Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

For a good related time, please google for the skyscraper index by Andrew Lawrence. The TLDR is in a boring commodity market like skyscrapers (... or boats?) you always get the "worlds biggest" right before a financial collapse.

Anecdotally Parkinson's theory about fancy buildings mean a company is dying hold true across my decades of telecom experience. So if you look at this as the fanciest boat ever made not just the largest, Parkinson's theory applies and that corporation is doomed.

View on HN

Of course you will get the "worlds biggest" before any sort of collapse. Its like the same adage when trying to look for something 'it is always the last place you look'.

"I was going to build the world's longest suspension bridge, but then I found out someone had already done it." - Jack Handey

Can we really apply that kinda theory to this operation though? This ship is presumably the largest because they need to fit an entire factory on it, not because they are trying to one-up their competitors in some kind of gambit.

Indeed. This will be the first floating LNG (FLNG) processing facility, not just another Big Fucking Mega Boat(TM).

And there will be more of the FLNG facilities, too.

Studying and mitigating the effects of wave motion and wind interference is also a particularly impressive feat in industrial engineering.

Since the facilities will be rated to withstand weather conditions comparable (or better) to standing ones, one could even say that they're more reliable with increased uptime.

It is sort of selection bias. Large buildings (and boats) are more effective, so it makes sense to build them if you have enough money.

And comparing gas rig platform with 'fancy' luxurious boat just does not make sense.

If you think of it in terms of that they "need to" make such a construct to do business, as opposed to being able to do business without such a big investment, then it makes a bit of sense.

Not sure why the downvotes. You are making a valid point. If shell is making such big, complicated investment it means that all the low hanging fruits are gone.

They need to do it because there is no easy gas left to tap (for them). A lot of the good and easy stuff is under government control.

So it is a gamble. If they fail - it could drag down the whole corporation. If they succeed they will get quite rich.

Good news—Comcast is building a new skyscraper in philadelphia.

That's kind of like saying that you always find what you're looking for at the last place you look.

I don't think this logic applies to steamships. Larger vessels travel faster and provide an economies-of-scale effect that drastically reduces operating cost per unit of freight. The initial investment is large but in the long run it makes shipping a lot cheaper.

It's not like we are running out of luxury buildings or luxury yachts, so their prices are very unlikely to go up - but then can collapse. While in the meantime, as we have less and less of natural gas, its price will increase. Of course, it might collapse as well, if the demands stops. But I think it's a lot more likely that we would stop buying luxury yachts than we would stop burning fossil fuels.

Which corporation—Samsung, who built it, or Shell, who bought it?

Shell

Reply on news.ycombinator.com