You can tell capitalism is in its late stages because we build the coolest fucking things of all time while simultaneously having rapid wage gains for the very poor
How can a system survive being awesome as shit while also becoming more egalitarian https://t.co/zFBVbe9nqa
— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) January 16, 2024
I would much rather undergo a(nother) root canal than even the most refined of sea cruises, but c’mon. Ever-bigger cruise ships are built because more people want to take the kind of vacation their improved incomes finally permit them to dream about! Even if one objects to ‘tourists’ cluttering otherwise attractive foreign sites and threatening local eco-systems, why not let people congregate on a big floating petri dish cargo ship where they can gorge on familiar dishes, unleash their screaming offspring, and make potentially terrible romantic choices?
Quote from a locked account:
Late stage capitalism means that roughly once a year a middle class family can go on a decadent entertainment ship staffed by people who are also making a living wage and can afford their own vacations.
Heck, anyone who’s read ‘classic’ mysteries (Murder on the Nile, for instance) knows that people were already complaining about the democratization of cruise ships almost a century ago!
who do they think the target market for cruises is? this is not recreation for the uber rich. These ships get bigger and bigger in order to bring prices lower and lower. Cruises are primarily recreation for the middle and lower middle classes. Rich people don’t go on cruises. https://t.co/RQZCqBGIv6
— Jon ???? ???? (@OpenBordersJon) January 16, 2024
My favorite thing about "late stage capitalism" is that the term was invented in the 1920s
Any day now, guys! Any day capitalism will really end because of its internal contradictions! We've been saying this 150 years, but we're serious for reals this time!
— Swann Marcus (@SwannMarcus89) January 16, 2024
Someone in 2099: "Why can't we build beautiful things like this? RETVRN" pic.twitter.com/u8tQCwWqJq
— G. Scott Shand 🌐 (@GScottShand) January 16, 2024
Late stage capitalism is just the communist version of the end days.
— Noah Ruderman (@devilscompiler) January 16, 2024
Of a piece with the medieval peasant trads…western moderns cannot even conceptualize how poor, sick, and deprived our ancestors were before the Industrial Revolution and capitalism transformed the world faster than anything had transformed it before.
— VictorK1862 (@VictorK1862) January 16, 2024
one of the secret advantages of not growing up in the west: you treat grocery shopping like a chore but I always have a happy little yeltsin on my shoulder spreading his arms in drunken wonder when I enter the store https://t.co/8Y4Qje21pU
— Seva (@SevaUT) January 16, 2024
War for Ukraine Day 692: Russia Has Once Again Bombarded Civilian Targets in Kharkiv
Quaker in a Basement
Ah, for the days when one could book passage on a freighter.
Yutsano
Please to count me as one who does not understand the reasons for going on a cruise. Never mind that this ship probably has accessibility coming out of its portholes. I’ve only been on a cruise ship once for a friend’s wedding. That was more than enough.
EDIT: I got 2nd but don’t really have the enthusiasm to celebrate right now.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Different strokes for different folks.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: Indeed! My brother and sister-in-law did a cruise of the Caribbean for their honeymoon and really enjoyed it. I suppose the ports of call would be the most exciting points for me. But as you said in so many words: YMMV.
EDIT: are we the only ones awake right now?
H.E.Wolf
My dad did, during one of his summer holidays while he was at Oxford. He had a tux in his duffel bag, in case he was invited to the Captain’s table. :-)
The freighter went from England to Scandinavia, then back to England. Next stop was North Africa, and my dad was asked if he wanted to go along, but Michaelmas term was about to start, so he declined.
My dad wasn’t a big talker about himself, but he had big adventures, so when he did mention something, it was usually a wow.
Eolirin
@Yutsano: Nope, not that I should be. >>
Jackie
Cruise = Petri Dish. No thanks.
Freemark
@Yutsano:
Nope. Not even midnight here.
On the only cruise I ever took I ended up with a bad stomach bug that I feel almost certain I got from bad airline food on the way to the cruise. Spent the first five of the seven days in the cabin.
Ken
Total agreement with that last tweet. Two hundred years ago, I would be contemplating another dinner of boiled cabbage, and wondering if I dared put the last dried pig trotter in the pot — or whether I should save it in case spring was late.
Lyrebird
Yes that whole boat looks terrifying, I would rather take a container-ship cruise, or maybe just scrub the garage floor instead. But yes, many people love cruises, and no they’re not the super rich. Aren’t the super rich the ones that buy the mega yachts? Not cramming in with a jillion other people.
Eolirin
I do think one of the other things that really pisses me off about “capitalism” as a stand in for all of the evils of the world is that it fundamentally misunderstands the source of most of the issues laid at it’s feet; the vast majority of them are cultural and political problems, not necessarily an issue with markets, money, or profit seeking per se.
Capitalism is like water, and it always finds its level. Culture is the bedrock that water rests on, and if that culture is sick, capitalism is allowed to do horrific things. But that’s mostly the culture’s fault, not the market system’s. Nothing has to be allowed to be this awful other than that we’re not organizing successfully enough to stop it. Every labor action that’s successful, every regulation that reigns in bad behavior, every successful governmental program that provides for those with little means, and every taxation on accumulations of wealth, point the way not just to mitigating those excesses, but also that doing so is in fact possible. Even just the way companies respond to social pressure. Yeah, they’re inclined to do the minimum on hot button issues, but that they care at all tells you that they feel the need to; they’re not magically separate from those concerns.
Racism and misogyny are the far greater contributors to the brokenness of our society and culture. If they were weaker forces, we’d be making the reforms we need to make. The republican party would have already ceased to be a going concern.
HumboldtBlue
I learned just now there are “adult cruises” for those 18 years and older.
Another Scott
@HumboldtBlue: Wasn’t Rep. Madison Cawthorn on one of those before he went to the House?
Great fun!!
[groucho-roll-eyes.gif]
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Quaker in a Basement:
Never did this. Never had the slightest desire to do this.
After his divorce, a friend convinced me to go on a cruise with him as moral support. Two guys on a short 4 day Memorial Day holiday cruise to Ensenada.
Had a good time. Learned that the passengers on this trip ate and drank much more than average.
Much more fun than driving down to Ensenada.
Jackie
@HumboldtBlue: Not gonna click – even tho it’s officially B-J After hours.
AlaskaReader
@Quaker in a Basement: You still can.
AlaskaReader
Plague ships
eclare
@Yutsano:
My aunt and uncle turned to cruises as they got older. To them the advantage was only having to unpack once. In addition to the usual Caribbean cruises, they did several in northern Europe, including one with a St. Petersburg stop.
I went with them and some other relatives on a Caribbean cruise and had a good time. We all did our own thing during the day and met for dinner each night. It worked out well.
But that was a unique circumstance.
AlaskaReader
Capitalism – This is the market incentivizing planetary destruction.…
eclare
@Eolirin:
Very good points. Capitalism is why companies now have diversity in ads and DEI initiatives, their customers demand it. It’s government, elected by voters, that is trying to stop this, not capitalism.
dmsilev
@eclare: My parents are on a cruise right now, and not having to unpack at each destination is a big part of why. Now that they’re over eighty, the long walking trips are a thing of the past. They still are going somewhat off the beaten track though; I got a text from them today from the Falkland Islands (including a photo of a baby sea lion napping on the shore), and the ship is headed around Cape Horn.
Brachiator
@Lyrebird:
When I taught a tax class, to keep things fun but semi on topic, I would talk about relative differences in wealth. I would note that the wealthiest athlete generally could not afford to buy a yacht. These were toys for billionaires.
Jeff Bezos spent $500 million for his super yacht. Annual operating expenses are about $25 million.
coin operated
As a bachelor, I was the king of 3 and 4-day weekends. could count the number of times I took a week-long vacation on one hand. Along came mrs coin…and she loves week-long cruises. We’re set to embark on a Caribbean cruse in just a few weeks. It’ll be my third*…she’s lost count of her passages. We’ve had fun so far.
* actually…this will be my 4th cruise. My first one was a three-day booze cruise with stops in Mexico on Carnival…she said that one doesn’t count.
mrmoshpotato
@Yutsano:
Same.
Geoduck
I read a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote once about an American somehow who had a citizen of the Soviet Union visiting them, and took the visitor to a grocery store. The visitor refused to believe this vision of opulent splendor was real, that it had to be some sort of Potemkin propaganda thing. And so they drove to another store or two, maybe even in the next town over, and the visitor almost broke down, realizing in that moment that the USSR was doomed.
