A 61-year-old hotel that has never had a guest | Hacker News Reader

A 61-year-old hotel that has never had a guest

fortune.com

128 pointsfunkyy45 comments

This is just par for the course in China. It is all about money laundering and not real mismanagement, the reasons are all "unclear" because these buildings are not built to be actually used...lots of corners are cuts and pockets are padded. So having an excuse not to open works out, and places the inevitable outrage into the next or next next administration.

uh, this story is about italy.

Sure.

But the point is that the money all goes to the local good ol' boys, whoever they are. The local contractors who pour concrete. Beyond that...well, no one cares.

So? It's the same story in countries with highish levels of corruption.

China's corruption is almost all a byproduct of rapid growth. Italy's lacks that growth right now so their corruption is coming from somewhere else, perhaps intrinsic.

It doesn't matter where the corruption comes from, the rules of the game for transferring money from public pocket A to private pocket B using sham projects are pretty universal.

Did you just say that Italians are intrinsically corrupt people? I hope that's not what that meant.

I think parent meant the Italian system of goverment and their society. It wouldn't make sense to imbide the intrinsic qualities of something as large as the Italian nation as a whole into their citizens at birth.

I don't care what political/economic system you have; if you don't have a way of Stomping out corruption--your system won't work, or won't work very long.

For all our(United States) faults, what I am most proud of is that corrupt individuals are eventually caught. It might take too much time, but in the end; they are usually caught.

Personally, I despise corruption, and nepotism! (I threw in nepotism because I believe the best person should get the job, not the guy who has networked the most? Plus, it's been on my mind lately.)

> For all our(United States) faults, what I am most proud of is that corrupt individuals are eventually caught.

Individuals, perhaps, but not groups. George Will has a great column today about whaling museums, the mohair subsidy and sugar tariffs, as examples of the sort of petty corruption which we fall prey to.

George Will's column: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-barnacled-budget/2...

>It is all about money laundering

Maybe, but (apparently) in China many dead malls that were never really used were built simply to raise the GDP.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-ghost-cities-in-2014-2...

That is the official excuse, but those malls are crappy, where did the money really go? Bank lends money to SOE, SOE is told by CPC to build, SOE contracts out to some cronies, cronies subcontract out to more cronies, and so on...lots of cuts are taken, and finally something cruddy gets built that isn't useable but it doesn't matter since it isn't needed anyways.

We would be better off paying migrant workers to dig and fill in holes. Then at least you wouldn't have a monstrosity to tear down in a few years.

Tearing down monstrosities doesn't seem all that worse to filling the holes back in to me!

A lot of waste and air pollution. Construction and demolition alone contributed heavily to Beijing's bad air quality.

Compare "paying migrant workers to dig holes" vs. "paying migrant workers to dig and fill in holes". When you do both up front, you won't have to pay to fix things.

Blargh. If you spend a few million on a mall that no one uses, you're doing it wrong. If you measure those millions as part of GDP, you're doing that wrong too.

>It is all about money laundering

If this is true, then they need to learn about software - doing a fake project to build a new government website is a much easier laundering effort. And foreign hackers are always there to be blamed for the system not working!

Have you ever heard of Italia.it?

Reminds me of the Prora, a weird Nazi hotel compound on the Baltic Sea that was never finished: http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/01/the-10000-bedroom-nazi-...

That complex has been used many times and is currentlybbeing partially used. It just never was the hotel it was supposed to be due to war and cold war.

> "Strength through Joy" ("Kraft durch Freude," KdF)

Interesting that kraft is analogous to both strength and skill in German. Similarly in old Norse it's both strength and virtue. In English craft is defined as skill, i.e. in making things, yet Northwestern European languages place an emphasis on strength. I wonder if it's because as the language developed it was a time when making things required more strength than mental discipline/skill, such as lifting logs and stone for constructing shelter, roads, retaining walls etc.

I wouldn't say "Kraft" is analogous to skill in German. In fact I'd be willing to say it's never used in that sense. "Fähigkeit", "Fertigkeit", "Kompetenz" and a few others are usually used for "skill".

