21 + acre park-like paradise, lush landscaping consisting of many ponds, lakes, hundreds of palm trees, various fruit and flowering trees, many large old, oak trees, two bridges and a large deck cantilevered over a lake.

In the forums, tannerpittman asks whether seastead communities would attract undesirable elements like organized crime, or be unpleasant to live in because of all the vice shops:

I've been adding more about the importance of having a frontier to the revised book (Polycentric order also has a post about this).  Here is one of the new sections:

Consider people who:

1. Are unhappy with the current state of society.
2. Have a specific vision of what a better society for them would look like.
3. Are interested in building their lives around that vision

Not a lot of external progress to report this week, as we were focused on our first Board meeting and 2008 strategy.  Now that we've done that, expect to see some detailed volunteer project specs and job requisitions coming up.  I'm headed to the OTC tonight, and may blog from there.

Happy Cinco De Mayo!

We need a good name for a collection of seasteads attached together to form a village or city.  "A pod of seasteads" (like a group of whales) has been suggested, but I'd like to hear your ideas.  "An independence of seasteads"?  We could take the name from my proposed festival: "An ephemerisle of seasteads".

Or if one is pessimistic, perhaps "A target of seasteads" :).

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.