Your observations: 
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Rothbart explained that in the libertarian utopia, parents will be under no obligation to feed or clothe their child, because the infant is always free to crawl out to the street and beg passers-by to take it on as a foster-child.
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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.
“So this ‘new world’ you’d like to build - what would it be like?”
“Exactly like the one we have now, but I can do whatever I want!”
“So how would that work?”
“[shrugs]”
I glossed over that when I read the article, but no wonder Thai authorities were pissed - 12 miles! They were living firmly within the country’s borders, no doubt illegally, in what is essentially a boat (probably also illegal), while pretending the laws of Thailand didn’t apply to them because they were in the water.
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I remember the L5 Society and their vision of libertarian utopias in O’Neill habitats. Good times!
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Re: complicated supply chains that facilitate getting things / ditching existing (trade) systems that took decades to build on a whim to start over
See Brexit.
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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.
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Who wouldn’t want to live in an Azkaban isocube?
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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.
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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.
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Perfect if you’re trying to get to the other other place though:
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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.
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.
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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.
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Unwilling host country: “Sure, you can get off the boat, once you apply for a visa. Visas will cost $BIGNUM, payable in Swiss francs.”
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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.
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So you’re saying they would be the real-world garbage patch kids? Seems about right.
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Well, then they could set up a recycling facility and have an easy harvest of material to recycle.
Yes, and to already have boots.
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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…
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All of that happens behind a curtain of money. Kind of like those hidden doors for servants in old mansions.
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