Given the wide range of styles, I would guess the artwork for these cards was lifted from various places around the internet.
I see no artwork credits, and found the source for at least one image: the character "Feng Bai" is an image of Esther Quek that's been put through some filters.
As someone not familiar with "Seasteading," this was a very confusing site visit.
I couldn't understand if the "game" took place on a cruise ship, or what the objective of the game was. At first, I thought this might have been an in-person LARP-style event at sea (which sounded interesting), but after reading the commentary here, I think it's just a way to promote their actual Seasteading fantasy.
Are you saying that it'd be rude of me to show up to their event as a level 13 half-orc cleric of pelor with a pouch full of foam balls to properly target my spell effects?
That actually sounds like a lot more fun and gosh I've missed LARPing over the past year.
They'll need a cleric when a blight hits their hydroponics or the virologist decides that a good way to make money is to poison the group and sell a cure. You could make good money fleecing them!
The seasteading idea makes me wonder how much it would cost to run an actual state (with a military/sufficient protection) based on distributed platforms/boats. Assuming said state could negotiate deals with ports around the world, it doesn’t seem that absurd. A few billion, maybe?
There is something of a historical basis for this, although of course without the tech and still based primarily on land. It’s called a thalassocracy.
The Hanseatic League was something of a similar phenomenon and actually not completely alien to what I’m proposing. As were a lot of pirate Freeport-type cities in the 1600s Caribbean. Medieval/Renaissance Venice probably counts too.
A better example would be the Phoenicians, who were a thalassocratic civilisation based around all edges of the Mediterranean Sea (North Africa, the Middle East and Southern Europe) who (IIRC, not a historian) were predominantly traders.
If I were to guess at how seasteaders would make money? Bringing things to you that you'd normally have to travel for (or are illegal) and pay a lot of money - medical and cosmetic tourism, gambling, that sort of thing.
Finance? Crypto? Just software in general? Development of technologies that are somehow hampered by regulations in larger states, but not ethically questionable enough to get invaded over. Or, said research could itself be funded by a larger state.
The last one is a plot point in a Ghost in the Shell episode, if I remember correctly.
> Development of technologies that are somehow hampered by regulations in larger states
What's actually on that list though? That you can't find somewhere with actual land that's will allow it so you don't have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up where you could also put this lab.
I think genetically modifying human embryos (think “designer baby clinic”) could plausibly fall in this category. Rich people (and their surrogates?) show up, get baby IVF’d and then go back to their home countries. Potential clientele, small high tech industry, not quite distasteful enough to attract a cruise missile or two.
Maybe the initial experimentation where we have to figure out the actual genes to tweak for these things but once that's through I think it'll be quietly everywhere.
> Development of technologies that are somehow hampered by regulations in larger states, but not ethically questionable enough to get invaded over.
If its that consistently regulated, there's likely to be sufficient will to come up with an excuse to take action against a vulnerable violator. And a nation of boats doesn’t need to be invaded, they just need powerful nations to impose sanctions (including second-order ones on trade partners) on them.
Not if the larger states want to benefit from the research without legalizing it themselves.
E.g. Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
The criticism that smaller states will just get invaded makes no geopolitical sense. If that were the case, the entire world would be divided into 3 countries.
> Not if the larger states want to benefit from the research without legalizing it themselves.
If the larger states wants to benefit from research without legalizing it...they’ll just do it covertly, without legalizing it. The reason to not want to legalize it is to prevent other people from exploiting it, which is definitely going to extend to anti-authoritsrian seasteaders and their other potential customers.
And if they did want to tolerate an external third-party for deniable benefit doing something the major state felt the need to keep illegal...well, historically (even when the minor partner has the resources of a traditional nation-state) that’s often a transitory relationship that ends poorly for the minor party. Ask Manuel Noriega—or Saddam Hussein—about it sometime.
> Guantanamo for research. Or Project Paperclip.
Yeah, Guatanamo-for-Anything and Operation Paperclip are the kinds of things states (even if they involve things the state wants to pretend to prohibit) really want to keep tight, direct control over.
You are labeling all SeaSteaders with the anti-authoritarian libertarian types. This is not what my comment stated.
Right now, states use each other to circumvent domestic laws. It really doesn’t seem far fetched that a larger state would allow a smaller one to exist if it were geopolitically/economically/etc. in its (the larger state) interest. If anything, it’s more likely, because they can be more easily controlled.
“Sure, we won’t invade your scientific seasteading research nation, as long as you share the results with us. “
Building the boats probably requires substantially more of a land presence than in former times. Relying on another party to supply the primary offensive and defensive weapon system, or most of the core components, might not work out.
> The seasteading idea makes me wonder how much it would cost to run an actual state (with a military/sufficient protection) based on distributed platforms/boats. Assuming said state could negotiate deals with ports around the world, it doesn’t seem that absurd. A few billion, maybe?
