Archived-Discussions

February Maritime Law Meeting

In February 2009, legal research volunteer Jorge & I had lunch with a noted international expert on the Law of the Sea, who we’ll call X. We mainly discussed near-shore medical tourism as the initial business model. Here are my notes from the meeting:

There is a tension between credibility and regulation of flagging states. The ones which will monitor you the least also have the least credibility in the world of international law. Patri & Jorge believe we should follow a laddered approach. Start with whoever will take us – Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Liberia, Panama. See how it goes.

Spinning off dynamic geographic part of blog

As TSI grows, we plan to split off blogs by topic, so that people interested in political theory don’t have to read about engineering details, and vice-versa. As the first such forking, I am going to be spinning off the dynamic geography related posts from here to a new blog. It will be about the topic area which contains federalism, seasteading, anarcho-capitalism, Mencius Moldbug, tax competition between nations, and other structural reforms to improve competition between government.

Legal Status of CoastSteads

One of our favored business models has been the CoastStead – a business park operating 12nm offshore, just outside territorial waters. Being able to draw from the economy of a first-world country makes it much easier to make money and finance a seastead.

However, our recent legal research has determined that this model may not work with existing international law. While a ship is under the flag jurisdiction beyond 12nm, artificial installations are regulated by the coastal state throughout the EEZ (200nm or more).