I'm curious what the process is for rich people wanting to buy a yacht. I can't personally imagine ever wanting one. If I was rich I'd just rent one if I wanted to experience it (maybe they aren't for rent). AFAIK none of these people have any time to use them. Further, for me at least, if I was a billionaire, I'd much rather stay at some posh penthouse in the center of town than some inconvenient boat on the water. My fiction is some yacht mafia comes up to you and says "You're buying one or else".
> I'm curious what the process is for rich people wanting to buy a yacht.
Most likely you tell your PA to organise it.
But otherwise there seem to be a few companies making large custom yachts - you can see them in some seaside towns. The most obnoxious "we'll build anything for cash" I've seen was Sunseeker in Poole, UK (see https://maps.app.goo.gl/TCcRnqkCFKWLY6WF8) - they have a large number of multi-deck absurdly big boats on display all the time.
> than some inconvenient boat on the water
The inconvenient yacht designed to your desires and containing any equipment you want, that you hire the crew and a good chef for and just say where you want to get on / off? Yeah can't imagine enjoying that either ;)
Or "to death", yes. Same sentence structure works fine barring the occasional word order change in most Germanic languages (e.g. Kjøp en båt, arbeid deg til døde/til døds" in Norwegian. I can't find a way of making it rhyme in other Germanic languages, though.
(incidentally work/werk have cognates in German and Scandinavian languages too, but only as nouns (Werk, virke, verk etc.), hence the shift to "arbeid" in the Norwegian version; and "buy"->kjøp or e.g. German kaufen is extra odd, with English having retained a Germanic form while the others inherited a latin loan-word; yes I know this is a total digression...)
I think you underestimate how rich some are. I think the process is much more like everyone else, trying to buy something slightly more exciting each time. After the sixth smartphone you buy it becomes much more like a chore and less like a fun buy. So when you're bored with real estate you start shopping boats and when you're bored with boats you start with aeronautic/spatial.
>See, the power of owning a magnificent yacht like that is in how you’re telling the world that you’re beyond buying and selling. You have more money than there is money to have. You’ve transcended. There are no frontiers left for you on dry land
> Further, for me at least, if I was a billionaire, I'd much rather stay at some posh penthouse in the center of town than some inconvenient boat on the water.
Ah, you’ve just never visited Costa Smeralda :)
One of the most beautiful places on earth, but the hotels are terrible and will still charge you over 10k euros a night. The only way to enjoy good quality accommodation and service is to go on a yacht.
(Also a wonderful place to visit with a tent or perhaps a small sailboat, just stay away from the hotels and most local restaurants unless you want to pay 300 euros for a pizza)
I guess billionaires could still pay for that, but it sounds great to have your own place that you can move anywhere along any coast in the world, where you can entertain your guests and where service and privacy is exactly the way you want it.
It’s not a problem of being able to pay for it, I spent hundreds of thousands on an all-expenses-paid site inspection. The client was happy to cover because they were planning a 5M+ wedding. Despite the frivolous spending, I didn’t really have a good time. Money was no object, but I still felt like I was constantly being taken advantage of.
The big problem I had with Costa Smeralda was that despite the outrageous price tags, I was staying in a marriott room that would’ve gone for 200€ anywhere else. Eating a 300€ pizza that would cost £15 in central London.
It wasn’t like Courchevel, which carries similar price tags but also feels truly special.
From what I understood the Costa Smeralda properties only survive because of very old money folks whose parents were going there every year since before WW2. Besides me the youngest customers were in their 60s, there won’t be any left once they die off.
Perhaps the rumored Aman property will change this? I don’t know.
At least the yacht guarantees that the experience will be exactly what you wanted, even if you pay through the nose for it. It’s a portable ultra-luxury hotel you bring with you.
They're statements, not meant to be practical for the most part.
You can literally buy lightly used smaller cruise ships substantially cheaper than most super yachts - the cost is in customized expensive interior and in operating the thing with a large crew, not in the "bare" ship structure per se.
They're attractive to some exactly because the barrier to having one is far higher than for a luxury penthouse, to the point that the biggest ones are known by name and recognisable wherever they go because there are so few of them.
