Discover the hilariously epic failure of a crypto-fueled libertarian cruise

[Brainspore]

@RickMycroft

Using their own money, they funded the first attempt at a single residential seastead, in the form of a floating white octagonal box 12 nautical miles off the coast of Thailand.

I guess one could argue that The Principality of Sealand was an earlier example of residential “seasteading” of sorts but it’s hardly been a picture of peaceful utopia. The people who live there didn’t build it (it’s a decommissioned WWII-era gun platform) and in fact seized it at gunpoint from an earlier group of squatters/pirate radio broadcasters, then had to spend the next several decades trying to fend off people trying to seize it from them in the same way.

It’s a shithole place to live that apparently survives primarily on selling novelty stamps and the like. It exists today only because the government of the United Kingdom doesn’t seem to think it’s worth the trouble to evict them. And it STILL sounds like a nicer place to live than any of these libertarian sea pods.

[KarlS]

@Brainspore

Those pod houses look like some kind of sci-fi supermax prison.

Who wouldn’t want to live in an Azkaban isocube?

[FGD135]

And if they would float in a stable way and survive storms and whatnot - sooner or later they’d end up clustered together in one of the ocean gyres. Like all that plastic waste.

Ocean gyre

[jerwin]

Durring WWII, the germans deposited rescue buoys in the english channel.

[Hanglyman]

The seapods crack me up. It’s as though they based their whole concept of living on Subnautica, not realizing that magic sci-fi replicators aren’t a real thing.

[L0ki]

@TornPaperNapkin

It’s like some one designed a level of hell

Perfect if you’re trying to get to the other other place though:

Stylite

[GagHalfrunt]

@VeronicaConnor

Another common theme in tech bro libertarians is a casual disregard for the expertise of others.

As seen in Elon Musk’s attempts to reinvent transport. I’ve already posted a takedown of Hyperloop, so here’s one on the Boring Company.

Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring

tl;dr

In short, Musk,

a) has little understanding of the drivers of tunneling costs,
b) promises reducing tunneling costs by a factor of 10, a feat that he himself has no chance to achieve, and
c) is unaware that the cost reduction he promises, relative to American construction costs, has already been achieved in a number of countries.

[13enster]

@j9c

… or… in an alternate version, a less functional version of The Raft in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

I am sure these guys would love to be compared to anything in Snow Crash or maybe Cryptonomicon, but they just aren’t that cool and the Bruce Lee pirates would totally wreck them.

[GoatCheezInfrno]

@cepheus42

I do love their idea of seasteading, though. “Hey, let’s park a few hundred feet of the coast of some country so we can be FREE while relying on the resources provided by their robust government and infrastructure.”

Unwilling host country: “Sure, you can get off the boat, once you apply for a visa. Visas will cost $BIGNUM, payable in Swiss francs.”

[GoatCheezInfrno]

@gracchus

bootstraps

Gotta love that favorite conservative metaphor. The only way to be pulled up by one’s bootstraps is to have someone or something to help.

[ClutchLinkey]

So you’re saying they would be the real-world garbage patch kids? Seems about right.

[BakerB]

Well, then they could set up a recycling facility and have an easy harvest of material to recycle.

[ClutchLinkey]

@GoatCheezInfrno

The only way to be pulled up by one’s bootstraps

Yes, and to already have boots.

[gomezlopez_javier]

Honestly guys, we all have been there, through Bioshock I and II (I don’t care too much for Bioshock 3). All of these ultralibertarian freedom loving utopias fail at the same point, someone has to clean the toilets, dispose of the garbage and cook the meals. You can’t re-write tens of thousands of years of cultural evolution and dismiss the solutions we humans have come up with and pretend you have a better solution that can be implemented from scratch.

Unless you decide to live off the land as a hunter gatherer from the stone age there is NO CHANCE you can be 100% self sufficient. You can reduce your dependence on third parties as much as you decide to reduce your level of comfort and/or increase the amount of work to do daily to get those 2000 calories. Apparently a young and healthy hunter gathered could get enough calories working 20 hours a week, depending on geography and season but if you want other stuff like french wine or electricity to run your mining rig, someone else has to do it

Being completely self sufficient on a smallholding usually goes well until you get a busted appendix or a plague that destroys your crops. Hell, my grandfather was a farmer (and an excellent one) and although he practiced natural and organic farming as much as possible (use of manure, rotation of crops, manual labour with little mechanization, etc) he had no problems in blasting the potato beetles with pesticide because the potato crop would keep the family and livestock alive during winter.

Pesticide that came from a chemical supplier that manufactured it according to a very specific set of regulations regarding quality and safety…

[simonize]

@VeronicaConnor

That’s a great analogy. A common theme with utopian libertarians is a total lack of understanding of the supply chains required for their lives to be comfortable. Like, hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of links in a chain are required to get coffee on the store shelf. It took us hundreds of years of building up social systems, governments, technologies, and trade to create a world where everyone can just have coffee whenever they want. Or chocolate. Or nectarines. Or toilet paper. The notion that you can just “start over” on civilization and get something better is mind boggling hubris and ignorance.

All of that happens behind a curtain of money. Kind of like those hidden doors for servants in old mansions.

[RickMycroft]

But that might be doing something useful, generating real wealth, rather than the slow forgery of BitCoin!

BTW, I don’t see how they’ll compete with crypto efforts that tax national power grids or use a coal power plant to drive them. A solar-powered PC in the corner won’t cut it these days.

[Mindysan33]

@chenille

the predators that feed on those or on people who fall in

@VeronicaConnor

The world runs on the specialized expertise of others. We all benefit from that expertise because of… wait for it… community and social contracts .

Well, but also, sometimes… or rather often, force, poverty, and straight up lack of choices, too. Our supply chains are shot through with pockets of unfreedom and people who have had their choices taken away and force to work for starvation wages. Those people are just as critical to our supply chains as the expertise that runs those chains.

[wil9000]

How did they NOT call this boat the “John Galt”, or “Galt’s Gulch”? And, in fact, it went far better than I expected. I expected it to be resting on the bottom of the gulf, somewhere off the coast of Panama.

[DonatellaNobody]

@13enster

Bruce Lee pirates would totally wreck them

12 year old 5’1" Captain Phillips pirates would probably wreck them as well.

That 12 year old was fighting for his life, something those techbros never needed to do for a second.

[matman]

Yeah I am wondering about the fine line between seasteading and coral reef building.