question related to the GP saying they never handed their personal phone number out to people they worked with, which seemed rather limiting to me.

> But then I'm not American.

Europeans being smug about how much better their society is than Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.

Btw, I’m American and I would simply not answer if my work tried to contact me while on vacation. Conversely, I know multiple Europeans with terribly unhealthy work/life balance who work constantly while on vacation.

> Americans’ is such an annoying cliche at this point. We get it, Europe is a paradise.

I get it, for Americans this is an unusual experience but the rest of the planet putting up with American Chiche’s about us is Tuesday

I am the smug American which reminds all the euros that they make 1/3rd of what an American does while simultaneously working harder than the average rest and vest engineer at a tech retirement home like Microsoft.

Everyone I think about how bad American WLB is, I take a look at the supposed utopias of Europe and find that they’re whole nations of crabs in a bucket.

> I am the smug American which reminds all the euros that they make 1/3rd of what an American does

Including healthcare and public facilities? Or does this only apply to tech workers?

PP is bragging that USA 2%ers do better financially than the European 2%ers, as long as their kids don't get murdered at school, because they can watch their investment portfolio grow while playing video games at the office all summer instead of going on vacation.

Yeah above a certain income threshold, healthcare is actually rather cheap here. Like ~$700/month total cost for the employer and mostly $0 for employees. For excellent care. Annually that’s 4.2% of a 200k salary. That’s significantly less than what you would pay in your social contributions in Europe. but of course it sucks for people who don’t make good money, which is the whole point of complaints.

In one of the Carlos Goshen documentaries, in his time at Renault he required so much overtime that one salaried employee threw himself off a balcony at the Renault technical center in France.

I guess that Renault employees are American, even if they are French.

I think this is described in Apple's documentary, not the one from Netflix.

There are plenty of jobs where it’s not like that.

Of course it depends on the job, so this isn’t 100% guaranteed to be the case, but I find people who think they always have to be online are often just imagining that they have to because of anxiety, and if they just didn’t respond, nothing bad would happen to them.

I sort of agree. Like who is so important that their peer or superior can't handle issues if they're out? How do leaders see their business surviving if the person they're calling gets hit by a bus?

But at the same time, it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default.

I'm Germany HR should be punishing managers for doing that, as a single call is basically directly an entire day of new vacation time, plus punitive damages for disturbing the employee. Of course employees who can't afford to bankroll the lawsuit tend to get shafted.

> it does seem that most tech jobs expect you to be available after hours for calls and extend that to vacation by default

Not any tech job I’ve ever had, except very occasionally after hours if unavoidable due to working with people in Asia, and planned well in advance. Never during vacation, that would be crazy.

But there have probably been people on my same teams who thought it was expected, due to them being workaholics or just bad at sticking to boundaries.

You have a separate team for on-call? Never need to do off-hours elevations? That sounds wild.

Obviously on-call is an exception. That would fall under “rare and planned in advance”.

Except for my very first job when I was running shipyard jobs, no one has ever expected that they'd be able to reach me off-hours though they may have left messages of various types.

Back in the day, I took some month-long vacations to places like Nepal that were really off the grid at the time. Some people I knew were incredulous that I did so. My actual managers didn't care because I did my best to pick "good" times to do so and did my best to inform people and make arrangements. It was never a problem.

I do think, over time, being more or less continuously in-touch became more normed.

Just tell them you’ll be out of range?

So tell them you're on a cruise, then just turn the phone off..

How does someone know you are in cell range?

Why do you care what that wage thief thinks?

"Bring work to your whole self."

Because I was enjoying myself on Bourbon Street.

That is time that I paid for that they took from me. I will never get it back.

You should reread the comment you replied to.

Airplane mode exists, as much as people don't pay attention to the security briefings anymore

Someday, I hope the FAA will catch on that it's a safety issue that the incessant droning on about shit-tier credit card programs is training people to ignore cabin crew announcements.

Separate your work and personal phone? It seems not the healthiest of companies to work for. If you can’t set boundaries, might need help by using. A second phone

My colleagues and I put the work line on an eSIM so we can turn the work “phone” off completely with a toggle in the Settings app.

(If anyone from Apple is reading this, would be great to be able to schedule DND on a eSIM line.)

Should be able to do that through shortcuts and automation?

Here someone disables it entirely, but should be able to do something less intense than that too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/comments/16hoo4h/automati...

Or is the issue that there is no way to set DND on a particular SIM on the front end?

That certainly sounds like an express lane to burnout.

Please take care of yourself, and consider the implications of peers who think it's OK to call you at these times. There are a lot of ways to say "no" without saying it.

