
The Hottest New Thing in Seasteading Is Land - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-20/silicon-valley-seasteaders-go-looking-for-low-tax-sites-on-land
======
SerLava
Isn't this the plot of BioShock?

If this sounds like a dorky joke post, it's not.

Isn't this literally motivated by the same neo-fuedal oligarchical narcissism
that made the bad guy in BioShock build essentially the same thing as this?
Tell me one of these "seasteads" won't get hit by some speedboat pirates and
decide OK, we're gonna arm up and hey why not build down? And you know what?
No one's gonna say we can't do human experiments on our residents, so why not?
As long as they sign their names to it.

Just stay in Palo Alto or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes. This is
bleak, bleak stuff.

“Do I want to create the first venture-backed city-state? Hell yeah”

~~~
patrissimo1976
Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the
king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff.

Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling
the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get
hit by an asteroid.

I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously
transgressive. If you make new things, something bad might happen! And
existing companies might lose customers! There will be change! Chaos! Mayhem!

Or - crazy idea here - perhaps we could have the courage to not let the plot
of a video game limit our social innovation?

Or, if that's the only metric you have, at least pick the right game -
SimCity!

~~~
rozab
The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the
Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

~~~
TimTheTinker
> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years

That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't
have kept on coming.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less
forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people
sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home
country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be
murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

~~~
freehunter
Exactly. A large chunk of the population was forced to American against their
will, and a large chunk of the people who chose to go to America only survived
because of the labor of the people who were forced to be there. Claiming
success on the back of slave labor isn’t something that’s super popular these
days.

------
mindcrime
I don't know if they will ever succeed or not, but it sure is heart-warming to
see people still pushing these ideas and trying to get something going.
Competition is Good Thing and if we can come up with something better than
nation-states, then we should. Personally I encourage these guys to keep
experimenting, keep iterating, and keep pushing to break the mold.

Maybe "government" as we know it today is a just a "fashionable solution" \-
to riff on pg's earlier essay.

~~~
theflyinghorse
It really does sound like a bunch of wealthy folks (and I don't mean your-
town's-surgeon wealthy, I mean billionaire-class-wealthy) want to further
remove themselves from laws that govern everybody else. Imagine this - a group
of super wealthy bound by no laws of any nation but benefiting from them all.
Terrifying.

~~~
BurningFrog
A city of all billionaires sounds like a very small city.

Also, hiring for service jobs might be hard :)

~~~
all_blue_chucks
Why hire? There's no law against kidnapping or slavery on a seastead.

~~~
HaloZero
Because the UN will get on you. While this isn't an issue for some random
warlord in Africa if you're a tiny island who still wants to operate within
the world you're still fucked.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
The UN doesn't have an army

~~~
Alupis
No, but it's members do.

And some of those members aren't afraid of using them, or their Navys, or Air
Forces...

~~~
edanm
You're not wrong, but consider that there are plenty of atrocities, including
slavery, happening right now around the world.

~~~
OldHand2018
Happening in sovereign nations, not on floating platforms in international
waters [1].

Items of interest:

Article 88: Reservation of the high seas for peaceful purposes

Article 98: Duty to render assistance

Article 99: Prohibition of the transport of slaves

Article 100: Duty to cooperate in the repression of piracy

Article 101: Definition of piracy

Article 103: Definition of a pirate ship or aircraft

Article 105: Seizure of a pirate ship or aircraft

The law is very clear on the authority of warships to intervene.

[1][https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...](https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unclos/unclos_e.pdf)

------
novok
" _Slytherin_ sweatshirt"

"sipping well water at his mountaintop _compound_ south of San Jose"

"He also says, _with a straight face_ , "

Next up they're going to say lex luthor bald head and evil villain laugh.

\----

The principle has been done before. It's similar to free trade economic zones
in other countries, shenzen is one example, or reproducing something like HK
or Singapore in other areas of the world.

~~~
novok
So because it's been done before, it's not as radical of an effort. I bet if
they changed the marketing to "let make another Singapore in YOUR COUNTRY" I
bet locals, politicians and journalists would be way more into it.

------
keiferski
Obviously it's sci-fi scenario, but the real solution (assuming that you see
it as a problem) to overbearing and entrenched government power will probably
be self-sustaining space colonies.

Experimental governments on Earth are limited by the fact that [large state
power] can invade you in a matter of hours for arbitrary reasons, no matter
where you on are the planet. Fly off into the deep cosmos, though, and your
chances of survival dramatically increase.

~~~
lisper
> the real solution (assuming that you see it as a problem) to overbearing and
> entrenched government power will probably be self-sustaining space colonies

Why in the world would you think that the politics of self-sustaining space
colonies would not devolve into the exact same (dys)functional states (pun
intended) as politics here on earth?

