People who sleep aboard ship do so because they love sailing. My father bought a 30' sailboat from a man who used to live on it, sailing from place to place unt

People who sleep aboard ship do so because they love sailing. My father bought a 30' sailboat from a man who used to live on it, sailing from place to place until he bought a bigger boat to serve as home. Sleeping ashore in a hotel conveys "oh, this old thing?" vibes about your yacht. You don't really care about ships or sailing, you just bought it on a whim, because you're rich enough to do that. And yes, they are wealth signalling. I remember a white paper put out by Oracle about "Java isn't going anywhere". It included a photo of Larry Ellison's America's Cup yacht. To technical folks the yacht photo is ridiculous. But technical folks don't get to make large scale technical decisions, those are made by business people. And the yacht photo reinforces the central message to business types: Java is backed by a successful company with a billionaire CEO, so you can count on it for your business.