Gretchen
My son is getting married on a cruise next year. My husband, who gets seasick and hates the whole idea, asked if he has to go. Yes, yes you do.
I worked with a guy who went on two or three cruises a year every year. He gambled so much that the cruise company gave him discounts to keep going on their cruises.
Kristine
::photo looking down on upper deck::
All those colored tubes look like entrails.
Ben Cisco
Mama Cisco was a fan pre-Covid. Not so much now.
It’s a balmy 14 degrees here in Birmingham. This is NUTS.
Eolirin
@eclare: If we stopped celebrating psychopathic behavior it’d go a long way, I think.
wjca
The only reason I can see for an ocean cruise is to see places that aren’t otherwise accessible. The Inside Passage in Alaska comes to mind.
On the other hand, some river cruises, for example the ones Viking does in Europe (haven’t checked out the others), are great. See places that are intetesting, sleep while getting to the next one, fairly small (as opposed to the oceangoing behemoths), and no packing and unpacking every day.
piratedan
@mrmoshpotato: I don’t do well on the water myself, but if you’re married and have kids, it’s like a parental vacation of sorts… activities for them and you and the spouse. You can join them on any and everything or if they’re gregarious, they hook up with others in the age range and do anything and everything with them. You can drink, eat, gamble, dance or just sleep. Depending on where you go, there are day trips at your ports of call, sometimes activities for the family at those places.
Took the kids one year on a Christmas Caribbean Cruise, we got to hang in a quiet cove with a few other families while my youngest got entranced and fascinated while holding a sea cucumber and searched for sand dollars and shells for a couple of hours. The oldest just graduating from puberty was astonished by the bikini concept and ended up blushing for about a week straight.
So it depends on where you go and what you’re looking for.
Brachiator
@Gretchen:
When I went on my first short cruise, some people put those medical patches behind the ear for seasickness. I had no problem. I even enjoyed the rolling motion of the ship.
When we got back home on land, I had motion sickness for 2 or 3 days. Very strange.
moonbat
The underlying assumption of capitalism is that resources are infinite and they are not. That is why, unregulated, it will inevitably lead to the collapse of the environment and whatever human societies rest on it.
Captain C
@Geoduck: That may have been in the book about the MiG-25 pilot who defected; I seem to recall reading it there.
Sure Lurkalot
@Brachiator:
He won’t even notice the outlay or annual maintenance cost.
Like not ameliorating poverty is a choice a rich country makes, so is allowing people to hoard money and wealth.
frosty
Everyone is talking about the benefit of cruises meaning not unpacking and packing every night. This is why we have a trailer for our road trips. Everything is in the same place, where we packed it. And better than a cruise, we sleep in our own beds.
Granted, we’re kind of limited to North America, but I’m OK with that. There’s still a lot of places we haven’t seen. And some we’d like to go back to.
Roberto el oso
Some of those water-slide tubey things appear to be extending out over the water. If I’d gone on one of those as a kid I would have had nightmares for years afterwards.
Aussie Sheila
@Eolirin: This exactly.
I’m so over the ‘late capitalism’ BS. Markets have always been organised and ordered. The lack of same is mere banditry. The real issue here is the laziness and stupidity of people who won’t get off their arses to go organise and agitate for stronger and better democracy in the economy. That is the secret of a better and fairer economy and society. In other words, No Shortcuts!
wjca
A similar (also probably apocryphal) version I came across back in the 1970s had a refugee/emigree from Russia (or, various, some Eastern European country) arriving here. He was already convinced things were far better in the US; that’s why he came. His host felt compelled to show him that there were still serious problems here, so they took a drive thru the slums of the city they were in. At the end of which the new arrival burst out “But where do the poor people live?”
The way I understand just how amazing we have it is personal. My inlaws, in their late 60s, took a two week trip along the Silk Road in Asia. Also, at other times, a couple of trips to Japan. They weren’t particularly wealthy. He was an auto mechanic his whole life; she was a housewife and, after their kids were grown, an occasional potter. But they could afford it. When, in the past, was such a thing even conceivable?
eclare
@mrmoshpotato:
I thought that way, too, until I went on one. Again, specific circumstance, but it was very pleasant. On the days at sea I went to the top deck, got a chaise lounge by the rail, and pulled out a book, occasionally ordering an adult beverage brought to me.
Roberto el oso
Re: American grocery stores. Sometime in the ’80s several members of the Kirov Ballet came as guest performers with the Houston Ballet. My wife was in the ballet orchestra, knew just enough Russian to get by, and so she was delegated as one of the group the guest dancers hung out with. The 2nd night they were in town they went to a generic grocery store (Safeway, Fiesta, something like that) and she says they spent several hours just slowly going up and down the aisles, and they insisted on having their photos taken beside some huge display of Buddig lunch meats. My wife was extremely thin at the time and the Russians kept pointing at the chips and sweets and meat counters etc., and then pointing back at her and laughingly asking “how are you possible?”
eclare
@piratedan:
I had a coworker with three kids, teenagers, who enjoyed cruises for the same reasons you wrote. She and her husband could do what they wanted while the kiddos made friends and explored. They established several check in times during the day, but other than that, everyone was free to do as they pleased.
AlaskaReader
@eclare: Capitalism is never having to acknowledge your own downstream costs.
Brachiator
@frosty:
That’s the thing. People are different. I would never buy a trailer. I’m not big on road trips. But I love flying and cruises. I love foreign travel and hotels. When I went to India I stayed in a hotel that used to be a Maharaja’s palace.
My sister and her husband love to drive all over the country. My favorite great aunt and her husband visited every state. A cousin and her daughter have gone all over the world. My brother decided to visit Canada on a whim.
I guess a lot of my family have a travel bug. We just satisfy it in different ways.
eclare
@Aussie Sheila:
The culinary union (which includes bartenders, casino workers, hotel staff) in Las Vegas is doing just that, threatening to strike right before the Super Bowl. I hope culinary workers in other cities take note, this what organizing can do.
Sister Golden Bear
@Yutsano: The only cruise I’ve done was in Antarctica, and the only other one I’ll probably ever do is an Alaskan cruise. However in both cases, they’re the only way to see the locations.
But the Carnaval-style cruises are really the modern equivalent of the golden age of the Poconos resorts. Lots of food and drink, countless entertainment and diversion, with a bit of being outdoors.
Redshift
@Geoduck: The company I worked for in the 90s hired a Russian programmer, and after many months of visa issues (he was camping in the airport at one point so he could get in a plane before things fell through), he arrived. One if our admins was helping him get settled and took him to the grocery store. In the produce section, she figured out after a but that he was asking what day of the week all that would be there. When she told him it was like that every day, he nearly wept.
Redshift
My dad worked for the Navy, and I once got to go on a day-long cruise on the USS Nimitz (aircraft carrier.) That was pretty cool.
AlaskaReader
@wjca: For the Inside Passage there are ferries, don’t even need a cabin, heated top deck solariums with lounge chairs double for sleeping. Plus you can get on and off at differe3nt ports as long as you keep going either north or south. When you do stops, your choice of transportation can get off with you. A plague ship can’t compete with that.
Prescott Cactus
Not having to unpack is a biggie. Not having to be concerned about each countries laws about prescriptions is nice. Don’t need a letter from your doctor, don’t have to worry about how many pills you have (Japan 2 week supply – max / Australia 3 months). Is this decongestant legal, is this anxiety med ok? Painkillers, watch out. . .
Besides being a Petri dish, those workers are not paid a living wage. They bust their ass for 12 hours a day over a 6 to 9 month contract. It beats what they would make if they were in their home country and they get to see the world, but they don’t chat about their portfolio’s at the employee bar at night.
Prescott Cactus
@AlaskaReader:
Bravo !
AlaskaReader
@frosty: We take our trailer on the Inside Passage ferries, roll on, roll off, up and down the coast.
Sister Golden Bear
@frosty: After my mother retired, she did a lot of traveling including a Danube River cruise. She mentioned that many of her fellow travelers were “really old” — her words — so not having to change rooms was a big plus. As well as not having to walk that far, since the destinations were all port towns, and the historic districts were all next to the river.
Poe Larity
Has there been a zombie cruise ship series?
I would watch that.
NotMax
Wow. Could that headline be any more patronizing and condescending?
/Chandler Bing
HumboldtBlue
The only way watching a Trump speech is tolerable.
Accordions.
