Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments
techregister.co.uk
techregister.co.uk
> On March 11, 1966, these landowners, all fully owned subsidiaries of what is now The Walt Disney Company, petitioned the Circuit Court of the Ninth Judicial Circuit, which served Orange County, Florida, for the creation of the Reedy Creek Drainage District under Chapter 298 of the Florida Statutes. After a period during which some minor landowners within the boundaries opted out, the Drainage District was incorporated on May 13, 1966, as a public corporation. Among the powers of a Drainage District were the power to condemn and acquire property outside its boundaries "for the public use". It used this power at least once to obtain land for Canal C-1 (Bonnet Creek) through land that is now being developed as the Bonnet Creek Resort, a non-Disney resort.[3]
> However, Walt Disney knew that his plans for the land would be easier to carry out with more independence. Among his ideas for his Florida project was his proposed EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, which was to be a futuristic planned city (and which was also known as Progress City).[4] He envisioned a real working city with both commercial and residential areas, but one that also continued to showcase and test new ideas and concepts for urban living.[3] Therefore, the Disney Company petitioned the Florida State Legislature for the creation of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which would have almost total autonomy within its borders. Residents of Orange and Osceola Counties did not need to pay any taxes unless they were residents of the district. Services like land use regulation and planning, building codes, surface water control, drainage, waste treatment, utilities, roads, bridges, fire protection, emergency medical services, and environmental services were overseen by the district,[3] and the only areas where the district had to submit to the county and state would be property taxes and elevator inspections.[1] The planned EPCOT city was also emphasized in this lobbying effort.
> On May 12, 1967, Governor Claude R. Kirk, Jr. signed the following statutes to implement Disney's plans:[5]
* Chapter 67-764 created the Reedy Creek Improvement District;
* Chapter 67-1104 established the City of Bay Lake; and
* Chapter 67-1965 established the City of Reedy Creek (later renamed as the City of Lake Buena Vista around 1970.)
> According to a press conference held in Winter Park, Florida, on February 2, 1967, by Disney Vice President Donn Tatum, the Improvement District and Cities were created to serve "the needs of those residing there", and the company needed its own government to "clarify the District's authority to [provide services] within the District's limits" and because of the public nature of the planned development. The original city boundaries did not cover the whole Improvement District; they may have been intended as the areas where communities would be built for people to live.[1][3]
> A five-member Board of Supervisors governs the District, elected by the landowners of the District. These members, senior employees of The Walt Disney Company, each own undeveloped five-acre (2.0 ha) lots of land within the District, the only land in the District not technically controlled by Disney or used for public road purposes. The only residents of the District, also Disney employees or their immediate family members, live in two small communities, one in each city. In the 2000 U.S. Census, Bay Lake had 23 residents, all in the community on the north shore of Bay Lake, and Lake Buena Vista had 16 residents, all in the community about a mile north of Disney Springs. These residents elect the officials of the cities, but since they don't actually own any land, they don't have any power in electing the District Board of Supervisors.
> The District headquarters are in a building in Lake Buena Vista, east of Disney Springs.[11] The District runs the following services, primarily serving Disney:
> Law enforcement – Officers from Orange County, Osceola County and the Florida Highway Patrol are contracted to police the district. In addition, the Walt Disney Company employs about 800 security staff in their Disney Safety and Security division. While Disney security maintains a fleet of private security Chevrolet Equinoxes equipped with flashing lights, flares, traffic cones, and chalk commonly used by police officers, arrests and citations are issued by the Florida Highway Patrol along with the Orange County and Osceola County sheriffs deputies.
