Just a reminder that all our fascinating political theory and social commentary about diverse visions of a better society has moved to Let A Thousand Nations Bloom. Here are some recent posts:

• Thinking Like a Dandelion - _"Let’s focus less on trying to perpetuate one copy of what we believe is the best society and instead work on ways to decrease the costs of producing societies. The results will be better than we can imagine.

We are not the only ones to recognize the opportunities offered by the ocean's dynamic geography. From The Economist:

Foreign military bases have both political and practical difficulties. “Seabasing” may offer a solution

BASING troops and equipment on foreign soil is fraught with difficulty. Even friendly countries can cut up rough at crucial moments, as America found when Turkey restricted the use of its territory and airspace during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Phillip Greenspun has a long review of The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, written by Mancur Olson in 1982. As you can see from this review excerpt, Olson's model is quite relevant to seasteading.

The strange, weird, red-pill world of political theorist Mencius Moldbug is not the world as I see it. It has far more extremes, more evil, more black-and-white judgments, and more overarching historical themes. But I find it fascinating because it overlaps with my world in places where few others seem to.

Legal research volunteer Jorge Schmidt pointed me at this new book which describes a trend which seasteading will accelerate:

Today, a California resident can incorporate her shipping business in Delaware, register her ships in Panama, hire her employees from Hong Kong, place her earnings in an asset-protection trust formed in the Cayman Islands, and enter into a same-sex marriage in Massachusetts or Canada--all the while enjoying the California sunshine and potentially avoiding many facets of the state's laws.

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Some nice dialogue has developed around Jacob Lyles' structuralism posts, which I mentioned in the recent Structure and Policy post.

Jacob Lyles has an excellent series of posts over at Distributed Republic about structural libertarianism and policy libertarianism - the question of whether people should advocate better governmental policies, or entirely different forms of government.

I was recently asked: "Is the plan still to have no rules during Ephemerisle, or does having it in the SF bay mean that there will have to be some rules?"

I replied: 

There will definitely have to be rules based on US safety laws / Coast Guard regulations.  There may be other rules as well.

 If you haven't run across N55, they are an odd somewhat-anarchistic art collective based in Denmark.  Among other things, they work on small DIY floating structures like MICROISLAND, FLOATING PLATFORM, MODULAR BOAT, and SMALL FISHFARM.  Their most recent project is a walking house.  While not the most efficient way to implement dynamic geography, it has (like most of their projects) a certain artistic flair:

From Calculated Risk:

Less worker mobility [due to negative equity] is kind of like arteriosclerosis of the economy. It lowers the overall growth potential.

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