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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

> But he still couldn't get rid of it until this guy came along

Yep. There are always droves of "it belongs in a museum" crowds, but when you ask if they want it there is only silence.

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The sad reality is that there are countless more things in the world that belong in museums than there is museum space/staff to properly take care of it.

Or money. Note the Living Computer Museum basically collapsing after Paul Allen's death.

This was, sadly, a conscious choice made by Allen long before his death. Same as with his airplane and tank collection. He had plenty of time and legal advice to set it up with an endowment that could allow for its continued yearly operational budget and chose not to do so. His heirs don't care about his personal toy collection so it's been sold off.

The same thing basically happened with Malcolm Forbes' collections. It's perfectly normal for heirs to just not value things you've collected in the same way you did.

Which is why if you actually care you create an independent and well funded organization before you die so your heirs can't sell it all off.

Would that really be better than letting your family sell it to the highest bidder? The only real concern I see if its value falls below the metal it contains or the mover breaks it. If a family cannot sell and does not value it then whats the point of keeping it?

If one believes that collection should be for the benefit of the public, proper organization would remove it from the estate that goes to the heirs.

It wouldn't matter if the heirs value it or not, because it wouldn't have been theirs. Because he let it remain in his estate, he left it to his heirs to decide what to do with it, and clearly, they did not care to keep it as a public collection, nor to endeavor to keep it together as a collection. I guess I should have visited it when I had the chance.

I'm reminded of the sad case of when I saw the pinball museum in Baltimore once, it was quite interesting, a lot of pre-electronics paddle games and the sort, and naturally, a large arcade of pinball machines. :)

I went to go back one day with friends, and found it had permanently closed in the interim, apparently because they couldn't afford the rent. [1]

(People in that thread love to complain about only getting a 1Y lease - but if they needed to move in a hurry, there's sort of a time crunch, and the longer the lease terms, the less favorable they're likely to be, since the landlord probably wants to hedge against prices going sharply up over that window...)

[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/18wsn6/national_pi...

On any thread where the topic of various "collectibles" that surely someone wants comes up, there are tons of people who are "you can't just toss it" but somehow thy never want to take them off your hands themselves.

I totally understand the impulse but it's just not realistic to preserve everything.

>there are tons of people who are "you can't just toss it" but somehow thy never want to take them off your hands themselves.

It's not really realistic to expect everyone that values something to also be in a position to house and care for it. Someone can acknowledge that something should be protected and displayed without taking on the burden of doing it themselves.

This whole "if it's so great why don't you take it" attitude that comes up anytime someone laments the lost of a cultural/historic/artistic item is just negativity for the sake of negativity.

>I totally understand the impulse but it's just not realistic to preserve everything.

Agreed, but many of the comments here go too far in trying to denigrate the folks expressing the impulse without being able to act upon it.

Someone needs to pay to preserve it and the majority of museum collections are in a basement someplace. I don't denigrate people who want to preserve some collection but I also don't think it's realistic for them to expect "someone" to just do it for them.

It's like the computer history museum that closed

*Living Computer Museum

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