A pilot project for a new floating city will have 300 homes | Hacker News Reader

A pilot project for a new floating city will have 300 homes

businessinsider.com

28 pointsdsr1290 comments

I surely may be wrong in my prediction, but the thing I'm most fascinated about by these libertarian settlement plans is when they organically reintroduce all the government systems they wanted to escape in the first place.

Child me was always excited for the day I could break away from the government (parents) and spend all my money on vices like snacks and video games. College me did that and learned the hard way what adult me now practices: a responsible need for the restrictions my parents imposed upon me.

I really like some of the ideas of libertarianism. I think it's a valuable counterpoint to strong government in a debate that should go on forever with no real right answer. But I think these libertarianism to the extreme ideas are, at their core, irresponsible fantasy.

>"I surely may be wrong in my prediction, but the thing I'm most fascinated about by these libertarian settlement plans is when they organically reintroduce all the government systems they wanted to escape in the first place."

Is this a prediction or are you referring to examples of this happening?

My prediction. Are there examples?

Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe we really don't need social security and everything just works out.

I don't know of any examples. I was hoping you did.

> Maybe we really don't need social security

I think the libertarian idea is that we really don't need social security through threat of violence. There's a notion of the role of "private" charity. Libertarians aren't necessarily selfish or unempathetic.

Contributing to something for the common benefit can also be borderline-coerced through social pressure. This is explored somewhat in P K Dick's short story "Foster, You're Dead!" (one of the ones adapted into something rather different in the Electric Dreams TV Series)

http://www.sffaudio.com/podcasts/FosterYoureDeadByPhilipK.Di...

Although I found the story to somewhat muddy the waters by the world having both individual/private bomb shelters and a pay-per-use public one, as well as having a subscription-based communal shelter in the school. The town's defense was community paid but optional (through social pressure).

Of course that's fiction, and we're all aware of real life examples of "tragedy of the commons", but human nature isn't entirely one-sided, either. Aren't there examples of "pay what you want" or "pay what you think is fair" schemes that work?

You seem to assume Libertarians are planning to do this in order to live in some sort of headonistic society. There are tons or terrible rules and laws out there (the war on drugs to name a big one) and tons of rent seekers. Those would die in a libertarian society.

I doubt that will be true, definitely not right away. Think about all the prisoners from the drug war in the US.

As silly as some people might see a project like this I think it is incredibly important, since there is really no competition in government. You are born somewhere and for the vast majority of people, you can't pick a different set of laws or a different currency.

Whatever happens, this is a choice wrapped in a small community. While it is going to be for people rich enough that they had a choice in the first place, at least it is the start of being able to choose something designed instead of a legacy of hundreds of years.

My hope is that whatever they choose to do, they set an example for transparency.

Think about the metaphor you've made. In it, citizens are the "children" and need it's parents (government) to restrict their freedoms since they are not able to decide for themselves what is in their best interests.

It's not about wanting to be like a child who spends all their allowance on ice cream. It's about wanting to be an adult who is free to decide what is in their best interests for themselves.

He didn’t give a metaphor. He said that he once wanted absolute freedom and then he grew up.

The notion of “heaven on earth” is a childish one, regardless of ideology.

> He didn’t give a metaphor.

In that case, I'm finding it difficult to understand what Waterluvian meant by saying:

> Child me was always excited for the day I could break away from the government (parents) and spend all my money on vices like snacks and video games. College me did that and learned the hard way what adult me now practices: a responsible need for the restrictions my parents imposed upon me.

Are you saying Waterluvian's parents are literally the government? Why is Waterluvian talking about parental restrictions? If not relating it to governments restrictions on its people, isn't that a non sequitur?

My parents limited my computer and video game use and would prefer I watched TV - for some bizarre reason they thought the other two were bad for me but TV must have been fine because they grew up with it. Turned out the games were mentally engaging and promoted hand-eye coordination while computer use was my gateway to earning more than they do combined. They wanted me to waste time cleaning my room all the time, yet I don't clean much of my apartmemt much and nothing bad happens. One railed against how awful Chef Boyardee is for you but as far as I can tell they're decent cheap rounded meals. One literally tried to tell me it was wrong to wait until the zebra stripes end on a road to turn into the turning lane - as if you were obligated to drive over the stripes, which is illegal.

