Results for “Cruise ship” 48 found
Seasteading
First, I agree with Will Wilkinson that a seasteading community would likely evolve back to non-libertarian political visions.
Second and more fundamentally, I am for the seasteading idea. There are today many oil derricks, owned and run by energyl companies. There are many cruise ships, with more or less autonomous legal governance. More and bigger cruise ships would be better and if some of them moved more slowly that would be fine too. But when I step on to a cruise ship (well, actually that's the sort of thing I don't do; personally I hate cruise ships), I don't feel I am moving from an inferior political order to a superior political order.
I've wondered whether I should retire on to a cruise ship of the future, but I'm not attracted per se by the "politics" I would get there. I would expect more freedom in the Lockean sense but less of the positive freedom that comes from living in a larger, more diverse, and yes also a more stupid society. I wouldn't live on the Mensa cruise ship either. I'll take some of the stupidity of modern society (the landlubbing version) to get the diversity and the greater number of open niche spaces and free possibilities.
On a smaller scale, I live under different kinds of corporate, non-profit and university governance all the time. That's great, but I don't view their totalized extension as my preferred utopian path.
I'd like people to be smarter, more thoughtful, more tolerant, and more loving of liberty, yet in ways which do not drain away the diversity of the United States, which I feel is the best available foundation to build upon. No matter how good a seasteading charter may sound, any given venture just can't be that credible until it has succeeded for a very long time. History and precedent matter and by the way have you checked in on Estonia lately?
Addendum: Here is Alex on seasteading.
Seasteading
A small but passionate minority is deeply dissatisfied
with current political systems. These people seek the autonomy to live
under and experiment with different political, social, and economic systems
than currently exist. It is this search for sovereignty, for the freedom of
self-government, which is the fundamental motivation for seasteading.
That’s Patri Friedman (son of David, son of Milton) and Wayne Gramlich in their seasteading manifesto. In interesting news, The Seasteading Institute has secured funding of $500,000 from PayPal founder Peter Thiel to help make the idea a reality.
Long-term trends are somewhat favorable for seasteading because with a cell phone and internet access more and more people could live on a seastead and make a living. Cruise ships are already floating cities with few regulations or taxes. Harold Berman argues that the rise of the West was due to competitive law. Homeowner’s organizations, hotels and condos are private governments (for more see my edited book The Voluntary City.).
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.
Maybe liberty comes not from choice of government but from forcing people who are unlike to live together. Isn’t the real reason the First Amendment has any force not that people agree on the value of freedom of speech but rather that they disagree on who they want to shut up? Is religious freedom a product of agreement on the value of religious freedom or is it a product of disagreement on who is going to hell?
Still I hope for the best and congratulate Patri. Seasteading has come a long way.
The new Bush health care plan
Jonathan Zasloff writes:
Bush plans to pay for it not by efficiencies, but rather by restricting the benefit packages of the already insured, through the deductibility cap. I’m sure that there are some extraordinarily lavish plans out there, but is there any serious policy justification for this way to go? If anything, this seems to be a recipe for business to delete coverage, and throwing more people into the individual market.
Paul Krugman is very negative. Arnold Kling loves the plan. Greg Mankiw isn’t complaining. Ezra Klein says it is better than nothing.
My feelings are mixed, but my view is closest to Zasloff. In the short run the plan gives more coverage to the people who need it most, while avoiding the mistakes of recent state-level plans. That doesn’t sound so bad. (By the way, has anyone serious done a study of subsidy incidence for health insurance tax credits?)
But I cannot side with Arnold Kling’s view that third-party payment lies at the root of America’s health care problem. Our tolerance for anxiety is sufficiently low that I expect the future to bring more and more insurance of many kinds, whether from the private sector or from government. The cost of this insurance, in terms of induced inefficiencies, will be high but a secure health care situation is one of the things in life that alone can make a difference between happiness and misery.