What's the budget of the US Navy? A seasteading "nation" would be eminently vulnerable to military attack unless it dominated the seas militarily to an absurd degree. It only takes a couple cruise missile or torpedo hits to sink a ship (and destroy a seastead), but you can't destroy a land based nation that easily.
Why would a seasteading nation be inherently more vulnerable than a preexisting tiny nation?
Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
These will not be anarchist communes, that's not what right-libertarians want. There will be a minimal government, funds for self defense, and so on.
> Why would a seasteading nation be inherently more vulnerable than a preexisting tiny nation?
Like I said, you can sink a ship with one or two missiles, but you can't sink even a small island with any number.
> Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
Because the whole point of seasteading is to not follow those nations' rules. Why would they offer military protection to a seastead that's trying to undermine them? The need for such protection also reveals the fundamentally contradictory and parasitic and nature of seasteading.
"Because the whole point of seasteading is to not follow those nations' rules."
There are many small tax havens out there with no self defence forces that don't get invaded. Why would a seastead necessarily not be able to enter into the same category as these?
Just with a little bit of imagination - the seastead island could be build next to a small/medium sized poorer country with some existing naval presence and come to some agreement with them to be a special economic zone of sorts, but with its own autonomous government. The agreement could be set up so as to be economically enticing to that country, while satisfying the seastead's need for self defence, and therefore be a win-win situation that goes ahead. The seastead could pay some tax money to this country for that purpose (right-libertarians usually believe in publicly funded defense).
This is not a perfect situation for the seastead. They're at the whims of that single country and whomever rises to power next. But it working out seems entirely plausible to me if the agreement is legitimately win-win. Especially in the context of having five distinct islands set up and allowing them to compete for citizens - even if one collapses, the ones that had better agreements with their neighbors will survive and grow.
It's not guaranteed to work, there are a number of failure modes I can think of (along with possible ways to remedy those) - such as the US pressuring the small country that's helping the seastead, but it's not as doomed to fail as others are making out, in my view.
> but you can't sink even a small island with any number.
Most countries on Earth could murder everyone on small inhabited islands perfectly fine with their current armaments while having zero casualties themselves.
It's frankly quite disturbing how many people dream of seasteaders being slaughtered without consequence while the world cheers it on, people simply trying to opt out of modern societies don't deserve this level of vitriol.
Pre-existing tiny nations are grandfathered into the international legal system thanks to, well, their pre-existence. Also, almost all of them are either (1) already bowing to the will of their bigger neighbors (e.g., all Caribbean micro-nations and the US, Georgia and Russia), or (2) in the middle of nowhere that nobody cares about (e.g., Nauru), or maybe both.
If any "seastead" gains traction and it becomes enough of a problem to, say, the US, nobody would even need any missiles. The US will simply declare it being illegal (for everyone) to do any business with these people. I hope the seasteaders have experience in subsistence fishing - they will need it.
The inability of seasteaders to see how storms and corrosion are going to get in the way of this little fantasy is breathtaking. I doubt any of them have ever personally sailed a boat through bad weather. The moment conditions get a little rough they'll be begging the Coast Guard for rescue.
This, I think, is the true defeat of SeaSteading - most of the original proposals came around in an era of booming economies when Strong Towns wasn't even a consideration and maintenance cost for infrastructure was written off as inconsequential.
Maintaining a city partially submerged in sea water is going to cost far more than maintaining a boring one built on land. You'll be paying Hawaii prices for meat, and likely need to import either soil or nutrients (if going hydroponic) to grow any fresh fruit - otherwise you'll need to hover near large ports of entry to leech off the existing supply lines for produce. Shipping companies will happily deliver container on container of fresh diverse fruit to LA, Seattle or Vancouver to sate the known demand of millions of residents - it'd be far less appealing to supply the one seasteader who has a hankering for dragon fruit with his weekly fix of... like three dragon fruits.
Absolutely everything about SeaSteading is predicated on the idea that everything would be cheaper without taxes... while also marking up the price of everything. I too would love not to pay for the military, but that's about the only service of significant cost you're effectively dodging while accepting so many other fees and expenditures.
Somewhat telling how none of the characters they offer have jobs that would actually be important here. You really need things like "general contractor", "boat mechanic", or "welder". Instead, they have things like "maritime lawyer", "encryption" (whatever that means), "zoologist", which would be almost useless.
Hard to become the megacapitalist most libertarians want to be (and assume they'd be) selling just your labor. There's only so much of you to go around, much better to be the capital class and push around ideas and people to make money.
The fact that most people interested in Seasteading are the kind of libertarians who think things like "building codes", "safety inspections", "occupational licensing of marine engineers" and "paying taxes to fund a water rescue service" are all unconscionable restrictions on their personal freedom is just the icing on the cake. You couldn't pay me to set foot on whatever floating death traps they might manage to cobble together.
