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Pop Culture

Woman who lives on a cruise ship for free shares the 4 things she can’t do

Living on a ship isn’t perfect. It’s just close to perfect.

via Pixabay/Pexels

A beautiful ocean liner

Upworthy has covered a few stories about people who decided to live permanently on cruise ships because it's cheaper than living on land or in a nursing home. These stories have connected with millions because they say a lot about the modern cost of living but are also aspirational.

Christine Kesteloo has become popular on TikTok with over 680,000 followers because she shares what living on a cruise ship is really like. Kesteloo is the wife of the ship’s Staff Chief Engineer, so she gets to live on the boat for free. She only has to pay for alcohol and soda, which she gets for half off.

“I live on a cruise ship for half the year with my husband, and it's often as glamorous as it sounds,” she told Insider. “After all, I don't cook, clean, make my bed, do laundry or pay for food.“

Kesteloo’s life seems pretty stress-free. After all, she's basically on a permanent vacation. However, even though she lives on a cruise ship as a “wife on board,” there are a few things she either can’t or shouldn’t do.

She shared these four things in a TikTok video with nearly 10 million views.

@dutchworld_americangirl

I go through four things I can, and cannot do it while living on the cruise ship with my husband #weliveonacruiseship #4things #alaskacruise #cruiseship #cruiseshiplife #cruise #alaska #caribbeancruise #cruiselife #livingstsea #getreadywithme

1. No gambling

Kesteloo says she cannot sit at a slot machine and “play my heart out until I win.” She believes it would “look a little weird if I, as the wife of the staff chief engineer, won a big jackpot.”

2. Can’t leave the ship with the guests

When the ship arrives at a destination, she can't get off with the guests. She must wait about an hour and exit the vessel with the crew. When returning to the ship, she also has to be on time. “No, they will not wait for us,” she says. And the same goes for her husband, if they “miss the ship, someone else will take over the role.”

3. Sit in a crowded pool

Although Kesteloo has access to the pool, gym, and all the ship’s amenities, she’s cautious not to interfere with the guests' good time. She’ll exit the pool if it’s busy because “it’s just the right thing to do.”

4. Must have international traveler insurance

She must have insurance in case of a misfortune on the ship. But as a citizen of the Netherlands, they already have coverage and just have to pay a few extra dollars a month.

Some of the most popular commenters on the video were from women regretting that they married men who aren’t chief engineers on cruise ships or those who want to know where to find a single one.

"OK, can you explain how to marry a cruise ship engineer?" one female commentator wrote.

"How. in. the. H E double hockey sticks do I become the wife of a cruise ship engineer???? I don’t have to work AND cruise for free!" Cute_n_catchy added.

"Does he have any single friends with same job??? Asking for me." Hannah LaCaze asked.


This article originally appeared on 8.23.23

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Democracy

This Map Reveals The True Value Of $100 In Each State

Your purchasing power can swing by 30% from state to state.

Image by Tax Foundation.

Map represents the value of 100 dollars.


As the cost of living in large cities continues to rise, more and more people are realizing that the value of a dollar in the United States is a very relative concept. For decades, cost of living indices have sought to address and benchmark the inconsistencies in what money will buy, but they are often so specific as to prevent a holistic picture or the ability to "browse" the data based on geographic location.

The Tax Foundation addressed many of these shortcomings using the most recent (2015) Bureau of Economic Analysis data to provide a familiar map of the United States overlaid with the relative value of what $100 is "worth" in each state. Granted, going state-by-state still introduces a fair amount of "smoothing" into the process — $100 will go farther in Los Angeles than in Fresno, for instance — but it does provide insight into where the value lies.

The map may not subvert one's intuitive assumptions, but it nonetheless quantities and presents the cost of living by geography in a brilliantly simple way. For instance, if you're looking for a beach lifestyle but don't want to pay California prices, try Florida, which is about as close to "average" — in terms of purchasing power, anyway — as any state in the Union. If you happen to find yourself in a "Brewster's Millions"-type situation, head to Hawaii, D.C., or New York. You'll burn through your money in no time.

income, money, economics, national average

The Relative Value of $100 in a state.

