Ferrocement, a composite of metal and concrete, is one of our favored building materials. Because the strength to weight ratio is not as good as steel, ferrocement structures end up being heavier and slower, but that’s fine for our needs – in fact, that’s just the direction we want to compromise. So I was interested to stumble across a free online book: [_Fishing Boat Construction: 3.
We just moved to a new website host, which should be faster and more reliable. Our previous (Dreamhost) was slow and often had serious problems under higher than normal load, and so this has been in the works for awhile. We had been planning to migrate in a few days, but when the site started crapping out again today, our volunteer sysadmin Ben went ahead and made the move this afternoon. We hope all of you will find the website experience to be improved.
The Sea Shadow is one of the most famous SWATH ships – a black, futuristic looking vessel which was the basis for the stealth ship in the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Like our seastead designs, SWATH ships have high stability due to a low waterplane area, and a similar shape to the Sea Shadow is under consideration as a possibility for single-family seastead designs (our next engineering effort).
From James:
The TSI website is a cornerstone of our strategy to grow the seasteading movement over the next several years. It is one of our primary ways of communicating our message to people unfamiliar with seasteading, and it serves as a community hub for enthusiasts active in the seasteading movement. There’s a lot of software development and maintenance involved in making it the most effective community-building tool possible.
We’re looking for a volunteer to manage our website development team.
(This is new entry for our extended FAQ section in the book, written by TSI’s Director of Development Liz Lacy)
Recently I saw a blog post from someone who had heard about seasteading and was turned off by the idea, describing it as “a bunch of rich, entitled white guys wanting even more freedom and entitlement.” Now, I can understand that response, in fact I’d be lying if I didn’t say that my first response to the idea was somewhat similar.
I just wanted to share a recent email from James, our Director of Operations and Volunteer Coordinator, to current volunteers:
Hello TSI volunteers,
I’d like to give you a quick heads up about the progress of our volunteer program. This past week has been phenomenal — between our recent press coverage in Wired and CNET, and our networking at the BIL conference, we’ve doubled the size of our active volunteer team from about 10-20 people.
This year we are starting conference work much earlier, so it will be bigger and better and less rushed. Also because Ephemerisle is a major, major undertaking which requires tons of coordination and planning.
We are working on the dates for these events, and we need your input. Please fill out this poll. (And there will probably be more polls to come as we continue to fill in the details. After all, the conference is for you, so we care what you want!)
Alexia sent us a text document with answers to all 19 of the questions from the February YayBoo list. I have added it to the ClubStead engineering hub, to which I also added a table of contents, as it is getting quite long.
As a reminder, we also posted the webcast video. It is quite boring and the sound is not good, so I really can’t recommend trying to watch it.
There is a lot in common between the Free State Project and Seasteading. Both have their origins in people who are fed up with traditional political activism, tired of talking about better government, and ready to start living it. I am developing a talk for libertarians for my upcoming speaking tours where I analyze methods of changing governments, why the standard ones (proselytizing, policy activism) don’t work, and why structural change is needed. Why it’s time for action, not for more debating.
