Clearly if you live in one of those
you need one of these
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Yeah that is a bad idea with “floaters” written all over it.
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Yes. And since you have to float the ballast, even more buoyancy is needed. Like I said, the renders of their little houses don’t have NEARLY enough buoyant volume.
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Not really, although the degree of control over the EEZ is contentious.
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The basis of the hilarious surrealistic short film Simon of the Desert
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Which begs the question of whether they really really need to come back.
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I’ve got a pair of old D10’s kicking around for just that purpose. Not that they get used very often, but still, one never knows…
“ Man, I really want them to make some of these “Seapods” and for people to buy them, just to see exactly what kind of a disaster it would end up being.”
Just had a thought, maybe they could be flogged to anti-vaxx/mask/whatever types as their own little private utopias where they don’t have to pollute their lives interacting with the flocks of sheeple…
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Spring 2020 they were still nerfing around with a 1/3rd prototype of their stick sans pod, a stone’s throw away from the marina in a shallow sheltered bay in Panama. “Look how stable our glass of plonk is!”
I can’t wait to see the aftermath video of when they try a full-sized one in the ocean.
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Has this been posted yet?
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IF there is any justice in this cosmos, then yeah, Bruce Lee pirates* would be their just dessert.
I did think of “what about pirates?” as I waded through that Guardian article.
This. Oh yes.
They’ll be the first ones begging for police protection once any Bruce Lee pirates were to show up.
And now, off to go resew that pirate flag with some… dyed… “materials”…
*
For any hardy souls who want to just read the “Flatland” plaintext version of Snow Crash, someone appears to have put it up, here:
https://lost-contact.mit.edu/afs/adrake.org/usr/rkh/Books/books/Snow%20Crash.txt
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‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned… a man in a jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.’
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said in reference to
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It’s also, like every idea promoted by tech-bros, not new.
I mean nomads have been a thing for a few millennia.
This seasteading in particular is just the modern version of being or dreaming of being a new age traveller. Replace the RV or caravan with a ship and what’s the difference?
RV’s are relatively small, uncomplicated vehicles, designed to be operated by inexperienced owners.
Ships are ginormous, complicated vessels, generally designed to be operated by a large, experienced crew. And the longer the intended journey, the more crew and/or more experience is required.
Oh and an RV simply can’t go too far beyond its logistics base. It’s always going to be fairly near a road, which means it can reach or be reached by mechanics and mainstream civilization in general.
So yeah, you still have to deal with the Man.
And that’s not good enough for J. Random-Techbro III and his pals. So off to sea we go.
And because they’re smarter than every generation of human beings before them and have the great good fortune to have the magical tool of $whatever_the_new_tech_ hotness_is, they’ve either already solved all the issues preventing everyone else from doing this or just know they’ll be able to solve each problem as it comes up just like Mark Watney!
Except Watney is a) fictional, b) a highly trained expert in several relevant fields and c) entirely reliant for his continued survival on the profligate use of the resources and expertise of at least two major nation states.
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oh my gosh, this is my real life at my job. My manager is so hyper-focused on this one aspect of my job that it’s mind boggling.
Meanwhile, two key staff members have resigned, and others are considering…
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and d) tried to get back in touch with NASA as soon as possible because he understood he couldn’t survive on his own.
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Or possibly a tax dodge, establishing a fictional “residence” while they actually jet around from Basel to Vail to NYC. At the end of the day the “government oppression,” that these techno-libertarian Ayn Rand devotees object to is paying taxes. But yeah, not too many millionaires are going to be willing to give up on the actual luxuries and freedoms that their wealth gives them for the imagined freedom of no government. I just don’t see the IRS buying the idea that they are no residents of ANY country, and not being a US citizen makes it somewhat more difficult to funnel big funds to congressmen to be able to get them to bring the IRS to heel.
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This doesn’t even matter, honestly. The US taxes its expat citizens. The only country to do so, AFAIK. It doesn’t matter if they move to Sealand or whatever, they still owe the IRS. There are forms and processes for legit expats to demonstrate that their income was all earned in another country, and thus minimal actual US tax ends up being paid (minus the thousands of dollars to cross-border tax preparers). However if you move to a non-country (or unrecognized country), that doesn’t work and you owe all your tax to the IRS anyway. The only option is to renounce US citizenship, which would be the stupidest possible thing they could do. Good luck ever getting back in or doing any business anywhere as a stateless person.
The whole “we tax you anywhere” part of being American is a primary reason many Canadians no longer bother with dual citizenship if they work in the States. The fees and complications to avoid paying double taxes to the IRS keep getting ratcheted up, and they also keep increasing the cost and complexity of renouncing citizenship to keep people from doing it. Land of the free, indeed. 
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Which is why establishing residence in a tax-haven country and renouncing your US citizenship is a thing among a certain class of rich, entitled asshole. Wasn’t their a techbro a few years ago that had a hissy fit after becoming a citizen of a Caribbean country and renouncing his US citizenship because he was denied a visa to to to a conference in the US?
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What I want to know is: If any eventual real pods look like their concept art, all curved white and windows, where are they going to buy blinds and curtains that work with that? Because the tropical sun, including glare off the water, will be brutal, especially if it overloads the air-conditioning.
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