Image by Tax Foundation.

If you're quite fond of your cash and would prefer to keep it, get to Mississippi, which boasts a 16.1% premium on your cash from the national average.

The Tax Foundation notes that if you're using this map for a practical purpose, bear in mind that incomes also tend to rise in similar fashion, so one could safely assume that wages in these states are roughly inverse to the purchasing power $100 represents.


This article originally appeared on 08.17.17

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Popular

Nonprofit exposes 'housing cartel' behind sharp rent increases across the country

"In Phoenix alone, you've seen rent increase 76% since 2016."

Photo by Daniel Tadevosyan|Canva

Nonprofit exposes reason behind sharp rent increases


It's no secret that there's a housing crisis in America. That's not to say that there aren't enough houses for people to live in, there are plenty of houses and apartments available, they're simply unaffordable. Over the past several years the cost of housing has increased to an amount that is so out of reach for the average person, that homelessness is on the rise as people unable to pay their rent are evicted.

While the housing prices continue to climb, wages have essentially stayed the same. This has led to people across the country making difficult decisions in an attempt to keep a roof over their heads. But most people have no idea why rental rates have skyrocketed in less than a decade. One nonprofit is exposing where this unexplained increase is stemming from with the help of the attorney generals' of Arizona and Washington D.C..

More Perfect Union is a nonprofit media organization aimed at empowering working people. Recently, the organization tackled the American housing crisis with a pretty shocking discovery.

There's a singular company behind the exorbitant housing prices in Arizona and D.C. though the states are thousands of miles away from each other. The attorney general of the District of Columbia calls the company an illegal housing cartel due to the tactics used and the money made. The company is called RealPage, which uses an algorithm that pulls from renters confidential information to skew the housing prices.

Landlords sign a contract to work with RealPage, but according to documents uncovered by the investigators, if a landlord pushes back against the rates, the company can expel them from the program. But what about all the empty units? There doesn't seem to be a concern because the rates are so high that the landlords still increase their revenue even when some apartments are empty for long periods of time.

This may feel a bit like a movie plot, but it's not science fiction. RealPage may be operating in multiple states across the country contributing to the unaffordable price of housing for American citizens.

a view of a city with tall buildingsPhoto by Gabriel Valdez on Unsplash

"We're talking about an algorithm that aggregates otherwise confidential information that the landlords have that ordinarily they would not share with their competitors," Washington D.C. Attorney General, Brian Schwalb says. "That allows then the algorithm to spit out a pricing recommendation. All designed to keep the overall market at its highest peak."

Arizona Attorney General, Kris Mayes explains, "they're not charging what the market can bear they're controlling the market. It's leading to the exacerbation of our affordability crisis, our housing crisis here in Arizona."

RealPage's practices are so concerning that the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice stepped in to remind landlords and companies of antitrust laws. "Your algorithm can't do anything that would be illegal if done by a real person," the text reads on the screen, in part.

Landlords who sign up are bound by the rules set by RealPage, which state RealPage sets the rental rates, leaving landlords little option to opt out. They company even sends out "policing agents" to enforce these prices by physically checking on the landlord and leasing agents. Landlords are lured in with the promise of increased profits, some may not realize at the outset that the prices their renters would be expected to pay would be unaffordable causing some to become homeless.

But with RealPage working with landlords across the entire state, every rental property would increase nearly simultaneously, leaving renters no choice but to pay more than they can afford. In reality this may mean getting second and third jobs, foregoing important medications, pulling children out of afterschool care to allow them to care for themselves and more just to afford housing.

The problem with algorithms setting rental prices and anything else that has to do with human needs is that computer codes are not human. They don't know that Alice living in 3B is a single mom out of work because she just had a mastectomy. An algorithm doesn't factor in that Marc in the split level is having to drive an hour every day to help care for his elderly mother or that Carol on the first floor left an abusive relationship and this was the only place she could afford.

Leaving the lives of people up to an algorithm can have disastrous affects, and the lawsuit the attorney generals are bringing will highlight that concern using RealPage as the example.

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Education

The amount of money Americans budgeted for food 100 years ago is mind-boggling

If we think our grocery bills are high now, it's nothing compared to what families spent in the early 1900s.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

Even if we shop at the most expensive stores, we still don't spend as much of our income on food as they did in 1901.

As inflation following the COVID-19 pandemic peaked in the summer of 2022, Americans keenly felt it at the grocery check-out. It seemed as if prices had gone up on everything, and our food budgets took a hit. Even though inflation has eased since then, many of us are still lamenting the amount we're spending on groceries and dining out every month.

A New York Post headline ominously pronounced in February 2024 that "Americans have not spent this much of their incomes on food since the Gulf War," citing a federal statistic that U.S.consumers spent 11.3% of their disposable income on food—a higher percentage than we've seen in the past 30 years.

But as they say, it's all relative. While we balk at spending 11% of our income on food, families in the early 1900s would have been thrilled at spending that little on food.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spent a whopping 42.5% of their household budgets on food in 1901, nearly four times what we spend now. In real numbers, that means the equivalent of a household with the current median income of almost $75,000/yr spending $2,610 a month on food. And that was the reality for a long time—even a few decades later in the 1930s, people were still spending more than a third of their income on food compared to our 11% today.

And the economy, while different in its nature, wasn't drastically different in terms of numbers at that time. The unemployment rate for Americans in 1901 was 4.0%, approximately the same as March of 2024. The country was between two mild recessions and it would only be two more years before it overtook Britain as the world's wealthiest nation. It's not like there was some huge economic downturn that had caused food prices to soar at that time. Food just cost a whole lot more relative to people's income back then.

Okay, so food budgets were high relative to income back then, but what about housing? Surely, people spent far less of their money on housing at that time, right?

Less, yes, but not by as much as we might assume. In 1901, housing made up 23.3% of the average household budget, while in 2022 it was 33%. Definitely an increase, but not as drastic as the decrease in our food budgets. (Caveat: Those percentages don't speak to everyone's individual situation—some Americans are spending upwards of 50% of their income on rent and utilities.) Our clothing expenditures have also gone down by a lot since 1901, from 14% of income to less than 3%.

So where is all of our money going to make our budgets feel squeezed? One spending category that's not even included in the 1901 statistics, which makes up double digit percentages of our spending today, is transportation. In 1901, the automobile industry was in its infancy, still a couple decades away from its first big boom that made cars commonplace. Now we have cars, buses, subways, air travel—and the fuel for all of those things—that people in 1901 simply didn't have to consider.

We also have technology like computers and smartphones now that have become more necessity than nice-to-have. And along with that, of course, we have copious entertainment extras that most of us can't imagine living without.

Another expenditure that doesn't show up in 1901 is healthcare, which takes up 8% of our budgets now. Did people simply not have healthcare expenses back then?

Basically, no, they didn't. According NPR, Americans spent around $5 a year ($100 in today's dollars) on medical care in 1900, primarily because there wasn't a whole lot of medical care to be had. We forget how far our advancements in medicine came in the 20th century, and that those advancements have a cost. Throw in the health insurance industry evolving in the middle of the 1900s, and now medical costs make up a decent chunk of our budgets.

It's fascinating to take a step back and look at the big picture of history when we find ourselves complaining about the price of a banana or a bag of rice. It's not that we can't or shouldn't feel frustrated when our cost of living increases, but when it comes to food budgets, we're living in pretty flush times, relatively speaking. Especially when we consider how much more access we have to different kinds of foods than ever before.

Fluctuations in retail prices have always occurred, of course, due to wars, recessions, etc., and some items have become more expensive while others have gotten cheaper, relatively speaking. But regardless of individual prices, if we find ourselves lamenting our curren grocery bill, it might help to remember how much more of the average budget food used to be. Even if grocery prices were to rise more, we still won't be anywhere near the percentage of our paychecks that food used to take up, and that's certainly something to be grateful for.

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