I've watched a few youtube sailing channels a few years ago. For these people (unlike the billionaire), they're all living on their boats. Basically it's not about the sailing, but about the ability to move around the world (picking and choosing the weather/seasons you want), experiencing new places, being very into water sports and activities etc.
So basically think having your posh penthouse, but moving it around the world.
There's rich, and there's superrich. This is a boat for the superrich. The superrich don't have to choose between a yacht and a penthouse, they have both in every city they frequent. They also do not necessarily use them themselves, the are often used to host and bribe (politician can have a month on the fully staffed yacht).
A friend used to be an electrician for a company building such yachts. Good money!
Yeah. However coup you think it is, it’s fouler. I wouldn’t try to throw one, I would be to afraid to have it break in my hand and then have to live with that awful stench for more than 5 seconds.
From the headline, I was wondering if there was a way to speed up a rotten egg process? Like drill a tiny hole in it and leave it in the sun? Otherwise I’d have to wait weeks/months for it to rot depending on geo
This was my first thought. Leave it to businessinsider to not even question where these Dutch people are going to procure their rotten eggs, most of them have never seen one.
Hmmm Dutch citizen here, it looks like the same bridge as the one where a I lived (Alphen aan den Rijn) and it looks close to Hefbrug, there are a couple of bridges, that have the "same look". One in Alphen aan den Rijn, Boskoop, This one and may be somewhere else.
Bridges like this can be "easily" dismantled. (If it's the same build/material/architecture as the in Alphen aan den Rijn.
The problem isn't that it's particularly hard or risky to dismantle the bridge. It's that this specific bridge is an industrial monument that holds a special place in many people's hearts and after the last restoration in 2017 a pledge was made that the bridge would never be dismantled or otherwise harmed again.
Then along comes Mr. Rich Man with his exorbitant needs and suddenly these promises have all become worthless. It's a matter of principle; people are fed up that the rules never seem to apply to the super rich and everything and everyone has to make way for their demands.
Why would you build a bridge that can be opened up and then promise never to open it up again, especially when there’s a shipyard on the other side of it? That makes no sense.
Because it doesn't function as a bridge anymore. It stopped functioning as a bridge back in 1993. It's a monument now, an industrial monument and part of the city's heritage. It's already permanently in the open state and more than high enough to let almost any ship through easily. Except for Mr. Bezos' new superyacht. That's why it would have to be dismantled.
It's a bridge for trains that now use another track, and it is permanently 'open' for normal shipping. Bezos' toy isn't a normal boat so they have to dismantle it, which includes lifting out the movable part in its entirety. This is not without risk to the structure, as has been proven in the past.
There are reasons to hate Jeff Bezos and the super-rich, but him buying a big boat from a Dutch company isn't really one of them.
Would you rather he bought the boat from a company in another country? Remember, buying luxury yacths is not the same as taking precious resources out of a country, and he doesn't decide the salaries of the ship builders.
The link posted here on HN doesn’t seem to work, but the anger is about dismantling a national monument bridge that was promised to never be dismantled again (unless, apparently you are quite rich and then you can get the promise broken), not that a Dutch company built it or that it took natural resources out of the Netherlands. https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/02/a-bridge-too-far-local...
Do you think the average Rotterdam resident cares nearly as much as the press and online forums would like you to think?
Also, I find it rather suspicious that none of these articles are actually discussing the technical implementation and potential issues facing that. What real risk does opening the bridge present?
I live here, people are upset and talking about it. The article I linked to also covers what you’re asking about, going over the perspective of the citizens concerned with breaking the promise as well as the perspective of the mayor and companies who believe they can do it safely.
Agreed, it will also be debated by our elected representatives next week.
In the end Dutch people tend to be pragmatic and I suspect it will be dismantled again, but we will see. At the same time, there is a strong sense of societal fairness and that being rich shouldn’t be able to buy you exceptions. In the meantime it is a real discussion that is happening, not anti-billionaire propaganda that no actual citizens care about.
That’s right, jobs matter too and that’s the discussion that’s happening (otherwise they would presumably just keep the promise to not take it back apart).
For what it’s worth, it didn’t go off the previous time without a hitch, it ended up being covered with scaffolding for over a year I believe. That was where the promise to never do it again originally came from.
