Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Seems like this is some kind of political movement to create autonomous floating mini states.

Have these people never played BioShock? This is basically the same naive libertarian ideas going wild.

For such an project to be successful you need to have some serious funding. Why should anyone fund this?

Any legitimate industry will have a hard time on the ocean where you have horrible logistics, nearly no access to resources and are miles away from potential clients.At best I could maybe see a niche for some gimmicky tourism.

So what would it be used for? Let's be honest: Tax evasion, human trafficking and gambling.

It would be way too expensive to live there for normal people. Plus it would more oppressive. You can at least flee from a tyrannical government on land. If you are in the middle of the ocean? Good luck.

Though I dig the futurism. As long a they keep larping, good for them. Just hope they don't think it is a good idea in real life.

View on HN

>For such an project to be successful you need to have some serious funding. Why should anyone fund this?

<del>Not to support it, but Peter Thiel is a founder of the Seasteading institute[0], so funding shouldn't be a concern.</del>

>The Seasteading Institute is a nonprofit organization, based in California. It was founded in 2008 by activist, software engineer and political economic theorist Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, and technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel.

Looks like he gave up on it though[1]:

>In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Thiel said seasteads are "not quite feasible from an engineering perspective" and "still very far in the future"

[0]:https://www.seasteading.org/about/

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.in/facebooks-mysterious-hardware...

> So what would it be used for? Let's be honest: Tax evasion, human trafficking and gambling.

I can think of a lot of uses besides those. Prostitution between consenting adults, fun drugs, medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc, testing of drones and driverless vehicles, playing lawn darts, and avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.

> Prostitution between consenting adults

There are real world countries that you can visit for this.

For some reason, people that promote legalization are never willing to look at countries that have done so.

We have this here in Germany and I have to tell you, it is not a success story to say the the least. There is a huge problem with human trafficking. Yes, people always say it will go away if you legalize it. The data says otherwise, it gets in fact worse. All the red light district are also controlled by criminal gangs. They are mostly ignored by the state as long a they "help" with collecting the taxes. And this is what is happening in a strong state with a relative low level of corruption.

> fun drugs

Again there are enough states that allow them and the list if growing.

> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA

Same here.

> testing of drones and driverless vehicles

Sure you can test them. How else a companies developing them? Sure public roads are regulated, thank god for that. I don't want to die because someone wanted to test his driverless car in production.

> playing lawn darts

Why can't you in your country?

> avoiding obsolete regulations

Eh sounds minor and again lot's of countries to choose from already.

A strong benefit of seasteading is that a small group of people can pick and choose which things they want to be legal. For example, you cite a couple things which are legal in Germany, but homeschooling isn't legal there, nor is vacuuming on Sunday.

Wanting to homeschool you kids but not being willing to give up easy access to legal prostitution is a very strange hill to die on.

I get what you are saying but Libertarians seem to ignore elementary freedoms in favor of picking really weird fights.

What elementary freedoms? Not having to starve to death. Not being bankrupted by health care costs. Not having to fear for my live. No having to live in a society where people lack basic education. Enjoying well maintained public roads. Being taking care of when getting old.

They have some weird ultra-naive definitions of freedom that only seems to include absence of rules. Like they see not being able to vacuum on a Sunday, not the freedom to enjoy a quiet Sunday. (Well at least I can dream about, it is not as enforced as people here probably believe.)

Everything is give and take. Societies thrive when people are willing to compromise.

The "elementary freedoms" you list should more properly be considered entitlements.

The advantage of the seasteading scheme is that different groups can pick different hills to die on.

There are probably people who would like the worst of both the US and Germany: no shopping on Sunday, alcohol only to be bought at state liquor stores, no noise at certain hours, no driving over 55 miles per hour. I think it would be great if they had a floating* island all to themselves.

* if it didn't float, that would be fine too

> Why can't you [play lawn darts] in your country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_darts#Safety_and_bans_in_...

To be fair, you can still play lawn darts if you have a set. I remember playing with a set of lawn darts, like the real ones with the spikes, with my cousins back in like 2004-2005, nobody came to arrest us.

Also Nerf has multiple options for lawn darts on sale that don't have spikes. And no one ever banned horseshoes or bocci which are also the exact same game/sport.

They just stopped selling the one particular variant, and not really because they were "banned", but because of the market realities of the low margins for selling only a somewhat fun toy versus the litigation costs and settlement costs from its injuries. If they thought there was big enough demand they'd slap a ton of warnings on it, include an arbitration clause in a jurisdiction friendly to them, and put it back in stores in a heartbeat.

