Live data from Hacker News

Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

newatlas.com

111–120 of 360 posts

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#111

The cruise industry is very fascinating to me. I think in the medium term we could see significant populations of people living long-term on cruise ships; it seems like the economic model is long-run more efficient (assuming the shipbuilding industry is very good at building these structures). You avoid the property tax, zoning, and regulatory burdens that go with living on land. It's likely safer because you're not…

Don't people disappear (fall overboard) all the time?

Also I would think diseases spread pretty easily on ships.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#113
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "raw dog" (in gen z parlance) I had to google that...... I'm afraid 'raw dogging' means something very different in Blighty!

Means the same "very different" something here in the US too... Maybe doing it in a cruise ship adds to the excitement ?

The term has been "repurposed" by gen z/alpha to mean having an experience in real life without filters.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#114
post #62

Cruise ships have a huge ecological impact everywhere they go. They burn colossal amounts of fuel, they produce lots of toxic exhaust, sewage, etc. A lot of destinations for these things don't exactly have a lot of regulations for any of this either. Just flying to your destination and staying in some nice place is arguably both better for the environment and probably a lot more enjoyable depending on your tastes. No…

They produce sewage that would otherwise not have existed?

Years ago, Key West built enough extra sewage treatment capacity to process sewage from the many cruise ships which visit the city. There was a plan to require all ships to discharge and pay for treatment so that sewage was not dumped 12 miles off-shore, which is only 3 miles past the reef. Captains get a bonus for fuel savings, so they tend to dump as soon as it is legal.

The cruise industry threatened to remove Key West from their list of stops, wrote some checks to the various non-profits, and the status quo was preserved.

The cruise ship industry is an ecological disaster, by choice.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#115

I watched the videos embedded in the article, annoyingly they don't show the cutting process just the splitting part but still. One thing I always appreciate about watching these sort ofs things is how much work and people goes into it, like the people repainting the hull and sides of the ship, looks like real hard but honest work and probably comes with a great sense of satisfaction to boot seeing the results of you…

The cutting apart of ships at their end of life in salvage shipbreaker junkyards is fascinating, terrifying, and sad in equal parts. This (and similar) documentaries of the salvage beaches in India show a lot of interior cutting: https://youtu.be/5jdEG_ACXLw?si=Jx7STIHrAEX0Hq6F

It’s a stark juxtaposition from these shots of clean, carefully planned and engineered operations in high-tech ports. Shipbreaking is often done freehand, based on experience and intuition, without much in the way of reference documents or safety gear.

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#116
post #33

This reminds me of the case a British destroyer from WW1. This ship started as two Tribal class destroyers, HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu. In 1916, the first lost its bow to a torpedo (and then running aground); the second lost its stern to a mine. The admiralty decided to salvage the remains by joining them together into a new ship, dubbed HMS Zubian. https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-f...

I used to have a car like that - relative in car business specialized in buying late model cars that had one end (front or back) in good shape, and other end wrecked, and would use the two good halves to make a new car. He used a jig to get the alignment precise, and claimed it was as good as factory. The car seemed fine - there was no way to tell.

A 'cut and shut'?

Where do you live for that to be legal?

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=cut+and+shut

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#117
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very informative, thanks. "none having to do with the ship sinking Titanic-style." It's rare, but not nonexistent. The Costa Concordia springs to mind. Schettino ended up with all the blame, but it did seem to be that there was some degree of institutional incompetence as well. But not with the construction AFAIK

The Costa Concordia ship was basically beached and turned. It did not sink, rather it collided with some rocks near the coast. This is very different from "sinking Titanic-style". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Concordia_disaster EDIT: oh hm, maybe you're right; like the Titanic it collided with something and water began to pour in, unlike the Titanic it was close to shore so the whole ship did not sink.

If nothing else there's the MS Estonia disaster[1]. Structural failure due to a wave impact leading the car deck to flood and the ship to sink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_the_MS_Estonia

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#118

The cruise industry is very fascinating to me. I think in the medium term we could see significant populations of people living long-term on cruise ships; it seems like the economic model is long-run more efficient (assuming the shipbuilding industry is very good at building these structures). You avoid the property tax, zoning, and regulatory burdens that go with living on land. It's likely safer because you're not…

It's already begun with some news articles noting that retirees find back-to-back cruise voyages less expensive than nursing home care: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/is-living-on-a-cruise-...

Is their nursing care on cruise ships though? Not exactly the same

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#119
post #33

This reminds me of the case a British destroyer from WW1. This ship started as two Tribal class destroyers, HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu. In 1916, the first lost its bow to a torpedo (and then running aground); the second lost its stern to a mine. The admiralty decided to salvage the remains by joining them together into a new ship, dubbed HMS Zubian. https://www.twz.com/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-f...

I used to have a car like that - relative in car business specialized in buying late model cars that had one end (front or back) in good shape, and other end wrecked, and would use the two good halves to make a new car. He used a jig to get the alignment precise, and claimed it was as good as factory. The car seemed fine - there was no way to tell.

This is called a 'cut-and-shut' and is considered to be extremely dangerous. There's no way you'd get insurance for one if you disclosed its origins, which he probably wasn't when he was selling them on.

In the UK at least, passing one of these off as a standard repair is illegal (it's a 'radically altered vehicle' and would need to be registered as such with a special licence plate).

Re: Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money

#120
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Means the same "very different" something here in the US too... Maybe doing it in a cruise ship adds to the excitement ?

The term has been "repurposed" by gen z/alpha to mean having an experience in real life without filters.

Well...... shagging in a car whist a bunch of blokes stand around watching and wanking certainly is an experience in real life without filters!

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dogging

Post reply on HN