My guess, informed by nothing other than my own cynicism, is that the Rotterdam city council will use the manufactured outrage to extract more money from Bezos to dismantle that bridge.
All this is does is hurt the local shipyard. Do you think the next buyer of a super yacht is going to build there? Or even smaller yachts now that there's a political limit on the size of ship they can sell.
Also throwing eggs at the boat just makes work for some poor souls who will have to clean it. The boat is designed to withstand the ocean, it can get wet and be washed.
This whole thing is so silly, I'm compelled yet embarrassed to comment.
What I'm getting at is that Jeff Bezos didn't plan for the bridge to be dismantled, he was probably not even aware of it, and him buying a big boat is besides Amazon's exploitation of workers, tax-avoidance and sucking money out of countries.
I don't even understand why a company would decide to build a boat in a location where it's impossible to transport it from there to the sea. The whole point of building a boat next to a port is so that it can be dropped into the sea with the minimum of hassle.
An obvious solution would be to built it without the masts, move it somewhere closer to the sea and add the masts at the end. This seems far more sensible than removing a bridge.
>I don't even understand why a company would decide to build a boat in a location where it's impossible to transport it from there to the sea.
It’s obviously not impossible to transport the boat to the sea.
> This seems far more sensible than removing a bridge.
Opening up the bridge is trivial, just look at it.
There’s little chance they won’t open it up, as that’d just screw the local industry by placing a permanent limit on what they can build inland of the bridge.
Instead they will most likely find a reasonable solution to safely and quickly dismantle the bridge and put it back together. This isn’t a hard problem to solve, and a lot of money is at stake.
There are multiple shipyards in Europe that were build hundreds of years ago and were never meant for ships of today's size.
Procedures to get these ships out include dismantling structures (as seen above), deepening the river by digging up soil, and backing up the river. The last two procedures have severe impact on wildlife and sometimes farmers whose fields and pastures get flooded.
Compare your life relatively to his. PERCENTAGE RATIO wise, you probably did as much bad as he has. Assume you did 10% really bad things in your life. And Jeff did also 10% bad things.
But the other 90% wow!!! (And your life too!!!)
Millions of jobs overall. Thousands of jobs directly and indirectly to build, furnish, secure and staff that yacht. Countless kids of those families. The ability for you to order anything and have it delivered to almost any part of the world in a few days.
Families taken out of poverty. Jobs for those who don't have them. Amazon AWS that touches the internet for almost everyone worldwide.
Those Dutch citizens should swallow those rotten eggs.
(Loved and visit The Netherlands, don't get it twisted).
Whatever, I'll definitely lose karma for this one. Don't care.
And how many of these did he steal out of people's previous places of employment ? E.g. small retail shops, book stores, etc.
Also there is quite a stark difference between employment and meaningful employment. I wouldn't consider being a tiny part of someone's megalomanic daydream a fulfilling place to be.
This thread talks about the "ability" to do harm. You don't need to own a car in order to park a car in the middle of a highway. You can rent one for instance.
What I meant is just that you don't need to be a billionaire to cause harm. Sure, you can find an example of somebody who has absolutely zero money, and cannot physically do no harm to anybody (e.g. because locked up in a prison or something), but that's besides the point.
The Dutch don't really care about his boat, but they care about a bridge. This bridge, "De Hef", is a symbol of Rotterdam. People are proud of it. Several years ago it was temporarily dismantled and almost permanently removed because it is no longer used. But the people of Rotterdam were pissed and fought to turn it into a monument, which they did. The officials made a promise to never touch the bridge again, except for maintainance. And now some billionaire comes along who wants dismantle the bridge because immense superyacht can't fit underneath. That's why people care
I doubt Jeff was personally involved in the planning. He might have just about been involved in choosing the ship yard based on examples of their previous boats. Beyond that I doubt he'd have too much involvement. Even the snag list will be left in the hands of the captain he employees to manage the boat on a day to day basis.
Might be, but it's just a terribly bad look, especially when you offset it against news reports of working conditions at Amazon. Or more local, the young Dutch people not being able to buy any house in the current market. It is not related, but just rubs people in a very wrong way.