I am within three years of retirement, so the problem will soon solve itself.

As we age, we start to think about legacy.

Yours could include teaching your company to respect vacation time.

This is a fading benefit. The ship I took this summer had free Starlink connections powering their WiFi. It wasn’t great for calls and they blocked video, but texting was possible. (You had to be careful though because they also exploitatively ran a mobile cellular microcell that charged insane data roaming fees, which meant you had to be very careful about when you turned on roaming.)

Never tried doing a Zoom call, but the trans-Atlantic crossing I did in the the spring, I didn't pay for video streaming but Starlink at $20/day was pretty good for Internet generally. Was tempted to unplug but I didn't. Kept my phone on airplane mode the whole time.

We used to run an exploitative cruise ship terminal internet cafe where people would pay dollars for access to minutes of like, yahoo and msn messengers so really nothings changed.

"The big draw for me was that my phone wouldn't work."

There isn't really a shortage of other options with that feature (though it's shrinking); granted they mostly don't have people waiting on you.

Personally I'm a fan of "I'm on vacation, my phone is at home" though I understand that doesn't work for everyone. If there is an actual emergency, there are people who know how/where to reach me.

Tell me you live in the US without telling me you live in the US...

My sister in law brings her work phone everywhere and then finds the spot in the house with no signal and just leaves it there for hours on end. I can see it.

Show her the Airplane Mode button?

No mention yet of "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again?" by David Foster Wallace?

Okay, so this. Read it if you haven't. Probably the best essay on a generally "unheavy" topic I've ever read, and so iconic that "Cruise Essay" is dang near becoming its own genre, e.g. Gary Shteyngart's "A Meatball At Sea."

Behold, I have found the source! Original title was “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” but then it was given a new title when it was included in the short story collection “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”

https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazi...

> all-inclusive resorts...

And these have zero appeal to me as well.

As someone who road trips all across the U.S. with the wife, the highlights have of course been the serendipitous ones.

There’s a different kind of serendipity that comes with Cruise vacations as opposed to road tripping, but it’s still very much there. Furthermore, I can’t really have a road trip experience with 16 people in my travel group; If we want to be together, we’ll be stuck, packed into a van. I can have a great cruise experience with a group that size on a cruise or at a resort.

I say this is someone who had taken multiple motorcycle trips across the US. Coast to coast on one of them and another down Baja.

"I can’t really have a road trip experience with 16 people in my travel group"

Convoys work for this. Perhaps even more fun if they're fun cars with a lower car to passenger ratio.

Convoys have become shit shows more often than not in my experience, but point taken. So many ways to skin the vacation-cat.

Yeah, depends on the people and the quality of the vehicles. Motorcycle trips tend to work well as convoys.

Riding a motorcycle is not a substitute for sitting at a pool or restaurant. It's different.

We're talking about road trips. What are you talking about?

Serendipity on cruises, eh?

The axiom of cruises is: You will never see these people again.

Do people go cruising to make long term friends?

I have plenty of long term friends, but I have never done any activity with the explicit goal of gainng them.

That being said I have made long term friends on cruises.

Love to do the motorcycle road trip some day.

But I don't even have 16 friends so that will never be a problem. As the kids left the nest it has become just thew wife and I. We're a duprass.

That's the beautiful thing, different people enjoy different things, and on vacation, people get to pick and do the thing they enjoy, rather than the thing someone else enjoys.

Except with cruise ships, morally righteous people are declaring this specific thing wrong and trying to keep people from being allowed to do this.

The Guardian claims that "At full power the Harmony of the Seas’ two 16-cylinder engines would each burn 1,377 US gallons an hour" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/21/the-worl..., which would be 5.2 cubic meters per hour, or 125 cubic meters per day, so something between 100 and 125 tons. Other sources I've seen claim "up to 250 tons" (https://www.colorado.edu/mechanical/2016/07/25/how-much-fuel...). A ton of diesel-like fuel produces around 2.6 tons of CO2 (the O2 comes from the air).

So let's say 750 tons. Split across 5000 passengers, a 7-day cruise would be 750 / 5000 * 7 = roughly one ton of CO2 per passenger per cruise.

Myclimate estimates the total footprint of a 7-day cruise, standard double cabin on a >4000 passenger ship, one day in port, as 2.1 t (this presumably also covers food etc. so it's not surprising that it's higher). They also estimate just the flight (one passenger, round trip, economy class) of a trip from New York to Maui as 3 tons.

Most of the people getting on the cruise are also taking round trip flights to and from the port, so tack that on top of the flights.