Child me knew all along my parents were full of it despite being well-meaning and my opinion hasn't changed. So, this analogy has the opposite effect for me.

Who is restricting you now that did not in college? Your spouse? Or maybe you grew up and can now restrict yourself? Or did you go to prison and now understand breaking some laws are not worth it?

I just read a great book about seasteading:

https://www.amazon.com/Seasteading-Floating-Environment-Libe...

It will be expensive at first but long-term, the social, economic, and environmental benefits could be enormous. It's not just about one little island.

Socially, the idea isn't so much to promote one particular ideology, but to allow experimentation with lots of different economic and governmental structures, in an environment where people can easily move to the ones that work the best. The book points out that similar conditions brought us the advances of ancient Greece and renaissance Italy.

Aquaculture on the open seas looks very attractive; the economics work out well and it's great for the environment. And small island nations with good access to shipping and lots of economic freedom have tended to do very well in general.

what makes you think they won't nuke those out of existence as soon as they become successful?

The geopolitical equivalent of 'protection-money'?

technological advancements for defence, like Laserturrets.

And the fact, that nuking is considered a crime against humanity even when you target libertarians.

Does not mean that it will not be tried, though, as soon as they will be seen as a threat to any big player established. But there are lots of easier options, than plain nuking - "terrorists" for example. "A previous unknown generic terrorist group just has hit Seastate X, how tragic"

Or they could just declare them terrorists, easier imho.

If they get the slightest possibility to do so, yes. Like, "they support a digital currency, which disrupts our economy, also they support people who write software, which is used by terrorists to communicate, therefore terrorist supporters = terrorists"

Why would you nuke them, that's (literally) overkill.

But I suspect its failure (to keep out international criminal orgs), not economic success, that gets them raided by traditional nation-states.

Nobody's raided the Cayman Islands yet. I don't know whether seasteads would end up being offshore financial centers, but plenty of island nations are providing all sorts of financial services to criminal organizations without significant consequences.

> Nobody's raided the Cayman Islands yet.

The Cayman Islands are a British Overseas Territory. A seastead isn't going to be an overseas territory of a significant power in its own right that is also a NATO member and permanent UNSC seat holder.

True, but there are other offshore financial centers doing the same thing, which are not under the British umbrella, including several small European nations, several in the U.S. sphere of influence, Asian centers such as Singapore, and independent oddballs like Uruguay and Somalia. None of them have faced serious consequences of any sort.

The U.S. Government forced the Cayman Islands to expose people using the Island Nation as a tax haven, thus negating the benefits of the islands and large parts of the clientele have gone elsewhere. Since these are only expected to be a half mile offshore they are going to end up being subject to whatever nation-state they are offshore of. Were they to try this in the deep ocean I suspect rogue waves would be an issue. Either way this isn't likely to succeed politically, although I see no reason why technologically it wouldn't. It's more likely going to end up being a playground for the ultra wealthy to sometimes visit and say they have property on.

It could end up being a wealthy playground, but the people doing this stuff would consider it an utter failure if that's all they accomplish. What they really want to do is sequester billions of tons of carbon, provide billions of tons of food, and provide an economic opportunity for a billion of the world's poor.

I think whether that's possible depends mostly on how cheaply these things can be built at scale.

Why would anyone do that? They're trading partners. They provide lots of seafood at good prices, cheap biofuel, some light industrial work, and they're attractive tourist destinations.

lots of different economic and governmental structure... that can survive existing on a raft with no natural source of fresh water let alone any other natural resources except maybe fish.

>>And small island nations with good access to shipping and lots of economic freedom have tended to do very well in general.

rafts don't actually have good access to shipping, docking two ships at sea is an entirely different proposition than a deep water harbor.

"Raft" is a slightly ridiculous description of these things. 300 houses is a small pilot project. We're actually pretty good at building large, stable structures at sea.

The book covers the technical side of things fairly well. Here's one approach:

- Use an OTEC, which pumps deep water to the surface. It generates electricity from the temperature difference and outputs distilled water.

- The OTEC also pumps organic material to the surface. That's what happens at natural fisheries. Most of the open ocean lacks any significant ecosystem because everything that dies sinks to the bottom; natural fisheries are places where currents bring that back to the surface. The OTEC does that and makes massive aquaculture possible.

Some companies are already doing open-water aquaculture, and the economics have been much better than traditional fish farms, which are quite profitable themselves.

Did anybody else catch the part where this group is already selling cryptocurrency?

Looks like yet another ICO scam to me.

I would assume it's a scam if I hadn't read the book. There's a fairly large seasteading community, with a bunch of companies, real experiments, conferences, etc. The people behind this project are a major part of that.

Why are there so many people posting in this thread who seemingly want this project to fail? What do you have invested into it failing? To me this seems like a cool experiment, why not try it out?

The best thing about a sovereign seastead is how any properly equipped Real County(tm) will roll up in a boat and just blow it away. It’s like barbarian cities in Civ, essentially.

Or will tear themselves to pieces. Like all the libertarian camps in South America, particularly “Galt’s Gulch” of Peru.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn53b3/atlas-mugged-922-v...

Unless they start doing stuff that is crime on the neighboring countries, I don't see why any of them would bother.

But they better have some protection against piracy.

Committing crimes is the basic activity of Libertarians. The point of getting rid of the rules is you want to do the things that are against the rules. If the other countries still have the rules then you have conflict. Especially considering one outcome of the Libertarian philosophy is pollution of air and water is to be prevented not by regulation but by the self-interest of the person who owns the air and water. If that person takes leave of their self-interest and starts dumping toxic waste into their personal water property, Libertarians have no solution to that pollution. And the neighbors are going to be mad.

So an easy defense is to avoid dumping toxic waste on your neighbors. I don't see why people assume seasteaders will be idiots.

Meanwhile coastal cities are dumping all sorts of waste into the oceans. Some of the seasteaders want to build offshore of those, and use forms of aquaculture which would clean up that waste.

Unfortunately pollution is not easily reversed. It's easy to say that if someone pollutes your water you'll sue them, but in reality it's unlikely that you'll be able to recoup your damages; pollution is often irreversible and the other guy doesn't have any assets anyway. Example: Libertarians love to hate RoHS and other lead controls. But one standard bar of lead is enough to poison tens of millions of people. Much better to prevent that, hence regulations.

You're right that coastal cities pollute. Large groups of people can make decisions as badly as small groups and individuals. It's an unsolved problem.

You just said upthread that rather than relying on lawsuits, nearby countries would "roll up in a boat and just blow it away" if a seastead polluted. If you're right then the seastead has a pretty good incentive not to pollute; if you think now that you're wrong then we have nothing to argue about.

In any case, for a long time the main industry for seasteads will be open-water aquaculture, which is completely nonpolluting in experiments so far, and able to clean up the excess nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural runoff and coastal city waste.

Being on outlaw is the basic reason for creating a libertarian place, but the law is not all criminal. Most libertarians I see on the web (I rarely see one in person, I guess they are rare) mostly want lower taxes and less public services.

This is a naive caricature by people who don't understand libertarianism in the first place.

Posit that a lot of laws on the books are unjust, and incredibly hard to reverse. See marijuana prohibition, which has caused countless societal problems for decades and has been particularly problematic for minorities with disproportionate punishment.

To say that they just want to break laws and pollute is plainly ignorance and a garbage argument. Some libertarians may argue that property rights and tort law will handle things like pollution externalities, there's also perfectly reasonable libertarian argument for government to prevent the tragedy of the commons (and even in the name of defense -- that doesn't mean that the EPA is perfect and doesn't overstep its bounds, see countless municipalities needing to develop projects that are held up for years due to bureaucratic absurdity)

"The neighbors are going to be mad" - Every libertarian system has mechanisms for handling externalities, primarily through the courts. Seems like polluting my land and causing health problems is a pretty clear violation of NAP.