> Disney security personnel are involved with traffic control and may only issue personnel violation notices to Disney and RCID employees, not the general public.[1] Security vans previously had red lightbars, but after public scrutiny following the death of Robb Sipkema,[12] were changed to amber to fall in line with Florida State Statutes.[13]
> Environmental protection: Many pieces of land have been donated to the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation and the South Florida Water Management District as conservation easements, and the District collects data and ensures that large portions remain in their natural wetland state.[11]
> Building codes and land-use planning – The "EPCOT Building Codes" were implemented to provide the sort of flexibility that the innovative community of EPCOT would require. The provisions contained therein, although rumored to be exceptionally stringent, have in fact never been far and above those of the Standard Building Code or the Florida Building Code (FBC) that is currently in force in the rest of Florida. In fact, since the inception of the International Building Code (IBC) in 2000, the EPCOT Building Code defers much of its design parameters to the IBC-based FBC, and many of the reference standards contained therein. Particularly with regard to wind design, today's standards are better than the ones that previously existed, and today's RCID buildings are built to withstand 110 mph (180 km/h) winds. Hurricane Charley (2004) reached maximum sustained winds estimated 85 mph (137 km/h) at the nearby Orlando International Airport but winds were lower on RCID property. Although the codes are ostensibly updated on a three-year cycle, the most recent and currently used version of the EPCOT Building Codes is the 2015 version.[14][11]
> Utilities – wastewater treatment and collection, water reclamation, electric generation and distribution, solid waste disposal, potable water, natural gas distribution, and hot and chilled water distribution, through Reedy Creek Energy Services, which has been merged with the Walt Disney World Company[11]
> Roads – Many of the main roads in the District are public roads maintained by the District, while minor roads and roads dead-ending at attractions are private roads maintained by Disney; in addition, state-maintained Interstate 4 and U.S. Highway 192 pass through the District, as does part of the right-of-way of County Road 535 (formerly State Road 535).[11] Disney provides transportation for guests and employees in the form of buses, ferries, and monorails, under the name Disney Transport. In addition, several Lynx public bus routes enter the District, with half-hour service between the Transportation and Ticket Center (and backstage areas at the Magic Kingdom) and Downtown Orlando and Kissimmee, and once-a-day service to more points, intended mainly for cleaning staff. Half-hourly service is provided, via Lynx, to Orlando International Airport (MCO).[11]
On the one hand, it was allegedly quite gorgeous and housing there had many amenities considered quite modern for the time. The town also had a very low mortality rate due to how clean it was.
On the other hand, George Pullman founded the town partly as a social enterprise, believing he could make his workers happy and productive through urban planning and strict rules. This partly meant eliminating businesses catering primarily to vice (the only establishment that served alcohol was the hotel, which workers rarely entered). He would also regularly inspect workers homes to ensure that they met certain standards of cleanliness.
It was also, first and foremost, a company town, and one that was expected to be profitable at that. As a consequence, you could only rent housing, not buy it, and the rent was expected to subsidize the town rather than the town subsidizing worker expenses. Additionally, public gatherings were prohibited unless sanctioned by the company, hence why visitors often remarked that the place looked empty.
In the end the company wound up cutting wages after the panic of 1893, but not cutting the already-high rents. This led to the Pullman Strike of 1894, which would go on for 2 months and would eventually end with the company being forced to sell its residential holdings, essentially ending the Pullman Company's reign over the town of Pullman. George Pullman would die 3 years later from a heart attack.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Pullman https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/blood-on-the-tracks-in-pullm...
Oh, sure, these are tech companies, not railroad companies, but you have to remember that the Pullman Car Company was a tech company back in its era (a railroad car that functions as a hotel!), and George Pullman was regarded as a benign industrialist, much like how we might see Bill Gates today. The town of Pullman was considered bright and modern and "smart" for its time, much how we'd likely view a tech company town.
In the end, as much as we like to bemoan the inefficiencies of city government, we're probably better off. Nonetheless, I'm rather curious to see how this goes.
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
Is this the plan for the nevada corp towns? If not presumably the corp towns would have to compete to offer quality living.
Whereas these towns would be competing for the thing itself. However there are high switching costs so I could see scenarios where the towns become traps on the decline. Or optimize to get people to move in then take profits on the backend from poor management.
So, yes, you could commute. But it sounds like it might be a long commute. The lower paid staff may not be able to.
The liquidity possibilities is what makes this different than prior corporate scrip and how that was a pejorative.
In some circumstances I’m the only contributor to the liquidity pool so they’re selling directly back to me. Some think they are punishing me by selling when they don’t believe in an outcome, and I’m like you just sold ... to me ... at a lower price than you earned it.... paying contractors that immediately sell is more like having a put on your own token! it’s an unparalleled amount of control.
Not too far of a stretch to bring back the corporate towns too.
The 20s are going to be fascinating.
> ... I haven’t diluted any shares of the company ...
Non-dilutive, non-cash compensation, which is often times more liquid than equity
Best of all worlds
all the stock options and private equity gamblers require a lot more belief than people compensated in tokens.
so fascinating how much our realities have diverged in just a few short years, when it is very obvious which employees and contractors are wasting decades of their life for a payday that never comes. didn't plato write about this like 3,000 years ago?
