Keeble

"the bird"

left wing bird, online and trying this " alternative social media" thing again. recently unionized barista. Weekly wikipedia streamer. ❤ @proxy ❤30. Avi: me!

last.fm listening


yes, they're undisputed germ pits as currently designed, spreading norovirus and COVID/ other things labelled as con crud willy nilly. yes, they're run off an army of mostly imported servant labour, working 10-12 hour days 6 days a week for, what, 800-1200 dollars a week? Yes they're environmental nightmares. But as ways that public space can be used and divided god do i love cruise ships. they're a perfect illustration of just how luxurious public space can be when some amount of private space is sacrificed. they're a perfect example too of how collectively paying for most things in an all inclusive manner results in a cheaper overall experience with higher quality of life. theres a reason that a lot of the room and board systems of colleges mirror cruise ship design, as do aspects of retirement homes and certain styles of living once common in the US like Apartment Hotels or hey arnold!-style boarding houses.

All those negative things i mentioned above are, in my opinion, solvable:

  • Cruise ships, because they're serving people on vacation and thus by definition are serving non working people like in a senior care setting, have a staff ratio of like 1 staff member/servant for every 2 passengers, who are not doing any work. if you invert this ratio to a much more standard 1 person not working (bc they're retired or in school) to 2 people working, the massive amount of overwork needed to support everything goes away to about 35 hours per person per week needed in work hours from those working. During the time off, people get collective public luxury.
  • Ventilation and cleanliness goes a LONG way towards preventing infectious disease. Basically, follow the ventilation measures the WHO did for their own offices or what Newton Public Schools did. While this wont eliminate disease it goes a long way. Also people wouldnt ALWAYS want to eat out as in cruise ships, so something that'd make sense too is to have groups of 40 or so people share large kitchen spaces but still have the option of eating in public spaces for a board cost; model this off of college room and board programs that are targeted at students who have small kitchens in their dorms too. Rather than one big dining room go for a lot of smaller roughly 40 person rooms surrounding a central kitchen; this minimizes airborne disease spread among eaters while decreasing time needed to move food from a kitchen to a dining area, with some sort of room service option like in senior centers also availible. In the rooms, id say some sort basic minifridge + burner + sink + toasteroven setup would go a long way, with more elaborate kitchen facilities shared. This would also apply to laundry; the most efficient way to do this would be to totally collectivize laundry like the way cruise sheets/towels already are (imo people are WAY too precious about only trusting themselves to do their laundry and it 100% is downstream of the racist reasons common laundry declined in the us in the last 100 years--a pervasive fear among whites that mixing their clothes with black peoples' clothes is Bad. Its the same ideology that lead to the decline of public swimming pools).
  • the environmental badness of cruising is largely from just how unregulated they are due to being international waters. both royal carribean and carnival have been fined millions for dumping both untreated sewage and oil(!) into the ocean. yes, only millions. Also, most cruises run on very dirty diesel fuel. Taken out of the need to be floating on water, things like solar and wind power and more electricity rather than fuel burning becomes more economical, also being in one municipality gets rid of the lack of regulation that comes from international waters

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