The project, which is now called Blueseed, is led by a team of execs plucked from Thiel's Seasteading Institute. Although the original plans for the floating tech village looked something like a fancy oil rig from the future, the latest plan is to either convert a cruise ship or remodel an old barge in to a swanky island anchored just outside the jurisdiction of the United States. — sfist.com
Click here for the Blueseed website.
25 Comments
It's my design on the story cover, and I'm sorry to say you got the title all wrong.
Blueseed will be a hub for tech small innovative tech companies which can't support all the red tape and immigration restrictions elsewhere, while being 1h30min from Silicon Valley. It'll mostly have shared rooms and relatively low rents.
200 companies have already signed up, none of them with obscenely rich people.
Yes! Yes! Getting all of the libertarians on something that easily sinks is a brilliant plan. Make it bigger so they all fit on there!
Rusty,
Probably the great majority of those moving aren't libertarians, just people wanting to open their businesses. If they went there by political orientation and not by profit-seeking risk calculation they would probably fail.
I'll be on board developing the pirazapper (pirate zapper), to keep'em away from my desk.
The best quote:
Libertarianism, by contrast, is a theory of those who find it hard to avoid their taxes, who are too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to win Iraq-reconstruction contracts, or otherwise chow at the state trough. In its maundering about a mythical ideal-type capitalism, libertarianism betrays its fear of actually existing capitalism, at which it cannot quite succeed. It is a philosophy of capitalist inadequacy.
...from the best-ever essay on these floating utopias. People who can't seem to succeed at the rules decide to just run away from them. Poor babies.
With that said, I'd love to someday design a boat.
Donna, this is probably a quote from someone who as never even read a decent article on libertarianism, a political theory of those which avoid any contact (and therefore contracts as well) with the state as they regard it as inefficient at producing wealth to the society, being taxes a smaller issue than excessive regulations, for example. The quote fits much better into a conservative's POV than any variation of libertarianism.
That aside, Blueseed doesn't have a lot to do with libertarianism, but trying to find better rules for entrepreneurship, innovation and general quality of life. You live in the USA, so you're happy with your wealth and better rules. The problem is that people from the outside aren't welcome in your country and don't have the opportunity to start a new one just as the first americans did centuries ago. I'm sorry, but telling people that live in developing countries - such as myself - that the only way to for a better life is by trying to correct the corrupt and stagnated politics that we have is nationalist, elitist and closed minded.
" I'm sorry, but telling people that live in developing countries - such as myself - that the only way to for a better life is by trying to correct the corrupt and stagnated politics that we have is nationalist, elitist and closed minded."
What kind of opportunities are you going to find on a ship docked 12 miles from a landmass you still can't enter? How do you even get on this boat if not from USA?
Primary perpose for this love boat is tax shelter for Americans too poor to operate from the Caymans. Not helping out a foreign man find opportunities.
Rusty, I don't think you are aware that to open a company in countries like Brazil, where I live, it can over a year and many thousand reais in monthly operation costs, even if you have no workers and no products, just for the paperwork. Some tech companies take much longer than that to start operating, as regulation is always created for products that don't yet exist. The law is applied only as a way of government restrictions and corruption financing. Thieves aren't arrested and lawsuits can take over 20 years to settle. Labour costs are so high that many times it is equivalent to the worker's salary, and taxes amount to almost 50% of our GDP, with extremely bad public services such as education and infrastructure.
I guarantee the opportunities for business are much higher in a place like Blueseed than anywhere in Brazil outside central São Paulo. The point of the ship is that visiting visas to the US are much easier to get then working visas. One can almost work in the US and "live" in Blueseed. After all, more than half of workers living in São Paulo spend more than 1h30min to get to work because of traffic, not counting the high chance of getting killed while at it.
What a misguided title!
