@Nrdsb4 , I am sorry if I offended you somehow. If I’d paid a hefty sum expecting luxury and ended up with a traditional camping experience, I’d be complaining, too. I get it, but the fact that the bread wasn’t toasted wouldn’t be a reason. And I wouldn’t be overly dramatic as if my life were in danger. Attendees keep comparing it to a refugee camp, but it’s not like a refugee camp simply because they have no electricity, running water, or because they have nothing to eat except bread and cheese sandwiches on untoasted bread. They’ll live.
I’ve gone to several music festivals. Some didn’t live up to the hype and cost. Nothing this bad or expensive, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles. I also hate traditional camping, but have spent up to a 9 days on a sailboat - which is like camping on the water to me. You run low on rations, hit swells where you are feel your life is in danger and spend hours trying not to capsize in the middle of the ocean. I doubt many would feel sorry for me, but that’s OK. First world problems.
My comment was that I wouldn’t be overly dramatic as if my life were in danger. I haven’t heard of any muggings, but have heard about luggage stolen. Leave it unattended, take the chance it will get stolen. Sucks, but not life threatening.
It’s always awful when someone scams others and seemingly doesn’t REALLY care and wasn’t even there to help deal with the fallout. I predict some mega lawsuits from this debacle.
@1Dreamer -it isn’t that “unattended” luggage was stolen. The luggage arrived in a large shipping container and people had to dig through and find it themselves. Of course that didn’t work.
Once retrieved, there was no way to secure the luggage, or any other belongings as there were no locked rooms, only tents. Of course that didn’t work either!
There were no locked anything, other than passengers padlocked in the airport. People who didn’t guard luggage in their tents reportedly got it stolen (e.g. if they left their tent or things unguarded to go to the bathroom or find out what was going on, or for any reason).
There were some reports of beatings and thefts, but not any photo confirmation I’ve seen. Some reports of roaming wild dogs.
In the video link I left, the guy specifically complained about the bread not being toasted. I found humor in that, but it’s OK if you didn’t. I didn’t say it was OK that they got ripped off, which they did. Just found him to be overly dramatic, but life is too short for internet squabbles over such things.
Do you think the Frye Boot company is hating this festival? Months back when I first heard about it, I kept thinking it was sponsored by the boot company the first couple times I saw it in print.
Personally, I find Frye boots close to Frye’s electronics. This is simple but Fyre (pronounced like fire) because “it’s LIT,” according to founder scumbags.
One of the women who was hired to be a talent promoter wrote an article in The Cut and said that she had to fly to the island to do a site inspection. On the way there she says she was given instructions not to go into the ocean because there were sharks everywhere. Can you imagine this guy not thinking about how he might manage to keep thousands of people out of the ocean on an island? Especially at a music festival where there would be alcohol and drugs???
This particular woman quit 3 or 4 weeks into the assignment when she realized there was no way anyone could pull this off in the time frame left before the scheduled event.
She lasted longer than another guy who flew in and quit after 4 DAYS when folks weren’t being paid and were calling about that and he wasn’t able to get responses.
He was also shocked when he heard while flying in there were sharks in the water so couldn’t go into the water.
Some of the reasons why there is some schadenfreude is the customers being motivated in large part due to Fyre’s explicit marketing promising an not only a luxurious music event with fancy A/Ced villas, but also “insider” exclusivity playing on a sub-demographic who so desires such status that they are willing to pay hundreds or even tens of thousands for the seeming privilege.
The groups with this attitude seem to fall into two broad camps…those who are contemptuous of them for believing genuine exclusivity/insider status could be had by merely paying large sums for it(seems to come from those perceiving themselves as high status “genuine insiders” running in exclusive circles) or those who are contemptuous of them for being motivated by such SES-based exclusivity status seeking in the first place(Folks like many Obie classmates/alums from my undergrad years and earlier).
While a bit of this schadenfreude is understandable, what happened went well beyond the customers being “noveau riche upstarts” or “trust fund/rich idiots who deserved to be taken to the cleaners”.
The customers were ripped off and placed in genuine danger as shown by folks losing their luggage and/or getting mugged/physically assaulted by locals and even reportedly by security guards who were supposed to be protecting those customers.
Could you both be referring to the same person who wrote the following?
Some reports said some of the organizers were there in the only villa in the sea of shabby tents…and brusquely told the hapless stranded customers to “figure it out yourself”.
Doesn’t help that Ja Rule’s apology emphasized that he wasn’t at fault for what happened despite being one of the key organizers or that McFarland was quoted as saying that they were naive.
Doesn’t exude any signs of taking responsibility for the fiasco or even having an apparent clue as to how badly their enterprise flopped.
And a class action lawsuit has already been filed:
@HarvestMoon1 “… Can you imagine this guy not thinking about how he might manage to keep thousands of people out of the ocean on an island? Especially at a music festival where there would be alcohol and drugs???”
To be fair to the sharks once they ate a few concertgoers they would probably be sated.
I’ve been reading people’s tweets. Apparently they each paid $12,000 for the weekend. If he sold 50 tickets he stole $600,000. If he sold 100 tickets, that’s real money! I imagine they paid via credit card and he’s already moved the money. There are probably bank and fraud laws in Exuma that will let him slip away with a chunk of money. As someone mentioned performance art. A huge swindle.
