Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession | Hacker News Reader

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession

dailymail.co.uk

21 pointscwan17 comments

It is time for Startup School to take to the ocean.

I think we should charter one of these vessels and sale around the South Pacific while building our companies.

We could fit 100 companies on board, charge each $100/day and turn a profit:

"You may wish to know this because, if ever you had an irrational desire to charter one, now would be the time. This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500)."

Anyone want on board?

Wow, $5500 a night is probably cheaper than a top stateroom on the Queen Mary 2, and a helluva lot bigger. On the downside, it probably doesn't include fuel or docking fees.

It would make an excellent lair for a supervillain, though.

Being a supervillain with a 'landlord' that you are renting you lair from is would be the equivalent of Bill Gates being a billionaire living in his mother's basement.

I was kinda assuming you'd pay the first month's rent while you got all your stuff moved in, then steal it and sail the seas, hijacking nuclear submarines.

...or like being a "private eye" who lives in a trailer home a short distance from his aging father's bungalow.

Don't forget that the engines in these things burn something on the order of 1 liter of fuel oil/second.

Looks like the beginnings of Rife's Raft from Snow Crash.

Google filed a patent for offshore data centers last year... http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/09/06/googl...

anyone know why there is 'loading' activity whenever I select text on the page? I noticed the same effect on yesterday's esquire articles as well.

They're probably using the same text highlighting code as esquire.

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/98o77/go_to_esqu...

Spot the glaring fact-checking failure in this article...

How about you just point it out to save everybody some time?

There is no big secret about it, which is the sort of reason the Daily Mail is Fail. It's just not talked about much outside of the business pages - there's no conspiracy to kept the fact of the anchored fleet covered up.

There are two reasons for it to be there: one is that a glut in cargo ship availability (due to the long order cycle) has coincided with the recession, so that the expected growth in shipping has stalled. Hence the large number. As for the location outside Singapore, it's handily just north of the equator and so not subject to tropical storms and weather patterns, meaning it's the handiest place is Asia to park a ship without paying port fees.

Sure, it's interesting that there's so much unused capacity gathered in one place, but 'secret'? I think not.

I guess the author hit 'replace all' when editing in the word 'Christmas' somewhere:

"You used to look Christmas from here straight over to Indonesia..."

Hint: first sentence

The daily mail is a sensationalist tabloid rag. Most of the article is probably BS.

I agree the mail is terrible, and as other comments have said it's no secret (try googling 'dry baltic index' for business news stories on the topic). But besides that, this article is far above the mail's usual standard.

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