Slashdot Mirror
Paypal Founder Helping Build Artificial Island Nations
MadMartigan2001 writes with a pretty crazy article on a project involving floating libertarian paradises. From the article: "PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel has given $1.25 million to an initiative to create floating libertarian countries in international waters. Thiel has been a big backer of the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build sovereign nations on oil rig-like platforms to occupy waters beyond the reach of law-of-the-sea treaties."
This idea has been tried several times and it always ends the same way (with fail). Think about it, if it were really that easy to declare your own country with its own laws, every asshole with a sea-worthy boat would be proclaiming his own little kingdom. Idiots who believe you can do this are the same morons who think that you can murder someone in international waters and not face prosecution or that you can get out of paying taxes by sending a letter to the IRS stating that you refuse to recognize their authority (ask Wesley Snipes if that shit works).
The only real way to establish your own country is to get the people of an existing country to elect you dictator or to stage a coup overthrowing the existing leader (or at least seize a portion of their existing territory). And even then, your rule is only as stable as your ability to defend it (from both internal and external threats).
So if you plan on setting up your own little kingdom on some old oil rig just off the U.S. coast (or coast of any country) and doing whatever you want, you had better damn sure be ready to defend yourself when the Navy shows up in a big, heavily armed ship looking to introduce you to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the concept of Universal Jurisdiction. And if it's the U.S. Navy, you're probably going to need a *lot* of firepower on your little oil rig, Your Majesty.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor. Where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality. Where the great would not be constrained by the small. And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.
Make billions. Build islands out of awesome tech stuff.
Next step?
Build mothership!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It will be interesting the first time a band of pirates (the killing and looting kind, not the sharing kind) storms one of these 'sovereign nations'. I'm guessing they will develop a sudden affection for the country with the nearest naval vessel who can save their bacon.
You know what would come in real handy?!
A barge with a nuclear reactor to provide electricity!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Quarantining rabid libertarians out in the middle of the ocean? Where can I send my contribution to this marvelous project?
Ask the US to send the Navy out to rescue you.
And in what way is trade "abusively exploitive to labor"
When it's the slave trade?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Exactly! We need countries with stronger property rights. For example, did you know that in many countries you can't legally own people? The ability to buy and sell your fellow man is the traditional bedrock of most successful societies. Once unfettered from such silly, non-traditional restrictions, capitalists will have free reign to create a magnificent society the likes of which we have not seen since ancient Greece.
... tech billionaires used their cash to say, help find a cure for malaria, instead of telling kids not to get an education, and this latest anti-societal rant?
For a paltry $1.25M, a random Rich Guy bought his name in the press, which he will use to stay in the limelight for a little bit. He will then trade on this temporary fame during the launch of his next business venture and keep his Wikipedia entry from being deleted.
Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
Also, unless he builds it in international waters too (using money he has yet to allocate), how is he going to manage to get it through territorial waters into international waters to begin with? No national authority is going to let a vessel of any size sail out of the dock without registration with an actual country. It doesn't have to be registered in the country it's built in, but it's got to be registered somewhere.
So their gated communities with their private security services aren't enough for these fuckers. Now they want to live in their private countries.
What a waste! There should be a tax on anti-social behavior.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
Old Hungarian joke:
- Where do you work?
- At the Ministry of Naval Affairs.
- Are you kidding, we don't even have a seashore!
- Hey, we got a Ministry of Public Welfare too.
After all the unilateral shit we've dealt with from paypal, are we surprised to see their founder try to become his own nation?
After all the times we've heard about paypal indefinitely freezing funds without a court order or automatically refunding the buyer in any ebay dispute, this doesn't surpise me; after all the times we've heard them claim they're not a bank and therefore not subject to finance laws (all while holding deposits, issuing debit cards, offering money market accounts, etc.) we should have been surprised if their founder didn't try some hare-brained libertarian scheme to achieve personal sovereignty.
Libertarians, they're always good for a laugh... While the specifics are the exact opposite, the level of practicality is right up there with Trotskyites.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Basically, there are two ways to be a sovereign nation:
1) Get international recognition as such. You get the UN members to recognize you as a sovereign nation and support your rights to that end, and you are good for the most part.
2) Have enough guns that nobody can question your sovereignty. If you have a powerful enough military, it doesn't matter what other nations want to say, you are sovereign by the fact that they won't do anything about it.
If you have both of those things, then you are really golden.
However that's it, those are all you have. You either get the big boys to say "Yep you are your own nation," or you have the ability to force it.