Well that does sound like it will make the game more interesting, though... Maybe all they need is a psychedelic-mushroom-inhaling plumber experienced in dealing with death traps?
They could use their flexibility on scientific ethics from their libertarian values on hypnosis drugs and steroids (and weirder super power drugs) to maintain an (at first) easily controlled slave labor force to keep themselves safe (at least until the inevitable rebellion and/or disintegration of the society). Such a drug-based culture might be quite the shock to the bio-logy.
There are plenty of island states and micronations in the world today. Some of them, make money be letting corrupt people from other countries deposit money in their hidden bank accounts, or create shell companies to get around tax and finance laws etc.
These countries continue to flourish, even though any of the top 50 armies in the world could clean them up in half a week without breaking a sweat.
Why do you think a few thousand people floating out into open seas will be invaded, if they are not threatening physical violence against any other state in any way?
> Why do you think a few thousand people floating out into open seas will be invaded, if they are not threatening physical violence against any other state in any way?
Well, the mere existence of another state tends to lead to a diminution of whatever states are close by (within 200 miles). That's why in 2019 there was a seastead that got destroyed by the closest government (Thailand) because, even though it was in international waters, it was an affront to their sovereignty: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-18/bitcoin-couple-face-d...
Although they were less "invaded" and more "arrested"
Why would a seasteading nation be inherently more vulnerable than a preexisting tiny nation?
Couldn't the same bilateral relationships with large states be developed by the former that afford the same level of protection that's currently enjoyed by the latter? And if you think not, how is that not merely a failure of imagination?
I do agree however that a venture like this would be much, much more likely to succeed on land. I just don't see your retort as a foregone conclusion.
Do you think that governments are just going to start killing people just because they decided to live on a boat somewhere?
There are lots of things that many governments could do right now. But there is really very little reason for most governments to just start sinking ships, at random, even ships that aren't affiliated with a country that could protect them.
In practice, I would expect a sea steading "nation" to work out similar to any other tiny nation.
There are lots of tiny nations, around the world, but we don't see them getting nuked by the rest of the world, for no reason.
Right, nuking a small country would be pretty wasteful and politically expensive compared to a more usual tactic like propping up an oppressive regime who supports cheap export of natural resources, or in the case of a country with few resources, mostly ignoring them.
Exactly. That is what would happen. Small nations exist all over the world. And the reality is that they mostly just get ignored. We don't really see these video game plots being acted out in real life.
Seasteading would result in the same situation, as what happens to modern day, tiny nations. It would be ignored, beyond, of course, arm chair internet comments that fantasizing about the horrible things that people want to do against their political opponents (as usually happens, in threads about this stuff).
But the actual consequences would not amount to much.
It's a libertarian movement at the heart of it so most laws really. Taxes (especially taxes), drug regulations, finance, etc are the classics that get brought up.
HN has a bizarre nasty streak when it comes to seasteading. These disparate groups of people are trying to hack together a nation from scratch yet all you'll mostly find here is hate and derision for these dreamers.
My theory is there's something very primal in people's brains when others try to leave the tribe, they'll find any reason to castigate it, no matter how irrational.
Honest answer: In the past. A lot of snark is because the people being snarky already had long discussions in the past. Looking up old topics is probably a good place to read the comments/discussion.
Sadly this used to be a fairly good place for mostly-snark-free discussions, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. At least for some topics of discussion.
As well as more obvious motivations, it seems often used to preemptively strengthen the perception of an argument. There's obviously demand for wildly partisan positions on just about any subject online; Going straight to derision gets people otherwise disinterested in the topic "on your side".
Seasteading (at least in its current libertarian guise) has always seemed to me like a bunch of rich people just wanting to run (float?) away from the problems they themselves helped create.
Like how about instead of spending billions on floating company towns, you spend some of that money on helping the billions of people globally who are sick, homeless or hungry?
But no, they just want private floating pleasure palaces where they can avoid paying taxes and do drugs, while the rest of us schmucks stuck on land continue to subsidize their "Entrepreneurship" by paying taxes that support the infrastructure their businesses exploit, and paying for the negative externalities their "Disruption" creates.
Vote a government that reduce spending, and eventually remove taxes and the government itself.
Let infrastructure (health care, police && safety insurance, court system, roads, banking, army) gradually become private services you need to pay to use.
Companies won't be able to exploit infrastructure anymore, nobody gets their profits forcefully stolen by politicians on threat of violence (albeit some of the bureaucracy and management overhead will move to private companies).
I (and, reading their comment, the poster you are responding to) doesn't see that as a "solution for us schmucks". Instead, a solution for us is a government with more spending, higher taxes on the rich, and halting the privatization of government services (and in some cases reversing it, like healthcare).
The entire world of space science fiction is based on Seasteading like communities. Along with a lot of other fiction.