I get it. It's utterly insane that some people are allowed to accumulate such wealth. That said, I think the only one you can really hold Jeff Bezos to account for is working conditions at Amazon.
to be honest this could also be seen as a protest against the government who allow the bridge to be raised or against the shipyard who pushed through with a design that clearly wouldn't fit without making the government's do this or against bezos who ordered a far too large yacht against the shipyards recommendations (if that happened)
I haven't counted them but many may be smaller than a majority.
We Europians love to brag about superior values and about culture. (Have to ignore how we got there) If we build all those things ourselves (which we didn't) they would be a better fit.
The Chinese have their own eco system with that dictatorial control over content and the slave labor which doesn't line up with our values but they do have their own thing. The US system of tracking and data mining ur mum for purposes of drone strikes also doesn't really tickle our fancy. Platforms that can kill off your business whenever they like in a "sucks to be you" kind of way is not really how we want things to work in Europe. If any stereotype can be had we are more of a "does what it says on the can" kind of people.
Definitely not for me. Amazon was the first corporation that let me buy books from around the world cheaply. They were shipping from US back then and it was way faster and cheaper to get books in English from them than from any other retailer. In my country I could maybe get some abridged stuff for learners from a very limited selection. Amazon improved my life so much I don't think any European company comes close. I've learnt English and many other things thanks to them.
Google for all it flows were the first with amazingly good search, first very good web based email and first very good maps with turn by turn navigation. It saved me and all of Europe so much time and money I don't think the whole of EU budget with all of the programs would ever come close to it.
Those companies offer tremendous value for hundreds of millions of people in Europe every day. Honestly I would rather have the whole German economy with their polluting cheating cars and idiotic EU programs that got snatched by grant seeking industries at the cost of bigger taxes for real business go bust than Google or Amazon.
I am still waiting for an EU company to come up with anything remotely as useful.
Not OP/GP, but i think they're refering to the classical American obsession with money and jobs. As in, it's okay to give huge tax breaks to a multinational corporation like Amazon or Foxconn so they open business in that location and employ a few tens or hundreds of people. Many times things have been evaluated that way ( X program will create Y amount of jobs or regulating pollution / increasing minimum wage will cost Z amount of jobs), and IMHO that's a bit of a narrow focus, even if valuable. When you only optimise for number of jobs, you can miss a lot of important things ( are these jobs any good, do they have any future, what's the ROI, isn't the money better spent in another way like infrastructure or education, etc).
I was just explaining the "jobs jobs JOBS" mentality. I disagree with the notion that people should be thankful to rich people for choosing to spend their money in a country for trivialities such as yachts. A few hundred jobs is not something to be fucking thankful for.
The lawmakers drew a line that favours the rich. When you have companies making millions paying more in taxes than the common folk who barely scrape by. The lawmakers do it because of the rich lobbying them. Something the most people don't have the money for.
For sure everyone does their best to minimise the taxes they pay, but when you are the richest person in the world with some $200 billion, maybe you should be doing silly schemes like charity for tax avoidance.
Heck I tend to minimise my taxes, but often I don't even have such opportunity. The best I can do right now is contribute to my pensions. I'm on a current tax rate of around 50%. Outside that, there's not a lot I can do to minimise the tax I pay. Compare that the rich, who through their lobbying, and their schemes have paid an effective tax rate of around 3% over 5 years.
My statement is ridiculous to the rich, not so much to the rest of the population.
Well, the bridge is designed in a way that allows it to be easily and safely dismantled.
The 2017 government promised to not dismantle it anymore, but 2022 government seems to disagree. The important part we're missing are the risk assessments from engineers involved in the project.
As far as I understand from reading the news, the 2017 promise was mostly given because at that time the local government had left the bridge covered in scaffolding for an excessively long time.
Apparently the bridge was redesigned and to be brought back in its old state (its a monument) was also made to be deconstructed. The previous version of the bridge was able to let ships through. Or so I heard.
And to think, he could have lobbied to change laws to pay a share of taxes that poor folks would think are fair, given money to feed people, paid for vaccines in poor countries, and a slew of other things that would likely support businesses and add to GDP in various places, but no.
Instead he's buying an obscene super-yacht - which probably has its own regular yacht and a few other ships that come with it - and dismantling a bridge to get it into the water. It is more obscene considering he could likely do all of this stuff without, you know, becoming poor - but it is only the really helpful stuff that isn't getting done.