Aussie Sheila
@eclare: Yes, exactly. In Oz the issue of basic (minimum wages and conditions) are set by a Commission that operates via legislative direction. The legislative direction of the Commission depends on who gets to legislate it. I understand the difficulties of chicken and egg arguments, but really, if wages and conditions are set in the US largely at state level, why aren’t US leftists concentrating their energies there, instead of running no hoper US Greens candidates, absolute grifters like jfk Jnr and the rest of the absolute cluster fuck that seems to be the US Left?
I’ll say one thing for US Cold War liberals. They really and truly fucked the US Left. It is inbelieveable.
SpaceUnit
At some point Walmart will become a player in the cruise ship racket. It’s so clearly on-brand.
ETA: And all cabins shall be equipped with naugahyde recliners with built-in cup holders.
AlaskaReader
@HumboldtBlue: Nah, I’m gonna have to disagree,
….the only way to abide another Trump speech is to ignore it completely. Not give him any air at all.
NotMax
Repeated from several weeks ago. New standard or floating boondoggle? The Insane Scale of the World’s Largest Cruise Ship.
@Poe Larity
Not zombies per se but if looking for mysterious SF, 1899 on Netflix. Caveat: not everyone’s cuppa; turned out to be a sharply divisive series among watchers.
Eolirin
@Aussie Sheila: The only real leftists in the US are part of the Democratic party. The people who run as greens or what not, are effectively grifters and Russian backed chaos agents. There’s no coherent political party there.
I should amend; the only real leftists who are interested in achieving policy objectives rather than hoping for some kind of revolution are part of the Democratic party. The revolutionaries aren’t interested in incremental change or policy. They don’t organize effectively as a consequence, and are as grifter prone as the right. They’re also a tiny minority of lunatics for the most part.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: I think maybe it’s a matter that ‘US leftists’ aren’t actually what you describe.
I for one don’t have any truck with third party candidates and I think that’s fairly standard for most left leaning folk.
HumboldtBlue
Dick Morris allowed the gimp to escape during an interview today.
NotMax
@Aussie Sheila
So off base you’re playing on a whole ‘nother diamond.
TS
@frosty:
For old folks travelling the rivers around Europe – 100 times better than a bus trip. I don’t cruise but have many friends who do – they have all come home with covid over the past year. Tell me its worth the illness at the end – I don’t wish to find out.
Layer8Problem
@NotMax: ” . . . 1899 on Netflix.”
I liked it, but I can see how people might not. I wanted to see where a second season went.
Mike in Pasadena
If the ship calls at an important tourist destination that one would like to see, then it might be worth the risk of a disease-ridden vessel. Say Petersburg with the cruise taking care of Visas and interactions with Russian immigration. Russia was creepy for me in 2019, even five years after Russia snatched Crimea. It would be worse now with the current war on Ukraine.
Aussie Sheila
@Eolirin: Ok , I get that. But FFS the energies of Dem leftists should be state and local and nothing else. You have to work to build a movement.
@AlaskaReader. I hear you. But we have preferential voting here, and while I am extremely partisan in my politics, I often toggle my vote to ensure the best, most leftist polly wins the position I am voting for.
First Past the Post voting systems are terrible, especially in a polity where social media plays such a large role in ordering the votes of people who largely don’t care about politics and thus largely don’t have a clue about who would help them the most. The reality is that most people don’t care about politics at large, and organising requires absolute micro attention to issues that people care about.
eldorado
david foster wallace has entered the chat
Aussie Sheila
@eldorado: Who ?
NotMax
Closed caption WTF just now in a WW2 documentary.
Dialogue: Britain was helpless to defend Poland.
CC: Britain was helpless to defend bones.
.
Do wonder at times what the hearing impaired take away from such things.
Ksmiami
@Ken: and your clothes and skin Would be covered in soot because of the coal burning if you lived in a city.
Aussie Sheila
@eldorado: I just googled his name. If you think I am anything like this person, you lack reading skills as well as political skills.
Cheers.
Aussie Sheila
@NotMax: Huh? You’re so obscure, you are inscrutable. Luckily.
eclare
@Ksmiami:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London
10-12k killed in 1952.
Aussie Sheila
And while I’m at it, the discourse about cruising and who does and doesn’t like it, is illustrative. Personally, I would never go on one. I like to walk outside hotels when I travel. But the social contempt and moralising about people who like cruises encapsulates the problem with the US liberal/left. Who gives a fuck about cruises? If people like them so what?
Less social disdain, and more serious organising would go a long way to reducing the next wave of economic and social regression emanating from a polity that can’t seem to reform itself even in the face of the most serious political regression since the 1930s.
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
@Poe Larity: One of the best episodes by The X-Files was about a zombie ship
gene108
I’d love to go on a cruise one day. Looks very relaxing. Hang out watching the ocean go by. Some activities, if you want them.
No rush to do anything. No having to get up early to beat the crowds that show up midday for the museum, historical monument, etc. on other vacations.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Getting hammered with another storm coming in off of the Pacific with more to come tomorrow. The lights have been flickering here for at least the last three days but no outages as of now. We have backups on all of the critical stuff so we’re good there. Two of our three cats dgaf about weather but poor Stewie is hiding in the closet. The humidity is a bit high so I put the dehumidifier near the closet and fired it up for a bit. He will actually loaf right next to it when the storms are real loud…lol! But that vacuum can go fuck right off!
Hopefully the power is kept up but no worry of freezing as it’s 53 out there, just wet and windy. Lost the interwebs last night through the early AM and wouldn’t be surprised to have it happen again tonight.
mrmoshpotato
@Poe Larity: Zombie cruise ship series?
Got some specifics about what you’re dreaming up here? Who’re the zombies?
SpaceUnit
@Aussie Sheila:
Okay, fine. But I’m with those who view cruise ships with abject horror.
WhatsMyNym
@Aussie Sheila:
The USA has a large population, you can’t compare it to your little country. The government is also organized differently.
Aussie Sheila
@SpaceUnit: OK. But so what? I approach many things with abject horror that others find perfectly OK. What I object to here is making any kind of a political argument out of personal, aesthetic preferences. It’s mad. And worse, it’s absolutely killer politics for the left.
Aussie Sheila
@WhatsMyNym: Sure, Australia is small in population, but in geography I think you’ll find it’s a lot larger than you think. Nevertheless, it is always a good strategy to seek out examples of where people have succeeded in things you haven’t been able to. It’s called ‘best practice’ . The US might like to try its own export some time.
SpaceUnit
@Aussie Sheila:
Peace. This is just banter. I’m not coming after their cruise ships any more than I’m coming after their fucking hamburgers or gas stoves.
AlaskaReader
@HumboldtBlue: …simply true to form for someone with no redeeming value.
patrick II
Who do you think does not want Trump to be the Republican nominee more, Democrats or non-MAGA Republicans?
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: Alaska does not have first past the post elections.
Aussie Sheila
@patrick II: Non maga republicans obviously. I imagine Dems will be delighted with facing an indicted, convicted sexual assaulter and demented crim in the 2024 general election. If they can’t win this one in a landslide, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
AlaskaReader
@NotMax: I’m guessing they can see past the anomalies, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re maybe more adept at the task than their counterpart. Closed captioning is chock full of errors.
gene108
@Aussie Sheila:
The only organizing that matters is making sure Democratic voters turnout in November. It’s not something that’s going to show up in January.
@Aussie Sheila:
U.S. political organization is very very decentralized. Parties have no real control who can run under the party name.
Anyone, with any qualifications, who meets the legal minimum age and residency requirements can run for any office, at any level of government. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat, Republican, or Green Party candidate running for a seat.
Some people have a more realistic chance of securing the nomination to contest the general election than others, but that’s not up to the party apparatus. It’s usually decided by voters in primary election.
The “Left” can’t control who decides to run as a Green. If their choices are a bunch of no hopers, than that’s what they have to chose from for the general election.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: Baseball. Surely they play baseball where you live?
Brachiator
@patrick II:
Non-MAGA Republicans. These people know that they need a better candidate. But they are being pulled along by Trump and by the idiots of the GOP leadership.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader: I’m very glad to hear it. FPTP results in very unrepresentative outcomes if people’s actual political preferences are valued. One sure way to sink a democracy is to ensure that there are only two ways a person can express their political preferences. I prefer strong, disciplined parties, and a varied, democratic means of expressing actual political preferences. But I guess that’s because I live in a small country. 😉
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: …should one inquire about the housecleaning still to come where you live?
Aussie Sheila
@gene108: I understand the decentralised nature of US politics. God knows, I worked with US unions in the 90s and it was an eye opener, believe me.
