The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land • Hacker News Board

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#221

Post by meheleventyone » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

aww_dang wrote: post #211

SerLava wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

Leaving aside the issues with exploitation inherent in using power imbalance to experiment on the poor the OP is talking about a situation where you are “voluntold” and have not volunteered.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#222

Post by microtherion » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:11 AM UTC

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?

There's no place in the solar system that's remotely as habitable as Earth, even if the latter suffers a massive disaster.

Space exploration is more like Amazon spending $100B to build a hut with 10 Arduinos on the summit of Mt. Everest.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#223

Post by SerLava » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:12 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #167

SerLava wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 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. Explain to me what you think the difference bet…

I promise I will do that for you if you tell me you are having trouble differentiating between an organization physically capturing you and locking you in a box, versus an organization deciding which brand of mayonnaise they will bring to your table.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#224

Post by edanm » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:12 AM UTC

Alupis wrote: post #200

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UN doesn't have an army

No, but it's members do. And some of those members aren't afraid of using them, or their Navys, or Air Forces...

You're not wrong, but consider that there are plenty of atrocities, including slavery, happening right now around the world.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#225

Post by SerLava » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:14 AM UTC

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.

This is kind of the worst part- that they lack the historical literacy to recognize that they wouldn't even be the first. And they'll just dive headlong into it.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#226

Post by solveit » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:26 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #174

darawk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm glad you brought up cruise ships because, as you say, they are difficult to flee, and they have indeed been embroiled in human trafficking. Few people think that this means that cruise ships are inherently a bad idea; it just means that they should be done well. Why do you think seasteading can't be done well?

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#227

Post by aww_dang » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 8:48 AM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #221

aww_dang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...…

Leaving aside the issues with exploitation inherent in using power imbalance to experiment on the poor the OP is talking about a situation where you are “voluntold” and have not volunteered.

As opposed to the power differential between a federally funded, government operated research facility and poor US citizens? Would be nice if the OP could cite where residents of the special economic zone will be coerced.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#228

Post by tim333 » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 9:00 AM UTC

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…

> This is bleak, bleak stuff.

There have been a number of low tax, rule of law city states like Hong Kong and Singapore that did rather well and provided a refuge for many Chinese when China was going a bit nuts under Mao and the like. It's not all bleak.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#229

Post by voldacar » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 9:01 AM UTC

nickpinkston wrote: post #58

twright wrote: post #52

Seasteadding today seems a lot more like the ambitions of billionaires for their own benefit. I am not convinced they are interested in new forms of governance insofar as they are just interested in a tax-free region where they can skirt regulations on an absolute level. I might be convinced if the discussion around these new societies they want to build were more focused on egalatarianism. Otherwise, it sounds like…

[flagged]

Wow, people support political movements that would benefit them if they came to power? Tell me more, enlightened social analyst!

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#230

Post by darawk » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 9:21 AM UTC

SerLava wrote: post #223

darawk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Explain to me what you think the difference bet…

I promise I will do that for you if you tell me you are having trouble differentiating between an organization physically capturing you and locking you in a box, versus an organization deciding which brand of mayonnaise they will bring to your table.

Which organization is physically capturing you and locking you in a box, here?