I don’t understand humans with this anti business mania that has become popular these days.
Local shops sell products multiple times more expensive than Amazon does, so low quality that you have to replace them frequently, limited selection, bad customer service, bad return terms, expensive delivery …
Amazon has been a blessing to customers, and innovated a lot in this space.
I am not sure if I recall this explanation for existence of ultra rich people from PG. Today, a small group of software engineers can build valuable products that scale to millions or billions customers. The return to education and skills is all time high. They become rich, but also make most others better off too. I don’t think we should politicize it, become Luddites, throw eggs, or prefer a lose-lose outcome.
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I see strange comments in this post that don’t make sense. As for the quality of Amazon services, someone comments it’s poor. Fine, it’s an option, you may ignore it. The worth of companies is set by markets, others that apparently find it useful, hence the usage and valuation.
As for taxes, every person or small business I know hires accountants to minimize taxes legally. Tax evasion is illegal, and will be severely punished. There are nation states checking every aspect these big businesses to ensure they operate legally. Modify your tax code if you want (and be prepared for changes in businesses).
I think it’s well known that FAANG’s salaries are amongst highest in the market. These companies are careful, as poor treatment of people will be immediately all over media.
Finally, there is a comment: let’s tax the hell out of successful businesses anyways! Bizarre. Pure jealousy. It will not stop at ultra rich, will eventually engulf everyone and hamper innovation.
Whenever I search for anything on Amazon I get strange, unknown brands of things that look like counterfeit copies of the product I searched for. I bought my partner a new pair of binoculars for her birthday and I literally couldn't get them from Amazon even if I wanted to as the listings were just close-but-not-quite knockoffs, even when I searched for a brand name and product sku. That's what Amazon is now. It's a market for copies. I don't consider that a blessing.
Absolutly not, Amazon is a horrible shop, it's full of random crap, terrible ui, full of deceptive practices to try to get you buy some stuff like prime or whatever.
When searching for something, half of the search result is always super dodgy.
Amazon pays its workers more than most other comparable jobs. Amazon's primary employment business is already not particularly profitable. Amazon is worth what it is because shareholders value it highly, not because it's extracting fat margins off its employee's efforts.
>I don't see how Bezos adds any value, I legitimately don't.
Back when he was in charge of the company's day-to-day operations, he made a series of decisions that customers really appreciated, even if the employees didn't. These decisions lead Amazon to achieve dominance in many markets around the world.
In our customer-focused economy, rightly or wrongly, this is the definition "adding value". I'm completely on-board with the "work reform" argument that we should incentivise or legislate better conditions for employees (I only employ one person myself, but she is paid very well!), but the idea that good management is worthless and all value comes from labour is laughable.
Did you know that coops are perfectly legal in the US? You can start a competitor to Amazon that is employee owned. If Bezos isn't adding any value, you should easily out-compete Amazon, given how loyal the employees will be.
Here is an idea. How about we have dislike for those that hoard wealth, while the majority of the people live in poverty, and died of it.
How about we dislike those that avoid taxes like the plague, and yet, use all our services to their fullest extent.
How about we dislike those that exploit workers, turned a blind eye, and give a middle finger to most of their workers, and the people?
It's got nothing to do with jealousy, and everything to do with how horrible of a company Amazon is, and how its founder, and until recently its CEO, have let it become a horrible in the name of money.
I don't under people defending the ultra rich. The likelihood of the average joe getting to Bezos' wealth is next to zero. It's ridiculous to defend him despite all the bad he does. Before you say he adds to society by donating money or whatnot (e.g. Bill Gates), you know what works better? A good welfare system for those that need. One that would otherwise be funded partially by the rich's tax money that they love to avoid.
Ah right. The wealth that Bezos creates. The one whose workers are living pay cheque to pay cheque and barely scraping by. The one whose workers are peeing in bottles because they can't afford to be fired for taking a break.
It's not zero sum game because the wealth they create favours the investors. Not the population. The aim of a company is to create wealth for the investors. Not for anyone else.
I'm not sure why it is you're defending the rich in this thread, but your arguments have been overplayed for years.