Are we that afraid of leaving the basement that we have to put down even a RPG based on the idea?
A real seasteading community or two around the place is enough to create a wealth of new fiction. You don't have to leave home to benefit.
We've had real sea communities 'outside' the law already. Some were blown up (Rose Island - Netflix), some not. But they contributed a real thing to this world, they were interesting.
I'm only vaguely familiar with the seasteading idea in general, but this page was a whole other level of confusing. Is it some sort of role playing scenario to test the viability of different forms of governance at sea? Is it for fun? Science? Profit?
> Seasteading is building floating societies with significant political autonomy. Nearly half the world’s surface is unclaimed by any nation-state, and many coastal nations can legislate seasteads in their territorial waters.
> The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit think-tank promoting the creation of floating ocean cities as a revolutionary solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems: rising sea levels, overpopulation, poor governance, and more…
Seasteading is not a solution to any real problem. It's like colonizing Mars or the moon - human bodies aren't evolved for either of those environments, and it won't make sense until we're post-biology to inhabit those places at any appreciable population volume.
Seasteading actually makes less sense than visiting Mars. Beyond living on an oil rig or research platform, there's only downside to life at sea: upkeep of the rig, importing resources, lack of fresh water, medical, and sanitary supplies. What you do have are rusting, corrosion, barnacles, bad weather, sea sickness, etc. There's nowhere to go and nothing to do. Just ask oil rig personnel how much fun their lives are.
What about trash and refuse? I imagine that's dumped right back into the ocean. Or damaged, partially submerged rigs that serve as shipping hazards? There are so many negative externalities.
Humans are terrestrial, and we're suited to live on land. All of our advantages are here.
It's like the 70s returned and they want people to live in biodomes. There's no point! No rationale worth any of the innumerable downsides.
We're not facing overpopulation. If anything, population growth in the 1st world needs to accelerate to match declining replacement rates. The earth has a much larger carrying capacity, and we're not even close to hitting it.
Sea level changes aren't stopping people from moving to Miami and investing in real estate there.
We're not going to see millions of people living "Principality of Sealand" style. It's as obtuse an idea as NFTs.
Uhh, we also weren't evolved to read books. We're post-evolution, even if we're not post-biology. There are plenty of people thinking through how we could have a sustainable society on Mars, not really sure why people couldn't do the same thing here. You're assuming negative externalities without seeing what people could think up. Also, as far as the Earth's carrying capacity goes, the footprint per-individual is much larger than it used to be. The traditional statement of carrying capacity seems to need some reassessment, because there's a really good argument to make that global climate change is evidence that we are past our current carrying capacity.
I personally don't find the idea of Seasteading compelling.
> Uhh, we also weren't evolved to read books. We're post-evolution, even if we're not post-biology.
Reading doesn't pose a challenge to our basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation), whereas Mars and seasteading do. The hill climbing barrier was considerably lower for our species.
Outside of the accomplishments for science and engineering, there is likely little benefit in building up Mars as a habitable destination for humans to live at scale. Unless the economies of space mining can support it, there's really no reason to be there beyond a thousand or so individuals.
I don't buy the astroid survival argument either. In the near term, putting humans on Mars does not de-risk the potential for an asteroid to cause human extinction. Mars colonies will likely still be reliant upon Earth for survival for a hundred years to come as they will not have adequate resources, support, or manufacturing capabilities for self-sustenance let alone growth. It's unlikely that a small colony could Matt Damon themselves back from the brink without a large industrial civilization backing them.
Research into enhancing human lives here on earth and protecting our environment will pay greater dividends. I'd even wager that advances in AI/ML, BCI, and biology outpace space colonization tech due to their immediate applications and inherent venture capital fundability. (SpaceX will be funded because of the DoD, NASA, and terrestrial communications. Mars not so much.)
> global climate change is evidence that we are past our current carrying capacity.
The current economic and political regime doesn't curtail dumping carbon into the atmosphere. The correlation with population is complicated. China and the United States, two of the largest contributors to CO2 emissions, have slowing population growth if you discount immigration.
I'm convinced he biggest benefit to colonizing Mars if we have the technology is that there won't be as many people there. If you can make Mars livable you can make anywhere on Earth livable even post climate crisis. The real thing that goes away is there won't be 7ish billion other people who also want to keep living trying to copy the tech and competing for those resources.
> Mars colonies will likely still be reliant upon Earth for survival for a hundred years to come as they will not have adequate resources, support, or manufacturing capabilities for self-sustenance let alone growth.
It'll take a hundred years after we start for the asteroid survival argument to be valid. A hundred years is too long, so let's never start.
> Reading doesn't pose a challenge to our basic needs
Having had developed a -7 vision by 12 years old, I'd beg to differ. Because of books, I'm completely useless without contacts or glasses in human "natural habitat".
