I'll be at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Texas on Tuesday & Wednesday next week to listen and learn about the current state of the offshore industry.  If anyone else will be there and wants to get together, add a comment or send me an email.  If there's enough interest, maybe we can do a dinner on Tuesday?

A lot of bad things happen in the world, which means there are a lot of options for those who wish to make the world a better place.  And there are some consistent patterns to the badness which make some areas more fruitful than others for the advancement of humanity.  Arnold Kling writes:

My co-blogger cites the number of people murdered by Stalin as an example of government-caused harm that is very difficult for the private sector to top.

• Community
  • Joep set up wiki.seasteading.org, so we now have a wiki!
  • Blog uptake picked up considerably, as did website traffic:

I'm expanding the FAQ to answer some of the comments made on the Marginal Revolution post, and I decide to start with a couple answers I should have written up long ago, because they are so frequently needed:

Alex Tabarrok writes:

Competitive law appears to increase efficiency but it's less clear that competition among governments gives rise to a libertarian world.  Homeowner associations, for example, often impose stricter zoning regulations than cities.  You could say that the system as a whole is more libertarian, but no one lives in the system as a whole.

Anyone who has been around the nation-founding subculture long, or read much about it, knows that it is full of scams, hopeless visions, and impracticality.  One of the great chroniclers of this is Scamdog, whose website (while not updated much in the past 5 years) has fascinating historical information on projects like Laissez-Faire City.  Here's an excellent page on Why Scams Work:

For those (like me) who prefer using RSS to going to a webpage, we now have RSS feeds for the forum.  At the top level, there is a feed of all new topics in all forums:

http://seasteading.org/forum/feed

If only some topics are of interest to you, each forum has its own individual feed as well, which can be found on the page for the forum, for example:

http://seasteading.org/forums/community/irl-gtgs/feed

As requested, there is now an RSS feed with the full text of each entry at http://seasteading.org/blog/feed/full, and the RSS links now point to it.  (For technical reasons we made a new feed rather than modifying the existing one).  This feed can be viewed on LJ as tsi_main_full.  You can still find the old feed, with summaries only, at http://seasteading.org/blog/feed.

Spurred by Rising Seas, Dubai's Floating Ambition

Paul van de Camp moved to Dubai from Holland because of that "anything is possible" spirit. He isn't interested in skiing in the desert, but he has opened an office in Dubai to try to sell an equally bold concept: building on water. His company, Dutch Docklands, specializes in floating structures.

My day job is at Google, where there has long been a tradition of the "weekly snippet".  This is a short summary written every Monday about what you did last week and what you plan to do this week, automatically indexed so you can search them or look at someone's snippets.  It's a nice way to keep track of what other people are doing, and I'd like to bring snippets to TSI.  Here are some snippets for our first public week:

(Another new snippet from the book beta, inspired by a lunch conversation today.)

When talking about how we'd like to revolutionize the governing industry, we used the metaphor that we'd like government to be more like the internet industry than operating systems.  One of the properties of the internet is that it is based on a variety of open standards which allow many diverse programs, companies, machines, and people to interoperate.  We'd like seasteads to have this property also.

Some of the recent set of website changes, probably installing the GUI editor, seems to have broken the formatting of the site, specifically by removing paragraph tags.  Sorry about that!  I've fixed some of the pages by hand, but the rest will have to wait until our Drupal coder fixes the bug.

This website is less than a week old, so you should expect more hiccups like this as we continue to rapidly add features :).

(This is a small new section for the book beta.  I will frequently post such sections as writing progress on the book continues.  Comments welcome.)

(this will go into the book beta, in the Review section)

Here is a comment on a floating city post somewhere on the internet that represents, to me, exactly what is not needed to advance the movement:

This morning I took a leadership class that used the principles from Made To Stick, a fascinating book about what I'd call "memetic engineeering". The authors try to figure out what makes some ideas spread so fast, even when they are false (like urban legends), so that those principles can be applied to spread important true ideas.

• Lasse notes that the UC Boulder talks I gave in 2005 are up on Google Video, here's a page with them embedded.
• I'm working on job descriptions for some paid staff and volunteers we're looking for.
• Lots of small website bugs fixed. More still to come.
• Some more "user properties" have been added, you can click on your name on the upper right, then click Edit to fill them in.
  

Thanks for all the bug reports on website issues like broken links. Most of them have been fixed, except for users not being able to create new forum threads. Our programmer will fix that tonight, and for now I'll start some threads. If you find more problems, please comment here.

UPDATE: I think I fixed the forums issue, let me know if you still have trouble.

As long promised, we've redesigned the website with forums, blogs, and more, as part of launching The Seasteading Institute. If you haven't yet, you may want to read the introductory press release. Please poke around - you'll see some familiar content from the old site, and some new pages to reflect the project's more active status. Expect to see lots more over the coming weeks and months as we kick into high gear!

It seems quite likely that our large sea-cities will be free-floating, for various reasons. First, there are not very many seamounts to anchor to in international waters (> 200nm from any place a rock sticks its nose above water). Second, the need for an exit from unhappy nation-neighbors and the dictates of dynamic geography to be modular suggest that we'll get more freedom and safety if we aren't tied down. Just common sense, really.

Google's 3D Warehouse for SketchUp models has a weekly challenge. Last week's was to model a floating home.