Oh! Rusty. As far as I know, this project was meant to be a place for small teaches start-up companies. Yes Theat’s right! You heard it right. As you were born in this country, you may never experience the long bureaucratic process of obtaining residency status or employment authorization card. That place was intended for those who can’t get PR or other residency status after graduating from US. Colleges. Unlike the architecture world that we live in, the IT industry has a lot of investors who are willing to throw money at young and talented people. Some of the private investors don’t want to lose the talented people because of the visa limitation and other hurdles. They also want to make sure that it is easy to commute from places like Silicon Valley if they need to do face to face meetings. How to enter? It is rather easy to get visit visa than other stuffs like jobs or family. If you’re trying to equate the young and enthusiastic people with libertarians, so be it. If I’m correctly remember, they only thing US has been doing well since early 1990s is the IT industry. I’ll take any IT person over blood sucking Wall St. guy any given day. In case you’ve been sleeping under a big boulder, the whole IT industry is full of foreigners. Hey, if they can contribte to econmoy, why not? Help you help me. Right?
P.S. Indian food at Google's Mountain View is not bad at all.
I do apologize that my place inside the US does mean, honestly, that I'm unaware of the difficulties faced by people who want, for whatever reason, to move here.
But look: Peter Thiel is leading this. Peter Thiel is a dingnut Libertarian, full stop.
From the article: The primary goal of the new island nation is to allow international entrepreneurs a chance to get close to Silicon Valley's white-hot startup scene without all the messy paperwork involved in actually obtaining a work visa.
So I'm a registered architect, but you know, man, "actually obtaining" a building permit is soooo much "messy paperwork" that I think I'll just declare my restaurant project a sovereign nation that doesn't have to meet those silly laws - that's the only way I'll be able to get access to that "white-hot" public gathering space scene. Public life safety? Participating in a society? Screw that shit, I've got CNC-cut asbestos panels to install!
And I should add I'm fully in support of very liberal immigration laws. The last word of that sentence being the key aspect for this discussion.
"that's the only way I'll be able to get access to that "white-hot" public gathering space scene. Public life safety? Participating in a society? Screw that shit, I've got CNC-cut asbestos panels to install"
you win the internet today donna.
@ Donna
What I trying to say is if the foreigners can contribute to economy, we should allow to do so. If the small startups become a successful one, U.S. can reap millions to billions from IPO to tax revenue. Didn’t Sergey Brin come from Russian? Didn’t he contribute more into this society than many people who literally wasted their life on wrong things? I’ve no doubt that if these people on the ship want to do business in Silicon Valley, they have to respect U.S law and regulations as well. These people will have to make contracts based upon US cooperate law and tax law.
Comparing architecture and IT might be like comparing oranges and apple. One is somewhat structured, formatted and regressing, but the other is flexible, conduit and expending
I’m also thinking about social issue on these ships. I think it is far from utopian thing. It will be more like being on Carnival Ships minus 24/7 fun.it should be interesting to see what kind of law will be on that place If it is in international water, will they still implement U.S. law? I assume it is more likely to be a short term solution for those who need a place to stay and work. Am I going to stay there, no way. I won’t, but some will.
Donna,
Being a licensed architect and an IT startup entrepreneur are two ENTIRELY different things.
You are correct, as a licensed architect one IS responsible to follow laws, building codes, ADA requirements, etc. to protect safety and welfare of the people that will be occupying one's buildings for decades to come.
As an IT entrepreneur, one is often working on minute budgets with small teams and the primary way to get off the ground is to obtain investors, while there are still bureaucratic business registration laws to follow.
Now, this company is talking about getting around work visa issues that so many young entrepreneurs face in the U.S. There are current U.S. startup visa acts being "discussed" by the Legislature; however, with illegal immigration issues muddling the legal work visa problems there is little chance of such legislature passing.
Therefore, your comparison is inappropriate. In social utilitarian terms, the presence of strict building regulations and the circumnavigation of debilitating work visa regulations are both doing the most public good. One protects people's lives, the other enables creation of businesses and potential job opportunities for the people.
Also, as an architect, one should be aware of the effect of spacial conditions and interpersonal proximity on human interactions and productivity, especially in teams. Hence, one can quickly realize that incubator spaces (like the one Blueseed is proposing) are quite beneficial to increased startup productivity; this is comparable to charettes in the design world. Basically, imagine a charette environment available 24/7. This aspect, for one, is largely absent from most architectural firms and often hinders design quality.
