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Comment by jdreaver | Hacker News Reader

How is this ironic? They are piggybacking on the already-established international legal framework. It is indeed possible to criticize the welfare state, defense spending, and corrupt government while still using the legal system. It is a practical decision.

Arguing against government services while still using them is not in any way hypocritical, precisely because you have already paid for those services with taxes. For example, I am not a fan of social security and how it is managed, but you can be damn sure I will use it once I reach the required age, because I have already paid for it. I will be trying to get the money that was taken from me back.

I think socialized medicine is a huge, clunky band-aid on top of a broken healthcare system already made worse by government intervention, but I won't stop going into hospitals if the US adopted a fully socialized healthcare system.

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Ironic is the wrong word.

But the whole point of building a city on a ship was to avoid any national law. If you want to partner with a real country, then might as well build the city on sparsely populated piece of land, and save on the expenses and inconveniences of ship based living. Charter cities and special economic zones seem like a promising idea to me, but seasteading always struck me as very silly.

Great point.

I think they are trying to eventually become independent. I think of this as a kind of bootstrapping procedure, where they start off inside the waters of a nation, and eventually move into international waters once they are established. Indeed, staying inside a nation's waters indefinitely would be counter to their stated goals.

If these ships are movable, then one advantage over a land-based city is they could even change nations when they felt like it.

> I think of this as a kind of bootstrapping procedure

Sure, but a lot of the reasons they list are essential. E.g., calmer waters near large bodies of land and therefore in sovereign water. Proximity to supply chains that lead to/from large land-based populations. Etc.

> If these ships are movable, then one advantage over a land-based city is they could even change nations when they felt like it.

notahacker's sister post is spot on.

As far as I can see, the only notional advantage gained from being based just offshore is that they can theoretically leave, though that does seem to be (i) vastly underestimating the complications involved in sailing to whichever other country will have them and (ii) vastly overestimating the difficulty of selling up and leaving under a more regular land-based arrangement.

They could theoretically leave, but if they have serious unresolved disputes with their host country, it could very well prevent them from leaving by using force. What then?

The ironic thing is that if the technology is successful, it'll be used by nation states to claim more territory. Spratly Islands made to order, on crack. Not that a very brief frontier period couldn't be interesting on its own account, but it'll be brief if it happens at all.

> They are piggybacking on the already-established international legal framework.

Well, no. Being out on the open sea would put them within the international legal framework. They're piggybacking on some national legal framework, and a big part of the ideology behind the project is getting away from said national legal framework. That is ironic.

> precisely because you have already paid for those services with taxes

I somehow highly doubt that they'll get the concessions they want from a government to whom they've paid taxes for years.

It is very ironic that they want the benefits of taking risks while avoiding risk. There are plenty of countries that are destroyed/impoverished yet still have signed international treaties, so perhaps it would serve better to do the experiment there.

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