Comment by sheepdog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sheepdog | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps this is just my inner poverty showing, but how does something like this even happen, from a monetary perspective?

I'm assuming the owners had investors or loans or some other financial reasons that would prevent them from spending a lot of money and then simply parking it forever.

And wouldn't property taxes or city nuisance abatement fines nibble away at the property over the years? It can't be completely free of carrying costs, right?

Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?

I did some research and found that there was a huge court case that didn't go in the owner's favor. So perhaps the owner is too emotionally invested to cut their losses?

Or perhaps they are tremendously wealthy and using the loss to write off other business gains? Or maybe it changed hands through inheritance, so the owner doesn't care about recouping the initial investment? Or maybe I'm overestimating the remaining value, and the thing is already a total loss?

This is all speculation. But it would be very interesting to learn how such a large venture was left to rot...

I'm no expert in arcade games but often the case with niche assets is that the cost of getting them off the premises can outweigh their market value, and assets are only worth something to creditors if they can be sold to recuperate accounts receivable.

For example via my employer I technically own a large multi-engine aircraft that is worth some $70 million dollars but requires significant repairs, engineering and refurbishment to restore to airworthy status, to say nothing of the cost of logistics to actually get the thing to a repair and overhaul facility. Even the cost to move it to a disposal facility (shredder) is prohibitive and requires significant logistics.

So it languishes in an aircraft grave yard providing a valuable service as a bird habitat.

You can't post a tease like that :) Details? You got a blog?

>Even if there is no ongoing cost for the ship, wouldn't the owners rather have sold the furnishings rather than leave them to rot?

Organizations with more lucrative things to spend their man hours on tend to let abandoned projects just sit rather then liquidate them because the ROI of whatever they usually do is better than the ROI of liquidating a failed project. Property tax and other upkeep costs often wind up buried somewhere in a long list of similar costs from all the other real-estate the organization owns or leases or has to otherwise pay for. Things tend to finally get liquidated when a property needs to be sold or turned over like happened here.

Same mentality behind why each of us have a box of old VGA cards, 8MB RAM modules, and serial cables still in our closets that we haven't touched in years. You could sell them on eBay or Craigslist but for $0.50 per cable why bother?

There's a great 8-Bit Guy video, of him walking around a massive warehouse of brand new computers from the 70's through the 90's. Owner had a super sad story and was inviting anyone with an interest around the Houston area to take all they could. But how many can you fit in your car?

Found it. https://youtu.be/rvM82T3C2Ik

I don't know about this particular case, but it's not unusual for scenarios where an insurance or some other claim is made rendering property largely frozen / illegal to liquidate as anything but salvage.

Maybe if you sit on it long enough the statute of limitations can expire and you can do something more interesting than incur the costs of transporting a massive thing only to have it cut up for scrap, especially if you own land where it can just sit idle in the mean time.

There would have been a long period of time when those games would have been worthless.

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