Furthermore given our "political irrationality" (my apologies to many readers, such as Matt and Ezra, but I am referring to your tendency, yes yours, to want national health insurance), there is a positive external benefit attached to private health insurance, above and beyond the gains to the insured. How far would the Democratic health care agenda get without "45 million uninsured"?
The goal is to get (virtually) everyone insured and keep them insured for as long as possible, and yes I know that eventually means health care at 20 percent of gdp and lots of people getting screwed out of just claims for reimbursement. It is simply the best we can do, and for that reason I don’t want to tax private health plans.
The ambitious long-run program should be to restructure the insurance industry –through a judicious mix of regulation and deregulation — to encourage competition across service quality rather than competition across cost-shifting. Frankly I have no idea how to do that but no one has ever convinced me it is impossible or utopian. We simply need better incentives for evaluating the performance of our insurance companies, and better ways of evaluating the performance of our doctors and hospitals. I’m not going to call that small potatoes, but compared to how health care has evolved since say 1920 it is not asking for the moon. That is one reason why I don’t want to lock into total government control of the health care market for the next five generations or more.
In the shorter run, I expect medical tourism to continue to grow in importance, including possibly cruise ships.
Last week I had my first physical in twenty years, and it seemed no different from visiting a witch doctor who makes you feel better by shaking the rattle.
Uncommon common sense on welfare and poverty
From Jane Galt, read the whole thing.
For me the most intriguing passage (but not the central point) is:
Something that conservatives, and especially libertarians, have been slow to grapple with is that the more productive our society gets, the greater the possibility that some peoples’ labour simply isn’t productive enough to support them at a minimum level. Can we really tell former welfare mothers to go bunk ten to a room the way my Irish ancestors did? We’re a pretty rich country. Are we comfortable telling people to live as if they’re nineteenth century peasants, if their cognitive gifts, or education, won’t stretch to more?
I wonder whether increasing wealth will ever eliminate the case (sound or not) for, say, welfare payments or the public funding of education. Won’t the U.S. at some point, however near or distant, become rich enough so that government won’t have to…fill in the rest of the sentence yourself…? Or does growing wealth jack up land prices so much that subsistence becomes increasingly harder to achieve? I’m not talking about a relative status effect here, or changing expectations as to what is a decent life (though those factors play a role too). To some extent higher real wages also boost the cost of producing human beings (i.e., raising children), analogous to William Baumol’s "cost disease." You can raise a family of seven in Mexico on one thousand dollars a year, just try that in Fairfax County. And might further economic growth only exacerbate this contrast?
Some mid-level developing countries address this problem by allowing shantytowns to spring up in or near their major cities. The wealthy live in the "normal" city, the poor in the shantys. There are other ways of setting up parallel colonies on low-wage land. Randall Parker writes of old people moving to low-cost cruise ships (no, not ice floes), and of course many of the elderly migrate to Mexico or Costa Rica. The default of course is to keep everybody in the higher-rent, higher-value network, and not coincidentally raise general taxes over time. We will all continue to pay lip service to the integrationist ideal, but let’s say you think the case for welfare will never go away, no matter how wealthy we become. This view implies that the pressure for "separate colonies" will only increase over time.
Panama Canal facts
1. 14,000 ships go through the Canal each year; 2/3 of these are headed to or from the United States.
2. A crossing takes eight to ten hours.
3. The Canal is currently financed by tolls; one luxury cruise ship paid $226,194 for passage, an all-time record.
4. New ships are often forty feet wider than the current Panama locks. Within ten years most new container ships won’t fit through the locks.
5. Any rebuilding would involve considerable flooding of territory and the relocation of Panamanian citizens.
6. The Panamanian economy is relatively healthy, but heavily reliant on canal revenue.
7. Many Panamanians are reluctant to have their country take on the full cost of reconstruction.
Here is one account of how the Canal might be rebuilt.
