Anyone who has been around the nation-founding subculture long, or read much about it, knows that it is full of scams, hopeless visions, and impracticality. One of the great chroniclers of this is Scamdog, whose website (while not updated much in the past 5 years) has fascinating historical information on projects like Laissez-Faire City. Here’s an excellent page on Why Scams Work:
For those (like me) who prefer using RSS to going to a webpage, we now have RSS feeds for the forum. At the top level, there is a feed of all new topics in all forums:
As requested, there is now an RSS feed with the full text of each entry at https://seasteading.org/blog/feed/full, and the RSS links now point to it. (For technical reasons we made a new feed rather than modifying the existing one). This feed can be viewed on LJ as tsi_main_full. You can still find the old feed, with summaries only, at https://seasteading.org/blog/feed.
My day job is at Google, where there has long been a tradition of the “weekly snippet”. This is a short summary written every Monday about what you did last week and what you plan to do this week, automatically indexed so you can search them or look at someone’s snippets. It’s a nice way to keep track of what other people are doing, and I’d like to bring snippets to TSI. Here are some snippets for our first public week:
(Another new snippet from the book beta, inspired by a lunch conversation today.)
Some of the recent set of website changes, probably installing the GUI editor, seems to have broken the formatting of the site, specifically by removing paragraph tags. Sorry about that! I’ve fixed some of the pages by hand, but the rest will have to wait until our Drupal coder fixes the bug.
(This is a small new section for the book beta. I will frequently post such sections as writing progress on the book continues. Comments welcome.)
(this will go into the book beta, in the Review section)
This morning I took a leadership class that used the principles from Made To Stick, a fascinating book about what I’d call “memetic engineeering”. The authors try to figure out what makes some ideas spread so fast, even when they are false (like urban legends), so that those principles can be applied to spread important true ideas.
