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Nearly 150 Companies Show Interest in the Tech Love Boat
New submitter dandv writes with a story from VentureBeat about another entry in the race to escape national jurisdiction by offshoring work — literally offshoring, that is : "Blueseed is a Silicon Valley company that plans on launching a cruise ship 30 minutes from the coast of California, housing startup entrepreneurs from around the world. These startuppers won't need to bother with U.S. visas, because the ship will be in international waters. They'll have to pay tax to whatever country they're incorporated in, though. So far, 146 startups said they'd like to come to the ship."
You can remotely access and program pretty much any system you'd ever work on in an offshoring relationshing. Your physical location has little or nothing to do with the ability to provide the contracted services.
While there is demand for at least some of the offshore service provider's staff to be working on-site with the customer companies, you wouldn't be able to do that with this ship. You still wouldn't have a visa, so you still wouldn't be allowed to "land" from the ship for such meetings.
In order to be in international waters, the ship would be what, 200 miles out from shore? That's a pretty long ride for any landbound customers to take in order to come meet with you on the ship. Customers don't tend to meet at provider sites; they expect the provider to come to them.
That being the case, what is the actual purpose served by working on this ship?
Or is this like the old Sealand failure? A great idea in concept that has no practical purpose and few real backers?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
None. The "Tech Love Boat" exists solely as a tax and immigration dodge, and its founders are proud of it. May real pirates raid this libertarian haven; may real storms smash its bow. Let me hazard a guess that they'll incorporate in Antigua, and pay no taxes, and that they'll import slave labor from India to work in the bowels of the ship.
Blueseed wants the benefits of proximity with Silicon Valley, and none of the costs. Why should we give a damn about them?
I'd also like to know who these "entrepreneurs" are. Let them live in their cabins and bar them from the shore. They don't want to pay for civilization, due to their brilliant and stunning gifts. They choose to leave civilization to live in their Brave New Race to the Bottom, _stay there_.
When a crime occurs on the "Love Boat", who will settle that crime? Blueseed? So they'll be a government, too. Hmm, maybe an invasion sounds good..
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
The advantage of these ventures is that they're outside national jurisdiction. The problem with these ventures is that they're outside national jurisdiction - and for almost every company out there, they benefit from the protection of a country's laws more than they suffer from them.
Sealand failed because anyone who hosted data there was wide open to the whim of Roy Bates - and if you didn't like his whim, you had no recourse. This will be no different.
A good article on Sealand: http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/28/2909303/sealand-havenco-doomed-data-haven-history
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
All these Randians will expect the US Government to rescue them when their ship goes tits up. Perhaps the best answer is for the US Coastguard to quote them to provide emergency services - 35% of turnover?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Why is it that every Libertarian seems to think that they can skirt laws just by taking some boat out to international waters? As if the nearby country is going to be like "Damn, we know you committed the murder, but you were JUST over the line into international waters, so we're going to have to let you go!"
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
When the nearest hospital is over 200 miles away, you'd better have helicopters ready to make the jump. And you'd better have them cleared for permission to enter US air space with no notice (like that's going to happen).
This is just another scam. Another variant of the "company town", where they deduct your room and board and other expenses from your pay, and if at some point you don't like it, you can take a long walk off a short plank.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Am I the only one who read this as "VCs will found a way to get cheap offshore talent under their collective wings by purchasing a cruise ship on which to enslave, err, house their startup 'incubators'"?
Sweatship
Nice reference, great game, but here in reality the man did not toil alone. He was not able to produce without the poor being kept away from his warehouse at night, he was not able to risk only his investment by nature but by laws governing incorporation, nor was he able to get it to market without roads. I love how those who have never done a day of physical labor like to talk about sweat, blood and tears though.
Let me summarize an entire articles worth of weird and ignorant /.er opinions:
1) this is the first boat that is not US flagged to ever sail either in or nearby the USA, and if it docks for repairs it'll be the first time a foreign vessel has ever entered a US port, so no one will have any idea what to do.
