The Seasteading Institute

 Lots of stuff this week…

• Community
  • Conference
    • This is the last week to RSVP – then we’ll be sending final counts to the hotel.  You don’t have to pay on meetup.com, you can pay at the event, but you do have to RSVP on meetup.com!
    • We have t-shirts!  We’ll be selling them at the conference, you can also buy them here.  A volunteer (Justin Owings) is working on improving the t-shirt designs on the online store.
    • We have bumper stickers.  Each conference attendee will get one free, and we will sell them at the conference/socials for $5 each.
  • Publicity
    • Chris Baker from Wired Magazine will be attending the conference for a story.  (For a sample of Chris’ past work, see The surprising narrative richness of GTA IV).
    • Brian Doherty of Reason will be attending the conference, and hopefully writing a story on us also.  As the author of Radicals For Capitalism and This Is Burning Man, Brian definitely has the cultural milieu for seasteading!
    • I recorded an EconTalk podcast w/ Russ Robert, but it may not be up for awhile due to the financial crisis.
• Research – I am trying to talk w/ MBARI and UC Berkeley about cooperating on a research program.
• Engineering – Our consultants will give a general presentation and Q&A session about ocean engineering at the conference, so that conference participants can get up to speed on the issues involved.  They are continuing to fill in the details on DeepSeastead and Coaststead designs.
• Administrative
  • Staff turnover at our non-profit advisory firm is slowing down our turning in our non-profit app, but our side of it is all done.
  • We were alert to the problems at Washington Mutual, our bank, and we transferred our funds elsewhere for safekeeping weeks before WaMu failed and were sold to JP Morgan Chase.  It turned out that no depositor’s money was lost, but we didn’t want to take any chances.