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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

#41

Post by skywhopper »

sovietcattle wrote: post #36
kauffj wrote: post #16

I think this is one of if not the most important issue in the entire world. We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy. Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest. A framewor…

"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest" That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the…

Wow, you are truly delusional. Markets don’t work in the absence of a governing body with a monopoly on force. If you relish the thought of explicitly living in a world run by gangsters, I guess it’s true we are headed that way. But the emergent properties of such a future do not include anything you or I would call “individual freedoms”.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#42

Post by shadofx »

mandevil wrote: post #26
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…

I can't see how libertarians would actually work in a space colony situation. Leaving aside how self-sustaining a space colony could ever truly be (Charlie Stross has written a lot about that), in a world as fragile as a space colony would be, I see fascism as vastly more likely than libertarian. If literally anyone can push the a button and kill a substantial percentage of the colony, you have substantially more ris…

The trick is to never have more than one human per ship. We would "wear" our space vehicles like an extension of our bodies, in the same way we consider clothing today.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#43

Post by SerLava »

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 human experiments on our residents, so why not? As long as they sign their names to it.

Just stay in Palo Alto or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes. This is bleak, bleak stuff.

“Do I want to create the first venture-backed city-state? Hell yeah”

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#45

Post by shipman05 »

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…

This future is dystopian (and likely). Sure, there might be a few libertarian or communitarian utopias out there, or maybe even a few safe haven colonies where persecuted groups or sects can live without fear of persecution.

But there will also be colonies that are absolute hell for their inhabitants: institutionalized chattel slavery, legalized pedophilia, animal torture, all manner of non-consensual sexual deviancy.

Just imagine if guys like Jeffrey Epstein could scurry off to their own solar system and build an entire society based on their wants and desires, far from the reach of international justice.

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#46

Post by dang »

sovietcattle wrote: post #36
kauffj wrote: post #16

I think this is one of if not the most important issue in the entire world. We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy. Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest. A framewor…

"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest" That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the…

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It leads to tedious, repetitive, and usually nasty discussions—see first reply below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#47

Post by dang »

skywhopper wrote: post #41
sovietcattle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest" That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes, therefore indebting and impoverishing the…

Wow, you are truly delusional. Markets don’t work in the absence of a governing body with a monopoly on force. If you relish the thought of explicitly living in a world run by gangsters, I guess it’s true we are headed that way. But the emergent properties of such a future do not include anything you or I would call “individual freedoms”.

Personal attacks aren't ok regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please edit such swipes out of your comments here. We've had to ask you this more than once before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land

#49

Post by peteretep »

smitty1e wrote: post #35

Down the road, the still hotter thing in Seasteading will be physical security. Do-it-yourself city-states will be like owning hard metal gold, and for the same reason: once you reach the tipping point of being valuable, you become a target to own/eliminate. For a more near-fetched, though not precisely analogous example of the this kind of issue, see Deepwater Horizon => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horiz…

There’s a much simpler example in armed attempts to take the Principality of Sealand
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