You might notice history has worked this way. The US is a sovereign nation because it was able to become so via arms. They said "We aren't subject to Crown law anymore." The Crown disagreed with that and a war was fought, the US won, that made them sovereign. Was shit the British could do at that point, they had been defeated.
The southern US states are not a sovereign nation for the same reason. They declared their sovereignty and left the union to become the Confederate States. The US decided that no, that wasn't ok, union membership was permanent once given, and a war was fought. The Confederate States lost, so they weren't sovereign, they had to be a part of the US again.
It would be a helluva a lot cheaper just to move to New Hampshire. Free State Project
Links
>>Come on... $1.25M? Nobody's building any kind of large-ish sea-worthy vessel for that kind of money, much less a floating office building, data center, residences, etc.
It'll buy you an in at the Sultanate of Kinakuta. Then you just need to find a large stash of hidden Japanese gold from WWII, and you're all set.
If you'd read his business plan, you'd have seen all that.
The Seasteading Institute's Patri Friedman says the group plans to launch an office park off the San Francisco coast next year, with the first full-time settlements following seven years later.
Like that's going to work.
People have talked about building artificial islands and setting up their own sovereign states. There are areas of the Caribbean where the ocean is so shallow that this is feasible, and there are plenty of submerged and semi-submerged islands around the world. With enough money, barges, and rock, building an island is possible.
But, under current international law, that doesn't yield sovereignty. The Law of the Sea treaty reads "a naturally formed area of land, which is above water at high tide". Nor can countries expand their territory by building artificial islands. (One of Japan's key boundaries is defined by an island that's worn down to the size of a small bedroom. A protective breakwater has been built around it at great expense.)
If do-it-yourself sovereignty were going to work, the oil industry, which puts up many offshore structures, some of which are actual islands, would have done it years ago.
In all seriousness, if you are willing to spend enough construct floating cities, why not just buy a small island nation who's population is fleeing anyway? You can keep the remaining population as I image most of them are fishermen. And, I would imagine keeping experienced food gatherers around would come in handy. As an added bonus, you would have actual land you could grow traditional crops on as well, feasible materials extraction, permanently connected infrastructure, etc...
As a minus, though, you are kind of stuck in place if any disasters show up (typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, the hostile military of an authoritarian nation with tiny dicked leaders....)
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
That's the nifty thing. People can come to earn their fortune, lose it all, and be unable to afford passage off. Thus ensuring a perpetual underclass of dirt-cheap labor living in whatever abandoned corridoors they can set up a shelter from sticks and blankets in. We can call the slums Down Below.
This is why Haiti, with its absence of building codes an the accompanying bureaucratic enforcement infrastructure, withstood a nearby earthquake with no serious loss of life or property damage, whereas the neighboring Dominican Republic, with its regime of building codes, had a major humanitarian catastrophe.
Oh, no, wait, I got those backwards. It was the one without building codes or a functioning government where hundreds of thousands of people died.
When stuff works in theory but doesn't work in practice, that means your theory is wrong.
Let's assume the nations of the world, out of the goodness of their hearts, decide to ignore your offshore entity. It's still not going to work because such an entity is going to be intrinsically politically unstable.
The first thing is that the artificial nation is going to have a very small population. Probably the closest analog we could name would be intentional communities, or communes. They generally don't last very long -- certainly not as long as a nation. Most fail in a year or two, a few go on for a few decades, especially if they're anchored by a charismatic religious or quasi-religious leader.
But this enterprise has the earmarks of the less successful ventures. You get a lot of people who feel malcontent in regular society, enough to give up on it entirely. Highly *motivated* and *opinionated* people. And you're going to put them all together in a tiny structure in the middle of the ocean where they can't get away from each other. Well, they could stay in their little apartments all day and avoid each other, but you can't build a working society with misanthropes who never want to see other human beings. And even if you structure your society so people more or less never deal with each other, you still are going to have disputes. And I assume these will have at least some kind of elected government, and people will disagree with each other.
And it won't matter how uniform these people seem to be when you put them into this bottle; human perception of difference expands or contracts to fit whatever differences there are. In the pressure-cooker atmosphere on these things, what to outsiders seem like hair-splitting differences between these irascible, opinionated, not very sociable people will take on the appearance of cosmic gulfs. In a libertarian state, one of the few functions of the police is to keep people from murdering each other. They'll have their hands full in this one.
