The passengers don't seem to experiencing the same pleasantries that Carnival's PR office is spinning.

"There's human waste all over the floor in some of the bathrooms and they're overflowing--and in the state rooms," passenger Gregg Stark, who is traveling with his wife and children, told CNN.

Passenger Jonathan Evans emailed CNN Thursday, saying, "We are not allowed off of the boat despite the fact that we have no way to use the restrooms on board. ... The cruise director is giving passengers very limited information and tons of empty promises."

Even if they're generally well-behaved, children still tend to not mesh very well in adult settings. We tried very hard to not inflict our daughters upon other people while they were under ten years of age, because they got cranky and cross when tired or bored, and it wasn't really fair to either them or the adults with whom we were hanging out.

So, if we couldn't get a sitter for the evening, or talk Grandma and Grandpa into watching them while the Spouse and I traveled to some exotic locale on our own, we generally didn't go anyplace that we knew wasn't going to be kid-friendly.

Don't know if you read this guest post over at naked capitalism, but I'd recommend it for anyone who'd like a common sense explanation about modern monetary theory.

Here's an excerpt (bold is mine):

Modern Monetary Theory is a way of doing economics that incorporates a clear understanding of the way our present-day monetary system actually works - it emphasizes the frequently misunderstood dynamics of our so-called "fiat-money" economy. Most people are unnerved by the thought that money isn't "backed" by anything anymore - backed by gold, for example. They're afraid that this makes money a less reliable store of value. And, of course, it is perfectly true that a poorly managed monetary system, or one which is experiencing something like an oil-price shock, can also experience inflation. But people today simply don't realize how much bigger a problem the opposite condition can be. Under the gold standard, and largely because of the gold standard, the capitalist world endured eight different deflationary slumps severe enough to be called "depressions." Since the gold standard was abolished, there have been none - and, as we shall see, this is anything but coincidental.

The great virtue of modern, fiat money is that it can be managed flexibly enough to prevent both deflation and also any truly damaging level of inflation - that is, a situation where prices are rising faster than wages, or where both are rising so fast they distort a country's internal or external markets. Without going into the details prematurely, there are technical reasons why a little bit of inflation is useful and normal. It discourages people from hoarding money and encourages healthy levels of consumption and investment. It promotes growth - provided that a country's fiscal and monetary authorities manage it properly.

The trick is for the government to spend enough to ensure full employment, but not so much, or in such a way, as to cause shortages or bottlenecks in the real economy. These shortages and bottlenecks are the actual cause of most episodes of excessive inflation. If the mere existence of fiat monetary systems caused runaway inflation, the low, stable rates of consumer-price inflation we have seen over the past thirty-plus years would be pretty difficult to explain.

The essential insight of Modern Monetary Theory (or "MMT") is that sovereign, currency-issuing countries are only constrained by real limits. They are not constrained, and cannot be constrained, by purely financial limits because, as issuers of their respective fiat-currencies, they can never "run out of money." This doesn't mean that governments can spend without limit, or overspend without causing inflation, or that government should spend any sum unwisely. What it emphatically does mean is that no such sovereign government can be forced to tolerate mass unemployment because of the state of its finances - no matter what that state happens to be.