When I refer to the ‘left’ , I’m not referring to some centralised political organisation as such. I’m referring to a conscious, politically aware and sophisticated network of people , grounded in their communities and workplaces, who are able to punch far above their weight politically because they do the work and keep their eyes on the prize. I can’t stand the whiff of social condescension people adopt here when they disagree with other people politically.
It speaks for itself in my view. And after 30 years work with many Labor movement activists from many countries, this particular tic is very US liberal centric. YMMV.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Poe Larity:
Someone should have made a cruise ship map for Left4Dead. I would play the $#!t outta that! Maybe blow the thing up at the end of the finale and you escape on a speedboat.
But as far as going on a cruise ship? Oh Hell no. That’s not my idea of a vacation, not at all.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader: Huh? If you are referring to my house, it is clean enough for me, and that’s what counts. If you are referring to the Australian polity, it sure needs a good cleanup. But luckily, we have the means to do so, if people want to. It’s up to political activists to make sure we do. Luckily in our small country no government can prevent people from voting, or from having their vote honestly counted. You should try it some time.
NotMax
@AlaskaReader
The words “planetary paella” came up within the same documentary’s closed captioning.
Which makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the program yet would make a cool name for a band.
;)
TriassicSands
For those who want to go on a cruise or who don’t think cruise ships matter, take a few minutes and read about the catastrophic pollution they cause.
Who cares? Anyone who cares about the environment should care.
Ruckus
@Yutsano:
Have never been on a cruise ship but I have crossed the Atlantic 6 times. On a gray ship. I would imagine being on a cruise ship would be just a tad more entertaining, relaxing and likely sort of fun. The food is likely at least a bit better, they serve alcohol, there’s music and entertainment and the ship being a bit larger it likely is far more comfortable. And there aren’t 80 people sleeping and snoring in the same compartment.
mrmoshpotato
@SpaceUnit: The gas stove murdered Colonel Mustard with the hamburgers on the cruise ship. Am I right?
Aussie Sheila
@TriassicSands: There are a many more important targets for those that care about the future of a liveable planet than fucking cruise ships. Try government subsidies for fossil fuel companies, or handouts for drilling and fracking. For fuck sake, of all the targets in the world, middle and working class fondness for cruise ships is about number eleventy billion on my bingo card.
SpaceUnit
@mrmoshpotato:
Ha! Yeah, that’s the Fox News version anyway.
AlaskaReader
A very short accounting of just some of the things I find abhorrent about the cruise ship industry is that they most resemble a floating fantasyland kind of ultimate gated community that rudely barges near and far into other people’s neighborhoods at will.
Often times unwelcome by residents who are under the thumb of overlords who cut deals with the cruise industry, granting them variances, permits and whatever other access they need to exploit each port’s culture, history and trade.
There’s a closed loop of so-called ‘local’ businesses that can ‘participate’ in that exploitation, the cruise industry outright owns and operates many of the buses and trains, (again using public roads and rails systems), and where they don’t own the passenger transport, they control who gets transportation contracts. Many of the ‘shops’ and shore excursions are similarly controlled or owned by the tour companies.
The business model dictates that they do not compensate for the costs the business incurs, many of those costs of doing their business is borne by everyone but the cruise corporations.
Many of those neighborhoods are ports of call where the locals are suffering extreme need of even the most simple necessities of life. The disparity between those coughed up onto those shores is enormous. Some of those ports of call are inland and without being able to just normally discharge untold tons of garbage, toxic medical waste, and boatloads of sewerage overboard, that garbage is left behind to end up in someone’s backyard, …and that’s not to mention the incredible amount of pollutants expelled through their stacks while they steam here and there, not even shutting them down in port because they have to power that floating fantasyland 24/7 year round. Peer down on those locals who experience daily hunger and ponder the difference between your restaurant table assignments, your prepaid drink programs and their desire to simply have enough to feed their families.
Hang over that rail in those inland ports and watch them pull trains of wheeled dumpsters full of the food that no one ate at those numerous onboard endless buffets.
All the support infrastructure and it’s cost is borne by those neighborhoods where the fantasy barge ties up. The profits go to private foreign interests, subsidized by those most negatively impacted by their profit seeking.
And that’s not considering many billions of unseen downstream costs that will continue to accrue long after that business model collapses under it’s own over extended exploitive weight.
Does any of that seem sustainable or responsible?
I could go on….
Ain’t nobody going to justify that business model and still maintain any credible morality.
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
There were plenty of yachts back when Howard Hughes was the only billionaire in the West, and when there was a 90% tax bracket in the U.S.
Super-yachts like Bezos’ are a relatively recent thing. Plenty of yachts are out there whose price tag isn’t in the nine figures. The athletes signing those nine-figure contracts can unquestionably afford yachts, just not Jeff Bezos’.
Betty Cracker
My husband’s parents took the family on a Caribbean cruise once — the first and only time I’ve ever been on an overnight cruise. My husband felt trapped and did not enjoy it, but I thought it was fun. One thing we both disliked was the expectation to dress up for dinner. (I don’t know if that’s still a thing, but it was in the early 2000s.)
We skipped all the shows but the rest of the family enjoyed them. We loved the views of the night sky and exploring ports. I gambled for 20 minutes and won enough money to pay our substantial bar bill. I know how to quit when I’m ahead. ;-}
Ruckus
@AlaskaReader:
I don’t really get this. I lived on a ship much smaller than a cruise ship for 2 yrs, with 300 others, and as I said above there were 80 of us sharing one compartment. No plague, little sickness, other than some people got seasick, which one rather stormy crossing I was one of only 4 out of that 300 that didn’t actually get seasick. On the other 5 crossings of the Atlantic, and sailing quite a ways above the Arctic Circle or in the Mediterranean or south to the Caribbean almost no one got seasick. And that stormy crossing took twice as long as normal with the ship heading straight into 50 foot seas for 6 days straight.
AlaskaReader
@NotMax: ….that reminds me, someone mentioned a great band name in a thread I was too late to discover some back aways.
Sweaty digits.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader: Yeah it’s awful. But not as awful as the political capture of governments world wide by the fossil fuel industries, who donate lavishly to political parties left,right and centre across the world. I refuse to get into high dudgeon about cruise ships and the people who enjoy cruising while political parties across the spectrum continue to seek and accept fossil fuel donations in order to keep the tax payer funded subsidies going.
Less moralism and more politics would assist here.
lowtechcyclist
@Eolirin:
Well, that’s the problem with capitalism: in order to make it work out for everybody (or even a decent majority of people) it has to be constantly fought against to bring it within some sort of set of controls.
In a purely capitalist system, more and more money is controlled by fewer and fewer people, and it chews up whatever is in its way – workers, the environment, whatever. And since political power follows economic power, it’s extremely hard to control the beast. You have powerful systems set up convincing a good chunk of the population to vote against the politicians who would apply some sorts of controls and limitations to the capitalist system.
A market economy needs heavy regulation to make sure the benefits are widely spread, and to limit its chewing-up of the world. But it fights like hell against any and every regulation.
There’s no good substitute for a market economy, but it’s a leopard that’s perpetually trying to eat all of our faces.
TriassicSands
@Aussie Sheila: Well, by all means, if something isn’t the most important thing to care about, then we shouldn’t care about it at all. I’d say your bingo card is shortsighted, since pollution is probably the single most important issue facing all of humanity today and the oceans are a hugely significant part of that problem. In addition, cruise ships pump out a tremendous amount of air pollution and greenhouse gases.
Headline: “63 cruise ships owned by Carnival Corporation released more toxic sulfur gasses than all the cars in Europe, study says”
Yep, insignificant.
The great thing about cruises is that all you have to do is not go on one. And the more people who do that, the more cruise lines will either suffer (to the point of going out of business) or have to clean up their act. And all people have to do is care and not spend their money on a cruise. That takes zero effort. Just a little awareness and caring, which is clearly lacking.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: Tell you what, I’ll hold my tongue on passing judgement, and just say get back to me sometime after you’ve sorted the rest. Likely your energy is better spent with those living in closer proximity to you than I.
…and good luck in those endeavors of yours.
eclare
Wow. It is 1 degree in Memphis. I have lived here almost twenty years, it has never been this cold. Forecast for today is a high of 32, fingers crossed for that and for the power to stay on.
Aussie Sheila
@AlaskaReader: Oh sweetheart, my endeavours such as they were, are long past time now. I am happily retired, and can now donate and work for whatever floats my boat. You?
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
This.
I’m not and never have been more than middle class and I’ve owned a sailboat that could have crossed oceans.
