Startup Ducks Immigration Law With 'Googleplex of the Sea' | Hacker News Reader

Startup Ducks Immigration Law With 'Googleplex of the Sea'

wired.com

30 pointsukdm39 comments

The term that is conspicuously absent from that article is "tax", most probably they will have the ship registered to Panama or some similar and will not pay any tax when doing business with the Valley. People suggesting Singapore or Canada miss this point.

But apart from that, just think for 10 minutes, and you'll see how mind-bogglingly bad this idea is. Living in confined spaces with N other coders (that you didn't choose) most of the day is bad enough in a company space where you can actually go home or go out every now and then. Doing so in a ship is insane.

I had heard some horror stories about how Microsoft treated its temp coders from India. Similar stories for Asian nannies in Arab countries are dime a dozen on the news. Basically, if you accept work in an environment where you have unclear legal rights, exploitation is generally the next step. So, maybe if your code breaks the build, you'll have to walk the plank in this place.

>Living in confined spaces [...] is bad enough in a company space where you can actually go home or go out every now and then

The ship is supposed to be parked 12 miles off SF. It's like a regular job, you live in the city and commute by ferry. You don't like it, you stop going, and if they somehow try to prevent you from leaving then international piracy laws come into play.

I'd live in a confined space with n random coders who are talented enough to be on the ship anyday!

You're comparing an incubator space for entrepreneurs to Arab households hiring Asian nannies? OK.

Even the Microsoft comparison is not the same because Microsoft and the temps were not aligned with equity stakes.

Living with other coders actually would be appealing to some people. To those who do not find it appealing I would suggest they don't use Blueseed's services. I am not sure why there is confusion around this point. Blueseed is proposing an incubator space, not a slave ship.

There is no way Blueseed is going to make money on this by using commodity labor. I think the only way this is successful is if their equity stakes provide an outsized return on investment. So it will only work if Blueseed attracts the best and brightest and sets them up to succeed. Why would Blueseed risk getting a reputation for exploitation?

No, I'm comparing working at a place where your rights are secured by law to a place where they aren't or it's not clear what rights you have, hence the nanny example.

"There is no way Blueseed is going to make money on this by using commodity labor."

I think this is exactly what they have in mind, otherwise why not just build/buy someplace near SF. Or if it's the ship idea that attracts the "best and the brightest" why not just park it somewhere on the shore near the city, why does it have to in international waters. The only explanation I can come up is that they will use cheap Asian and Indian labor. If you have an alternate explanation, I would like to read it.

I'll believe it when I see it. If they're quibbling over a measly $1 million for real Internet connectivity, it's clear that they're not really going to get this done.

Also, what's the point of being near Silicon Valley when nobody on the boat is legally allowed to get a cup of coffee there? Might as well have your incubator somewhere where visas for techies are easy to come by. (Singapore?)

I'm also skeptical if they could pull it off. That said the price some cruise ships are going for at the moment is making it a good alternative to new office buildings.

With regards to being near Silicon Valley, people are still allowed to visit and have business meetings in the US with a normal visitor visa. They're just not allowed to work.

I think the time to commute in will be an issue. This means you'll have to live fairly close to the harbor you are being ferried from which could be a problem. I figure what will probably happen is the need for another cruise ship with cabins on them for part time residential accommodation.

The residents will be able to go to the mainland for meetings, coffee, conferences, etc., if they are from a visa waiver program country or have a B-1 (business visitor) visa. And if they don’t, it’s not really feasible to live on the ship or even get there. They just can’t work while on the mainland.

Inevitably there would be some kind of misbehavior by either the employers or employees, and I'm curious how legal conflicts would be handled. What would the jurisdiction be if, for example, if a worker needed to take a company to court for not paying them?

Ignoring the fancy drawings, this is not necessarily such an outlandish project. The main idea is buying a surplus cruise ship and transforming it into office space for highly paid workers who can get a tourist visa but not a work visa for the US. Simply the work certification costs and the delays involved in obtaining H1Bs for all those people would probably offset a good deal of the cruise ship's price. The workers can conduct activities they are not directly paid for (presentations, informal meetings) on shore in the Valley, and commute to do all their programming/other directly paid jobs on board.