You're mostly true. However, they slapped the warnings on the box in 1970. In 1989 they were banned, because kids (like, under 11) kept killing themselves with them.

I imagine it'd be easier to build an indoor simulated lawn then trying to do that on a ship. And, well before the point where a gigantic ocean liner becomes economical - you could always get a custom set of lawn darts crafted for you by any sort of metal working shop or factory.

Heck, you can probably get them on Etsy from China.

People who seriously propose seasteading do not believe that a central authority has the right to establish the definitions of either "consenting" or "adult".

At least some of them just want to be able to choose a better central (or decentralized) authority.

>Prostitution between consenting adults, fun drugs

Got to Nevada. It has legal fun drugs, blackjack and hookers.

> medical drugs which are tied up by the FDA etc,

Oh no, safety reviews. I don't know what "medical drugs" the FDA has stopped, but I do know a lot of snakeoil.

> testing of drones and driverless vehicles

Testing both in the US is easy. Well, not driverless vehicles on all public roads. But seasteads have no public roads so that still argues in favor of the US (some is better than none). That's without asking how many miles of roads you'll get on your boat.

> playing lawn darts

Has never been illegal, and (again in the US) are available for sale. There was a period of time when they were illegal because regulations preventing them from being sold to and used by children were ignored for two decades. Probably by well-meaning libertarians. If reasonable regulations keep getting ignored, you should expect harsher ones.

> avoiding obsolete regulations come to mind.

I'm not aware of that many obsolete regulations. I am aware of many regulations people claim are obsolete because they inconvenience them and they want a competitive advantage.

There are other laws libertarians would like to circumvent. Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs, civil asset forfeiture spring to mind. Starting a new country on the ocean is a pretty drastic way to fight back, but i can't deny the impulse to opt out when change appears impossible.

> Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs, civil asset forfeiture spring to mind.

Just out of interest: What kind of problem do you, personally, have with these that you are considering starting a new country?

And isn't it the issue that the rich can already circumvent laws just fine? How is all this going to help the poor who have to stem the main bulk of the tax burden while the rich use loop holes and tax havens? They ware not the ones that are going to live on the ocean.

> How is all this going to help the poor who have to stem the main bulk of the tax burden

Are you not aware of libertarian views on said tax burden?

I'm pretty sure the libertarian idea of not paying any property taxes would just lead to rich feudal lords owning everything and everyone else paying them rent. Which is probably worse for everyone else than paying taxes which are at least nominally used for the public good.

I really don't know how not to violate HN's guideline to maintain a kind and openminded discussion when presented with such a straw-man. There's just no way to react to this that would be in any way sincere and not offensive.

Property taxes are viewed as among the least bad types of tax among right-libertarians. And since libertarians believe in some minimal level of taxation to fund the army etc, your comment is inaccurate.

I'm not the OP, but the three listed things are fairly bland issues by libertarian standards.

Occupational licensing: it's gatekeeping that drives up the cost of services, reduces competition and quality. For example, when I dislocated my shoulder, the offsite radiologist who read the X-ray declared that it wasn't dislocated. He was wrong. Luckily for me, the staff at the clinic ignored his diagnosis and reduced it anyway.

Over scheduling of drugs: In the US, cannabis is a Schedule I drug at the federal level. This is the same bucket as heroin and the date rape drug. Prosecutors can use (or abuse) prosecutorial discretion to decide who to pursue for cannabis offenses, resulting in unequal outcomes based on your socioeconomic status. As a Canadian, I can be denied entry to the US if I admit having used cannabis. This seems wasteful, and impairs useful things like economic migration or families visiting each other.

Civil asset forfeiture: there are perverse incentives here where: (1) the agency seizing the money gets to use it for their operating expenses and (2) the burden of proof rests on the person whose property is seized. There are documented cases of police targeting travellers with out of state plates, knowing that they are unlikely to return to fight their case in court. As someone who takes road trips through the US, this affects me.

If you want to stir the libertarian pot, you should talk about child labour, consensual slavery and selling body parts. Occupational licensing, over scheduling of drugs and civil asset forfeiture aren't that out there, IMO.

> civil asset forfeiture

It seems odd to me to trade a small but real risk of this should I decide to carry around large quantities of cash (and/or drugs) for the risk of being robbed by literal pirates with no real recourse unless you're able to fight them off personally.

You ever notice how “libertarian gone wild” examples are always fiction? Movies, video games, etc... while collectivism gone wild’s real-world failures are everywhere to be seen in even recent history? USSR, China, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, ...

Not that all libertarian ideas are perfect, but when you start building on top of the non-aggression principle, other problems seem so much more manageable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com