"Kraft" can have a spiritual meaning of sorts (vitalize) though. "Kraft schöpfen" is often used to sort of mean gather your thoughts and get revitalized. That's how it's used in KdF. I guess "mental strength" fits most closely in the KdF example.

There's also an old-ish word "Geisteskraft" which means something like mental strength. However it does have a different connotation than skill.

> In fact I'd be willing to say it's never used in that sense.

I stand corrected. Based on a quick search, what I gather is that kraft tends to be used (in conjunction with other words) to define forms of force.

Thanks for taking the time to explain in-depth.

Think of the protest slogan in the eighties - "Atomkraft nein danke"

It would really surprise me if kraft meant virtue (which btw. really meant "manliness") in Norse. Maybe you could translate it with mana here in there but probably not virtue.

I was there the other week, i think things are finally on a roll. One building is almost finished and currently inhabited, another is being weather sealed which just leaves the other half dozen.

What's astounding is that the regional government can fund something to the tune of millions of dollars, then red tape it to death. Almost makes me wonder if the project failed due to the vicissitudes of political climate.

Those sorts of politics happen in companies too, which makes me wonder if there are similar "almost done, could be great, but never quite finished" pieces of software.

Looking at it simply, it's obvious that it was never designed to be opened. Seems as though large amounts of public money have been in play. If you look at the results it would seem to be that it was designed to siphon off funds.

It would seem that this was a success then. It take real skill to be able to siphon of funds for the same building 4 times.

The only red tape issue i see is the one were they forgot to ask for the funds. The drainage thing reminds me of a recent story about an airport in Germany (iirc), or for that matter how many highrises in Dubai are without a sewage connection, so each day 100s of tanker trucks transport sewage to a dump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Brandenburg_Airport

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/09/12/germanys-star-building-pr...

http://istderberschonfertig.de/

Machine translation works quite well with the last link.

> makes me wonder if there are similar "almost done, could be great, but never quite finished" pieces of software.

Absolutely there are. I worked on one project with ~30 other devs on one project for 3 years, then a change of management high up somewhere brings in a new guy who wants to make an impact, so he kills it and has the whole thing rewritten on a newer platform.

Makes you wonder what will happen to the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas

That thing is incredible. For those who are unfamiliar, it is an empty, uncompleted, unoccupied multi-billion dollar resort-hotel on the Las Vegas strip that was left unfinished after the big real estate market bust of the late 2000s. The outer shell of the building was completed all the way up to the highest floor, but the interior was never finished and according to Wikipedia it would require an estimated $1.5 billion more to finish to the point where it could open. It's been sitting unfinished in the middle of Las Vegas for years now, much like the famous Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.

The building itself is a sight to behold. Even in the outsized scale of Las Vegas, it's considerably taller than most hotels on the strip. I took a walk towards its end of the strip one night without knowing what it was, and after initially seeing it in the distance and thinking it was fairly small, it just kept getting bigger and bigger without seeming to get any closer. Finally I got up next to it and counted the floors in amazement. It's very surreal to see this giant unfinished monolith sitting completely dark in the middle of all the lights and activity of Vegas. Amazingly, it's still the #2 tallest building in the city (surpassed only by The Stratosphere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...

Similarly, in Bangkok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sathorn_Unique_Tower

Also stands in a central spot right next to pretty expensive apartment buildings.

Reminiscent of North Korea's Hotel of Doom more officially known as the Ryungyong Hotel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel

This is just a repost of the http://www.thelocal.it/20150716/grande-hotel-san-calogero-no... story. Pretty brasen by Fortune.

Seems it must have been resold via some kind of wire service, as seaching for it finds the same basic headline across a number of news sites.

Why is this article linked here? It seems to have very poor journalistic standards: An article about a money sink on sicily, home of the cosa nostra, without mentioning money laundering.

High journalistic standards mean that you only mention money laundering when you have proof of money laundering.

> it was finally completed in 1984

So it's 31-year old

While loading: “please tell me it’s not in Italy, please not here, please… fuck.”

Oh italy, you never change :)

Waste of public money in Sicily is outrageous even for italian standards.

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