Aussie Sheila
@lowtechcyclist: Efficient and effective Market economies cannot exist in the absence of strong states. Anything else is simply banditry. That is the conundrum that US political traditions are simply unable to grasp. That’s the difference between state formation in the 18th century and state formation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The world looks forward to the US catching up.
Leto
@lowtechcyclist: This was the easiest thing to Google. The amount of sports stars here in the US, and abroad, who own 8 figure yachts (Michael Jordan’s $80M yacht comes to mind) is quite a bit. While Tom Brady’s yachts only cost 7 figures a piece, he owns multiple yachts. Like you said it’s relative, but 8 figures is nothing to sneeze at.
AlaskaReader
@Ruckus: Consider that your ship was considerably more seaworthy, the passenger health was to a very large degree preselected, screened, vaccinated, deemed to be at least above average condition and thereafter closely managed aboard and even during shore ‘excursions’, the standards of cleanliness on your ship likely exceeded that of the evident annals of the plague ships, along with the fact that some of the illnesses hadn’t yet circulated widely a few short years ago.
Compared with the modern day plague ships, not designed for heavy weather sailings, whose qualitatively much larger and much less controlled passengers loads and substantially larger crews are rotated on and off near willy nilly in various ports of call all over the world, …I don’t see much that can be considered for comparison.
ColoradoGuy
Colorado weather doing its thing again. Two nights ago, -21F, same time this night, +43F. I look at the automated weather report from our local airport, and it jumped 20 degrees in one 15-minute interval.
I think one thing that sets the US population apart is the sheer power of corporate medium. This country never has a neutral, government broadcasting system, and the one that does exist, USIA, is forbidden by law to send programs inwards.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Plenty of yachts? Maybe. But the point that I was trying to make, with a bit of exaggeration, was differences in relative and absolute wealth. A lot of people believe that millions and billions are on the same scale. If I say that the cost of a super yacht is more than the entire contract of a famous ball player in the news, it helps people gain a little perspective. It also helps when students ask about the federal tax system and the budget and deficits, etc.
Talking about tax brackets is harder. For example, jackals here keep bringing it up even though almost nobody ever paid the top bracket in the past. And it certainly is not true that the 1940s and 1950s was a golden age of federal social spending. The effective tax rate was around 44 percent, still higher than today’s rates, but nowhere near 90 percent.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila: Yeah, nah, you do you, …I’m fine.
Betty Cracker
@eclare: ONE DEGREE?!? Yikes! 🥶 I hope you can stay indoors.
It’s 38 F here right now, which is damn cold for Florida. I had to find socks to wear and am not at all happy about it.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Most cruises are much more casual now.
AlaskaReader
@Aussie Sheila:Your term of endearment doesn’t come across as being wholly offered in good faith.
I prefer not to inject my personal life into shared narratives. I’m fine with just letting my words speak for themselves. I don’t feel they’re especially inarticulate and they certainly don’t change meaning depending on who or whom it is that offers them up.
Brachiator
@AlaskaReader:
Of course, during the pandemic, prisons and Navy ships were significant problems, and for similar reasons. From a Wikipedia summary:
AlaskaReader
@Ruckus: I still feel I could use one of those…
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
I may be able to venture out tomorrow to get more pet food, but with six inches of snow on the roads to melt, and another cold front coming in tomorrow, more likely it will be Sunday. The pets will be fine, I have plenty of people food to feed them, but I try to keep them on a consistent diet. Although I’m sure they enjoy the variety, my cat is loving all the tuna!
The dog is getting a mix of Cheerios and cooked oatmeal.
lowtechcyclist
@Aussie Sheila:
Be that as it may, how in the world did the term “First past the post” get used as a descriptor of U.S. elections? It in no way resembles a race with a fixed ‘post’ as the goal, and the first one past that post wins. If Biden and Trump were to spend this year accumulating votes
the whole time, and the first one to reach, say, 60 million votes were to be declared the winner, that would match the terminology. But of course it’s nothing like that. All the votes will come in at the same time, so nobody will get there first, and there’s no fixed
post to get past, just more votes than the other guy. Not even 50%+1 is the ‘post’; Clinton never did get 50% of the vote in 1992 or 1996, due to Perot’s independent candidacy.
How a total misnomer like ‘first past the post’ became a term that people use to describe U.S.-style elections is totally beyond me. Every time I see it, it’s like a phonograph needle scraping across a record. (Yeah, I’m old. And I still have a turntable.)
AlaskaReader
@ColoradoGuy:
The mission of the United States Information Agency (USIA) is to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the U.S. national interest.
The promotion of the US national interests has sometimes not been defined in parallel with ideological aspirations. When that occurs, I’m okay with not directing that inward.
I don’t guess that’s just me…
AlaskaReader
@Brachiator: I was going to mention the incidents during the pandemic but I felt that went without saying and wasn’t actually relevant to your question. Those incidents were tragedies I hope can be avoided or better managed in the future.
Baud
Oh bloody hell. Just overheard in MSNBC
The media is all gaslighting all the time.
ColoradoGuy
The power of corporate broadcasting in this country is hard to overstate, and Reagan’s demolition of the very moderate Fairness Doctrine opened the door to saturation-level far-right media on the AM bands. That’s been going on for thirty years, and now effectively controls the Republican Party.
This strange system goes right back to the dawn of broadcasting in the Twenties. The other English-speaking countries were far more cautious, and did not allow the American free-for-all that developed here. The FCC sets technical standards, but after the demise of the Fairness Doctrine, had little to say about content.
Thanks partly to this media oversaturation, a good percentage of the US population lives in a sort of mental Disneyland. AM radio in the rural areas; Fox News wherever cable goes; and One America News Network (and many others) wherever the Internet goes. It’s a wall-to-wall information bubble, a strange mix of paranoid fantasy, quasi-news, and religious indoctrination.
In other countries, you don’t get fundamentalist religion, far-right ranting, and stale Top-40 Hits when you scan the AM dial. Here you do. The “religious” channels (and there are many) on TV are nearly all fundamentalist and quite unrepresentative of mainstream religions in the USA.
This firehose of far-right religion and paranoid fantasy never stops, and it blankets the nation. It’s astonishing, considering how pervasive it is, that it’s only captured about 27~33% of the population. After thirty years, that seems to be the upper bound for this content. Is there a Left counterweight? No. Not on AM, not on FM, not on TV. Only on the Internet.
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
Sure. But that’s very different from saying that no sportsball player can afford a yacht.
Aussie Sheila
@lowtechcyclist: It is used to describe systems where whoever gets the most votes wins even though a majority didn’t want that candidate. Think an electorate of 50,000 eligible voters. There are three candidates for election. Candidate A gets 20, 000 votes. Candidates B and C get 30,000 votes between them. A wins with a minority of the actual votes cast. Not good. Not good at all.
NotMax
@AlaskaReader
Distinctly remember George W. Bush ordering the closing and dismantling of USIA libraries (which had been accessible by the local populace) in our embassies abroad.
Don’t know if they ever were reinstated.
AlaskaReader
@Baud: Most of the owners and staff feel that’s their prerogative. Public interest and anti-trust regulation is a thought.
Aussie Sheila
@Baud: Why would markets be concerned about interest rate cuts? They are great for borrowers and assist in the inflation of asset values like stocks and RE. Christ, the media can’t even get their corporate shilling right!
AlaskaReader
@ColoradoGuy: There’s not an equal counter but there are am and fm nodes that aren’t winger controlled. Two examples are public radio and college/university programming. Both are under fire from Republicans who would excise their access, but they still exist in some numbers.
Betty Cracker
@eclare: I bet they are loving that!
My dogs are unaffected by the cold so far aside from reduced time outside. I’m too much of a wimp to bother with walks when it’s colder than 50 F — I turn them loose in the yard to do their business and get some exercise. They can’t stand the cold either, so I don’t think it bothers them.
Baud
A couple of reddit comments about the FL special election win.
ColoradoGuy
One tiny little step towards the Australian voting system would be to make Voting Day a national holiday. No constitutional issues there, and it would be a simple law passed by Congress (next time we get a trifecta, and re-authorize the Voting Rights Act).
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Sure, depending on the size of the boat. But even here, maintenance costs can be deadly.
Also, I note that Michael Jordan’s net worth is estimated to be $3 billion, while Tom Brady is estimated to be worth $350 million. Different orders of magnitude, even when they go shopping for toys.
