I've told the story before on HN, but maybe it fits here too...
A great-uncle of mine lived in Eastern Germany. He bought a pleasure cruiser, about 28 meters length. For everything longer than 25m, he would have needed a captain's patent to operate, so he cut out a bit more than 3m at the rear, fixed up all the wires, pipes and shafts, and then had nice (even if imbalanced-looking) boat.
So he did the opposite of what the article is about :-)
Here in Alaska some fisheries and permits have historical length restrictions on vessels. In order to carry the gear, ice, and catch they wanted they would cut boats in half longitudinally and widen them.
A great-uncle of mine lived in Eastern Germany. He bought a pleasure cruiser, about 28 meters length. For everything longer than 25m, he would have needed a captain's patent to operate, so he cut out a bit more than 3m at the rear, fixed up all the wires, pipes and shafts, and then had nice (even if imbalanced-looking) boat.
So he did the opposite of what the article is about :-)
He spent most of his vacations on that boat, cruised up and down the rivers with his family. https://www.ddr-binnenschifffahrt.de/fotogalerie-gross/Passa... you can see that it ends pretty abruptly at the rear.