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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

#211

Post by aww_dang »

SerLava wrote: post #161
xwdv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK now Sea Citizen, you haven't been hitting your production targets... This is the third month you've failed to qualify for the monthly "bonus" scrip. After rent and commissary, I'm afraid that puts you in the red. And I don't have to tell you what that means. There aren't any open positions higher up, and you aren't exactly a top performer. The only way I see you digging out of this is signing up for the Human Init…

One of the stated goals of the project is to create employment in undeveloped regions. The plight of the unemployed in the 3rd world has never been cake and candy. Unemployed people struggle even in developed countries.

Another interesting contrast to your hypothetical is that in the US people are free to volunteer for paid clinical trials. Yet somehow you imagine the proposed alternative to be entirely malicious...

https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/recruit/volunteers.html

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#212

Post by stale2002 »

ehnto wrote: post #87
walrus01 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the free market has spoken!

That was usually my first thought when these projects come up. Who would want to live there? I can see why billionaires want to, but what about all the citizens that make up a real city? Why would a cook with a family and ambitions want to live permanently in the middle of an ocean, far from the "real world"?

If we are talking about blueseed, then the answer of who would want to live their is obvious (and was even in their sales pitch!).

The answer would be high skilled immigrant tech workers who don't have a visa, and want to be near the center of the tech world.

The way that the visa system worked, is that as long as you spend at least half your time, not in the USA, then you would be allowed to enter San Francisco as much as you want, otherwise.

Blue seed would be 12 miles off the coast of SF, so that would be a 30minute to 1 hour commute to the city. Certainly doable.

And Blue seed was advertising cheaper rents than the city to boot!

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#213

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

Its unfortunate that these efforts do nit understand that their hosts, the moment they see some self-organized community flourishing, will attempt to take over any self organized society.

A rich guy does something good that benefits a large group of people and generates wealth for all those involved, them an external socialist gun-holder neighbor takes issue with this unburdened group next door, and takes it over for the "good of society"

Its happened many many times and it will keep happening until the cost of attacking/stealing is so high as to prevent an outright takeover (only likely in space)

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#214

Post by friendlybus »

vanusa wrote: post #85
arrosenberg wrote: post #70

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.

It's their plain for the whole planet, basically. In fact it's what the whole idea of "smashing the state" has been about all along.

You would need a private military for that.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#215

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

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…

[dead]

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#216

Post by stkdump »

m463 wrote: post #163
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…

> A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I think this is preception, not reality. The US was formed with checks and balances amongst the branches of government yet there seems to be no checks and balances against government spending or taxation. The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achiev…

> The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achieved, or beyond.

Isn't that circular reasoning? Afaik, the Laffer curve just is a concept that discribes where the maximum tax revenue is (i.e. neither at 0% nor at 100% tax)

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#217

Post by tprice7 »

freehunter wrote: post #199
larnmar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That exact argument could be made against disaster recovery data centers. Why bother building a new data center and buying two servers when you could just have one and save tons of money?

The argument isn't that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's expensive, it's that we shouldn't colonize other planets because it's Pareto inferior to making orbital habitats.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#218

Post by aaronbrethorst »

friendlybus wrote: post #214
vanusa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their plain for the whole planet, basically. In fact it's what the whole idea of "smashing the state" has been about all along.

You would need a private military for that.

You’re in luck! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

Also, this story is wild: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/03/erik-prince-trump-uae-pr...

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#219

Post by Gibbon1 »

m463 wrote: post #163
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…

> A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I think this is preception, not reality. The US was formed with checks and balances amongst the branches of government yet there seems to be no checks and balances against government spending or taxation. The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achiev…

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#220

Post by grey-area »

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…

The same could be said of any governance model, including democracy, tyranny, monarchy etc.

Perhaps the problem is humans, not a particular system of government.

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