Ruckus
@AlaskaReader:
Have you ever traveled anywhere a passport is required? The reason I ask is that one often has to show that their shots are up to date to travel to places that a passport is required. In the navy our shots were kept up to date for anywhere we MIGHT travel. And yes the ship I was on was seaworthy. And yes we sometimes had to sail in rather adverse conditions. But ships that cross oceans do that often in conditions that are less than ideal. Same as airlines fly when it’s cloudy or raining or lighting and thunder or the middle of the night. I know because I’ve flown in airlines during those conditions. I’ve also flown 13 hrs over oceans without refueling, which is interesting.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: I’m working on a post about that special election victory. It’s very good news and may point to a way forward for FL Dems.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Excellent. I didn’t initially realize how big an upset win it was.
eclare
@Baud:
Thanks for the details.
NotMax
@ColoradoGuy
Stickier wicket than it appears, that. Presumably would apply only to elections when there’s a federal office on the ballot.
Cannot see, for example, Congress legislating so as to force Virginia to declare a holiday for its off-year elections. And what about special elections when there’s a vacancy in a House seat in a single state? Would Georgia get two holidays when there’s a runoff election? And so on.
Having a patchwork of some election days being a holiday and others not creates a two tier system by necessity subjugating some elections to a lesser status in both perception and import.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Repubs outspent Keen two to one and deployed every dirty trick in the book and STILL lost. It was glorious!
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
Well, my backdoor is frozen shut, and my front porch gets slippery, so for my dog I am using a lot of cleaner and paper towels. Sorry if that is TMI. Luckily, even though my cat prefers the great outdoors, she will use a litter box. I really don’t want to open the front door for her with these temps.
AlaskaReader
@Ruckus: Uh, yes to the first question. As to ‘vaccinations’, yes some countries require some variation of vaccination for entry, what isn’t required of cruise passengers is any effectual control over screening for pre-trip sickness of the kind that your shipmates were subjected to. Just like that guy coughing up a lung in that pasenger airline seat, there are cabins full on any given cruise that end up in onboard hospital or quarantined in their quarters, and that’s only if they are ‘detected’. Passengers who are carriers who show no symptoms are rarely screened out on cruises.
Cruise ships, unlike your ships, are rotated around the globe according to the seasons and the expected weather. Cruise ships don’t ply the waters of Prince William Sound in winter, let alone the Bering Sea. I’m sure the North Atlantic sailings are similarly curtailed seasonally.
I just still don’t see a lot to compare your ships with the mostly unregulated floating cities that cruise ships are.
lowtechcyclist
@Aussie Sheila: Oh, I know what voting system FPTP is used to describe. I’m just saying the relation between the actual words ‘first past the post’ and the voting system in question is negligible at best. You could call it ‘fuchsia voting’ and it would make about as much sense.
eclare
@Betty Cracker:
Looking forward to the post!
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
But it would sound a lot cooler.
evodevo
@eclare: And not just London…1948 Donora disaster in PA. When I encounter all the rightwinger whining about librul environmental regulations, this is what I think of….and how clean our air and waterways are now compared to then. (and how loud was the whining on the part of industry back then when forced to change)
Princess
@Geoduck: I may have posted something like that here. An uncle of mine, living in Czechoslovakia, was given permission to visit England for his brothers funeral. This was the 60s. He was a hardcore communist but realized he’d been lied to when he went to a grocery store and saw the price of eggs. Now, I know the names of all the people involved and the children who told me the story, but it may still be apocryphal!
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
Oh, whatever. You’re going to keep on trying to defend having told a falsehood about sportsball players and yachts. Fine. Knock yourself out.
LiminalOwl
@Yutsano: I hope you’re OK? (I don’t get to every thread in time, please forgive any ignorant comments.)
I have never been on a cruise and never really wanted to. Though the idea of going to Alaska and seeing the glaciers up close is tempting.
Baud
@evodevo:
Environmental regulation is another area, like abortion and vaccines, where we’re a victim of our success. People don’t appreciate it because they can’t imagine what it was like before.
lowtechcyclist
@eclare:
Then we can find out who would be first past it. ;-)
Brachiator
@Baud:
Damn, this is a great outcome. Thanks for the info on this election.
NotMax
@lowtechcyclist
Amen. The litany of (frankly, by now snobbish) “you’re countrying wrong” comments has become beyond tiresome.
I do not pie anyone but can sure as heck choose to merrily scroll on by when they reach such a drumbeat. With gusto.
Gvg
@Aussie Sheila: Markets are composed of businesses that are competing with each other and do not have identical views or business plans. Every change in conditions or change in expectations of the future, hurts someone and benefits someone. A change in the rates, up OR down always concerns someone. The media can legitimately write a story about that, and they are too silly and uneducated to do it with the context. Partly that is because the readership is also unable to discern this important fact. We tend to assume it’s because the paymasters want that but my own opinion is that the paymasters are also not that bright or educated and don’t actually know how the system that benefits them works. I have seen too many rich idiots in the news in recent years. These billionaires seem to not know how capitalism works and support the Republican Party threatening to blow up the fiscal credit of the United States on a regular basis, when that behavior ought to get them blacklisted forever is my prime example. It took generations of intelligent work to get to the point that the US dollar is the worlds currency and now we have had it so good (and stable) for so long that even a lot of our leadership think it’s natural and falls from the sky, not something that was carefully built and can be lost by fools.
Brachiator
@lowtechcyclist:
Obviously , that wasn’t the point. But as you say, knock yourself out.
LiminalOwl
@wjca: Ever see Moscow on the Hudson?
AlaskaReader
@lowtechcyclist: …the phrase was somewhat inappropriately co-opted from an idiomatic horse racing expression.
Jeffg166
@Quaker in a Basement: You still can travel on a cargo ship.
https://www.quora.com/Can-anyone-travel-on-a-cargo-ship-as-a-passenger-for-free-if-he-she-has-some-work-to-do-there-Is-this-possible-at-all#:~:text=Can%20you%20travel%20on%20a,from%20a%20typical%20cruise%20ship.
NotMax
@evodevo
Also too, Love Canal, Times Beach, Flint, Michigan; etc., etc. The list goes on.
LiminalOwl
@AlaskaReader: Oh dear. I may have to revise my plans for after retirement. Though the idea of a plane to get there is still daunting.
NotMax
@wjca
Soviet era joke.
Customer, walking into a shop and seeing empty shelves and displays: “Don’t you have any meat?”
Proprietor: “No, this is the store without any fish. The shop without any meat is across the street.”
eclare
@LiminalOwl:
I went on a trip to AK and saw glaciers without going on a cruise. We rented a minivan (there were five of us) in Anchorage and drove down to the Kenai peninsula. We took a boat trip which got pretty close, and we saw one calve. We also went to a park where we could walk right up to one.
eclare
@evodevo:
I’ll have to Google that one!
eclare
@Baud:
QFT. My US rep had polio as a child and sometimes uses a cane even though he is only in his late 60’s.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist:
Hahaha…
Soprano2
@eclare: I’ve done an ocean cruise and a river cruise. They’re completely different experiences, each good and bad in its own way. I enjoyed both, although I don’t think I’d want to take a week-long ocean cruise.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Obligatory?
:)
RevRick
@moonbat: You’ve got that right!
Late stage capitalism provides us with a cornucopia of goodies, but never accounts for the demands it places on the natural environment. I think the best example of this is the question, “Which expended more energy: the building of the Pyramids in Egypt or a jumbo jet full of passengers flying from LA to Cairo?” And the answer is the jumbo jet!
We never consider what it takes for us to have our overflowing pantries and refrigerators. For instance, here’s a fun little factoid:
The average American expends about 21 barrels of oil per year.
That doesn’t sound like much, but another way of putting that is that energy consumption is the equivalent of having 600 slaves working for you.
We credit capitalism with all the wonderful things we have when in point of fact, what’s made the difference is that we stumbled upon nature’s bounty in the basement. But this will not prove cost-free.
In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish pioneer of physical chemistry, presented a paper on the greenhouse gas effect of carbon dioxide. And when he did so, he immediately had a “ruh-roh” reaction, because he understood our growing reliance on burning fossil fuels would cause global warming. And here we are, 127 years later, confronting the catastrophe that might unleash.
I realize this is my inner Puritan speaking, but the hedonism which capitalism enables for so many people around the world may well prove to be our undoing. Astronomers have pondered the mystery of the Fermi Equation, which postulates the likelihood of other intelligent life in the universe, and the question, “So, where are they?” And the answer is the fearsome possibility of what they call the Great Filter. They go so far and then it ends in disaster.
