Live data from Hacker News

The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

bloomberg.com

141–150 of 275 posts

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#141
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.

The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves.

That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt you've done the research I have on this, so I'll leave it as an exercise to you and readers here to read my links, critiques of them, and draw your own conclusions. Also, I'm not saying everything Koch's touch is all wrong, but you can usually trace it back to self-interest whether directly or as cover. They do a lot of focus grouping to get from, for instance: "taxes are wrong" --> "don't build expensive pub…

Thanks to my past life working in the libertarian movement, I personally know a lot of the people written about in these conspiracy theories, and have been previously accused of being a paid Koch shill with nefarious motives for expressing my genuine (research-based!) opinions on what I think is best for society. I've met some self-interested people on the establishment Republican lobbying side, but almost none of th…

The ideology just happens to align so well with the interests...

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#143
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except, it doesn't have to work like this. If a nation is being exploited via loopholes of some sort, she has the freedom to close those loopholes. An increase in small personal nations would necessitate a change in policy (mostly around taxes), but would not be disastrous. Aside from taxes, most other laws exist to prevent one harming another. If someone goes to an island in the ocean, why ought we to care what he d…

>many cities have regulations against shooting off fireworks due to safety concerns. Few rural counties do, because while people can still harm themselves, there aren't too many others nearby to injure. Many rural counties have them as well. In fact entire states have rules against fireworks. Outside of places where wildfires are likely, firework ordinances are often there to prevent the people who are shooting the f…

[deleted]

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#144
post #104
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…

What’s bleak about consensual human experiments? The volunteers who sign up are doing a great service for all mankind. There is so much to learn.

I’ll start with this one...

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2917810/elephant-man-drug-test...

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#145
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For now you have to assent to the idea and immigrate. Unless you're a victim of human trafficking. Or, for example, read up on how scientologists use their cruise ship [1]. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/world/scientology-cruise-ship...

So...your concern is that seasteading will promote human trafficking?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

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

Maybe they won't. You are, in a certain sense, assenting to it right now. Websites have exactly this governance model. Hacker News is run by a king. We all choose to spend time here anyway, because he does a good job responding to our needs.

A lot of things work this way, in fact. When you go to a restaurant, you don't get to vote on the menu. You order what's there, but you choose which restaurants you patronize. There is no, in principle, reason that the same cannot be applied to where you choose to live.

The primary difference is the transaction costs of relocation and the cost of mistakes. It's easy to go to a different restaurant if you don't like the menu. It's less easy to move. But some people are willing to make that tradeoff for more efficient governance.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#147
post #117

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.

Colonising other planets is a lousy idea; at the very best you could at massive expense colonise Mars, but it would be (a) almost certainly worse than Earth and (b) only s doubling of our resources.

Orbital habitats, formed by disassembling the moon, on the other hand, can give us vastly more habitable area than available on Earth, and the environment can be engineered to be better than Earth ever was.

Recently I’ve become convo bed that other planets don’t have much of a role to play in our future except as a source of raw materials.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Do I want to create the first venture-backed city-state? Hell yeah” Ahem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_Indies And we all know how well that turned out for the locals.

I like this game. Let's continue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State Nope, there's absolutely nothing that could go wrong here.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21824178

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#149
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…

>>is bleak, bleak stuff

Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar.

And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property"

If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain.

>not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation

"Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.

Post reply on HN