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Vagenda and Pee-ara's avatar

Probably a cultural difference, in America, the boat you showed would be called a "boat." A "yacht" is a very large boat, with a captain and a crew, and is luxurious.

From Wikipedia: A yacht /jɒt/ is a sail or power vessel used for pleasure, cruising, or racing. There is no standard definition, so the term applies here to such vessels that have a cabin with amenities that accommodate overnight use. To be termed a yacht, as opposed to a boat, such a pleasure vessel is likely to be at least 33 feet (10 m) in length and have been judged to have good aesthetic qualities.

The Commercial Yacht Code classifies yachts 79 ft (24 m) and over as large. Such yachts typically require a hired crew and have higher construction standards."

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GlennC777's avatar

I suspect Jeff Bezos has given this entire thing about twenty minutes' attention. Twenty minutes seems about right. He knows it might do a tiny amount of short term damage and also that it'll quickly go away. Twenty minutes seems about right to make sure some short-term damage is mitigated. No more, because the long-term damage is beyond negligible. There's not a chance in a million that more than a fraction of a percent of his customers or even his employees (which are "fungible" at almost every level right up to Tim Bray's) are going to change their behavior by a single dime. The vast majority won't hear. The vast majority of those who do will shake their heads and do nothing. The vast majority of those who claim to boycott won't. The majority of those who initially do will come back. The rest are so tiny a fraction as to be entirely insignificant.

That's why the many comments promising to "be done" with Amazon dismay me. They imply an aggrandized sense of the importance of individual activist action when individual activist action is so weak as to be utterly unnoticeable. They *only* way to deal with the injustices inside Amazon, as well as Facebook, and Google, and inside virtually every company, large and small, from meat packing plants to ISPs to the Wal-Marts of the world is *collectively,* as a society, with rules, backed by force of law. Like, as the article points, out, France is doing. If you want to make change, apply your individual activist energies not to boycotting Amazon, because it won't change anything, but to putting rules in place that Amazon has no choice but to follow.

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