5 ms·

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. Just stay on Earth or whatever,

by patrissimo1976 7y ago

Just stay in Manchester or whatever, and pay your god damned taxes to the king. Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. Just stay on Earth or whatever, and fix your god damned environment. Settling the Solar System - how dare you? Tell me one of those space ships won't get hit by an asteroid. I mean, heck, the idea of doing a startup of any kind is dangerously transgressive. If you make new things, something bad might happen! And existing companies might lose customers! There will be change! Chaos! Mayhem! Or - crazy idea here - perhaps we could have the courage to not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation? Or, if that's the only metric you have, at least pick the right game - SimCity!

dbspin 7y ago
Startups aren't remotely transgressive. They're heavily promoted, financed and supported by virtually every state government and have been for decades (centuries if you count the startups behind colonial enterprises). Settling the solarsystem would be neat. It won't do anything to fix climate changes or overpopulation. It's not even possible in principle, let alone practice to remove significant quantities of people from the gravity well. Creating lawless zones for the specific purpose of fiefdom isn't new, entrepreneurial or even particularly imaginative. Unless you count the villains of Connery era James Bond as novel entrepreneurs. Just where do you think these marvelously useful, livable but mysteriously uninhabited "vacant tracts of land in developing countries" will come from.
- patrissimo1976 7y ago
  Charter cities are, like startups, heavily supported by the partner nation. The models are Dubai & Shenzhen. Instead of being completely funded and operated by the state, the new generation of cities will be public-private partnerships between developers and nations. A small, incremental degree of privatization. I have no idea where you get "lawless" or "fiefdom". These zones are requested, authorized, regulated, and monitored by a nation. Do you think the 3,000 SEZs in the world are lawless fiefdoms? This is strangely hyperbolic language for what's basically a new kind of free trade zone. Would make a good movie plot, though, you've got a grand imagination!
rozab 7y ago
The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.
- kiba 7y ago
  We can do both.
- TimTheTinker 7y ago
  > The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
  - fnord77 7y ago
    > That's a bit of an overstatement. After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so. > I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming. The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best. Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - readarticle 7y ago
    The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves. That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.
  - TheCoelacanth 7y ago
    You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.
jrobn 7y ago
I don't see humanity doing anything but descending into self-destruction. I'm sure tax-haven offshore city states will prove once again that humans, taken as a whole, are craven ruthless creatures. It's the reason we are the dominate species on this planet.
- plufz 7y ago
  Or maybe we are the dominant species because we cooperate so well. :)
adamsea 7y ago
Well let’s not forget “moving to the new world” also meant they process subjectifying the people whose land it was, in order to take it.
TomMckenny 7y ago
>>is bleak, bleak stuff Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar. And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property" If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain. >not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation "Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.
truculent 7y ago
> Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. I mean... yeah? There was famine and then genocide, then slavery?

dbspin 7y ago

Startups aren't remotely transgressive. They're heavily promoted, financed and supported by virtually every state government and have been for decades (centuries if you count the startups behind colonial enterprises). Settling the solarsystem would be neat. It won't do anything to fix climate changes or overpopulation. It's not even possible in principle, let alone practice to remove significant quantities of people from the gravity well. Creating lawless zones for the specific purpose of fiefdom isn't new, entrepreneurial or even particularly imaginative. Unless you count the villains of Connery era James Bond as novel entrepreneurs. Just where do you think these marvelously useful, livable but mysteriously uninhabited "vacant tracts of land in developing countries" will come from.

patrissimo1976 7y ago
Charter cities are, like startups, heavily supported by the partner nation. The models are Dubai & Shenzhen. Instead of being completely funded and operated by the state, the new generation of cities will be public-private partnerships between developers and nations. A small, incremental degree of privatization. I have no idea where you get "lawless" or "fiefdom". These zones are requested, authorized, regulated, and monitored by a nation. Do you think the 3,000 SEZs in the world are lawless fiefdoms? This is strangely hyperbolic language for what's basically a new kind of free trade zone. Would make a good movie plot, though, you've got a grand imagination!

rozab 7y ago

The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years. Preserving the Earth is a better option than colonising other planets, although less sexy.

kiba 7y ago
We can do both.
TimTheTinker 7y ago
> The New World was a bleak dystopia for a few hundred years That's a bit of an overstatement. I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming.
- fnord77 7y ago
  > That's a bit of an overstatement. After reading few books from the period and later ones by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I don't think so. > I expect if that were true, people wouldn't have kept on coming. The people coming could have incomplete or incorrect information. Communication was slow back then. Separating fact from falsehoods about the New World would have been a crapshoot at best. Even an entirely country got it wrong. Scotland bankrupted itself on the Darien scheme.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- readarticle 7y ago
  The bulk of immigration to the New World happened after the first 2-3 centuries, before that, the plurality were chattel slaves. That’s of course ignoring the post apocalyptic lives of the natives that survived successive waves of disease and collapse radiating out from points of contact, but it’s habit at this point.
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
  You're disregarding the extremely large number of people who were more or less forced to travel to the new world. Add up the slaves taken there, people sentenced to be sent there for crimes, people who had to leave their home country or starve and people who had to leave their home country or be murdered and you start to get a pretty large number.

jrobn 7y ago

I don't see humanity doing anything but descending into self-destruction. I'm sure tax-haven offshore city states will prove once again that humans, taken as a whole, are craven ruthless creatures. It's the reason we are the dominate species on this planet.

plufz 7y ago
Or maybe we are the dominant species because we cooperate so well. :)

adamsea 7y ago

Well let’s not forget “moving to the new world” also meant they process subjectifying the people whose land it was, in order to take it.

TomMckenny 7y ago

>>is bleak, bleak stuff Is the movement so narcissistic that the very existence of the people already living there is not even noticed? Is this hypothetical country a place where you ruthlessly steal from the original people to make a state where private property is the only right? Because "bleak" is the exact word that describes the lives of the millions of people who don't even show up on libertarian radar. And "hypothetical"is the right word because there were taxes and regulation form America's earliest beginnings. And, fortunately, it protected more rights than just property. Indeed, the founding fathers intentionally _removed_ the word "property" from the original phrase "life liberty and the pursuit of property" If there are any analogies to North America, it would either be the Puritans who had shockingly strict ideological requirements on their members or plantation owners who lived by laws completely different than their slaves. Because we know these libertarian colonists are not going to be building their own log cabins or personally work "their" land. Startups are those bootstrapped farms and self built log cabins. Likewise space exploration. But colonialism, when it isn't simply theft, is rent seeking and always at best zero-sum-gain. >not let the plot of a video game limit our social innovation "Bioshock" is apparently a necessary comparison because its plot is clearly more accurately known North American history evidently.

truculent 7y ago

> Moving to the New World is bleak, bleak stuff. I mean... yeah? There was famine and then genocide, then slavery?