Unfortunately, it will not work, because the first politician who will see a potential for voter outrage about this will exploit it to bring the whole thing down, either by causing the shut down of the ship-to-shore infrastructure, by digging up / stretching some obscure tenets of immigration law to penalize the workers, or simply by having the Coast Guard overstep its attributions and seize the entire operation (which is usually how micronations end). The project is thus doomed without some high-grade political support, and no sane US politician will offer any.

To add to the list of potential hinderances, the onshore customs office that could easily be set up to harass workers going to/from this "different country".

... and do tourist or other non-work visas allow unlimited exit/re-entry?

So we've seen the ship loophole for things like gambling before, and that's basically institutionalized. I think the truth is that immigration is too politically charged to go through legislature change - instead it's conceivable that, like Marijuana in decriminalized areas, that politicians are fine with it as long as it doesn't cause too much of a fuss. Just my two cents.

Gambling and marijuana have constituencies, foreign engineers who can't get a work visa don't.

But the companies who what those workers do.

Can you explain who exactly are these "highly paid workers who can get a tourist visa but not a work visa for the US"? If by "highly paid" you mean on the same level of typical US software engineer in CA, say $90K-$100K (and that's not highly paid in the valley) they I don't see how Blueseed can make money.

My question is: what is the value proposition of having a ship in international waters (you only consider the cost of buying the ship, but operating and maintaining it as well as insurance and health concerns would be huge expenses) other than having cheap (or, if you want, cheap-er) labor?

You are also assuming the workers can go to the Valley on a whim on tourist visas. For most internationals, e.g. Chinese and Indian, with single entry visas this is not possible.

I support the idea behind this project. Having said that if I were a betting man, I would bet against its success. Then again, I probably would have bet against Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. That's why I am not a VC.

However, just trying to do this should be lauded. There are some fascinating technical and legal problems that they are addressing. Anyone who is genuinely intellectually curious should be excited about this.

wow ! I always thought H1B was bad -- but this would be would be so much worse. With H1B, I was merely prevented from seeking employment elsewhere or walking away from the job but I was still protected by the laws and had some rights. However this 'Googleplex of the Sea' could a prison for programmers. If you left/lost an H1B job you have 30 days to pack your stuff and leave the country or get a new H1B application in . I am not sure what the laws of the sea are about leaving/losing a job on the sea.

Not sure why I was down voted, but the ppint I was making os that as I have grown older , I have come to appreciate laws including labour and immigration laws. With H1B visa, I could invest in USA, I could buy a home in USA, my kids could attend the local school,my family had health insurance -- these are all nice rights to have. Al the while from being protected from harassment and abuse and other bad stuff. A programmer on that ship is unlikely to have any of those rights and privileges.

Let me put it this way -- would you be willing to hire programmers so desperate for work that they would be willing sacrifice their basic human rights and voluntarily give up all the protections provided by laws ?

Let's consider this from a pure econ perspective:

1. In terms of supply, there are millions of people who spend long hours at sea for often far less pay and creature comforts than the people aboard this cruise ship would be getting. They are called sailors.

2. In terms of demand, the H1B caps are still hit quite rapidly, though since the peak[1] in 2008 (when they ran out in one day) the US has evidently become a progressively less desirable destination.

Therefore, supply exists and demand exists. The main question is whether the US government will arbitrarily harass these talented engineers and scientists when they come ashore for meetings. A lot will depend on whether the officials involved feel like they could pay a penalty in the media. I'd recommend that Blueseed film all encounters with the immigration officials.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Congressional_yearly_...

Its explicitly prohibited to film or use a cellphone during immigration.

That in itself is pretty disturbing. I am a native born US citizen, so I am not aware of things like this.

This was tried during the last bubble too. I remember there was also a company based out of the Caribbean which was offering outsourcing services. They had imported as bunch of coders from India/Russia. The added kicker? If you gave them a contract, your trips to the Bahamas (or was it Bermuda?) would be a business expense.... ;-)

I'd love to see a reference to the Caribbean company.

There was sea-code.com in 2005, proposing to operate offshore of San Diego. As far as I know they never got past the vapor stage.