The best would be a cooperative, where each employee owns an equal share of the company and has equal decision making ability.
duh? thats how all companies work and every instruction manual for founders dealing with VCs and outside capital is about that, which is what this entire forum is about. don't most of you guys here get "a very generous .005%" of a company which gets diluted three more times before it goes bankrupt? working either half a decade of your life or doing that but also paying for the privilege of buying that .005%?
the people getting paid in tokens are in a much better position, way more often, as in liquidity at or above the price of their service most of the time, and people here want to create a reason why that's a problem, really wonder why people choose self-limiting realities.
and why is owners in quotes? pretty much all cryptocurrencies are issued by an actual company that has actual shareholders, and books actual revenue for actual shareholders by selling the cryptocurrencies.
It's not different than any other kind of organization. The tokens do not convey and securities rights in the company, but they may convey some kind of collective benefit in the token-powered product.
However, fiat money (or some kind of commonly-accepted crypto coin) is IMO much better than a very niche/specific token.
It's much easier for someone paid in cash to convert that to something else (other currency, labor or goods) than for someone paid in a cryptocurrency (as it's harder to find people accepting it), and even harder for someone paid in some very niche cryptocurrency (by the sounds of it, you are the only one that is willing to take that "corporate scrip" of yours and exchange it for something else - that's much more risk for the contractors than a general purpose (crypto?)currency).
liquidity pools have solved all of this. locked liquidity pools solved it even better.
edit for anyone passing by: liquidity pools are a fairly novel concept that allows cryptocurrencies to be exchangeable for more liquid cryptocurrencies without needing to beg exchanges to list your token. It is completely permissionless and has resulted in these systems having more liquidity and volume than non-permissionless systems, throughout 2020. Basically, anyone can form a market and they can broadcast publicly that the market won't go anywhere. This is new to crypto over the last 15 months, and is an improvement to all markets. Comes with its own new issues but the market has chosen it.
https://www.coindesk.com/defi-flippening-uniswap-topples-coi...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-16/defi-boom...
find a source you respect that shows you the same thing.
No other asset class has assurances of secondary markets, even in mature markets people have just had to rely on actively traded markets continuing to exist in perpetuity with market makers simply being there without much understanding of how and why.
With fiat, the banking system and legal system has my back, and technical mistakes can pretty much always be resolved.
With crypto, I rarely or never have the legal system protecting me, am more exposed to fraud/shadiness from the various parties involved (exchanges - see Mt.Gox, etc), whoever provides the liquidity pool, etc, and am on the hook for any technical mistakes while doing the transactions (lost the private key or mistyped the address? Tough luck!).
As another commenter has said, you'd pay in cash if it was equivalent. Given that you don't, it means you have something to gain from it not being cash. I'm not implying anything illegal here, but paying in "company scrip" clearly gives you an advantage that cash wouldn't. In this case, it seems to be all good as the counterparties are happy with the deal, but I don't buy the whole idea of it being just as good as cash for the aforementioned reasons.
And then there is me, I have explained exactly what I gain from it not being cash, my first post said that and I said it again. It's the exact same for any company that pays in equity: the company still keep its cash, and they still get a tax deduction from any expense they paid for. This goes one step further in that the company has not diluted any of its ownership. In both circumstances of shares or tokens, the issuing company's cost basis is $0.00. (Sometimes the deduction benefit is in that the company has bought back some tokens at some point, and that specific lot of tokens are exchanged for a service closer to the same market price).
Fast, liquid, mutually beneficial, fairly instant final settlement. And maybe some of people involved actually know how to use a computer and don't mess up, you'd be surprised.
To me it seems pretty obvious that I shouldn't accept a niche token at all but clearly you think this is false, and I'm curious.
A lot of the year long boom in crypto has come from improvements of this technology.
Basically, the mere existence of it does not provide incentive for anyone but the issuer to create a liquidity pool. Different organizations started creating “yield farms” that pay out in an additional tertiary token to people that add to liquidity pools. This has really sparked the rise of it, as well as even more innovations/new services.
It should be obvious that the organization with cash, and shares and ability to issue debt, and newly minted tokens as a product, has an amplified ability to obtain goods and services by exchanging a variety of assets instead of just a cash position. That's not different than any other consumer facing organization, so what do you mean?
Because it's what's offered and is a good deal.
I'm about to start a long-term role where non-cash crypto-tokens are part of the compensation.
I'm not a "true believer" at all. I don't have any crypto at the moment, don't have a wallet yet, and to be honest it's just going to complicate my company accounts and taxation. I do know the field, and I'm sufficiently skeptical to remain not a true believer :-)
Good old fiat would certainly be more convenient, and I could invest that in crypto in my own time and on my own terms if I wanted to do that.
