Tangentially related but wow, these yachts are a pure expression of the excesses of fossil fuel capitalism. These personal boats are extremely inefficient, far more luxurious than 99.9% of human's domiciles, and they are only utilized some small fraction of the year by their ultra-wealthy owners. It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions, rather than scientific research, philanthropy, or mitigating climate change.
> It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions
When the yachts are idle, which is the majority of the time, they are typically plugged into shore power and are thus just consuming electricity from the grid. The electrical systems of these things are typically far more efficient than your home because they must generate their own electricity when at sea.
As for the wasting of money, you'll note that most of the cost of building a yacht is labor because they are mostly one-off builds and can't take advantage of automation. The article mentions that they cost 10% of the purchase price per month in upkeep. The vast majority of those costs are labor.
These things are among the most efficient devices for transferring wealth from the rich to the middle class. I wouldn't discourage their use at all.
I also wonder how much of the yacht business is really about money laundering or tax-evasion. Like the art collecting world. If your company buys the boat in one country, reflags it to Panama, sells it in Monaco the next tax year... I don't know any details but I'm sure there's substantial room here to massage what numbers you present to various tax collectors.
Given how short the ownership tends to last (~9 months according to an anecdote in this thread), I suspect moving or protecting money is probably part of it somewhere. I also imagine a lot of it really is just wealthy people spending for fun rather than profit.
> It's truly a shame that so much money is poured into such utterly wasteful possessions, rather than scientific research, philanthropy, or mitigating climate change
Realistically speaking, are these areas lacking money? Will throwing more money at the problem solve it, or is it another one of those "nine women can't make a baby in one month" problems?
Really, I find it hard to care about what other people do with their own time, effort or money. I'm not trying to stan billionaires, but really, who cares that they bought a yacht?
These could consume the wealth of several billionaires, make a difference to hundreds of thousands of individuals, and still not make much of a visible dent in the scope of the problems.
Upon what are you basing this assertion? Wealth disparity is huge, and increasing over time. Specifically, the richest 1% of Americans own about 40% of all wealth, whereas the bottom 90% of Americans only own ~20%. This implies that "consum[ing] the wealth of several billionaires" would make a huge dent in wealth inequality, and could dramatically reshape society -- in both good and bad ways, depending on how the wealth is used, and depending on unintended consequences.
Also, depending on the problem you're trying to solve, "hundreds of thousands of individuals" could very well constitute your entire problem space.
From what I understand, the wealthy will rent out their yachts when unused. Especially for people who could barely afford the yacht in the first place. Still horribly inefficient and wasteful, but not quite so unused.
The specified reason is because they chose to spend their money on philanthropy instead of waste their money on luxury possessions that they don’t even utilize. It’s fairly circular. What was the reason you are alluding to vaguely? The assumption here is that the person in question already made enough money for this to be relevant.
philanthropy is just a symptom of policy failure. it's less wasteful than luxury possessions, but those efforts eat up a lot of capital costs just through staffing, etc
Both yachts and philanthropy have most of their money go to staffing costs, and at the level of wealth yacht buying happens at I assume people are spending based solely on their virtues.
The real question though, is why not both? Most people buying super yachts could probably afford to set up a philanthropic fund of some kind.