We think renewable energies are going to save us, and allow ever more people to enjoy ever more material bounty without the limitations posed by CO2 and resource depletion. But then the rule of 70 comes into play ( understood in Assyrian clay tablets from 1900 BCE). This states that 70 divided by the growth rate equals the time it takes to double. Ten doublings equal a thousand times more. So even a modest 1% growth rate will hit that number in 700 years.
I love hot showers, a furnace that kicks on in bitter cold weather and A/C when it’s hot, and a vehicle that takes me wherever and wherever my heart desires.
But at its heart late stage capitalism is a magic spell making promises it ultimately cannot keep.
Chris
Huh, cool! I always assumed “late stage capitalism” was either a global warming reference* or a sort of academic tautology.**
* Meaning that the modern economy is going to destroy human civilization, in other words, capitalism is “late” not because it’s going to collapse from its own contradictions and trigger a revolution against it but because the parasite can’t survive after it’s killed its host.
** Meaning that given the way time works, whatever form of capitalism we’re currently in is the “latest” form of capitalism by definition. Sort of like how when my parents were children, “modern” referred to the 1950s, but time marches on, so now, “modern” refers to the 2020s.
NotMax
@Chris
First past the post-modern.
//
Nelle
@Ruckus: My dad served on a hospital ship during WWII, making 11 round trips across the Atlantic. They brought the wounded back from Italy (he watched the battle of Anzio from the ship as they brought casualties aboard) and France. He was also in North Africa, along the coast. They also brought back some German prisoners of war. Dad visited one he had befriended in Germany in the 1980s (German was his first language).
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
I think of it as having done well in the preliminary rounds. Bringing global warming under control is the big one. Whether it matters in the long run if we cleaned up the air in our cities or preserved wildlife habitat is still TBD.
Matt McIrvin
I’m pretty sure that last part is not true. The staffs usually have a lot of horribly exploited people from poor countries who are making a pittance, don’t they?
We went on a cruise once and decided we’re probably not cruise people. It’s like going on vacation to an OK resort hotel but then being trapped in the hotel most of the time. But my daughter had fun going on a Disney cruise with the in-laws. I guess if you prefer having structured activities and entertainments, low stress about where to go for dinner, and only small doses of local color, that’s what you want. I’d rather visit a city and have the whole city and its attractions as my playground for several days. So that’s what we usually do.
But I get it, because I’m also fascinated by theme parks, and the same people who are viscerally disgusted by cruises are also horrified by theme parks and regard them as dystopian nightmares that indicate a fundamental sickness in our souls.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Environmental activist organizations, like political campaigns, need to constantly trumpet that things are terrible in order to raise money. But expose yourself to those pitches over a period of decades and you get a powerful, and false, impression that environmentalism has never been successful at anything.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Agreed. A lot of incentives are whacked, to our collective detriment.
eclare
@Matt McIrvin:
Interesting. It really is to each his/her own, because while I had a good time on my family cruise, I would never go on a family trip to a theme park. Those just have no interest for me.
Kay
@Baud:
lol. All Dem campaigns will be like this now : issue X “and abortion”
Baud
@eclare:
In this thread, people discovering other people have different vacation preferences.
eclare
@Baud:
Hahaha…so true!
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: It’s definitely a niche appeal.
I belatedly became fascinated by roller coasters, after overcoming a childhood phobia, but I’m getting too old to ride them like a youngster would–I parcel them out in small doses.
But at the high-end parks that the likes of Disney and Universal provide, there’s interest in just being in that highly themed environment, and some lower-intensity family rides that give you some immersive experience. It’s like being inside a huge stage-magic trick.
Going to a big destination resort like Disney’s is like going on a cruise, in some ways–you’re in this artificial structured world that tries to keep you inside it for your whole vacation to get more of your cash. But there’s a bit more variety than on a ship.
satby
@NotMax: it’s amazing that people haven’t caught on to the troll. A very adept one.
JML
I’ll admit, the more these ships turn into floating cities, and the larger they get, the more I start to think “do I want any part of this?” But a friend is planning on doing a cruise as a surprise for her husband’s birthday and has been recruiting a bunch of his friends to go as well (sans kids) and I’m vaguely intrigued. As a single person, the cruise life hasn’t seemed great for me, but with a bunch of friends? Maybe?
catclub
@Lyrebird: I would say that the only way to see lots of ice on the water is via ship. And it is marvelous. Unless your name is Shackleton.
Two travel destinations I wish I could do again and again. Grand Canyon in winter, and Icebreaker in Gulf of St. Lawrence.
catclub
@JML:
Go by yourself and look at the ocean.
different-church-lady
Anyone who can afford a cruise doesn’t need a tax break. Fuck off.
NotMax
Sigh. Two hour respite of silence. Now next band of heavy rain pounding on the roof. Benn quite the soggy week and a half.
Soprano2
@frosty: Ugh, that’s work. When I go on vacation I want to relax and let someone else do that work. Like camping, to me camping is nothing but a lot of work.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We traveled pretty widely on our own, but as we got old, we found that cruising made it easier for us to still get to places we wanted to see. The Viking river cruises are about our speed now–a couple hundred passengers, no casino, no kids, stops at interesting cities. Those giant ships are horrifying to me.
different-church-lady
Nominated
Matt McIrvin
I do know this is true, because the gradual death of shopping malls (which may be overstated, but it’s happened to some degree) has led to a wave of nostalgia for shopping malls, especially among people about my age and a little younger for whom they were one of the main places for teenagers to have a social life for themselves. It’s weird to see these environments that were regularly lambasted as the great plastic scourge that was destroying everything good about America suddenly turn into symbols of the vanished greatness we used to have.
NotMax
@Soprano2
Every time I go on vacation I need a vacation afterward.
Geminid
@LiminalOwl: I never thought of taking a trip on a cruise ship; I have too many trips I want to take in this country, and I like to drive (although Amtrak is nice and getting better). Plus, I am somewhat agoraphobic.
But I was recently intrigued by a cruise I heard about on the Harrisonburg radio station. A local travel agent was promoting a Carnival line cruise from Norfolk to Bermuda and back. About a day and a half each way, three days at the island. The last date is in October, which seems like a good time. Norfolk’s just a 3 hour ride from here.
I could see hanging out on deck and watching the ocean, and walking around Bermuda checking out parks and book stores. I’d need to buy some new clothes though, which makes me think of Henry Thoreau’s warning.
different-church-lady
Also: I do hope you were being snarky when you said “simple pleasure”.
A simple pleasure is sitting on the porch with a glass of ice tea. Eating Christmas dinner every day for a week on a floating amusement park does not qualify.
Soprano2
@TS: I went to New York City in June with my choir to sing at Carnegie Hall. I came home with Covid. Was it worth it? Absolutely!!! Life is full of calculated risks; we all have to decide which risks we think are worth taking. You can slip, fall down and kill yourself in your own home.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: Malls wiped out main street. In some places Main Street is perking back up, but if you live in a place where it isn’t, then you don’t have the plastic replacement and you don’t remember the real thing, so you’ve got nothing.
NotMax
@Geminid
if the chef is scheduled to show up. Cold burnt pizza. Yum!
;)
eclare
@JML:
I was single when I went on a cruise with relatives. As I said, during the day we did our own things, but we got together every night, very enjoyable. Going with a group sounds like a good way to go on a cruise to see if you like it. I would never go on a cruise solo.
eclare
@different-church-lady:
How is your mouth?
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: We’ve learned a way to do that I think works for us. We’ve done some road trips but our more typical big family vacation is an approximately week-long visit to one or maybe two cities, not a lot of “if it’s Tuesday this must be Belgium” traveling around to many places.
It’s important for my wife and kid to build in one or two days of down time where they’re mostly hanging around the hotel or doing something low-intensity. (If we’re at a theme-park resort, or badly jet-lagged after flying across many time zones, I often need to do this too.)
They need more of that down time than I do. There’s always a part of me that feels like it’s a “waste” to do this especially when I’m in another country. But they’ll just burn out if they don’t. If I want to go exploring I can go off solo.
And that leads into the other thing. Now that my kid is a teenager and doesn’t require 24/7 supervision, it’s much easier for us to split up into ones and twos for the day. It’s absolutely crucial, vastly increases our enjoyment, for us to spend 2 or 3 days of the week splitting up and doing things apart that we aren’t necessarily all interested in. Just getting out of each other’s faces for a day keeps us from getting cranky about the enforced togetherness. Maybe other families are different this way, but we’re a bunch of introverts and I think that’s part of it.