You are cherry-picking only one of the environmental issues that cruise ships cause. Even that aside, you are also ignoring a large part of the discussion in the first article you cite, which focuses on all of the other, acute, air pollution cruise travel causes in the port cities. Focusing on CO2 is a strawman.

I focused on CO2 because it's often cited and one of the more comparable metrics, and I used those articles only as sources for my estimates. Between the date of the article and today, significant new regulation for maritime fuels came out.

But the kind of environmentalists I am talking about aren't suggesting to regulate cruise ship emissions, they demand banning cruise ships, because they're a visible symbol of loosely-defined luxury/"excess", and thus any impact is seen as unjustifiable.

Without 'moral righteousness' we have a degenerate society

>we have a degenerate society

I knew there had to be some reason . . .

> Get to skip out on flight to the Caribbean/Mexico

This is a strange comment, as most people still have to fly to a port city. So maybe that flight is shorter and a domestic flight, but it's still requires a flight.

There are many Americans who are terrified of flying into a foreign city. With a cruise out of Miami, they never have to step on foreign soil.

It can provide many benefits beyond people who are terrified. All sorts of barriers and annoyances can be avoided, such as managing passports, bringing medications, language barriers, differences in legal rights, dealing with customs, etc. This is even more impactful if you're traveling with kids or the elderly.

You still need a passport for most cruises. All the big cruises are non-US flagged with non-US crews and make a stop, if briefly, in a non-US port.

When you finish your journey, you have to go through customs and show your passport. And your passport will usually be checked before you embark as well.

Yes,for most cruises. There are some domestic ones.

US Customs and Border only require a birth certificate and government issued id for US citizens re-entering the US on closed-loop cruises. A closed-loop cruise is defined as a cruise leaving and returning from the same port in the US. This is the vast majority of cruises from the US.

Also many western hemisphere countries including almost all of those in the Carribean have agreements in place which allow US citizens arriving and departing via a cruise ship to need only a birth certificate and government id.

Traveling with a passport is best practice, you for instance are in trouble if miss your ship for some reason, but is not required for the vast majority of cruises from the US.

This is incorrect. Most cruises from the US are closed loop cruises meaning they depart and arrive back at the same port. CBP only requires a birth certificate and government issued id in these circumstances. In addition almost all countries in the western hemisphere which US originating cruises regularly visit allow US citizens arriving and departing via the cruise ship to enter with only a birth certificate and goverment id. In the Carribean the only exception which comes to mind immediately is Martinique. They used to not require a passport but changed this requirement during covid and have not gone back. Although US originating cruises do visit Martinique, I did so on a cruise in February, it is not a common destination.

Every cruise I've been on (US Citizen) required a passport. There are customs getting on the boat and off at the home port.

I have never been on a cruise from the US which required clearing customs individually at a port in the western hemisphere. The ships are usually cleared as a whole by customs upon arrival and most countries that cruise ships visit in the western hemisphere have agreements in place only requiring birth certificates and a government id for US citizens arriving and departing via the ship. Re-entering the US does require clearing customs but for closed-loop cruises from the US, the vast majority of cruises from the US, you can do so using a broth certificate and goverment issued id.

International flights are uncomfortable in several different ways.

In a cruise you can always just go back to the ship, and avoid any random issue.

I would guess that over half of all Americans are within driving distance to a cruise terminal, and that this group is overrepresented in the cruise company clientele.

You're missing an important intersection: you can get on a closed-loop cruise from the US without a passport and with a criminal record.

Cruises fill the "cheap Caribbean getaway" segment for the sizable American population where getting a passport or not having a criminal history would otherwise be a blocker.

Arguably it's also a motivator in why Cruises have the reputation they do, but that's beside the point.

Except, everyone is flying to Miami instead which isn't cheap. Also, until only recently, drinking was ala carte which was a massive, not included, expense.

Porting in most Caribbean islands is a depressing experience as well - you get to see the predatory cruise influence on shops right at the port and are also bombarded with locals trying to exploit you (no offense to them, they're trying to make a living).

If you never leave the ship, it's as you describe it - the all-inclusive vacation without any work, but leaving the boat is by far the worst part and almost negates any perceived benefit imo.

Again, no offense to the locals and I'm sure if they had to choose between no tourism and tourism to help the economy, they'd choose tourism but it's a very strange and usually sad synergy between the cruise industry and the participating islands.

While some of that rings true, I'd say it was still worth it to get off the boat and enjoy the islands. They are beautiful places with their own rich culture and history, despite the over tourism.

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