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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."
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
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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/
This is mostly true, and can bite them in the butt.
If they intend to operate out of US ports, and provide anything that even looks remotely like passenger service (I.E. hosting staff for their clients) then they can't exit and re-enter the United States without visiting a "distant foreign port". Back in the day when there was tons of coastwise passenger transport, this protected US firms from foreign competition. Today it mostly means that Alaska cruises have to port at Victoria and Maratimes/East Coast cruises usually in Halifax. For Blueseed this is going to mean visiting Mexico between port visits to the US. (And they *will* either have to visit the US or sail across the Pacific Ocean for servicing - a ship can't stay at sea forever.)
Also, pretty much every nation subscribes to SOLAS and even the flag-of-convenience nations have safety requirements. Not to mention, that if they ever port, they'll be subject to safety inspections by the Coast Guard of the nation they're porting in. These are non-trivial to comply with and are deadly serious - the can be at a minimum refused entry, or at worst impounded for failing to comply. On top of these inspections, if they hope to carry insurance, the ship will have to regularly be inspected and certified on a regular basis by a legitimate classification society...
These "tech Love Boat" companies all sound to me to have based their plans on urban legends about how the law of the sea and related conventions work, and not on any real world legal and business research.
Wrong. In a truly dog-eat-dog world, any dog that gets too far ahead gets eaten by the pack.
Yeah, except it has never once worked out that way in reality. In lawless regions or other areas where the government is weak, what inevitably happens is that you end up with a handful of powerful warlords who basically terrorize and dominate the populace. They build up their own private armies to not only protect themselves from the "pack" but to do whatever the fuck else they want too, including showing up at your home periodically to take anything they want and rape your wife. Life is great if you happen to be one of those warlords (or one of their family or close friends). Life is complete shit if you're anyone else.
And you're not escaping the leash. You're just trading in the democratic government leash for the much tighter and shorter leash that the rich and powerful will have you on in your libertarian paradise.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?