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Emlyn wrote:
> D. den Otter wrote:
> > http://www.ships-for-sale.com/floating_hostel_barge.htm
> > "Floating Hostel" Moor it in some shallow spot in
> > international waters and you have an instant autonomous
> > city (ok, town).
THe problem not answered by these sovereign-sea schemes is that to protect from
storms you will HAVE to build a significant seawall of some type to attenuate
wave action, or else have solid anchored structures seated on the seamounts
(like oil rigs) to be relatively impervious to them. A barge is not a very
seaworthy vessel.
> Don't float those things north of Oz; those precious, government free
> international waters are full of pirates. That's the torture & kill everyone
> aboard and take all the stuff kind, not the more harmless peg leg & parrot
> variety.
Sounds like they need some attitude adjustment. Just the place for
techno-libertarians...
> But then I forget that a lot of you guys are relatively heavily armed.
Si.
> There's some kind of endpoint to this libertarian extremism, where
> international waters hold exactly as many libertarians as can be squeezed
> in, without any one seeing the others (others are always over the horizon).
> Each person sits on his/her personal barge, fully armed with all many of
> ballistic weapons. Scanner (radar?) continually scan 360 degrees, and launch
> missiles, etc at anything that moves. Sounds like a really bad movie.
> Waterworld?
More like SeaQuest DSV, IMHO. Costner makes his post-apocalyptic movies the way
he does because he is so pessimistic about the future of humanity (his lack of
box office success with WW as well as The Postman indicate that his attitude is
not a popular one). Anyone anchored on a seamount stakes claim to an undersea
structure (as well as surrounding abyssal plains full of metallic nodes)
that is
a gold mine to those who develop it wisely. Costner doesn't understand this,
which is why all of his WW extras looked so Dickensian.
Since dwellers would no pay taxes to a government, they could afford quite
reasonable armaments on the open market. Those that get hair trigger wind up
getting snuffed by those who want to live peacably.
-- TANSTAAFL!!!Michael S. Lorrey Director, Grafton County Fish & Game Assoc. http://www.lorrey.com/gcfga/ Member, Extropy Institute http://www.extropy.org Member, National Rifle Association http://www.nra.org "Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils." - General John Stark
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