Seasteading, and charter cities, are of the most exciting things happening and likely to be the best development for human flourishing and particularly those who are trapped in bad governmental systems. The point is to lead by example with experimentation in government on smaller scale.

The right to get up and move and self-determine is probably more important than any other in regards to alleviating human suffering.

Floating city projects seem to conceptualize themselves as "buildings, but on water". Seems ineffective to me.

An armada of ships strikes me as the cheaper and far more practical approach.

Indeed - I always liked Neal Stephenson’s concept for “The Raft” in Snow Crash - take a bunch of vessels due for the breaker’s yard, lash em together, job done.

Snowcrash describes pretty well how a set of boats/ships would work for creating an independent society.

Of course that society existed only to break up and emigrate, it was hell on Earth, it requires an aircraft carrier as the center, and it was planned and executed by a mad billionaire with ambitions of world domination.

While President Trump may not have billions, he does have multiple aircraft carriers at his disposal and would love a place to put all the immigrants. I would suggest keeping the book away from Fox News or they may give him the idea.

Always found seasteading to be strange solution given the three poles of a) taking over the government or emir-ship of an existing island, b) building a geographically independent trading network not unlike a mafia or narco-paramilitaries with some anarcho-hedonist themed cruise ships, and c) starting a cult where converts do business with each other and resolve disputes using a ritualized parallel legal and taxation system.

Given these obvious precedents, it's difficult to see the problem seasteading solves.

Seasteading solves the problem that (1) requires and (2) and (3) historically have provoked conflict with the armed (military or law enforcement) forced of existing nation-states they seek to displace or operate within.

Seasteading doesn't obviously share that problem yet (which may just be because it's not been done enough and at large enough scale for have provoked notable responses.)

At scale, it solves more basic physical problems, by providing massive amounts of seafood and biofuel while also sequestering large amounts of carbon.

Being able to experiment with new forms of government, and having the economic boost from a few hundred new Hong Kongs would be nice bonuses.

I had to close the article when it claimed the floating city will solve one of the worlds biggest problems - rising sea levels. Really?! Solve?! Is that supposed to be a joke? Just another ICO scam in time for their presale. No wonder Thiel has distanced himself from this garbage.

The previous step to Rapture.

TBH, I can imagine an Ayn Rand inspired city to be pretty interesting.

Would an Ayn Rand inspired city reject states and promote individualism for decades, then finally accept help once it starts to fall apart?

http://inthesetimes.com/article/3328/floating_utopias/

Where does the garbage and sewage go?

A few of the main functions a city provides is collecting garbage, and treating sewage. I don't see a word about them in the Business Insider article. Are there details elsewhere?

I am not rich, but I can imagine living in such city and enjoying it. Amount of $60M, or even $120M doesn't sound something that should be hard to collect.

I imagine this being organized like Singapore, but looks like Dubai. I also don't think it is enough to just plop it somewhere, there should be thought on how it will function, what are benefits. Can it be place where superstars go to relax for example. Selling them 2M homes would be easy. It can be place for startups and conferences. I feel like more thought should be placed into this.

I think crypto makes sense for such project, but obviously potential for abuse are huge.

Obviously, one tsunami and this thing can be in serious trouble.

Again, given a chance to live there, or at least to spend some time and work and live there, I would take the chance.

Have never heard of a seasteader that had actually spent significant time out on the open ocean.

Doesn't pass my sniff test ... sounds expensive and who will pay for it test

It sounds like every nightmare City from Bioshock.

Seems to me that they would be highly vulnerable to a hurricane (or tsunami).

There is no redundancy in such a concentrated piece of land.

Puerto Rico was (more or less) helped by the US government. Who will help these people?

Why tsunami?

What do you mean? A low lying island is vulnerable to a possible tsunami, like an earthquake-generated one.

It's not really an island, it's a boat. It would rise and fall with the sea unless the waves got too choppy.

I think this article is a bit confusing. They talk about floating cities but then they mention building 300 houses on an island in French Polinesia.

Why is it that something like this brings people to act like it has all sort of unique problems that haven't been confronted dozens of times already?

How does French Polynesia deal with tsunamis? They have an alarm system and advise people to get to high ground.