I don’t think it was a huge swindle. I think the organizers actually thought they could pull it off without sufficient financing or without even remotely assessing the amount of work involved. They got in way over their heads. Then they doubled down and stuck to the their guns and went down with the ship (did I miss any analogies there)?
That is what makes it slightly funny and somewhat fascinating for me.
It is, as I mentioned earlier, like watching someone get up to do an oral presentation and realizing within a few minutes they didn’t prepare at all so they have to wing it. It is painful to watch but not without humor. It is a train wreck. You can’t not look.
So instead of being a way to swindle spoiled snapchat kids it was pure incompetence. Hubris. It was incompetence at an insane level and will be remembered as sort of a touch stone for anyone who ever has to deal with a millennial who is clueless. I happen to be a classroom teacher. I am not even remotely surprised this can or did happen.
We all know young adults that age. Is anyone here all that shocked that this happened? That people paid that kind of money to hang with models in a tropical paradise and not sense something wasn’t right? That the locals were not thrilled to see all these rich outsiders and take advantage of the situation? I love the Lord of the Flies and Hunger Game references. It reminds us all how close we are to starving or getting mugged kind of like after a major hurricane and the power goes out and you suddenly realize, without help, you basically have two days of food in the fridge and if you don’t manage that properly you might have to hunt in the woods to survive.
I don’t think this astounding level of incompetence is limited to the much maligned Millennial generation.
I know plenty of folks from the Boomer/Gen X who if they had attempted to plan something similar at that age or even now would have ended up with the same result.
After all, I doubt the folks running Enron/Arthur Anderson into the ground were Millenials…or even Gen Xers.
Same with Barings Bank before they ended up being bankrupted to the tune of $1.6 billion in 1995 because a group of Oxbridge/elite U graduate executives much more likely to be part of the boomer/older generations ended up being completely hoodwinked by a junior trader who never attended university because they never thought to institute basic security checks/balances commonly instituted in every other financial securities firms.
But here are a few things to consider. My dad’s generation dealt with the remnants of the Great Depression and WW II. My dad’s dad ran out on his family. My dad’s mom had an operation on her spine when she was young. Something went wrong and she ended up in a nursing home for the rest of her life. There was no lawsuit or anything like that. It was considered a mistake. Her life was ruined but that is how things go sometimes.
My dad was basically an orphan at around the age of 13 in a dust bow state. He hooked on with a friendly couple that raised him in exchange for him working on the ranch from dawn to dusk. If he didn’t work he didn’t eat. WW II might have been the best thing that ever happened to him because it was less work and provided an income he couldn’t have gotten any other way. The Navy also provided him some job skills. He stayed in 28 years. My mom’s journey, including not given much of a chance to educate herself, working in a sweat shop type factory, was very similar.
That was only one generation before mine. Compare that to the young people that paid all that money for a weekend concert to cavort with models and gourmet food and you might notice a few differences. The Fyre Festival isn’t just about the obscenely inept Three Stooges type organizers it is also about the large swath of the young generation who really think they are rock stars and intend to live like it every chance they get and if they can’t pay for it they will borrow money to do it. I am generalizing, sure. This site is skewed towards the parents of high achieving young people who do amazing things like get merit aid and NMS and so forth. They are not the kinds of young people I am alluding to really they are the exceptions not the norm. I don’t think one can sum up the millennials in a few cliches but if I had to this incident might work perfectly.
My father had a similar experience as he lost both of his natural-born parents by 10 and was forced to flee Mainland China as a refugee without any family at 12 in '49 along with many others due to the ongoing Chinese-Civil War and Mao’s takeover.
Once he arrived in Taiwan, he worked full-time during the day for a few years while attending night preparatory classes for students whose educations had been disrupted by the wars. In his case, the last time he attended classes uninterrupted was sometime in middle school and despite never attending HS, managed to score high enough on the college entrance exam to get free tuition to the #1 university and a complete full-ride(including room, board, books, and a small stipend) to the #2 university at 16 in the early '50s.
What made it more impressive was that he was not only competing against HS graduates who were a few years older, but also a multitude of older students whose undergrad educations were interrupted during the Chinese Civil War and had some undergrad under their belts.
After graduating college at 20, he had to put in his 2 years of military service as a conscripted lieutenant* in charge of an infantry platoon. Most of the conscripts were around his age or older and all the NCOs under his command were grizzled veterans of the Second-Sino-Japanese War/WWII and the Chinese Civil war.
However, among the accounts he related from that period of his life were several instances of inexplicable incompetence/idiocy among both career and fellow conscripted junior officers who were elite U graduates**.
As I said before, inexplicable incompetence/idiocy/hubris isn’t limited only to the much maligned Millennial generation.
This was an option for anyone who were able to gain admission to university and opted to complete undergrad before completing their service obligation due to a shortage of junior officers in the Army(especially infantry) at the time. This program ended up getting eliminated by the mid-'60s when this shortage of officers was no longer an issue.
** Apparently, accidentally shooting oneself in the foot with the M1911 .45 pistol was an issue due to university officer trainees overcompensating for the kick and there were a few instances when some officer trainees from his university officer training class almost fragged themselves/NCO trainers during live grenade throwing practice.