~~~
big_chungus
Some will, some won't. Just like on earth, new forms of government will
evolve. What we _do_ know from our historical past is that small communities
can do much better at self-government in most cases. It's always harder to
screw over your neighbor than a random guy from the other side of the nation,
and easier for the neighbor to get redress.

More importantly, I don't think the possibility of a bad outcome ought to halt
the progress of mankind in perpetuity.

Interesting thought: many suspect nations with frontiers flourish due to
having an "escape valve". I am curious to see what an unlimited escape valve
will enable.

~~~
mulmen
> Interesting thought: many suspect nations with frontiers flourish due to
> having an "escape valve". I am curious to see what an unlimited escape valve
> will enable.

Can you expand on this? I think I understand the general implication but it’s
not something I have considered before. If you have more thoughts/writing on
this I’d like to ingest it.

If I understand correctly the idea is “undesirables” can go to a place where
they are free to explore their ideas.

~~~
big_chungus
Sure. The basic idea is that there are always people who just "don't fit in"
to society at large. Those people can stay and cause trouble, can be
imprisoned, or can go through the safety valve to go live where they won't
harm others. It also gives people opportunity for advancement; think of the
many stories of families going west to find a better life. It allows societies
to preserve a degree of individualism and a shared goal of expanding into the
great un-known. I'm dipping my toes into deeper sociological waters here than
I'm entirely comfortable with, but there's a broader concept of a "safety-
valve institution" that can be viewed as positively helping maintain order or
negatively keeping oppressed masses from rising up (the class warfare folks
start beating there drums around here). Some more interesting reading:

* [http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html](http://www.ditext.com/shannon/shannon.html)

* [http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html](http://www.ditext.com/robbins/robbins.html)

* [https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011](https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/2716011)

The obvious issue is that the treatment of Indians was unethical in the case
of America, but space exploration might allow us to get many of these benefits
of historical colonialism without genocide. I'll admit that I'm biased
favorably towards this idea, as the frontier could, in some cases, be much
closer to a libertarian utopia than a more heavily-organized society, but the
up-side is that it provides options for those who want more and less state
control.

------
Zhenya
For those wondering about the mentioned couple off the coast of Thailand:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-seahome/thai-
nav...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-seahome/thai-navy-tows-
floating-home-of-fugitive-us-seasteader-idUSKCN1RY0SX)

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-libertarian-nirvana-at-sea-
ru...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-libertarian-nirvana-at-sea-runs-into-a-
stubborn-opponent-the-thai-navy-11556466473)

------
rtempaccount1
Ultimately any country/state needs a variety of services, from utilities like
water/sewage/electricity to emergency services like ambulance/fire/police to a
military to defend what you've got from other countries. you also need things
like roads, telecomms infrastructure and other things that have been built
over decades/centuries in established countries.

You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with other countries so
that the fate of your state isn't the same as the Thai SeaStedding adventure.
Then you may also need things in the longer term like social services, pension
funds etc to care for your citizens in the long term.

Those all need to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is taxes. A "low tax"
environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I'd guess that
these low tax environments intention would be to skimp on the services that
richer people don't need in exchange for having those richer people pay less
tax...

So I'm not really surprised by the comments in the article that they're having
trouble getting "host" countries to buy into this, what's the upside for them?
These low tax environments will obviously not provide good long term
environments for workers (the low tax is likely to == low social care
standards) so it'd seem likely they'll take in workers where it's suitable and
ship them back out once they're not productive any more, back to the host
countries they came from.

~~~
m463
> A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow.

I think this is preception, not reality.

The US was formed with checks and balances amongst the branches of government
yet there seems to be no checks and balances against government spending or
taxation.

The fact that the Laffer curve[1] is a thing leads me to believe that
government will continue to tax until the maximum taxation is achieved, or
beyond.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve)

~~~
Gibbon1
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYONGDA188S)

~~~
m463
wow, check this one out:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S)

------
AbrahamParangi
This was the obvious conclusion. The experiment is governance, not "governance
plus the enormous practical issues of living on the high seas".

I'd guess it's not stable unless you assume all the other trappings of state
(like the monopoly on violence) and then you're just some uppity proto-nation
practically begging to get subsumed into a more powerful entity.

------
twright
Seasteadding today seems a lot more like the ambitions of billionaires for
their own benefit. I am not convinced they are interested in new forms of
governance insofar as they are just interested in a tax-free region where they
can skirt regulations on an absolute level.

I might be convinced if the discussion around these new societies they want to
build were more focused on egalatarianism. Otherwise, it sounds like the
societies they want have already been built and tried around 100 years ago
with company towns like Fordlandia.