So why accept?
Because I like the company (a lot so far) and the people, the company seems refreshing and well-architected, I'm looking forward to working with the people there, they are working on interesting and worthwhile problems. I anticipate I'm going to learn a lot working there, not only technical, but about real world non-technical social issues I'm not that familiar with at the moment.
And the pay is good, or at least good enough. (I know I can get more by chasing consultancy contracts, but I'm taking a break from that to go all-in on a single company's product development).
Generally the same sorts of reasons for choosing any job.
Despite not being a "true believer" in cryptocurrency, I think I bring a grounded and mature view of the more general (non-currency) crypto ecosystem the company is working with, which will hopefully mean I contribute in a grounded and mature way to the company conversations, and in a better product for real world applications in the long run.
The fact some of the pay is in crypto-tokens is understandable given the company's mission as well as its source of funding, and I'm not unhappy with that. But I wouldn't choose it to be honest if it were a genuinely neutral option on the table. But in exactly the same way, I wouldn't choose RSUs or stock options with another company if equivalent (fiat) cash were available instead. In many ways liquid crypto-tokens are much better than stock options!
As a result, back to the point about corporate scrip. I think we are seeing a rise in scrip-like tokens, but, the GP is right, liquidity changes things. It gives back much of the autonomy that traditional scrip takes away. I know I can, in principle, trade the scrip for cash at any time.
The volatility is not great. The uncertainty around long term value of that portion of income is not great (although I do get to choose the proportion over a substantial range, and change it when I want).
But I've often been paid in international currencies too, and similar issues apply to that. There's some price volatility, it's worth keeping a balance in each currency for expenses in those currencies, and the company accounting and taxation for a small company paid a range of international currencies whose value fluctuates is also annoying.
So being paid in crypto-tokens, a kind of liquid corporate scrip, is not especially more bothersome than being paid in a range of international currencies. It's mostly just different practicalities.
We had a payroll company specifically for tax compliance and automation but any token payment to employees required us to do it ourselves. So vesting just reduced the number of times we needed to do it.
But contractors are much simpler.
So on criminal matters, we're talking about enforcement more than the law itself.
Given local law enforcement's history of asset forfeiture, corruption and biased enforcement, I'm not sure this new model automatically means people would be swapping out angels for demons.
Such abuse happens today and would happen with company governments to (except with companies, anything against company interests instead of political party/politician interests would be the model).
Bankruptcy involves someone else determining the alteration of rights and obligations under an established legal framework.
Repudiation of debt is just exercise of sovereign power by the sovereign debtor.
(In between the two is non-bankruptcy bailouts, where the debtor isn't the sovereign, but the relief is a specifically targeted exercise of sovereign power rather than an adjudication under a preexisting legal framework.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_debt_crises
Update: this is not a list of default events, but a list of crises. Some of them are default events, some are not.
https://www.scribd.com/document/493267147/Innovation-Zone-Bi...
• You must start with 78 square miles (200 square kilometers) of uninhabited land not contained in any township. (Not too hard in Nevada, but you might need to buy out a rancher to get something nice. There are single ranches this size. The size is suspiciously close to one which is currently on the market with good interstate highway access.)
• Initially you appoint a 3 member board to run things.
• You can a la carte take over various government services administered by your county, the sorts of things which are usually delegated to towns. (In the US all land is in a county, but only populated areas are in towns, the rest is "unincorporated" and is administered by the county.)
• Once the population hits 100 people, you have to have an election and the elected board replaces the appointed one.
Not 100% true - there are independent cities in some states. But this is just a nitpick.
Once it hits 100 registered voters. Do I even want to know how badly this number can be gamed?
For land and housing ownership, there is only one option in a given location. You either like the local government owned by the business, or you have to move to another state or even country.
Given what those games were envisioning I'd rather keep it as a fiction though.
> Given what those games were envisioning
yeah, no doy. I can create fiction too that would envision worse. no basis for political decisions though.
What rights can we guarantee for individuals if they lack the right to influence there government?
I guess I'm not sure I see a big problem here. if you have a bunch of land that no one lives on and isn't currently being used for anything, you get to set up your own little county there. no one has to move there if they don't like the deal, and federal environmental protection rules would still apply. there's more than enough land to go around in nevada, if you can actually think of something worthwhile to do with it.
