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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

#151

Post by arrosenberg »

darawk wrote: post #146
arrosenberg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

It seems to me that the primary difference is your ability to reverse course once you have relocated if you aren't the guy at the absolute top. Rather, it's not the switching cost going in, so much as the switching cost going out - it's the same problem you'd face joining Scientology.

The original question I responded to is "why the fear of opt-in competition to the current model of governance?"

The answer is that meaning of "efficient" can vary widely depending on who wields power. At our current evolutionary state communalism works up to about 150 people. Beyond that, you need a higher level of government, and historically that means some form of authoritarian government. Since this idea is being proposed by tech-funded billionaires, I can apply a filter to history to glean some insight as to what happens when a group of wealthy sociopaths are given absolute rule over a state. Since I value popularly elected, republican forms of government and free markets empowered by organized labor, I would naturally oppose an experiment that will very obviously lead to more autocracy, servitude, and exploitation by billionaires seeking to bestow feudal fiefs on themselves.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#152

Post by SerLava »

darawk wrote: post #146
arrosenberg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

>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.

The problem isn't that someone else might choose something for you. That's not what anyone is worried about here. An incredibly silly comparison.

The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end. The potential actual consequences are infinitely greater than condiment selection.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#153

Post by klyrs »

darawk wrote: post #145
klyrs wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'm saying it's a risk, and directly responding to the notion that "for now" emigration is at-will.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#154

Post by dickeytk »

arrosenberg wrote: post #70
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…

> “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.

We’ve seen a bit of this domestically too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#155

Post by novok »

"Slytherin sweatshirt"

"sipping well water at his mountaintop compound south of San Jose"

"He also says, with a straight face, "

Next up they're going to say lex luthor bald head and evil villain laugh.

----

The principle has been done before. It's similar to free trade economic zones in other countries, shenzen is one example, or reproducing something like HK or Singapore in other areas of the world.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#156

Post by HaloZero »

all_blue_chucks wrote: post #129
BurningFrog wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A city of all billionaires sounds like a very small city. Also, hiring for service jobs might be hard :)

Why hire? There's no law against kidnapping or slavery on a seastead.

Because the UN will get on you. While this isn't an issue for some random warlord in Africa if you're a tiny island who still wants to operate within the world you're still fucked.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#157

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

HaloZero wrote: post #156
all_blue_chucks wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why hire? There's no law against kidnapping or slavery on a seastead.

Because the UN will get on you. While this isn't an issue for some random warlord in Africa if you're a tiny island who still wants to operate within the world you're still fucked.

The UN doesn't have an army

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#159

Post by nickpinkston »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #101
nickpinkston wrote: post #75

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…

I don't doubt a lot of the leadership and foot soldiers alike are true believers. I also was involved and earnestly believed in the cause, but the evidence shows that Kochs are dishonest in business and have done a lot of things for blatant self-interest rather than for a principled stance.

I think the Koch Brothers themselves actually do believe what they say, but it's also hard to not conflate:

(1) The government shouldn't impose such strict regulations on business.

(2) I benefit if the government doesn't impose such strict regulations on my business.

Further, you can see how their childhood led to their libertarian / no-holds-barred pathology because of their absent father who encouraged them to fight-it-out in all disputes and their strict (literally Nazi) governess - leading to them sueing each other and anyone else who gets in the way of their "freedom". It's a shame.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#160

Post by [deleted] »

fnord77 wrote: post #138
TimTheTinker wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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