Donna, these building permits and regulations you are so fond of are the main reason for the favelas (squatters) in my country, as builders are not allowed to build low cost buildings for poor people. Oh, I forgot! Your country is so rich and the government gives out so much money for housing that solves the problem. Oops! No, it doesn't, your're actually in a crisis. Building regulations only stop people fr buying what they want and can afford, turning housing expensive and excluding people from nice cities and creating squatters in poor countries.
All: I'm the CIO of Blueseed.
Archinect author who didn't have the guts to list their name: kindly fact-check before copy/pasting crap from sfist.com. Sorry for being harsh, but this was lame.
Anthony: thanks, man. Also, your design rocks.
Rusty: knee-jerk reactions and labeling a venture without at least reading up on it on Wikipedia are lame. Go join Archinect's staff.
Mezka: your response is courageous, awesome, and way sweeter than mine. Marry me.
All: Check the Blueseed FAQ at http://blueseed.co/faq.html - it answers all your questions.
mezka, points well-made, as you clearly know more about the world of IT than I do (I know nothing). And I have no problem with knowledge workers from other countries having very easy access to the US (I also have no problem with service economy workers having easy access to the US - we have more than enough wealth to go around). And the incubator comment is of course spot-on.
But please be clear on this one point: Peter Thiel thinks he should never have to pay taxes that benefit other members of his community, and he feels this is a moral stance worth investing billions of dollars in. Maybe Bluewhatevs is a different logistical situation from Seasteading Insitute, but its roots are in the same place: I want mine, and I won't help you get yours.
Dan Dascalescu: Archinect did a cut-n-paste without comment here. Shouldn't you be going after Andrew Dalton, the author of the article in SFist, if you have problems with his representation? And on that note, if you're so worried about attribution, shouldn't all those fancy renderings on your site (the Artful Containers version is especially cool) be attributed to someone who, you know, designed them? Since you're so interested in the potential of talented people and all?
This conversation is cracking me up. I'm glad we haven't become so homogenized in the 21stC US -- that we still have sincere crackpots hanging around. Sometimes our political celebrities who are all much the same make me forget how many wacky things people will try to pull off in America. It's kind of inspiring, really. And the boats are pretty cool!
Hi Donna,
I did go after Andrew, and sent some corrections his way. I also left a bunch of comments at sfist.
The agreement we used when we sourced our designs specifically mentioned that Blueseed becomes the owner of the designs (Anthony can confirm). Can't go against the power of contracts and free association now, can we? :)
As for Thiel's stance on taxes, I'm not familiar with it, and it's not exactly relevant. Everyone on Blueseed will pay taxes according to their country of residence, and corporate tax according to their country of incorporation. More at http://www.blueseed.co/faq.html#taxes
ownership of images and fair credit for their creation is very different.
I have an idea, how about a weed boat. hydorponic weed garden floating in the ocean out in international waters....Now that would be fun!
Assuming this all pans out more-or-less as planned, Mr. Venture Capitalist, Peter T., is actually pretty smart. He gets first dibs on potentially lucrative start-ups. I wonder if he's putting in place intellectual property rights, similar to any work done within a University.
Ownership of design is, of course, a contractual relationship and common in architecture - you get rights to a one-time constructed version of the design, I'm not allowed to sell that same design to another client, and images get credited by name depending on whether we've addressed that in the contract or not.
I do find it hilarious whenever Libertarians (and whoa, calm down, not saying Blueseed is Libertarian though its founder sure as hell is) talk about contracts and laws. Who exactly enforces those laws? Society via taxes, that's who.
Donna, I think being a libertarian means trying to find out better ways to create and enforce law than democracy does today, via innovation outcomes from free competition. Probably you don't aggree with many laws in the US as I don't aggree with many laws in Brazil. Modern theories vary between competitive governments each one with their package of laws or competitive law itself, as argued by David Friedman.
Going back to ownership of design and even image crediting, I didn't require it with Blueseed. Probably if I did they would be less interested in asking me to do it, looking for someone else. Basically I rather take the job with no ownwership or credit than not.
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