City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away | Hacker News Reader

City floating on the sea could be just 3 years away

cnn.com

14 pointstransburgh16 comments

If they can figure out how to be safe in large storms, and a solution to piracy, I'd absolutely be interested in living on one. I also am curious how they will take care of the fuel costs. (Cruise ships are some of the most fuel inefficient vehicles on the earth.) tidal power would be quite useful in this kind of system.

After all, people have already spoken about using cruise ships as offshore platforms...

A single 50 cal. is a solution to piracy. Modern pirates are very poorly armed; they're just attacking ships which have mostly been stripped to a single pistol through law or policy.

Supply and demand will solve that, if profitable enough. Further, the current navies would have little interest in protecting these micro-countries being competitors as they are.

Sure, there's always a point at which it's profitable for criminals to take my stuff. The idea is to make sure I have enough protection or enough consequence-generation to offset the potential profit. I'm just saying that the vast majority of current pirates are poorly armed, and thus it's not hard to make piracy unprofitable on the level of an individual vessel or platform. It's not a permanent solution, but as that and other solutions become available, the totality is a long-term solution.

Why would you be interested in living in a Waterworld city? No seriously, what's the draw? I'd feel pretty damn cooped up and imagine that it'd be like living on a houseboat in the middle of nowhere.

The advantage would be living with people who shared the same values as I do and not being obstructed by the federal laws most of us would find distasteful.

But you're going to have to have laws and taxes of some sort to keep the mini-society going - how do you know they'll be ones you don't object to? There's plenty of countries around the world without the same laws as the u.s. and I don't see a massive outflow of libertarian hackers to them, so I'm not sure there's really as much demand as the builders think.

It's much easier to find 10,000 to 250,000 people who have the same values as you and can create a new culture. While I wouldn't be interested in a libertarian society, I might be interested in a completely secular system with full equality for GLBT citizens and a culture much like San Francisco without the federal impositions on the culture. (I wouldn't mind moving to the Netherlands either.)

Further, the laws can be more tailored for a culture when there are fewer than a million inhabitants. Common sense can work a lot better, and exile can be an option, making prison expenses much more managable. (After all, no one is saying that these would be granting citizenship.)

I see, so you like the idea of iteration on the policies that govern people, more than having specific freedoms. Makes sense, I wish we could open source bills for Congressional review, for example.

It's funny you should mention Holland - I visited during my honeymoon about 6 mo ago and thought it was gorgeous, especially all the clean graphic design, but read in my tourist book that there's a right wing resurgence and they're cracking down on a lot of the things Amsterdam is famous for, despite all kinds of studies showing that it's improved society.

"Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer who now works for the Seasteading Institute, said floating cities are the perfect places to experiment with new forms of government."

There are no new forms of government. They've all been tried. There are only people ignorant of history.

Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

So we should just stop trying? That's not very entrepreunial.

That's like saying "everything significant that can be invented has already been invented."

Its very short-sighted.

Well, there's never been this many people crammed into one government before, in several cases, and it's clear that some forms of government scale better than others, so it seems unlikely to me that everything that can be known about social organization with billions of people is already known.

Keyword: Could

Just thought of "The Raft" in Snow Crash.

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