The bottom line: We have a classic bargaining game here. Building a broader Canal is profitable, but who should pay? The longer the Panamanians hold out, the more likely the U.S. will sweeten the pot for improvements. Since the Canal is an object of national pride, they won’t just sell equity in the project. In the meantime they might give the Chinese a larger hand in the project, just to make us nervous. My prediction? The improvements will take at least five to ten years longer than they ought to.
By the way, if you’ve never seen the Canal, I recommend a trip to Panama. For me it is one of the world’s great wonders and the country is lovely.
Austin Vernon on drones and defense (from my email)
I think they still favor the defensive. On the front line they make movement, hence offense, very difficult.
In the strategic sense we’ve already seen Ukraine adjust to the propeller drone/cruise missile attacks. The first few months were terrible for them but then they organized a defense system with the mobile anti drone teams. The interception percentage for drones traveling a fair distance over Ukraine is extremely high, 98% type numbers. Most of the Russian focus in now on more “front line” targets like Odessa because the Ukrainians don’t have as much time and space to make the interception. They are downing maybe 60%-70% of those drones.
The Russians are slow to adapt, but they eventually do. There is no reason to believe they won’t get better at intercepting these slow drones. Expensive cruise missiles with high success rates can end up being a better deal when strategic drones have 98% loss rates. The slow drones are better suited for near front line attacks. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they adapted to be more expensive to add features like quiet engines, thermal signature obfuscation, and lower radar cross sections.
I also think it’s worth pointing out that the Houthis have tried unmanned surface vehicles and they’ve all been quickly destroyed. Same with their slower drones. The hardest weapons to defend against have been conventional anti ship missiles and the newer ballistic anti ship missiles. You can argue about the intercepting missiles being too expensive, but the US is moving towards using more APKWS guided rockets against these strategic drone targets. These only cost $30,000 each and we already procure tens of thousands of them each year. The adaptation game is ongoing but the short range FPV drones seem quite durable while the strategic slow speed drone impact looks less sustainable.
Here is my original post.
A Ross Douthat proposal on guns
So I would like to see experiments with age-based impediments rather than full restrictions — allowing would-be gun purchasers 25 and under the same rights of ownership as 40- or 60-year-olds, but with more substantial screenings before a purchase. Not just a criminal-background check, in other words, but some kind of basic social or psychological screening, combining a mental-health check, a social-media audit and testimonials from two competent adults — all subject to the same appeals process as a well-designed red-flag law.
Here is the full NYT Op-Ed. And speaking of Ross, and guns, or rather gun, Ross gives the correct Straussian reading of Maverick, namely that Tom Cruise dies early in the movie, and the rest of the film is his pre-death fantasy. This take is all the more plausible if you have seen Michael Powell’s Stairway to Heaven/Matter of Life or Death, where this is clearly the correct interpretation.
Monday assorted links
1. Coronavirus protective shield markets in everything.
2. Does election forecasting itself lower turnout?
3. Ebola spread less under the local chiefs.
4. How much of world gdp has the coronavirus reduced?
5. Dreher interviews Douthat on decadence and different forms of pessimism.
6. Lots of younger Filipino crew members on Diamond Princess also infected.
Markets in everything those new service sector jobs
TITUSS BURGESS doesn’t like to travel and says he knows “zero” about South Africa, which would seem to make him an unlikely host for a 10-day tour of that nation, especially one that costs nearly $27,000 a head. But on a chill March night, the actor, best known for his role as Titus Andromedon on the Netflix series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” patiently posed for selfies with travel journalists at a Manhattan wine bar to kick off Heritage Tours’ new Spotlight Series of trips. The company describes the tours as “immersive small-group experiences enhanced by the presence of expert personalities and influencers.”
…While Mr. MacMillan says that the hosts for his trips were chosen for their connection to the destinations, the link can seem tenuous. Courtney Reed, who played Princess Jasmine in Disney ’s “Aladdin” on Broadway will be hosting a trip to Spain focused on wine, fashion and food. She’s never been to Spain, but is “extra thrilled” about going. “I think my role is just to provide social ambience,” she said. “I’m a very easygoing person and I can create extra flair just having fun and appreciating our surroundings. I’m like a cheerleader….We’re going to have a blast!”