Huh, I had exactly the opposite reaction. Ceding what amount of power to a state? The article says a company would receive the same authority that a county government already gets. That's authority the feds never had; they're not losing anything here.
Which kind of defeats the purpose. How is it a charter city if it's still subject to all the same laws that it would be if it weren't chartered? The Lübeck model wasn't based on being allowed to staff the courts -- it was based on being allowed to write the laws.
My disagreement isn't that it'd defeat the purpose of it being a charter city, if the feds don't allow it it would indeed defeat the purpose. My point is that my immediate concern is that this draft bill may be challenged in court by somebody (name a government, tribal group, nonprofit, or NIMBY cohort) on the grounds that the state doesn't have that authority to grant these rights and that it should rest with the feds.
In practice this ends up being more of a muddy issue than I'd like it to be (cough interstate commerce clause cough), but in principle, that's the law of the land.
But it does seem that this proposal isn't really the same as what we'd think of as a charter city/county. I don't think the state would be giving the corporation carte blanche to write its own independent legal system; they're still subject and subordinate to federal and state law. The only expressly weird thing about this from a government perspective is that the county would be run by a supervisory board that the corporation entirely controls (as in, the company wouldn't have to hold elections for those positions). Still, that's a very big difference and I'm very much against this whole idea.
Huh? No federal power would be ceded: this would be, were it to pass, the State allocating power that is already the State’s in a different manner than it has previously
OTOH, there are some federal issues raised; many of the things corporations might salivating over using their new public powers for would likely raise 14th Amendment issues, and the lack of an superficial arm's length relationship between government and the private actor might make it harder to deny the improper purpose than it is in the case where officials are merely covertly in the pocket of private interests.
It seems to me that even greater dependency on their employer is not what a freedom loving people would want.
The issue is that they both try and represent themselves as part of the same group.
The freedom to not do something is basically the only freedom Americans consistently apply to things usually.
You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store ..."
Another PR and technical debt.
Those that frame this within freedom of choice to live or not live in a corp County, I respond that people will go to where the jobs are. Sure, serfs can choose to go starve in the forest, but if they stay on the lord's land and work, they at least get to eat. Freedom of choice is oppressed by basic necessity. These proposals are a slippery slope, given housing and employment pressures.
edit: honestly shocked by the number of people here willing to grant corporations/companies even more power.
Most of the people who post on HN are fortunate enough to have a good amount of choice when it comes to jobs and living situations. Many, many people in the world don't have that, and will, as you say, go where the jobs are, even if it's not in their best interests over the long term to do so.
As we become more advanced as a species and civilization, the ties between work and livelihood should get weaker, not stronger.
That said, there would be some interesting problems to overcome. To what degree of control do community activities/organizations go through the parent corporation, or are they done entirely independently? What happens if someone commits a crime? Would the corporation run schools? How does the corporation handle dating/gender imbalance?
Sweet, sweet child!
Why would you assume it would work this way? My assumption is that it most definitely would not be.
And even if it did, being dependent upon your employer-employee relationship for housing sounds pretty risky. I get that you might be in a position to not worry about that risk so much, but I think accepting things like that starts to set a dangerous precedent. It's already bad enough that we in the US already depend on our employers for health insurance.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Distri...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Dist...
Monsanto never stopped being a chemical manufacturer. What do you think RoundUp is?
This phenomenon is present in Saudi Arabia - Abqaiq (Spelling) and Ras-Tanura are both company towns for Aramco Oil Company and even Universities like King Fahd University (KFUPM) has comfortable, suburban-style residential quarters for its Faculty.
In fact, driving through Abqaiq and Ras-Tanura would seem as if you are magically transported to suburbs of USA. I kid you not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Aramco_Residential_Camp_...
By becoming a municipality or locality, the state Supreme Court has greater jurisdiction over the company and on top of that becomes common law land - essentially short circuiting the Section 230 debate.
Fair, but flat taxes, as well as most consumption taxes, are regressive. An income tax (or a wealth tax) is one of the few things that keeps an individual's contribution proportionate to their means, and can help out people at the very low end.
Alternatively I guess you could jack up property/land-use taxes (after eliminating income taxes altogether). Those are usually based on assessed value, which ties your tax to a (subjective, but mostly reasonable) measure of what you use. Ideally this would be a progressive tax, with very low (or 0%) rates for the first $X of value, similar to how income taxes in the US work now.
Oh is it scary that the capitalists are starting to exploit in this way in the north? We need more north-south solidarity.