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Paypal Founder Puts a Half Million Dollars Into Seasteading
eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."
Good. Go there and stay there.
You need to compute the value, whenever looking at new commune/ collective/ arcology/ society construction. This is in some ways a non-numeric computation, but you should at least look at the basic per capita cost, e.g., cost(infrastructure + risk) / population. Many managers focus on one but ignore the other, but any cost-benefit study must look at both. One offset to the cost would be the value of goods or services produced by the population.
A yurt in a comfortable biome houses a small self-sufficient family at nearly no cost. A small crew can man an offshore oil rig (at least, in moderate shifts) because of the immense value of the product. A commune living in a multi-hundred-ton cylinder of concrete and steel floating a dozen miles offshore had better have some damn valuable product to overcome the huge costs of infrastructure and risk.
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You shouldn't move much more than an island does so long as the length of the total surface is dozens of typical wavelengths long. About the only thing you'd have to worry about would be a tsunami.
If a hurricane can derail a train or knock over an oil rig. It could make a mess out of these.Do you seriously think the established nation states of this world are just going to let a bunch of platforms float outside their jurisdiction and reach?
In fact, nations don't even have to do anything about their landmass, they can simply apply their laws to their citizens in international waters, and they can enforce them there too. So, if you are a US or European citizen, you'll still be subject to DMCA, high taxes, and drug laws. Of course, you can give up all your citizenships, but then you'd have a hard time doing business with anybody on land.
This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.
Or is there some mysterious eBay-PayPal-Scientology connection I'm ignorent of?
They're all full of assholes?I'd amend that as "as long as there are those who are both greedy and short sighted there will never be utopia." Enlightened self interest usually coincides with everyone else's self interest.
Enlightenment aside, human nature is not static. We have several stable states, selfishness being one of them. In a society that encourages selfishness, does not allow the common person the ability to easily punish unfairness. If everyone around you is being selfish, chances are you will be, too, because you have to, or be taken advantage of. But if everyone around you is being cooperative, you most likely will act that way, too. So human society has an impact on human nature. Which is the point of utopias.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From TFA:
So, to be clear, the idea's not crazy, just everyone who's tried it so far. Hmmm.
Invenio via vel creo
If all you do is ensure that anyone can leave any time they want, then you have only one remaining ingredient to support this most fundamental human right:
Somewhere to go.
With the current, very limited, number of territories world-wide, the choices available to refugees is limited not only by the number of territories that would welcome them, but by the absolute number of territories.
Increase the baseline number of territories and freedom reigns.
The problem with current conceptions of "human rights" is they are enumerated in some sort of unstructured laundry list which results in the entire edifice crumbling under stress. Its tragic because the more you "feel" various things are "rights" -- the more "rights" you put on your wishful-thinking-list, the more "righteous" you sound to the intellectually handicapped. This creates a terrible situation for humanity -- where facades of "human rights" displace the need for territory -- the need for carrying capacity -- that forms the real foundation of life hence humanity hence their rights.
I've written up some thoughts on the nuances of a more rationally architected system supporting human rights in Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology that allows jurisdictions to become as "tyrannical" as they want over their territory, so long as they let people leave at will and support the creation of carrying capacity for the formation of volulntary association.
Seasteading is an important potential in this direction.
Unfortunately, Google's Patri Friedman, while far better than most, is indulging in more of the sloppy thinking that endangers human rights when he says things like "You can change your government without having to leave your house" or implies the assumption that seasteading jurisdictions will not exclude immigrants at their whim. We live in a physical universe with ecologies that operate in space. Attempting to deny spatial structure because you find it inconvenient or even "oppressive" is simply fantasy.
Seastead this.
First time I've ever wanted to friend an AC.
Living in a society is about compromise and respect for other peoples opinions and beliefs. Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue. Most of the problems societies have are when these groups get too powerful.
Frankly sending them all out into the middle of the ocean sounds like a great idea. Living accommodations optional.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I look forward to ejecting the ethical detrius of society, onto remote platforms. What could be more ideal? Isolating together, that element that believes all of existance should revolve around the desires and foibles of "me".
What a doom! to be forced to live in isolation with a bunch of other "visionaries", who believe that the works of Ayn Rand are literature, and expound a philosophy.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
By encouraging greed and discouraging cooperation, a free market system ensures that everyone will have to act in a greedy and selfish fashion in order not to be taken advantage of by the greedy and selfish.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So just pick a place where there aren't any hurricanes. :)
Steven N. Severinghaus
Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue.
The inverse, groups that cannot be tolerated by society can be problematic as well. Giving the Puritans land far far from the rest of England was just as much a blessing to England as the Puritans. Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it? Would the American people allow such a society to sit just off our shores? What about a cannabis farming floating island anchored just north of Bermuda, do you think Uncle Sam would let them alone? I don't think these floating islands are going to be the escape from global government/society that many want them to be.
We are all just people.