News

ResidenSea coming to SF in June

The 2009 Itinerary for ResidenSea (the first and only condominium cruise ship in the world) includes a number of California stops:

  • San Diego, CA, May 31 – June 2
  • Los Angeles, CA, June 3 – 5
  • Monterey. CA, June 7 – 9
  • San Francisco, CA, June 11 – 13

I don’t know if it’s possible to arrange a tour while the ship is in San Francisco, but we will certainly try!

TSI is hiring: Director of Engineering, Project Manager

We’re excited to announce that we’re hiring for two key positions:

Director of Engineering – Unfortunately, Wayne Gramlich, our co-founder and original Director of Engineering, has been unable to devote the time to TSI to continue in this role, so we’re looking elsewhere to fill his shoes. This person will provide vision and management for all of TSI’s technology initiatives, such as seastead designs and prototypes, and have some involvement with hands-on execution.

Design Contest Update: Deadline Coming!

Here’s an update from the design contest. We have less than two weeks left before the deadline May 1st, so keep those entries coming!

We have been contacted by Will Pierce who would like to design a seastead with an architectural drawing. However, as he doesn’t have a computer he cannot digitize the design to 3-D and thus cannot compete in the contest.

Cato Unbound follow-up

I have a follow-up essay at Cato Unbound, THE IMPORTANCE AND LIMITATIONS OF GROUNDWORK.

The implication of a “long, slow…slog” are a line that is slowly and steadily trending upwards. If someone has such a line for the libertarian movement, I would love to see it, but I do not believe it is an accurate assessment of our history.

With that said, here is a critical difference between an inchoate individualist mass and an organized, self-identified group.

Gulching

I’m reading Atlas Shrugged for the first time, and I’ve been thinking about the economic tradeoffs involved in a movement like Galt’s Gulch or seasteading, where you take an initial charge in order to achieve higher long-term growth rates due to more efficient government.

I decided to model the costs of Gulching as an initial cost to wealth, and the gains as a higher exponential growth rate. To make the graphs easier (by making it wealth-invariant, and thus not having that extra variable), I modeled the initial cost as simply being a fraction of wealth.

We have a final cost estimate for ClubStead!

The final engineering report is just about done, it will probably go up on Monday. Just wanted to update y’all with the cost numbers. The final design has 368,200 ft^2 of area, and 160,000 ft^2 of footprint (400×400), at a total cost of $95,300,700. This cost includes all structural elements, the hotel, generators, thrusters, fire safety, HVAC, fresh water system, and sewage.

That works out to $258/ft^2 of area, or $600/ft^2 of solar footprint, which is in line with our initial estimates.

Oasis Of The Seas

AMW sends us this video making it clear that cities on the sea are possible – they are being built every day. Like Royal Caribbean’s new ship – the biggest cruise ship ever: