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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.
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How would this affect taxes?
Agile Artisans
Not sure this plan will hold water. I hope they've weighed all the options.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Dumbest idea EVER. I do not understand this infatuation with outsourcing professional workers. You can't tell me it's anywhere near as cost effective as they're making it out to be. (My own experience says otherwise.) I smell another crash of DotCom proportions...
But if they're going to do this thing, they should at least do it in style. By utilizing an inexpensive aircraft carrier they could at least send these people home for occasional weekends and vacations. Under the proposed plan, they're basically prisoners on the ship unless they can manage to get a Visa to enter the country. Which, of course, negates the entire point of not messing with H1-Bs. And how do they think the government is going to react to having these people parked right off our shore? (Hmm... maybe they could refit the guns on the old carrier to keep the coast guard off their backs.)
Did I mention that this is a dumb idea?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...of a horde of unshowered, dropcloth wearing Indians chained to a deck with oars next to their keyboards...
(first post?)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Arg! Torpedo to the server room!
Now, with our awesome Slashdot power, we have now set fire to the servers on the ship, and it is in the process of sinking.
Good job, everyone! Now, World Domnination is within our grasp!
... I wonder what the tax implications for the workers are. And what happens if a crime is committed in International Waters? What about a guarantee of workplace safety and anti-discrimination policy?
I see lots of problems here.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
until they anchor it three miles off the coast to tell them the US claims territorial waters twelve nautical miles off the coast?
L. Ron Hubbard ALREADY owns the patent to this! Just ask his friendly help desk people at the scientoloaserfgad
asdfasdfasdfa
ASDFAESRFA
NO CARRIER
No, the U.S. considers the fishing, mineral, and sphere of influence within 100-150 nautical miles. U.S. LAW only applies to within 3 miles to shore. The only thing backing up this position is the 15 carrier taskgroups it can call upon. That's pretty much enough so that the U.N. doesn't want to make an issue of it.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I'd hate to be a coder on the ship during a good storm. We'll probably start seeing variable names like upanddown, backandforth, sidetoside, puke, makeitstop, and soseasick.
I totally want to set up a web server there and illegally distribute Windows ISOs from there, just so I can be charged with Piracy on the High Seas
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
From TFA: Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi. Or they can spend time shopping in the on-board duty-free shop.
I've done my fair share of time aboard a ship, and let me just say that anchoring out and taking a ferry (or water taxi, or whatever you want to call the vomit inducing small craft that transport you to and from the port) a "mere three miles," is a much bigger pain in the arse than you might think. If you're lucky, they run once every 30 minutes. In a situation like this, it's more likely to be every hour, or every few hours.
Do some shopping during the day, and now you'd like to change and grab some dinner and maybe go out? Enjoy catching the ferry back to your boat and then waiting for the next one to get back to land.
Oh, and that moderate sized TV you just bought? Have fun carrying it up the brow.. not to mention just getting it off the ferry, which is probably using its own power to stay pressed against a barge tied alongside the ship. Oops, you slipped? That's a shame. Dropped your TV in the drink? Hope you have a good credit card company, and they believe you.
But I guess maybe it's better than the pay and conditions in the country you come from, and I'm just a spoiled American.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
"International waters" don't start three miles off-shore. The US maritime claims are as follows:
Maritime claims:
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: not specified
In other words, they'd have to be at least 12 miles from shore, and possibly (depending on who's doing the interpretation) over 200.
Also, as far as I'm aware, the ship will have to be flagged somewhere, which means that it's effectively that country's territory when in international waters.
Someones tax man will find them.
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
it's all fun and games until Hiro Protaganist shows up and carves a hole in the hull with his chain gun on steroids.
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
This must be a fake ....
Notice how their first "Company News" lists an Article-FORBES with no link. If you go to Forbes.com and search their site for "SeaCode" you get: "Sorry, your search for SeaCode did not return any Documents. Please revise your search and try again."
Besides, 3.1 miles makes no sense as your not in international waters.