On something like this, since it is all construction, you could also build barriers around it to minimize a tsunami.

I wasn't worry about the people, presumably in this day and age they would have ample warnings.

But who will pay for the cleanup operation, if there is no nation state to fall back to?

Why would it be devastated if it was designed for it in the first place? Why is it that you think tsunamis destroy every country they hit? French Polynesia has actually been hit by tsunamis before, you just don't hear about it because it isn't eventful.

Also Puerto Rico was hit by a strong hurricane, not a tsunami. It was also already 100 Billion dollars in debt and had recently defaulted.

Also how do you think neighborhoods of 300 houses already deal with natural disasters? Do you think their only option is to rely on aid from a 'nation state'? They get insurance.

It may be a far out idea with many problems that would have to be accounted for but lets use our very best judgement.

Hurricanes are a challenge but if you're not close to shore, tsunamis are barely noticeable.

> Libertarian

> with its own government

What?

You’re confusing libertarianism and anarchy.

Practically similar. Bare minimum government is just one step above no government... aka anarchy.

Be careful when interpreting vocabulary. Connotations and wording can serve to obfuscate concepts that are practically the same thing. Libertarianism and anarchy sound dramatically different, but logically the concepts are similar.

Libertarianism can be a pretty big tent, lots of room for different opinions about what's minimal and what to keep or jettison. Sticking with the Peter Theil-ish variety, having enough government to preserve personal property rights is still a giant step apart from anarchy.

Libertarian governments are the bare minimum society finds acceptable. A libertarian government would maximize freedom and autonomy and only create laws to restrict directly infringing on other citizen's natural rights and freedoms.

Are there any practical examples of this theory?

The Somali government, for one. They don't have enough money for social programs or building inspectors, but have for the most part kept other governments out.

Not at all. Somali just has many different governemts fighting against each other.

I would argue that tribal leaders and mini governments form organically under systems with no or bare minimum government.

Make no mistake. Small Governments in somali fighting each other is the result of the initial establishment of minimal government. There was no grand plan of warring governments establishing checks and balances.

I’mma go watch Waterworld again

I just want to mention that seafaring is the closest we can get to libertarian lifestyle. Even when due to the flag of your ship you are bound to a nation somehow, yet there is much more freedom than anywhere else. For example, your ship can be build entirely up to your standards and wishes, while a car or airplane is regulated down to the smallest part.

It's sad that libertarians / ancaps are bullied out of the real world to do their experiment. These kind of experiments should be done on land.

> It's sad that libertarians / ancaps are bullied out of the real world

Uhuh. Though they just call that "thinking".

There is no "real world" form of utopianism. It's a dangerous adolescent form of thinking which requires purifying one's environment until it is All Good according to a single set of criteria.

All society-level attempts at this measure their results in millions of deaths.

By that standard we should have stuck with absolute monarchy. (you might want to think it over. I 'm sure the ancient romans said the same things, as did imperial russia)

Every change which has occurred has never resulted in a single pure ideology characterizing a civilization.

All change is plural and incremental, even so-called "revolutions" really just exchange the set in power for another set. They leave the plurality of really-existing power structures in place, whilst disturbing only a small number.

This is simply an incremental shift in power at the very top.

Utopian projects take pluralities of lifestyles and pragmatic political systems and attempt to unify them under a single consistent set of criteria.

It's something for the mind of an adolescent, to which this mode of thinking is common.

libertarians leave capitalism intact. You can say that government delegates is "a small number".

There is no "capitalism".

Society cannot be characterized by a coherent set of ideological principles. It is the behavior of human beings, which is highly plural and inconsistent when formalized.

There is no ideology to "leave in tact". By destroying the government you do not "uncover" some latent capitalism, you take the ways everyone is behaving -- have them repeat that behaviour -- but now without a government.

You'd find that to be a catastrophe.

Yeah, nothing worse than believers of "greed is good" who literally have no concern for society at large being told that their ideas are bad and that we don't care much for them.

who is this "we" who believes such falsities?

What? No one has "bullied" libertarians and ancaps out of anywhere, the choice to construct this settlement as it is and to move there is entirely voluntary.

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