My wife also usually insists on coming home a bit early and leaving at least one, maybe two vacation/weekend days at home for unpacking, laundry and recuperation before returning to work or school. I’ve learned the virtue of this.
Brachiator
Funny coincidence. Went to listen to a podcast of a talk radio host who was coming back from vacation. He talked about going on a Carnival Cruise line trip to Ensenada with 16 family members, a combination family reunion and birthday party for his mother. The people who wanted activities had fun. The people who wanted unstructured time, including the talk show host, had fun. He was totally off the clock.
His mother chided him for attending a captain’s dinner in casual attire, but he felt that the whole point was to be there totally un- regimented.
eclare
@Geminid:
I found hanging out on a deck and looking at the ocean to be very relaxing.
different-church-lady
@eclare: I’m a little worried things might be regressing. Gotta call the ENT guy about some refills. Thanks for asking.
eclare
@Soprano2:
To me driving is work, which leaves more trailer spots for frosty!
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Did someone say sitting on the porch with a glass?
;)
eclare
@different-church-lady:
Keeping good wishes for you.
satby
@different-church-lady: @eclare: me too, hope things get better for you.
plaindave
@gene108: Immunize yourself.
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
All employment under capitalism is extortion. As long as we people to derive power over others from ownership, it is a threat to freedom and a threat to democratic governance
ETA: Granted, I agree, cruises isn’t a strong example for capitalist excess. Arts and recreation have value.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: The human population isn’t going to keep growing exponentially–it’s more likely to stabilize and start shrinking by the end of this century. But spreading a prosperous Western-style lifestyle to more of the people who already exist means more resource consumption and environmental pollution.
But not everyone needs to do it in the very energy-intensive way that Americans do (everything built around automobiles with massive freeway and parking-lot sprawl), and it’d probably even be kinder to them if they didn’t.
I’ve seen lots of massive and confusing back-and-forth about whether “economic growth” in the abstract, which is a strange pretend thing about money, necessarily means growth in physical resource consumption–to the point of some people insisting this is axiomatically and tautologically true while others say it’s not even true today in practice. We obviously need a model for a decent society that doesn’t involve exponentially growing resource consumption.
But if our only alternatives are annihilation and “everyone is going to have to be voluntarily poor”, we’re going to choose annihilation. I don’t think there’s any way around that.
The social-media critiques of “late capitalism” really get me down because I’m inclined to follow interesting people who are inclined to repost things from other people who are really, really into “everything you ever do is morally wrong” critiques of capitalist society, and it’s easy to just be driven into the conclusion that, as people say, “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.
And then you can take that a number of ways. Some people seem to take it as license to just do whatever they want, since everything is equally immoral anyway. If every action is evil then nothing is.
But then there’s the terrifying possibility that there is no ethical existence under capitalism (the sort of Osama bin Laden/Unabomber Manifesto position).
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
You can reach that conclusion, as I have, and still further conclude that the best thing to do is use the tools available to work toward a more just society.
For what it’s worth, a kinder person making a desperation play might choose a hunger strike or self immolation over terrorism.
Chris
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
That I don’t disagree with.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
There’s no ethical existence, period.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Chris: There is an inherent power imbalance between the employer and the job seeker. The job seeker is under duress; without access to resources such as those owned by the employer, the job seeker can not survive.
The intent of the employer doesn’t matter. This is extortive.
E.
@Matt McIrvin: I often hear global population will stabilize and even shrink in some not-too-distant future, but I never hear the reasons for believing this to be so.
I personally get very little value out of most of the commodities sold today. I get a great deal of value out of community infrastructure like parks and public transport and public art, and places where people assemble, and universities. All those things are in decline though, in favor of shiny stuff and the fascination with the present and the self.
I would conclude that I am just different, but the things that bring me value don’t tend to be all that harmful to human and animal life the way our obsession with consumer products is. Smug comments like some in this thread (not talking about you) about the nature and value of capitalism strike me as shallow and not carefully reflected upon.
different-church-lady
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: off with ya.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@different-church-lady: I don’t know the details, but I’ve gathered reading this thread you aren’t feeling well.
Point is, I look forward to your more considered dismissials at a later date.
(D- ) Did not engage with the reading material.
Chris
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
Like I said, I don’t disagree. This is completely true.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@Chris: My bad, still getting used to mornings. ETA: And there’s my old nemesis, the double negative.
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: (D-) Did not engage with the reading material.
Another Scott
@Geoduck: Propaganda is a hellofa thing.
Nixon and Khrushchev visiting a US model kitchen in Moscow in July 1959:
“You build too many cheap houses! We build few strong houses that last long time!!!”
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@E.: Total fertility rate is dropping everywhere in the world, drops fast when people get rich enough that they’re not struggling to survive. In most of the leading economies it’s dropped well below 2 children per woman, so that eventually population will start dropping without immigration (it’s complicated because of “demographic momentum”–the delay inherent in children aging into reproductive age).
The countries where TFR is high–the thing the Population Bomb horror scenarios of the 1960s were based on–have been reduced to the poorest of the poor: a bunch of countries in Africa (and not all of them), and a few unfortunate places elsewhere like Afghanistan.
So some people are actually starting to freak out about a global population crash, and economies being unable to support their aging populations because of a shortage of workers. In the medium term, the obvious solution to this is to be OK with having a lot of African immigrants (voluntary this time, I hope), but people are racist so they probably won’t be OK with it. Of course, in the very long term, not even that is a solution.
Japan has been mulling this over for a long time. They basically decided to be OK with a shrinking population. What happens to them is an interesting sign of the future.
Matt McIrvin
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
Well, it’s like that old Peanuts cartoon where Linus tells Lucy our purpose in life is to help others, and Lucy says “then what are the others here for??” If all the people you’re being just to are as much a plague upon the earth as you are…
I suspect this kind of reasoning basically goes nowhere.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Same as any other.
Oh, no, not at all. What would creation be without life? Just a bunch of balls spinning. Numbers.
I can only conclude that the purpose of life is to experience creation. We humans have tools that allow us to experience more than any other life we know of.
It is therefore incumbent upon us to continue to learn, to refine those tools, and free all humanity to produce what it needs and use its time beyond that as it will. And, most importantly, to do so sustainably so the next generation after us can improve further.
If there is a god, it is all of creation. This is how we honor it.
Paul in KY
@Brachiator: I think I would have enjoyed a passage on the France or the Queen Mary, traversing the Atlantic. Not into bebopping around the Caribbean.
Have seen a Rhine cruise that looked interesting.
different-church-lady
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
I’m not locked in this lecture hall with you. You’re locked in this lecture hall with me.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
@different-church-lady: You’re too funny. Try to reel it in a bit…
Chris
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation:
No worries. Happens.
I think this is a life hack that a lot of the rich and powerful thought they’d stumbled onto when democracy first got off the ground (especially in America where “universal” suffrage came fairly early): sure, there’s no monarchy or aristocracy anymore, so you can’t order the peasants to do things, but as long as you control the things that the peasants need to have in order to live, you can still extort them into doing what you want, which leads to the same result. Thus, they could easily accept a political democracy, so long as it wasn’t paired with an economic democracy.
A ton of the problems that plagued nineteenth century America came from that dynamic. Employers: “Want to have any income at all? Then you’d better work twelve hours a day seven days a week with no bathroom breaks!” Political bosses: “Want your streets paved, your fires put out, and your criminals deterred? Then you’d better vote Tammany in the next election!” Churches: “Want to eat tonight? Then I’d better see you at church every Sunday singing loudly!” The Mafia: “Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call on you to do a favor for me…”
The sixty or seventy years of Progressive Era/New Deal/Great Society reforms did immense harm to all those petty tyrants by taking a bunch of things that they’d previously been able to use as levers to control ordinary people’s behaviors, and simply making them available to everybody as a right. The job was never finished, and there’s been regression on it in the last forty years, but it’s a lot better than it used to be. But we still need to do better.
Chris
@Matt McIrvin:
Not sure why the obvious answer isn’t “they’re here for us. And for each other.”
We’re social creatures. In animal terms we’re wolves, not tigers. Finding a pack and looking after the packmates comes with the territory.
wjca
Ah, but one other thing we have lots more of than you is hubris. Arguing to try something on the grounds that it works/has worked elsewhere is generally unhelpful — as in, seems to be worse than ignoring it. See, to take the most obvious example, gun control.
Chris
@wjca:
I roomed with an Australian for two years in college and I’m not at all sure this is true. I’m not saying it isn’t, but reasonable people can disagree.