~~~
hinkley
We’ve simply found a new way to make a company town without calling it that.

------
teh_infallible
A more effective way of approaching this goal would be to propose a seastead
as a way of creating valuable waterfront property as part of an existing
coastal city.

The technologies could then be developed with less political controversy, and
once the technological/practical concerns are ironed out, it would be easier
to build a more politically-contested settlement. You would no longer be
confronting political and practical obstacles simultaneously.

------
neonate
[http://archive.md/zG5Zs](http://archive.md/zG5Zs)

------
walrus01
Whatever happened to those people who planned to put a cruise ship in
international waters just off the coast of San Francisco?

"project blueseed"

[https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/14/silicon-
valley-...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2013/03/14/silicon-valley-
entrepreneurs-propose-startup-colony-on-international-waters/)

[https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/12/17/16...](https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2012/12/17/166887292/dont-
like-the-government-make-your-own-on-international-waters)

~~~
asdf21
[https://blueseed.com/](https://blueseed.com/)

nginx bad gateway.

No updates since 2014 or so.

~~~
walrus01
I guess the free market has spoken!

~~~
ehnto
That was usually my first thought when these projects come up. Who would want
to live there? I can see why billionaires want to, but what about all the
citizens that make up a real city? Why would a cook with a family and
ambitions want to live permanently in the middle of an ocean, far from the
"real world"?

~~~
walrus01
The sad reality is that the wealthy people running the place would probably
recruit domestic servants, using the same labor recruiters that send people
from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the
UAE.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_workers_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migrant_workers_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates)

[https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&ei=hjsBXo...](https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&ei=hjsBXo3pPOPy9AO24Y_ICQ&q=kuwait+slave+market+instagram&oq=kuwait+slave+market+instagram&gs_l=psy-
ab.3...3751.4901..5006...0.0..0.465.1825.7j3j0j1j1......0....1..gws-
wiz.......0i22i30j33i22i29i30.NTUBf4c399s&ved=0ahUKEwiNxML05MzmAhVjOX0KHbbwA5kQ4dUDCAo&uact=5)

------
robbintt
This won't ever attract American workers without a bilateral tax treaty, and
all these initiatives are in English...

I think there's more than 1 missing piece in these plans.

------
echelon
I'm immediately reminded of Sealand:

[https://www.sealandgov.org/](https://www.sealandgov.org/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand)

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/se...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/sealand-
outlaw-ocean-tiniest-nation/596074/)

They tried everything: hosting servers, their own currency, their own crypto.
It never really took off, but it was a fun and interesting effort.

~~~
walrus01
The really funny thing about Sealand's internet connection, at the time, it
was a terrestrial microwave radio link with a capacity equivalent fo a couple
of T1s going to a terrestrial ISP connection near the shore in England.

It was singlehomed to something that was network topologically
indistinguishable from putting servers in a house near the beach on land.

------
tyzerdak
If high intelligent without selfishness people would make some state that has
low taxes and simple whitelist of actions without changing it will be great
place to live.

------
mirimir
Me, I'd rather have a bobbler. Plus the associated technology, of course.

------
snidane
As long as there will be people born there will be demand for land for it
being the necessary condition for life and industrial production.

Billionaires now looking for ways to acquire more land? Or to create
artificial land on sea? Or to discover new continents or planets with new
land? Nothing new under the sun. Guess where all the money acquired from
current day monopoly industry ends up in era of zero interest rates and rock
bottom innovation. Of course the majority of it is parked in land.

This is not capitalism. This is feudalism. Just rename 'billionaires' to
'aristocracy'.

~~~
hindsightbias
This is the problem when you have more billionaires than land in Monaco:

