Honduran Islanders Push Back Libertarian Startup City | Hacker News Reader

Honduran Islanders Push Back Libertarian Startup City

restofworld.org

45 pointsimhoguy11 comments

From the article:

> They’ll be able to vote, too, but their franchise is limited. Residents elect only five of the council’s nine members. Landowners vote for two of the five, with voting power pegged to acreage. Buy more land, buy more votes. Próspera’s founders choose the four remaining council members, and a six-member supermajority is needed to alter policy.

So... feudalism.

Slate Star Codex / Astral Codex Ten post for more context: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera

Powerful people exploiting poor communities while talking about freedom is not at all unprecedented.

Not even Prospera can escape the Chinese propaganda machine

Reading the article, the locals are complaining about:

1. They wanted free stuff (water), and didn't get it.

2. They wanted more free stuff (from robberies), and couldn't get it - security was tightened.

In many of these countries, the reason for lack of development is the local people. Foreign libertarian communities will need complete political autonomy, perhaps even to form their own federation of micronations, otherwise the local population will essentially hold them to ransom in exchange for an increasing share of productive output.

This is why it might be easier to develop advanced human communities on Mars - no locals to worry about!

I'm wondering if we somehow read different articles.

"1. They wanted free stuff (water), and didn't get it."

Um... their water system failed, and Prospera hooked them up to their own water system, without informing them that they would be charged for this. Further, the entity doing the charging was calling itself a philanthropic foundation.

"This is why it might be easier to develop advanced human communities on Mars - no locals to worry about!"

I'm not going to make sweeping assumptions about you based on a single comment. However, this kind of phrasing makes it sound as if you believe peoples' wellbeing and autonomy are secondary to - or perhaps at odds with - profit.

Then Prospera stopped charging for the water, and the only condition they placed on completely free use of all the infrastructure that went into it was for the village to acknowledge that they were receiving the water.

The article says that they temporarily stopped charging for the water due to the COVID pandemic. Subsequently, they asked that the community enter into a formal contract as a condition for supplying water. This does not seem like they acted very transparently at all, and it's unsurprising that they would now be facing heavy pushback.

The article never said they started charging again, which means that "temporarily" was an editorialization.

Having a written agreement—I don't think it sounded like "formal contract" to me—is more transparent than the pre-existing situation where they were informally providing water. Your complaints are internally inconsistent and it seems you just want to kvetch.

A gated in town doesn't spell out liberty, to me atleast. Maybe the idea is flawed on ideological grounds and it is just a pretense to make a rich-guy gated community on a paradise island?

The word's basically lost at this point. If someone says "freedom" and it's not actually RMS, it's a 90% shot they're using it as a school-bathroom-toilet-paper-thin veil over "I don't really want to pay taxes for anything other than preserving my private property rights, and can we at least privatize that too?"

We almost need a new term for the old "Freedoms From (want/fear/persecution)" we used to talk about as a feature of a high-functioning civilization.

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