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Offshoring to a Ship in International Waters
JasdonLe writes "Sourcing Mag posted an article about Roger Green and David Cook, who hope to avoid US visa regulations that usually accompany outsourcing, with their company SeaCode, and a used cruise ship, sitting in international waters three miles off the coast of Los Angeles.""
Apparently, they have plans for 600 software engineers on this ship. Their major point of having them on the ship appears to be that they can maintain low costs to produce software, while only being 3.1 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. I am assuming they don't have to pay corporate taxes to any entity.
But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.
SourcingMag says that SeaCode will treat their workers fairly. That's great and all if we suddenly believed that corporations are honest and will regulate themselves. How many times have companys ran sweat-shops and claimed that they were treating their worker's fairly?
At first, I thought this was a joke. I am still unsure if it is.
Admittedly, I don't have much to contribute to this born and raised in the States, but it's not often we see something actually using a fair amount of ingenuity.. this is a cool idea. :)
Is this is the same David Cook who created the infamous TaskMaker game for the Mac platform?
Would it be cheaper, to use an abandoned offshore oilrig instead?
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
And while you're at it, why not just drop a super long anchor out at sea, declare your cruise ship to be an artificial island, and petition the U.N. to recognize you as an autonomous state?
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Countries can claim up to 200 miles as an "Exclusive Economic Zone". In other words, the US can't put an oil rig in the Persian Gulf 25 miles off the coast of Iran, and the Russians aren't supposed to send fishing boats to park 52 miles off the eastern coast of the US and/or Canada.
Countries can claim up to 24 miles as "territorial waters" which are then treated as being within that country. Pretty much. There are exclusions for ships merely transiting such waters to go somewhere else.
The US currently claims 12nm as territorial waters.
And there is a lot more backing that up than the US Navy. There is a whole series of treates going back at least half a century, and a body of international admiralty law going back 500 years or more.
Furthermore, since I think Reagan, the US (unilaterally) declared that its waters extend for 200 miles: the first 6 miles belong to the state, and the rest 194 miles belong to federal government.
Either way, 3.5 offshore is not International waters.
The IRS will point out to the proprietors that, while it was an amusing idea the first time it was tried (decades ago -- "Hey, if we operate a casino on the high seas then we don't have to tax winnings!"), they're still responsible for federal income taxes on income earned in places America has no soverign jurisdiction over. Thats why, for example, I have to file a tax return every year from Japan. Of course, the ship could just try to ignore them, but they'd have bank accounts and shore leave in places where the long arm of the law reaches quite easily.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I've wanted to do something similiar on a small scale for a *long* time now, I run my own consultancy and do most of my work for clients remotely, there's no real reason I need to be land based to do any of that stuff, so I started looking into maybe buying a houseboat on a local river, with the advent of wireless internet it was entirely practical to do so, and I thought that I could travel up and down the river and drop anchor closer to clients and thus have a shorter commute in the event that I ever did need to make onsite visits. That turned out to be a fairly feasible idea with no obvious gotchas, you run diesel generators for excess power requirements with a large battery pack hooked up to solar and wind generators, and you're fairly self sufficient when it comes to low end energy requirements.
This is from a twenty five year old guy that had lived all his life on land, and I have to say I consider myself a fairly practical person, so something about the entire idea just kept hitting me the wrong way, it had that "no, this is pie in the sky, it can't happen" feeling to it, and I just couldn't figure out why. I went into dramatic levels of detail in speccing out the lifestyle, you can purchase water generators which will create freshwater from seawater using nothing but energy (provided from the aforementioned power infrastructure) and there's plenty of storage room in a houseboat for food, which is pretty much the only thing you cannot harvest directly from your immediate environment.
That last statement triggered my attention and I thought, well, what about the ocean? What does it really take to make ocean passages on the high seas? or even just clinging to the eastern coast of Australia? If all the provisioning you've done so far works for a houseboat, why wouldn't it work for an oceangoing vessel?
So I looked into that some more, and found it very interesting indeed, there's an entire subculture, admittedly mostly of retired people, that live onboard their sailing yachts, travelling the world mostly at leisure. They had all the facilities that I had imagined you would need for a life at sea, large capacity batteries, solar and wind generators, backup diesel capacity, watermakers, etc etc etc, and lived almost entirely self sufficiently, travelling where they wished, when they wished.