[https://www.cnn.com/style/article/monaco-extension-
sea/index...](https://www.cnn.com/style/article/monaco-extension-
sea/index.html)

~~~
haroldp
I was a bit shocked by this:

> For $1 million you can buy just 183 square feet (17 square meters) of prime
> property, according to the Knight Frank 2017 Wealth Report, compared to 280
> square feet (26 square meters) in New York or 323 square feet (30 square
> meters) in London.

Land in Monaco is more expensive that New York City, but not a LOT more
expensive, hah.

------
mc3
One big problem: Pirates.

------
modmans2nd
“We will eliminate poverty by not letting the poor live in our cities “

------
m3kw9
Prob won’t get past govt allowing banks to work with these little states

------
yters
Everyone is hating on little city states like they are the bastion of human
exploitation, unlike _cough_ most Western societies in the past couple
centuries _cough_. I guess no one realizes what happened in Nazi Germany, the
Soviet Union, and even the US just a bit over half a century ago. Hundreds of
millions killed over political whim, anyone? Nothing Peter Theilians or even
Scientologists can concoct in these seasteads will ever compare to the horror
enacted by nation states the last century. I'd say the historical record is
entirely in favor of city states for safeguarding human life.

------
handelaar
For sure I didn't think there were enough problems with the status of the
Marshall Islands in international law, and so this seems like a brilliant idea
altogether.

------
kauffj
I think this is one of if not the most important issue in the entire world.

We currently have two primary forms of government: dictatorship and democracy.

Almost everyone prefers democracies. But many, if not most, living in
democracies also take major issue with the way their countries are run. The
best defense of democracy is Churchill's: democracy is the worst form of
Government except for all the rest.

A framework in which we can experiment with other forms of societal
organization, especially one in which minimizes or eliminates externalities,
has the potential to produce massive benefits if it discovers better forms of
political organization.

~~~
sovietcattle
"democracy is the worst form of Government except for all the rest"

That's until you realize that representative democracy (rule of majority) is
effectively an authoritarian system, which is based on the monopoly of force
and the monopoly of currency, and which incentivizes politicians with low time
preference to spend more money than what they take (by force) through taxes,
therefore indebting and impoverishing the whole population progressively.

There's a social organization system that allows for individual freedoms: free
markets with no centralized governments. It's not a setup that will be
implemented through revolutions, reforms or good will. It's inevitable that
we'll get there as the cost of transactions becomes increasingly small
(therefore making centralized systems of organization not viable). Refer to
the work of Ronald Coase to understand why that is.

~~~
dang
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It
leads to tedious, repetitive, and usually nasty discussions—see first reply
below.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
sovietcattle
My observation is not ideological, it's a reference to the work of an
economist...

~~~
dang
People understand these words differently, but by the standards that apply on
HN, it's definitely ideological and generic. These are things we're trying to
avoid, because internet forums don't have anything new to say about them. The
arguments just get increasingly repetitive and nasty.

~~~
big_chungus
Why pick on this comment, though? The whole thread here is an ideological
debate between forms of government and is repetitive; you may as well lock the
whole thing at this point.

~~~
dang
The comment was significantly more generic, which makes for worse discussion,
especially on divisive topics:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment).

One thing to look for is whether a comment remains anchored in the specific
content of an article, or has become unmoored from it. Most of this thread
retains at least some contact with it. Even the parent of the comment I
replied to
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866584](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21866584)),
which is pretty generic, has at least a wispy string connecting it to the OP.
But
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867096](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21867096)
just goes into talking points.

------
the-dude
Tried web in normal and private mode, can not read.

~~~
kencausey
Reader mode.

~~~
the-dude
Thanks

------
weregiraffe
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his bro?

~~~
the_reformation
I can't tell if that's a typo or not, but it's great.

~~~
weregiraffe
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all night.

------
52-6F-62
This is as suspicious and creepy to me as the unbridled control Alphabet
sought with Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto experiment.

~~~
the-dude
We have corporations as big or bigger as countries. The class war has ended.
What are we going to do?

~~~
kilo_bravo_3
The largest corporation (not government-owned) in existence today is a
microscopically small fragment of the size of the corporate behemoths of 100
years ago, and the corporations of one hundred years ago were microscopically
minuscule compared to the largest corporations of 400 years ago.

Not only that, but the ancient proto-corporations were not partners with
government, they were governments.

For about 20 years, the Mississippi Company was worth between $5-7 trillion,
adjusted for inflation. That's about 6 Microsofts, and at the time of the
Mississippi Company there were many chartered trading companies that ruled
over their dominions with iron fists. Microsoft doesn't have a private army.

How did puny little Microsoft/Google/Apple/BP/GE/Chase/whoever/whatever "end"
the class war when Standard Oil did not?

~~~
the-dude
Thanks for your comment. I did not mean to blame the end of the class war on
the mega-corps.

------
sudoaza
There's a somewhat progressive government in Honduras, Pres gets kidnapped by
military and flown out of the country Thiel + friends get ready to buy out a
piece bringing prosperity and justice

------
smitty1e
Down the road, the still hotter thing in Seasteading will be physical
security.

Do-it-yourself city-states will be like owning hard metal gold, and for the
same reason: once you reach the tipping point of being valuable, you become a
target to own/eliminate.

For a more near-fetched, though not precisely analogous example of the this
kind of issue, see Deepwater Horizon =>
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon)

~~~
peteretep
There’s a much simpler example in armed attempts to take the Principality of
Sealand

