Joining the manifesto / strategy proposal tradition started by Vince, Dan B has written up his proposal for BaseSteading. While TSI of course has our own strategy (which will be released for comment quite soon), seasteading is a diverse movement and we are delighted to see other people working on their own approaches.
Well, it’s not quite the Colbert Report, but Boston News Net has a hilarious segment about seasteading:
Welcome to The Seasteading Institute’s March Newsletter! We had a ton of press coverage this month, have lots of new volunteers, and a number of key projects are moving along.
A new section for the Extended Q&A in the book:
Related to transparency is openness – being public about our existence, goals, and methods.
A number of TSI community members have expressed concern about our policy of operating openly, stating our goal to create new governments on the internet and in public interviews. They worry that it could bring us to the attention of governments before we are ready, allowing them to quash our nascent movement, and suggest that it might be better to keep everything quiet until a large seastead community is operating.
In case you wonder – is this flag of convenience thing real? Will investors really invest in a company in some obscure foreign jurisdiction? This is from the risks section of a 2001 bond offering by Royal Caribbean (which I think was about $1B or so):
ENFORCEABILITY OF CIVIL LIABILITIES
We are a Liberian corporation and our selling shareholders are foreign corporations or partnerships.
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.
Patri / Vince meeting, Puerto Rico, Feb 20th, 2009
Discussion of TSI’s engineering strategy, key points. (wish I’d written this up sooner, my notes are a bit cryptic)
Vince’s version of his key points is on this wiki page. Discussion on this forum post. Wayne & I have a number of comments here on Vince’s ideas, as you will see.
I wrote the original mission statement for The Seasteading Institute somewhat hastily while trying to get the corporate entity formed and website going on a tight deadline.
From email correspondence with Michael Schutte, CEO of Brilliant Boats LLC, about the Poseidon Underwater Resort (mentioned in the book):
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.