2) there exists a single line in the sandy sea bottom, on one side its complete and total utter US control and the other side is all pirates.
3) magically, because this platform has servers instead of oil drilling equipment, decades of regulation and case law from the oil biz could not possibly apply to this biz, just because it makes for a nice sounding argument.
4) no one has ever lived on a boat for an extended length of time, nor is it even theoretically possible, much less comfortable.
5) the relationship must be binary, either a ship and its flag nation must be US lapdogs and hard core statists, or it must be a libertarian paradise, and only one of those possibilities is unrealistic therefore it Must be the other far extreme possibility (laughably goes for both sides arguments)
6) Foreigners and foreign sailors have never been present on a ship entering a us port, so no one will have any idea what to do.
7) Closely tied to #5, There are only binary governments, the hard core statist fascist western govts like the us and our european lapdogs, and pure capitalist anarchy, therefore since its probably going to be flagged out of panama or something, and panama isn't quite the usa, therefore slavery and polygamy will rule the ship. Uh, no. I don't think very many flag nations allow that on their ships. As a wild guess, I've been on cruise ships that are panama registered, if this tub's panama registered it'll be about as wild as a cruise ship... probably a nude tanning deck, a casino to gamble in, no secret police checking to see if couples in bed together are married (to each other) and are of the correct gender, and generally anyone looking "old enough" gets to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco although technically you have to be 18 in Panama (I think). That's probably about as wild as Panama is going to let it get.
8) A crime has never before happened on board a ship, therefore no one will have any idea how to handle a criminal activity if one happens.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Actually we still have the largest manufacturing sector in the entire world by quite a bit.
We have completely and almost totally destroyed our consumer products manufacturing, true. The only thing I've bought in 20 years made in the USA is/was some plastic trash cans and oddly enough a gasket-less aluminum pressure cooker made in Wisconsin.
The whole world depends on the USA either exclusively or as a majority provider for aerospace, mining equipment, heavy stuff like that. To a much lesser extent we still make cranes too. And chemical process equipment although like cranes we're trying to give that away to China as fast as we can. You can almost draw a graph of "unit weight" on the x-axis and percent imported on the y-axis and you'll see damn near a straight line where we import 99% of our kitchenware but we manufacture 99% of the world's production of 100 kiloton and up mining dragline equipment (you know, the things that strip entire mountaintops off?) and practically all mining trucks larger than 100 tons.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
None. The "Tech Love Boat" exists solely as a tax and immigration dodge, and its founders are proud of it. May real pirates raid this libertarian haven
Under international maritime law, all nations have a duty to combat piracy. "Piracy is of note in international law as it is commonly held to represent the earliest invocation of the concept of universal jurisdiction. The crime of piracy is considered a breach of jus cogens, a conventional peremptory international norm that states must uphold. Those committing thefts on the high seas, inhibiting trade, and endangering maritime communication are considered by sovereign states to be hostis humani generis (enemies of humanity)" Wikipedia
The bottom line is that it isn't in the interests of the United States to have pirates operating off the U.S. coast, even if they only target vessels of other nations.
When a crime occurs on the "Love Boat", who will settle that crime?
It is exactly the same legal situation as a crime on a cruise ship. The passengers are subject to the legal sysem of their flag nation, and of others that exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction. The U.S. Constitution gives the federal courts jurisdiction over maritime matters, so it is up to the courts to rule on which particular crimes are worthy of extraterritorial jurisdiction. See In international waters, are you beyond the reach of the law?
Exactly. The grandparent is complete bullshit and should be modded down.
The US is the world's largest manufacturing nation in terms of economic output. People seem to forget giant companies like Intel, Caterpillar, Boeing, Cisco, ADM etc. not to mention the pharmaceuticals and the farming industry which are world leading. Not only that but the US does it with a mere 8% of its workforce. The economic output of the average US worker is more than 10 times that of his Chinese equivalent because he's more technically skilled and produces far more valuable products in a highly automated setting.
The Boeing main aircraft assembly building in the Seattle area is the largest manufacturing facility in the world.