…Other travel companies are hitching their wagons to stars who don’t merely gild the travel experience, but add bona fide knowledge or expertise. “There’s only so much caviar and champagne you can give passengers, so we like to enrich their experience in an intelligent way,” said Barbara Muckermann, chief marketing officer of Silversea Cruises. The cruise line, which has at least one expert lecturer on each of its ships, invited nine artists, writers and other creative types including authors Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer and Saroo Brierley to make appearances during its 133-day World Cruise 2019. Besides giving lectures, each is contributing to a commemorative anthology that Silversea line is creating for the passengers.
There is more at the link, by Kevin Doyle at the WSJ, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Why aren’t millennials buying boats? (the boat recession)
“So, where are all the boaters your age?” asked a 60-something-year-old, at a patio bar on Gabriola Island in British Columbia. “When I was your age, we all had boats and had great big raft-ups out on the water.”
Our group of under-40 sailors was on a weekend cruise and digging into steaming plates of fish and chips. “I’m not sure,” I answered. “Are there fewer? Maybe it’s because they can’t afford it?”
“Nah,” he said. “It’s those iPads. My grown kids have no sense of adventure, happy to sit around ‘twitting’ all day.”
My husband, Robin, and I had often discussed this question. Having become first-time boat owners only five years before, at ages 24 and 29, we were often the only identifiable 20-somethings at our silver-haired yacht club.
…According to Ellis, boat ownership has seen a steep decline in the 20- to 39-year-old age category, with approximately 41 percent fewer 20- to 39-year-olds owning boats in 2015 than in 2005. In 2005, 4 percent of American males ages 20 to 39 owned a boat; but by 2015, that number dropped to only 2 percent.
Here is the full story, via Craig Richardson.
Market urbanism and tax incidence
I put some of my worries about market urbanism being overrated by its proponents in an earlier post, and I thought I would clarify a bit. I fully agree that we should deregulate building in major cities such as San Francisco, and just as importantly (or more so) stop rising cities such as Atlanta or Houston from going down that same route. That said, I’m still not happy with how market urbanists handle the distributional implications of their proposals. Let’s try putting the argument in terms of tax incidence.
If urban land currently reaps monopoly rents, a new tax on building largely will fall on the value of land. Both Ricardo and Henry George understood that.
Similarly — and here is the important point — the gains from removing taxes/restrictions on building largely will be captured by landowners for exactly the same reason. More stuff will be built, urban output will expand, land still will be the scarce factor, and by the end of the process rents still will be high.
In other words, if we deregulate building, landowners will capture a big chunk of the benefits. I’m fine with that, it is a Pareto improvement and I am not a capuchin monkey. But as I read market urbanists, many are more prone to talk about making various major cities affordable again as part of a broader reformicon program. I’m not convinced that will happen, or if so the case has not yet been made.
Just think of urban space as “a license to produce in a high MP of labor area.” As long as the city is not hitting diminishing returns, issuing more licenses probably will not lower their marginal value and thus will not lower rents.
Maybe — maybe, maybe, maybe — if you remove so many building restrictions, land won’t be the scarce factor any more and the gains from the tax reduction will be distributed in many directions. Alternatively, you may have a less simple model of tax incidence than the “first order effect” I laid out above (try this pdf too). Great, let’s try to figure that out, but then building restrictions may not much raise rents!…let’s be consistent.
In any case, I think the above is the basic dilemma facing market urbanists. It can do much to enhance efficiency and productivity, with attendant trickle-down benefits, yet without much solving the distributional problem in any direct way, as it is sometimes advertised as doing.