There is some limited evidence that a lot of close focusing (e.g. reading) may contribute to myopia, but it's hardly conclusive, and certainly at that magnitude is unlikely to be a single cause.
Last I read, researchers had pretty convincingly isolated the primary cause as insufficient intense UV-bearing light (so, sunlight) exposure during a handful of critical early childhood years, followed by genes as a distant second major risk-factor for near-sightedness. "Too much TV" or "too much reading" had been ruled out as meaningfully affecting anything, once isolated from the "too little bright light during certain ages" factor. The supposed mechanism is that intense light plays a role in getting the eye to stop developing and changing shape at the right time.
We're post "natural" (for some definitions) selection. C-sections, pre- and post-natal care, life-saving medical advances, glasses/contacts, artificial limbs, ... Not to mention most people don't actually hunt or grow their own food, build their own shelters, or sew their own clothing.
But evolution is still happening.
(nit: I had this comment sitting in a buffer because downvotes on this thread and elsewhere subject me to the HN bad commentor rate limit.)
Yep, this is more or less what I meant by post evolution. We are clearly still changing by natural means, but for most of the existence of all living things in the world, change occurred by evolving. Humans change by using technology to intervene, and the rate of change of our intervention mechanisms is so massive that we’ll likely not notice evolution in any meaningful scale ever again.
What do you mean by "definitely"? Other than some evidence of evolving protection against HIV in Africa, I'm not familiar with any good evidence of modern day selective pressure.
Evolution is insanely slow and it will take a while for our bodies to catch up to us but it is a constant force that you're never "beyond". The only thing that might count as an end is detaching ourselves from the phsyical bodies that facilitate natural evolution (i.e. ascending to beings of pure energy or whatever) - and even in that case, we'd probably still constantly tweak and improve our existence, we just will have moved beyond natural evolution.
I think there's a thought that eugenics was a natural evolution of evolution[1] - and, as a society, we generally find that rather repulsive and don't do it... But just because we're aware of ways we can artificially speed up the process doesn't mean the process isn't continuing.
1. It's a thought, or conception - this isn't me endorsing eugenics in any way. I just believe that, mechanically, it could achieve a similar result just accelerated and with a lot of really important moral questions.
This is a game, however the Seasteading movement itself is earnest in their desires/efforts to accomplish one or more of these scenarios or some variation of them.
That's an interesting thought. However, inconsistency in propaganda is real if you consider embellishments can differ greatly. The key is to control the conversation. You can easily censor an RPG chat, for example, to the same effect
Games are also bad propaganda because it costs little to try different things. So censorship, while possible, cannot be hidden behind plausible deniability.
Similarly, a game implies a set of rules that can be criticized and cannot be made vague on purpose -- as required by motte-and-bailey and similar rhetorical tricks.
Yes, the grandparent was implying games didn't make good propaganda because the flaws in their model are exposed by playing with it, as if propaganda needs to be dishonest or false, but it doesn't. Following their reasoning, and your example, games could be effective propaganda tools for a specific category of ideas; those that have the self consistency needed to be made into a compelling game.
Just in case Georgism is unfamiliar to folks here's a pretty good historical run down of the game[1]. I wanted to highlight that monopoly was very much intended to highlight the capricious and arbitrary nature of capitalism - rather than being an endorsement of using cut throat tactics to race to the top. I feel like the meaning the game has has undergone a significant shift societally.
I agree. They literally want to create floating cities spewing pollution wherever they drift under the excuse that nobody else can legislate what they do.
Colonizing Mars is probably more realistic, because of the difficulty of existing countries to invade. But many of the same problems exist, like the libertarian dystopia that they want to put in place.
None of the game proposals seem to be any kind of libertarian ideal - they all have governance and taxation of some kind. Reading between the lines it seems that the seasteading game proposals are about trying to simulate what might happen under each scenario.
If true, this is a surprisingly unsure approach to something like Seasteading which to me requires a huge leap of faith. Is the game meant to be an educational tool or is it meant to trial human nature to test the assumptions of each of those scenarios?
Aside from all the focus on the politics of seasteading, I think this actually sounds fun, very much like a D&D campaign. Maybe it's a little euphemistic about libertarian ideas but like, isn't that kind of the point of games?
Seems like this is some kind of political movement to create autonomous floating mini states.
Have these people never played BioShock? This is basically the same naive libertarian ideas going wild.
For such an project to be successful you need to have some serious funding. Why should anyone fund this?
Any legitimate industry will have a hard time on the ocean where you have horrible logistics, nearly no access to resources and are miles away from potential clients.At best I could maybe see a niche for some gimmicky tourism.
So what would it be used for? Let's be honest: Tax evasion, human trafficking and gambling.
It would be way too expensive to live there for normal people. Plus it would more oppressive. You can at least flee from a tyrannical government on land. If you are in the middle of the ocean? Good luck.
