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The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

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Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#131

Post by hindsightbias »

snidane wrote: post #96

As long as there will be people born there will be demand for land for it being the necessary condition for life and industrial production. Billionaires now looking for ways to acquire more land? Or to create artificial land on sea? Or to discover new continents or planets with new land? Nothing new under the sun. Guess where all the money acquired from current day monopoly industry ends up in era of zero interest ra…

This is the problem when you have more billionaires than land in Monaco:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/monaco-extension-sea/index...

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#132

Post by kiba »

rozab wrote: post #117
patrissimo1976 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid. I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something b…

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

We can do both.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#133

Post by TimTheTinker »

rozab wrote: post #117
patrissimo1976 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid. I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something b…

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years

That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#134

Post by glangdale »

mindcrime wrote: post #13

I don't know if they will ever succeed or not, but it sure is heart-warming to see people still pushing these ideas and trying to get something going. Competition is Good Thing and if we can come up with something better than nation-states, then we should. Personally I encourage these guys to keep experimenting, keep iterating, and keep pushing to break the mold. Maybe "government" as we know it today is a just a "fa…

I'm sure these guys' will have an idea of 'competition' that involves a suspicious amount of interaction with the economies of the "nation-states" that they are supposedly bettering (only without all that inconvenient 'taxing' and 'regulation'). It'd be rather a different vibe if they were talking about genuinely starting from scratch somewhere, somehow, but this almost certainly isn't the draw.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#135

Post by arrosenberg »

nsxwolf wrote: post #103
arrosenberg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why the fear of opt-in competition? Nobody is forcing anyone to move to these places. What they are is an opportunity to try out new governance modes. It's a governance mode that was heavily used throughout the European colonial period and it resulted in the rape and theft of the local populations and underclasses of all the nations involved. When you put things in the proper historical context, the hostility is ra…

Weren't there always native populations involved in these cases? That isn't the case with seasteading. For now you have to assent to the idea and immigrate.

Local populations AND the underclass. It's not like the entire population of the United Kingdom benefited from the largess of the Empire — the benefits accrued to the wealthy and the Monarchy.

What happens when you move there and some local strongman with the most weapons decides he needs slaves? Government exists because the majority of people got tired of being hassled by warlords, and they got banded together to create and enforce laws they could all abide by or one warlord was able to create a stable coalition for a time by taking responsibility for the justice of the land.

Why would anyone in their right mind, other than a warlord-wannabe billionaire, assent to this idea?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#136

Post by kapuasuite »

BurningFrog wrote: post #121
munk-a wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I like embracing the statement "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" I think we really need to solve tax havens before we can make more places that can serve as them.

The simple solution to me is that a country offers good value for the taxes people pay to it. Then people and their taxable assets will gladly stay.

This - although easier said than done in a liberal democracy.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#137

Post by dredmorbius »

echelon wrote: post #53

I'm immediately reminded of Sealand: https://www.sealandgov.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/se... They tried everything: hosting servers, their own currency, their own crypto. It never really took off, but it was a fun and interesting effort.

Or GGC:

https://panampost.com/adriana-peralta/2014/09/04/galts-gulch...

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#138

Post by fnord77 »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #133
rozab wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

> That's a bit of an overstatement.

After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so.

> I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.

The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best.

Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#139

Post by kapuasuite »

rtempaccount1 wrote: post #8

Ultimately any country/state needs a variety of services, from utilities like water/sewage/electricity to emergency services like ambulance/fire/police to a military to defend what you've got from other countries. you also need things like roads, telecomms infrastructure and other things that have been built over decades/centuries in established countries. You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with ot…

There’s a difference between Somalia and states that tax lightly and derive that tax revenue in economically efficient ways.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#140

Post by adamsea »

patrissimo1976 wrote: post #106
SerLava wrote: post #43

Isn't this the plot of BioShock? If this sounds like a dorky joke post, it's not. Isn't this literally motivated by the same neo-fuedal oligarchical narcissism that made the bad guy in BioShock build essentially the same thing as this? Tell me one of these "seasteads" won't get hit by some speedboat pirates and decide OK, we're gonna arm up and hey why not build down? And you know what? No one's gonna say we can't do…

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid. I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something b…

Well let’s not forget “moving to the new world” also meant they process subjectifying the people whose land it was, in order to take it.
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