1. To code in the sea.
2. To live in sea.
3. To live by the code of sea.
Rrrrr, it be a pirates life for thee
Imagine a passed over supertanker refitted with lots of small decks (a la being John Malkovitch). Fitted with UV lighting and irrigation many plants could be harvested in international waters. Customers would
arrive via boat.
Eventually some pissed govt sticks a torpedo in it.
It should be pretty easy to get a high power and supremely noisy transmitter to play havock with this threat to national security.
Might even make the pringles cans go 'POOF'
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
First of all, the 3-nmi line serves only as the boundary between state- and federally-controlled waters. The end of federal jurisdiction and the beginning of International waters actually occurs at the line 12 nautical miles from shore.
The official 3- and 12-nmi lines are demarcated on the highest-resolution NOAA charts for a particular area. These charts can be hard to find on-line, though it is possible to find certain areas though various state GIS websites and such. I also think the NOAA is systematically making vector data of the lines available.
In the case of Catalina Island, it has it's own 12-nmi belt of territorial sea, but the space between it and the mainland (so long as it is at least 12 nmi from either shore) is International waters.
There is a belt extending 24-nmi from shore called the "Contiguous Zone", in which a nation may exercize authority mainly to enforce environment and customs regulations. This area is still considered Internation waters, however.
Oh, come on. No one would hire child slave labor! Everyone knows child slaves are horrible at commenting their code.
You know what?
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.
CIA Factbook
Maritime claims:
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: not specified
Umm... no. The ship, being of US registry, can be confiscated and searched by US authorities. Not to mention that the US *has* enforced its borders beyond its 3 mile claim in the past.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sea++.
Thank you. I'm here all week.
I rather doubt the Coast Guard or Navy will have any difficulty claiming jurisdiction over a vessel that is more or less permenently "anchored" within 200 miles of the U.S. coast.
Scurvy.
-- Mace only makes me hornier.
Here's what I'd like to see.
Week 1: Operations launch. Works getting done. Going well.
Week 2: Work is better.
Week 3: Pirates came in and confiscated all our computers and electronic equipment. Called the coast guard. I think I heard them laughing in the background.
Week 4: We've drifted into China due to a complete lag of navigation or ship control systems. I, for one, welcome our new communist overlords.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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.
Well it would have been a nice idea, until you brought clap into it....
The RIAA was reported to be in negotiations to purchase a "kilo" class submarine from the former Soviet Union.
A spokesman for the RIAA said that while they could afford it, a nuclear sub was not necessary. "We will only be going out three miles or so, so a diesel sub will do just fine".
If they'd just cruise the baby around the world for a year or so I'm sure they could get a boat-load (ha) of programmers who'd be happy to work for a very low wage. I'd be tempted to work for low pay for a year in exchange for the opportunity to see the world and travel to exotic locations. Slogan: See the world, meet interesting people, and replace them with small shell scripts!
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
"Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi."
I smell something rotten here. Specifically the usage of the word "staff".
I smell a number of things rotten here, including the fact that the "entrepreneur" (or article writer) hasn't a fucking clue about international waters, which extend twelve miles from shore, not 3. This is the 21st century, not the 19th, and maritime law may not have changed much, but the definition of "international waters" has.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Conversely, would you do business with a company that leverages every advantage that they legally can to provide the best services at the lowest prices?
:) But that's my thoughts on it -- we, as developers, have to start playing a better game because I doubt offshoring is going anywhere.
Like it or not, offshoring is legal. Business often lets morality and ethics and so forth take a back seat to the bottom line and that's where many go off their tree about offshoring, not about its legitimate use in the business model. Employees are out to save their ass, and employers are out to save theirs. When you get to something like offshoring, you're talking about certain employees unable to save their ass because the employer is saving theirs.
What we really need is a better way to play the game, as employees, so that offshoring is either a) no longer appealing or b) no longer a threat to us. Note the differences in those two statements. Either developers need to make it so that offshoring is unappealing -- by developing better, smarter, faster, etc. -- or by making the threat of offshoring inapplicable to our state as employees, probably by developing skills, abilities, and knowledge that make no sense to offshore.
Now, HOW to do this is not something I've come up with.
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