Though I dig the futurism. As long a they keep larping, good for them. Just hope they don't think it is a good idea in real life.
>For such an project to be successful you need to have some serious funding. Why should anyone fund this?
<del>Not to support it, but Peter Thiel is a founder of the Seasteading institute[0], so funding shouldn't be a concern.</del>
>The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit organization, based in California. It was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel.
Looks like he gave up on it though[1]:
>In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Thiel said seasteads are "not quite feasible from an engineering perspective" and "still very far in the future"
> So what would it be used for? Let's be honest: Tax evasion, human trafficking and gambling.
I can think of a lot of uses besides those. Prostitution between consenting adults, fun drugs, medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc, testing of drones and driverless vehicles, playing lawn darts, and avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.
There are real world countries that you can visit for this.
For some reason, people that promote legalization are never willing to look at countries that have done so.
We have this here in Germany and I have to tell you, it is not a success story to say the the least. There is a huge problem with human trafficking. Yes, people always say it will go away if you legalize it. The data says otherwise, it gets in fact worse. All the red light district are also controlled by criminal gangs. They are mostly ignored by the state as long a they "help" with collecting the taxes. And this is what is happening in a strong state with a relative low level of corruption.
> fun drugs
Again there are enough states that allow them and the list if growing.
> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA
Same here.
> testing of drones and driverless vehicles
Sure you can test them. How else a companies developing them? Sure public roads are regulated, thank god for that. I don't want to die because someone wanted to test his driverless car in production.
> playing lawn darts
Why can't you in your country?
> avoiding obsolete regulations
Eh sounds minor and again lot's of countries to choose from already.
I imagine it'd be easier to build an indoor simulated lawn then trying to do that on a ship. And, well before the point where a gigantic ocean liner becomes economical - you could always get a custom set of lawn darts crafted for you by any sort of metal working shop or factory.
Heck, you can probably get them on Etsy from China.
To be fair, you can still play lawn darts if you have a set. I remember playing with a set of lawn darts, like the real ones with the spikes, with my cousins back in like 2004-2005, nobody came to arrest us.
Also Nerf has multiple options for lawn darts on sale that don't have spikes. And no one ever banned horseshoes or bocci which are also the exact same game/sport.
They just stopped selling the one particular variant, and not really because they were "banned", but because of the market realities of the low margins for selling only a somewhat fun toy versus the litigation costs and settlement costs from its injuries. If they thought there was big enough demand they'd slap a ton of warnings on it, include an arbitration clause in a jurisdiction friendly to them, and put it back in stores in a heartbeat.
You're mostly true. However, they slapped the warnings on the box in 1970. In 1989 they were banned, because kids (like, under 11) kept killing themselves with them.
A strong benefit of seasteading is that a small group of people can pick and choose which things they want to be legal. For example, you cite a couple things which are legal in Germany, but homeschooling isn't legal there, nor is vacuuming on Sunday.
Wanting to homeschool you kids but not being willing to give up easy access to legal prostitution is a very strange hill to die on.
I get what you are saying but Libertarians seem to ignore elementary freedoms in favor of picking really weird fights.
What elementary freedoms? Not having to starve to death. Not being bankrupted by health care costs. Not having to fear for my live. No having to live in a society where people lack basic education. Enjoying well maintained public roads. Being taking care of when getting old.
They have some weird ultra-naive definitions of freedom that only seems to include absence of rules. Like they see not being able to vacuum on a Sunday, not the freedom to enjoy a quiet Sunday. (Well at least I can dream about, it is not as enforced as people here probably believe.)
Everything is give and take. Societies thrive when people are willing to compromise.
The "elementary freedoms" you list should more properly be considered entitlements.
The advantage of the seasteading scheme is that different groups can pick different hills to die on.
There are probably people who would like the worst of both the US and Germany: no shopping on Sunday, alcohol only to be bought at state liquor stores, no noise at certain hours, no driving over 55 miles per hour. I think it would be great if they had a floating* island all to themselves.
People who seriously propose seasteading do not believe that a central authority has the right to establish the definitions of either "consenting" or "adult".
>Prostitution between consenting adults, fun drugs
Got to Nevada. It has legal fun drugs, blackjack and hookers.
> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc,
Oh no, safety reviews. I don't know what "medical drugs" the FDA has stopped, but I do know a lot of snakeoil.
> testing of drones and driverless vehicles
Testing both in the US is easy. Well, not driverless vehicles on all public roads. But seasteads have no public roads so that still argues in favor of the US (some is better than none). That's without asking how many miles of roads you'll get on your boat.
> playing lawn darts
Has never been illegal, and (again in the US) are available for sale. There was a period of time when they were illegal because regulations preventing them from being sold to and used by children were ignored for two decades. Probably by well-meaning libertarians. If reasonable regulations keep getting ignored, you should expect harsher ones.
> avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.
I'm not aware of that many obsolete regulations. I am aware of many regulations people claim are obsolete because they inconvenience them and they want a competitive advantage.
There are other laws libertarians would like to circumvent. Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs, civil asset forfeiture spring to mind. Starting a new country on the ocean is a pretty drastic way to fight back, but i can't deny the impulse to opt out when change appears impossible.
> Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs, civil asset forfeiture spring to mind.
Just out of interest: What kind of problem do you, personally, have with these that you are considering starting a new country?
And isn't it the issue that the rich can already circumvent laws just fine? How is all this going to help the poor who have to stem the main bulk of the tax burden while the rich use loop holes and tax havens? They ware not the ones that are going to live on the ocean.
I'm not the OP, but the three listed things are fairly bland issues by libertarian standards.
Occupational licensing: it's gatekeeping that drives up the cost of services, reduces competition and quality. For example, when I dislocated my shoulder, the offsite radiologist who read the X-ray declared that it wasn't dislocated. He was wrong. Luckily for me, the staff at the clinic ignored his diagnosis and reduced it anyway.
Over scheduling of drugs: In the US, cannabis is a Schedule I drug at the federal level. This is the same bucket as heroin and the date rape drug. Prosecutors can use (or abuse) prosecutorial discretion to decide who to pursue for cannabis offenses, resulting in unequal outcomes based on your socioeconomic status. As a Canadian, I can be denied entry to the US if I admit having used cannabis. This seems wasteful, and impairs useful things like economic migration or families visiting each other.
Civil asset forfeiture: there are perverse incentives here where: (1) the agency seizing the money gets to use it for their operating expenses and (2) the burden of proof rests on the person whose property is seized. There are documented cases of police targeting travellers with out of state plates, knowing that they are unlikely to return to fight their case in court. As someone who takes road trips through the US, this affects me.
If you want to stir the libertarian pot, you should talk about child labour, consensual slavery and selling body parts. Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs and civil asset forfeiture aren't that out there, IMO.
I'm pretty sure the libertarian idea of not paying any property taxes would just lead to rich feudal lords owning everything and everyone else paying them rent. Which is probably worse for everyone else than paying taxes which are at least nominally used for the public good.
I really don't know how not to violate HN's guideline to maintain a kind and openminded discussion when presented with such a straw-man. There's just no way to react to this that would be in any way sincere and not offensive.
Property taxes are viewed as among the least bad types of tax among right-libertarians. And since libertarians believe in some minimal level of taxation to fund the army etc, your comment is inaccurate.
It seems odd to me to trade a small but real risk of this should I decide to carry around large quantities of cash (and/or drugs) for the risk of being robbed by literal pirates with no real recourse unless you're able to fight them off personally.
You ever notice how “libertarian gone wild” examples are always fiction? Movies, video games, etc... while collectivism gone wild’s real-world failures are everywhere to be seen in even recent history? USSR, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, ...
Not that all libertarian ideas are perfect, but when you start building on top of the non-aggression principle, other problems seem so much more manageable.
Yes, but more likely the major naval powers would just ignore you unless you were doing something that specifically angered them (fugitives, human trafficking, piracy, etc).
Otherwise I think they'd be happy to let you sit there on your leaky little scurvy raft in international waters as long as you want. Piracy is a much bigger problem if you have anything valuable and aren't just sea hobos, but it's more likely the weather is gonna mess you up first.
> The long-wished-for Libertarian paradise where barbers don't have licenses and you can marry an 8-year-old is going to have to be brought about on dry land.
There used to be a lot more cleanliness issues with barber shops where they'd transmit various parasites and diseases. When the licensing and inspections were implemented these problems largely went away.
> If you're flying some made-up flag on the high seas there is no reason that the navy of some actual county can't just roll up and sink your stupid dinghy.
No, thats silly.
There are lots of tiny nations, with no ability to defend themselves, but we don't see them getting nuked for no reason.
The idea that just because some people decided to go live on a boat somewhere, that this means that nation states are just going to start murdering people, is just a made up story, in the minds of people who just want to fantasize about killing people who they disagree with politically.
Nation states would be harmed very significantly, on the political side, if they just started blowing up ships, for no reason, lived in by people who just want to live in the ocean somewhere.
The world is not some RPG civilizations game, where an unclaimed NPC boat, is going to be "taken over" for its resources. There are serious political ramifications, to this military fantasy that people have, about houseboats getting invaded.
> If you're flying some made-up flag on the high seas there is no reason that the navy of some actual county can't just roll up and sink your stupid dinghy.
There are two. On the level of rights and legality, there's non-agression principle. On the level of realpolitik, there's you being prepared to sink them first.
The NAP is a fiction made up by American libertarians. It is not a doctrine adhered to by the Russian navy.