By the way, have I mentioned that I love landowners? My school, George Mason University, is a significant landowner. So were the people who built up the northern Virginia area, such as Til Hazel. Great stuff, great efforts, great people. Landowners, love ’em or leave ’em.
p.s. I also love trickle-down benefits. Most benefits are trickle-down benefits.
When will self-driving cars be a real thing?
We discussed this at lunch yesterday, here are my predictions:
1. Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years. But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.
2. The American courts and regulators will not pin too much liability on the car companies or software architects. That said, the regulators will move slowly, and for some time will require a human driver stay at the wheel, even though this seems to be more dangerous.
3. Mapping the territory, reliably, will remain the key problem. Until that is solved, driverless cars will be a form of mass transit — except without the mass — along predesignated routes.
4. A Chinese city will do it before America does, but Singapore first of all.
5. In less than two or three years, you will see some American car dealership advertising “driverless cars,” but in a gimmicky way. You’ll still have to sit at the wheel and…drive them. But they’ll park themselves and have super-duper cruise control and the like.
6. The big gains come from everyone having driverless cars and that is more than twenty years away, but well under fifty years away.
Here is a related NYT article. I thank Megan McArdle, Robin Hanson, Alex, and others for their contributions to this conversation.
Addendum: We also talked about whether “Virtual Reality” will be a revolutionary technology. It will have its fans, but I don’t see it as a major breakthrough. It makes too many people dizzy, and doesn’t really have a killer app; perhaps it will change sex however.
Markets in everything: the ugly mirror
Tucked between their 4K televisions and their induction cooktop stove, Panasonic’s booth at the Consumer Electronic Show is also home to a futuristic magic mirror way more terrifying than that disembodied mask from Snow White.
The Japanese heavy-hitter’s smart mirror has digital displays, including a secondary projection of your own reflection. The projection can be virtually altered to display different makeup looks, hairdos, and even facial hair styles.
But here’s where it gets really fun: it can also pinpoint all your flaws, from tiny wrinkles to barely-perceptible pores, and then “recommend” a series of beauty products and treatments in order to improve your look. Because apparently we weren’t picking apart our reflections enough as it is.
It also keeps track of your horrible, hideous flaws, so you can see if all the money you spent is working, or if you ought to spend more money.
“Once you start using products, you can track whether or not they’ve been working,” sales rep Joey Liao explained cheerfully, gesturing to another volunteer who sat pouting at a vanity. “So if she buys a very expensive new night cream and a month later has made no progress, goodbye night cream! You don’t need to invest in that anymore. You can use a different product.”
That story was sent to me by the excellent Mark Thorson, who also points us to the Norwegian Caribbean cruise that has a special snow room.
Assorted links
1. Too big to sail?
2. What do we know about a possible marijuana legalization? (pdf)
3. The Japan Travel Agency for Stuffed Animals.
4. Arthur Danto has passed away.
5. Free to Choose? (car ad).
6. Bordo and Landon-Lane on credit booms and bubbles, here and here. Some dare call it Austrian.
Nostalgia on the high seas?
Only a few ships still make the journey, the best known being the Queen Elizabeth 2. Depending on the number of ports of call, the average trip is roughly 6-14 days, although some are longer. Ships traveling from North America depart from several cities, including New York, Boston, Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. They terminate their voyage at different locations, including Barcelona, Venice, Lisbon, Copenhagen and Genoa. In between, their stops are determined by the length of the trip and the cost. For example, you can take the Royal Princess on April 11,2000, and take a nice 19 [day] cruise to Barcelona. Your port of departure is Buenos Aires, and in between, you'll visit Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Dakar, Madeira, Casablanca, Gibraltar…not a bad way to get to Barcelona.
There is more here. I've also been trying to Google how planes traversed the Atlantic during the early years of WWII, although without success.
I believe that volcanoes are an underrated ecological problem and that this story still is being underreported. Events could prove me wrong in very short order, but I am reminded of the financial crisis, and the associated explanations from governments and the financial sector itself, around the time of the Bear Stearns collapse.