This sounded like a pretty ideal lifestyle to me, I'm actually currently in the process of saving up enough money to buy a suitable vessel for precisely this purpose, investigating further I found that catamarans provided a very good level of stability and comparitively low preparation time, as monohull vessels would tend to have a more severe angle of keel whilst under passage, catamarans were a better choice for a real working environment.
The only remaining hurdles are *absolute* global internet access, and raising enough money to buy the catamaran itself, I've tentatively decided on a Perry 57 catamaran, as I figure if I intend to spend the rest of my life on a vessel, I had best get something I'm not soon going to tire of.
I hope by the time I purchase the vessel broadband global satellite access may be a step closer to reality, if not it will likely be mostly hugging various coasts for doing actual real work rather than wandering the ocean blue at a moments notice and entirely on a whim, but even that is a hell of a lot more freedom than a five day a week desk job back on terra firma.
All I can say is, it sounds crazy, but it isn't. The only reason I can come up with that this deep seated belief that it really is insane remains with me is that we're conditioned from birth to believe that the infrastructure modern society and government provides us with in order to aid our survival is so complex that we could never hope to sever that link, because if a large amount of people really did do this, it would greatly reduce the current "democratic" and utilitarian justifications for the absolute power of modern government.
Don't take my word for it, though, if you're feeling restless, ill at ease, whatever, investigate it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results of your enquiries.
um... you do realize it's a freaking pleasure ship, pleasure being the primary word here. The entire boat was designed for people to have fun on, you make it sound like a jail.
The pleasure does not derive from the ship itself, it derives from the crew that is there to care for you and to provide you with luxury. The pleasure also derives from the ship being something new and different.
If you want a ship that is a more appropriate comparison think the navy. You get food, quarters, laundry, exercise room, etc. Yet the chaplains have to keep an eye out for the kids on their first cruise getting suicidal. A shipboard workplace gets old very fast.
Any ship up to Lloyds A+ should be able to do this, and cruise-ship are supposed to have slightly better tech anyway - all those lives at risk etc. Of course, the titanic...You'd probably tick the engines over once in a while.
Offshore refuel and repair is relatively easy. The ship would have to be dry-docked occasionally. You could do that in Mexico. But it's still expensive.
Technically feasable but would the "savings" be worth it? I think not.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Look up the specifications for any cruise liner Mercury project. There is enough redundancy for this never to happen.
PROPULSION
The vessel is propelled by four MAN B&W L48/60 non-reversible, four-stroke engines. Two have an output of 9,450kW and two of 6,300kW at 500rpm. Each gearbox is additionally provided with a power take-off for a 5,200kW shaft generator for electric power supply during the voyage. Depending on the required ship's speed, different propulsion modes can be operated. The engines are connected to the Renk gearboxes via flexible Vulkan-Rato couplings. The engine speed is controlled by digital, redundant, freely programmable engine governors that work together.
The vessel has two controllable pitch propellers, three bow thrusters, two stern thrusters and two active rudders that are operated by a joystick. For the ship's propulsion and manoeuvring operations, an integrated redundant, computer-aided, decentralised system is used, which is connected via field bus to the automation system. Each propeller plant, transverse thruster and rudder has its own self-sufficient process station, connected by a redundant bus with the bridge station. For seakeeping, installed stabilizers are capable of reducing the ship's rolling motion by 90% at a speed of 18 knots.
Electric power is supplied by four MAN B&W, type 6L40/54 auxiliary diesel generator sets, as well as two shaft generators driven by a gearbox.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
For example, if a US ship (be it military or civilian) tries to board a Canadian ship, and a Mexician ship is wandering by, it has the right to try to stop the US.
But any ship not flying a flag can, as far as I know, be legally attacked by anyone, not just the military. (By legally, I mean 'internationally'. I suspect US law, for example, would prohibit US civilian ships from attacking any other ships, even flagless ones.) Flagless ships have no 'rights' at all under international law and conventions of the sea. It's the truest form of anarchy...you can do anything to anyone, and not legally answer for it, but anyone can do anything to you, and not legally answer for it, at least not internationally.
If a US ship is attacking a flagless ship, no one can stop them. Flagless ships are classified as 'pirates', and not only are they allowed to be attacked, it's assumed they'll be attacked. Meanwhile, any ship with a flag attacking them can't be, itself, attacked. (Well, your own government can attack you.)
Which is why, if this project gets off the ground, they'll be flying some flag. Otherwise they're risking some ship from, say, Panama, legally boarding them and stealing all their stuff and their ship. And even if other nations want to stop them, they can't, because they are not allowed to fire on Panama's ships. (Well, without actually declaring war.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?