The reality of the matter is that any vessel not flying a real flag enjoys no standing whatsoever in the laws or treaties of the seas. Freedom of navigation is a right of states, not individuals. If you are not a state or under the protection of a state (a real one, not a comic book one) then you do not have the right to navigate the high seas.
Which is why so many ships sail under the flags of states with the ability to protect them, like the USA, Great Britain, Russia or China, and not Panama, Liberia or Bolivia.
If you sink a ship registered in Panama, you have made war against Panama and transitively against the United States of America and all other signatories of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance.
If say Russia sinks a Bolivian boat, there are plenty of other major nations with navies that will get upset about it just because they want to keep the Russians in check. Not because they care about Bolivia. If the Russian navy sinks some stateless seasteading anarchists, nobody is going to give a crap.
> The NAP is a fiction made up by American libertarians.
That's true, but that's also true for any other human doctrine, from human rights to US constitution, so I don't see how it makes it any less important.
> It is not a doctrine adhered to by the Russian navy.
> There are two. On the level of rights and legality, there's non-agression principle. On the level of realpolitik, there's you being prepared to sink them first.
LOL. I'm pretty sure that even possessing anything close to the capability to sink a modern warship (let alone using it) will doom any seasteading fantasy through a concentrated application of unwanted attention.
Depends on how that capability is setup, I imagine. "We have remotely operated mines at a 5nm radius and HMGs for close-in anti-boat defence" would be enough to deter anyone without anti-ship missiles, but still more than enough to kill a modern warship that comes too close. (Modern warships are generally not stupid enough to sail into hostile mines, however)
I've got no idea how you'd be able to maintain a perimeter of mines in the open ocean, though.
> Depends on how that capability is setup, I imagine. "We have remotely operated mines at a 5nm radius and HMGs for close-in anti-boat defence" would be enough to deter anyone without anti-ship missiles, but still more than enough to kill a modern warship that comes too close. (Modern warships are generally not stupid enough to sail into hostile mines, however)
That doesn't make sense. A modern warship would have anti-ship missiles or aircraft with ranges far greater than 5nm that could fly right over those mines.
Also, such a defense doesn't protect against a blockade, which would allow the seastead to be defeated without firing a shot. I'd imagine pretty much all conceivable implementations would be utterly dependent on trade for basic and not-so-basic supplies. Another threat: a commandeered supply ship loaded up with hostile marines and law enforcement.
I flagged this comment because it is hysterical and does not contribute to the high-quality discourse this site is known for
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
As someone who supports seasteading, I want to emphasize that it is NOT about libertarianism or any other political belief system. It is about competitive governance. If your political system, implemented on a seastead cluster, provides a better quality of life to its members, it will attract more citizens; if not, it will lose people, money, and influence. If you want to implement a religion-based society, you can do that; if you want to implement Marxism, you can do that; if you want to build Hong Kong 2.0, you can do that.
Considering that living an aquatic life necessarily raises the cost of absolutely everything you use or consume - do you think that SeaSteading is actually a fair way to evaluate a competition. It seems to me that absolutely anything terrestrially based has a long list of natural advantages including: soil, a lack of being constantly exposed to salt water, potential access to natural resources.
I'd argue it's more of a right-wing idea than a lowercase-l libertarian idea.
Libertarianism (left or right) argues for reducing coercion in society; right-libertarianism wants to focus on property rights as the basis of that liberty (even though we already know where that leads). Hence why they have this idea of creating closed-off separate societies based on property rights that can internally structure their economies how they wish.
The cruel irony of right-libertarianism (at least, the stateless-capitalist kind) is that it's not terribly difficult to imagine a sequence of events by which one could construct the same arrangement of coercive governments through property rights rather than conquest. In other words, the ancap argument against sovereign nations is that the US didn't get clean title to it's land, not that it's inherently illegitimate or coercive to have one person control the land that another lives upon. After all, what's the difference between a government charging taxes and a landlord charging rent?
Likewise, the only reason why we don't have competition between governments to provide services to citizens is because sovereign nations collectively decided to not play such games. If you want to switch governments, you need to make an immigration case for yourself to another government, which involves fitting into a small number of restrictive visa categories with yearly quotas on how many new migrants come in. You are not allowed to "just leave" without having somewhere to move to, which is where most of the restriction comes into play.
This is, again, not materially different from a landlord who refuses to provide housing to people who don't make a certain amount of money. Something that, again, is very much up right-wingers alley. Hell, you can do this the other way around, too - high housing costs are effectively a small-scale shadow immigration system. If I want to move to California, I have to be fantastically wealthy, while long-term residents have the advantage of rent control.
I see no artwork credits, and found the source for at least one image: the character "Feng Bai" is an image of Esther Quek that's been put through some filters.
http://www.artofwore.com/blog/2012/11/19/girl-crush-esther-q...