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/facilities/
It was Boeing who discovered the Y2K problem because they are such a large consumer of aluminum they have to project consumption of aluminum a decade in advance so the aluminum industry can scale their capacity to match their consumption.
I don't know where people get the idea the US isn't competitive in manufacturing. It is a huge force on a global scale in manufacturing, and factors like low energy costs because of the vast natural gas reserves being developed are likely to keep it that way. Anyone writing that the US has no manufacturing capability is full of bullshit.
http://www.shopfloor.org/2011/03/u-s-manufacturing-remains-worlds-largest/18756
http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/
The freest country with slavery and voting for only wealthy white landowners
- first of all, you are saying it like it was a bad thing that only landowners could vote.
As to blacks, as I said, I would NOT have ratified that Constitution with that language in it, but by 1870 the slavery was no longer the same issue at all.
I am against democracy, unless you are mistaken, I am against democracy, AFAIC democracy is mobocracy, it is the gateway to tyranny, that is my conviction.
OTOH having a representative democracy is fine, where a subgroup of people will vote on issues directly, not the entire population.
In 1870 to 1913 we had the beginnings of the labor movement.
- so? There could be no labour movement before there was labour, could there? When everybody is a subsistence farmer, hunter / gatherer, they don't form unions. But that's not why wealth was created at all. Wealth was created by the businesses, not by unions.
The businesses made people productive, provided management, efficient allocation of land, labour and capital and created the goods that actually were then bought by the very people who were working. That's how the tide lifted the boats.
As the free market capitalism provided the profits and investment capital, this was used to acquire and build better tools, making the workers more efficient and productive, and this is why one person could do much more with the tools than anybody before could without those tools, that's what investment is, and that's how a worker becomes more affluent earners - by being more efficient, by doing more with less time. That's why the working hours could eventually be shorted, that's why there were weekends.
Subsistence farmers don't get to enjoy 8 hour days and 5 working day weeks, they don't have that luxury. Only capitalist free market could create that.
The reality is trickle down does not work, and the rich are more than happy to take all the gains.
- nonsense.
This so called 'trickle down economics' is the ONLY economics that works. The more productive a worker at a factory is building cars, the more efficiently the cars are built, they cheaper they can be sold, so that more people buy them, because more profits are made by selling more cheaper products, not fewer more expensive products.
Originally only the very rich could afford cell phones, computers, plasma TVs. Today everybody has them - that's how productive the capitalists made the workers, that everybody can afford these things.
THAT is trickle down economics, THAT is how wealth is distributed in the free market. Your problem is you think about wealth in terms of money - but the best way to treat money is to have it concentrated in the hands of those, who were the best at organising land, capital and labour to produce that profit, that resulted from all those efficiencies and overproduction, and the market willing to pay for those profits.
You are saying that the wealth isn't being distributed? How many cell phones have you had in your life? Cars? Houses? Pairs of clothes? Shoes? TVs? Computers? Tables? Chairs?
You think wealth is what the rich have and you do not? Wealth is what you can use on daily basis, the rich have the WORK.
You think Steve Jobs having spent under 4% of his entire fortune during his life enjoyed the wealth he created by using it? NO. It was all invested, 96% of his wealth was always invested, so that slobs like you could be lifted in the tide that he was busy creating.
So only those with money should be allowed to vote?
- straw man.
The only people who PAY for the music should be able to order it. Those who pay income taxes to the federal gov't are those who should be allowed to vote, nobody else.
If I lose my job and live off my savings for a year I should not be able to vote?
- CORRECT.
NOT IN THAT YEAR.
You can't handle the truth.
That's one of the problems with libertarian dreamers. They crave a dog-eat-dog world, but they all think THEY'RE going to be one of the top dogs.
Wrong. In a truly dog-eat-dog world, any dog that gets too far ahead gets eaten by the pack...
Libertarians have no desire for power. They just want to see limited power OVER THEM. You seeing it as a quest for power over others is more revelatory to your own subconscious desires and/or fears than that of Libertarians.
Basically, you apparently can't handle a world where you are not on a leash...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley