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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

#171

Post by yters »

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…

Isn't this how most other civilizations lived in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as small city states, until the recent entry (in the west) of eastern style nation states?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#172

Post by yters »

Everyone is hating on little city states like they are the bastion of human exploitation, unlike cough most Western societies in the past couple centuries cough. I guess no one realizes what happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and even the US just a bit over half a century ago. Hundreds of millions killed over political whim, anyone? Nothing Peter Theilians or even Scientologists can concoct in these seasteads will ever compare to the horror enacted by nation states the last century. I'd say the historical record is entirely in favor of city states for safeguarding human life.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#173

Post by vjktyu »

learc83 wrote: post #97
big_chungus wrote: post #51

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…

What stops Russia or China to send their troops there?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#174

Post by klyrs »

darawk wrote: post #169
klyrs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Human trafficking is a risk in any scenario, though. It's unclear why that's a salient issue here.

It's salient because seasteads are relatively lawless and, like Alcatraz or a cruise ship, difficult to flee without assistance.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#175

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

Will the billionaires themselves do the kidnapping/enslaving?

If it's done by henchmen, we're no longer in the "billionaires only" city state that I'm making fun of.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#176

Post by clarkmoody »

SerLava wrote: post #152
darawk wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

> The environment they are trying to set up makes them unaccountable and undemocratic, capable of entrapping and exploiting people to no end.

This is the environment, as it exists, for hundreds of millions around the world right now. So even if your critiques are true, we're no worse for trying.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#177

Post by clarkmoody »

darawk wrote: post #84
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…

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. They might work or they might not. I find the hostility towards people trying new things to be strange and misplaced.

One would assume that on a site like Hacker News, there would be more imagination and enthusiasm for innovation.

Perhaps it's mostly selection bias on articles like this one that brings out the comments we see around us?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#178

Post by BurningFrog »

arrosenberg wrote: post #93
darawk wrote: post #84

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. They might work or they might not. I find the hostility towards people trying new things to be strange and misplaced.

> 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…

ReallY?

Can you list a few historical cities founded under a similar model that had the awful results you claim?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#180

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

lisper wrote: post #30
keiferski wrote: post #17

Obviously it's sci-fi scenario, but the real solution (assuming that you see it as a problem) to overbearing and entrenched government power will probably be self-sustaining space colonies. Experimental governments on Earth are limited by the fact that [large state power] can invade you in a matter of hours for arbitrary reasons, no matter where you on are the planet. Fly off into the deep cosmos, though, and your ch…

> the real solution (assuming that you see it as a problem) to overbearing and entrenched government power will probably be self-sustaining space colonies Why in the world would you think that the politics of self-sustaining space colonies would not devolve into the exact same (dys)functional states (pun intended) as politics here on earth?

It's ironic that it's easier for HNers to imagine a future of utopian space colonies than it is to imagine wealth being taxed.
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