Back then I thought http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/04/20/really-offshoring/ it wouldn't work out as ships are expensive, but it might be a good seastead-based business. Now former seasteaders are planning to use a cruise ship (I see they say such is inexpensive now due to low demand).

I very much hope Blueseed succeeds, but it is going to be very difficult.

You know, all I remember is that 60 Minutes (the CBS show) did a segment on that around 1999 or 2000... I Googled a little, but couldn't find a reference to it.

Dangit, I was going to make a snarky remark about how this story had already been posted, and thus the submitter was "ducking" the search feature ... but then I searched for that previous discussion and couldn't find it. (Tried all combinations of ship, immigration, hack, startup, bay ...)

This one? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3310873

No, it was one more specifically about the one startup's plan to anchor a big ship 12 miles out from SF and ferry in workers each day.

Although it was a different article in the first place, and so wouldn't count as a dupe, just same startup/plan. (I wish HN encouraged posting summaries and background links along with the story links like on slashdot and LessWrong.)

Ah, here are a few HN mentions of the same plan, although (still!) not the recent one I was thinking of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2830122 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3223706

Again, it doesn't help that each story's title manages to avoid the terms "immigration, ship, hack, anchor, foreigner, visa", and, as mentioned before, HN doesn't encourage summaries. puts on flamesuit

I believe you're referring to the Ars Technica article which was submitted two weeks ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3286693

Thanks, that's the one.

Now why are my HN searches on "immigration hack startup" just now starting to get that story as a result, when they didn't before?

I don't see how this has any viable advantage over either hiring legal workers in-country or international telecommuting. Who is so valuable that an inability to get a work visa warrants the enormous cost of a workaround infrastructure? instead of, say, just working the system until a visa can be acquired, or an alternative worker found?

To be sure, kicking around the recurring idea of an independent artificial island haven of raw [insert favorite "ism" here] is cool. There's a reason it hasn't happened yet: the value thereof does not exceed the cost of achieving and maintaining it.

There is decent/livable money in proposing exotic megaprojects - not because they have any chance of happening, but because just the proposal process attracts income.

As you point out, the challenges to overcome for such a project to succeed seem really huge compared to the expected benefit.

I think the one of the ideas about this kind of "overkill workaround" project is to get as much airtime as possible while kicking and screaming about how the current system is broken.

I wholeheartedly agree with the end goal, but to me this kind of article is really a form of disguised criticism - "Our system is SO broken that SOME PEOPLE are considering building an ARTIFICAL ISLAND (amazing, huh?, huh? HUH!? - wink wink sigh - yes it's really THAT bad!) to work around it.

Does this not strike anyone as being vaguely reminiscent of the origin of L. Ron Hubbard's Sea Org? I mean it's not the first time somebody has thought of using a ship (or a fleet of ships) to get around visa problems. I don't mean to suggest anything cultish about the plan, but it might be worth somebody's while to look at the port exclusion history of the Scientology venture and so forth before embarking on a venture like this. The combination of hostile governments, adamant corporate leadership and a staff bound not by billion-year contracts but by high wages (and slowly learning to accept new inconveniences as they arise) -- I can see this going badly.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3286693

During the last bubble there were two or three notable instances of people scamming investors on projects like these, attempts to buy/lease and load up cargo or cruise ships with "near-shored" indian developers. These scams often remind me of "Aquarius rising: Project Atlantis", a scam that targeted libertarians in the mid '90s.

This idea looks unreal for anyone thinking at least a tiny bit of long-term. It is not possible to provide all the infrastructure people need such as hospitals, schools, everything else and I seriously doubt anyone would want to put their families into such a circumstances when any of your entry to the US might be rejected.

Where are they going to get the support workers for the ship? (Cooking, cleaning, crew, etc)

Why why why is it better to buy a ship, retrofit it for office style work, then ferry a bunch of people to and from it every day rather than just use telecommuting?

Norman Bel Geddes would love this one:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/12/blueseed/?pid=3

Me too, but it's still a very bad idea. I can't imagine the big advantage when you have things like... the internet. Being able to conduct face-to-face meetings is convenient, sure, but living on a boat is usually very limiting.

How about opening shop in canada, a couple of hours flight away, almost the exact same everything.

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