But let's throw all that out, and assume all the psychological and sociological factors just work out. It's *still* a politically unstable entity because it has two factors which combine to make it a congenial target for authoritarian takeover, either from within or without: tiny population and substantial cash flow. Nobody is going to move to the middle of the ocean in order to be poor, so it follows that substantial resources are going to be flowing into and out of these places, or stored in the place. Anybody who can subdue the population can declare a new government, seize those assets. Then being in control of their own *state*, they have lots of options at that point. They could execute the people outside the clique as criminals. If the assets controlled by the state are productive, they might opt to skim the proceeds to keep the inhabitants under the iron heel -- provided they had any value. Or they just transfer all the assets to a stable country and leave.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So you build your four story house out of 2x4s at 32 inches on center, and it falls over and into your neighbor's house, and you don't have any money to cover your neighbor's losses, that's pretty much it for him.
Building codes don't just exist to keep you safe. They exist to keep visitors to your house safe, to keep your neighbors safe, to keep people on the street safe.
A building code, for instance, will say what the minimum attachment requirements are for rafters or trusses and for the roofing sheathing. These exist because there are situations, like tornadoes, monsoons, hurricanes or gails where roofing structures can become detached. When I put on my metal roof, for instance, local codes required a certain number of roofing screws of a specified length on top of a properly-attached sheathing or some other substrate (I used 1x4s attached to the rafters every 16 inches as I recall). This isn't just to protect me from getting water on my head when high winds rip off my roof, it's because flying metal roofing panels can kill your neighbors or people on the street. If you ever put on 20 foot metal roofing sheets and felt a bit of a wind come up and produce some lift, you would understand why those building codes exist.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If these guys want total lawlessness, free access to guns and zero government services, shouldn't they just move to Somalia? Isn't that the ultimate libertarian paradise? Or is the problem that other "libertarians" are there already? I know this sounds like a troll (ok, it is to some extent) but I'm genuinely curious why this isn't seriously being considered. If a bunch of milky libertarians really did move there and defended a chunk of territory, Somalia might actually be the one place in the world that would benefit from their arrival.
Think about it: 100,000 years ago humans were free to walk on the beach and catch fish to eat. They could also be attacked by the next tribe of canibals looking for food. Everything comes at a price.
Just don't come asking for aid and the use of our military when things start to get tough.
That's a little harsh. If they're in real trouble, have the Navy deliver a pallet of bootstraps and 5000 gallons of personal responsibility.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
This is pretty common. The woman who wrote all those harry potter books did it on the dole. When she got her payout she ran for the US to prevent having to pay the UK tax rates that pay for things like the dole.
I don't get this post. You're completely wrong. J.K. Rowling did start the books while on the dole, but she did NOT "run for the US" to avoid taxes. On the contrary, she specifically refused to leave the UK (she currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland), because she felt she owes a debt to the welfare state of Britain. Here are her actual words, from here:
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major's Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.
It's pretty clear she's a better person than you are; and I don't understand why you'd post something as far from the truth as you did. Maybe there exists a pathological condition that afflicts conservatives and creates an irressistible compulsion to lie? Just like the other right-winger who suggested Stephen Hawking would have died had he depended on the British National Health Service? (see here or here.
I'll say that. In order for the people in the Tea Party to have a valid point, they cannot WILLINGLY BENEFIT from the programs they publicly oppose.
You should look at that statement more closely.
So they are not opposed to CERTAIN people benefiting from the government programs.
It's just when the WRONG people benefit that they have a problem.
No. The problem is that they're complaining about CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE using the programs while THEY THEMSELVES benefit from those programs.
They want the BENEFITS (as evidenced by them voluntarily applying for those benefits and using them) but they don't want to pay the taxes if CERTAIN OTHER PEOPLE will also get the benefits.
I heard this and accepted it as fact then repeated it.
Please do not call me a right winger, I am far enough left to be considered a socialist in America. Which makes me about centrist on the world stage.
Your liberty to move your fist ends where my face starts.
Replace fist with "thermonuclear device", and then sit back and really think about how much liberty your ashes will have. One of the problems with Libertarianism is that it can't deal pro-actively with problems. You can't do anything about the sloppily run reactor until after it has melted down and destroyed your property (if you're one of the "lucky" survivors).
The central idea of most libertarians is that they know enough about everything to be able to make smart, rational decisions about everything. Personally, I think most libertarians suffer from a generalized case of the Dunning-Kruger effect where the effectively have no idea about exactly how much they don't know. I strongly suspect a truly libertarian society would bounce from once crisis to the next, never learning from their previous mistakes, until it collapsed under the cumulative damage from liberties abused.
Fanatically anti-fanatical