Unfortunately, this is probably what lies ahead for civilization very long term (500+ years or more).
As people "pop" like popcorn all over the world (becoming worth vast sums of money), they are going to become rapidly disincentivized from living in high tax jurisdictions.
They will ask why they pay so much in taxes when they could join a commune with other ultra high net worth individuals and buy better services than they would ever receive in a big city.
Once you can get to anywhere on the globe in under 3 hours for a reasonable sum of money, this will likely become the norm.
The wealthy will just take their stuff and go somewhere else.
So while I agree that microstates/citystates will become much more prevalent in the mid-long term I disagree about the rationale and whether it'll just be for the wealthy. I think we would have seen much more of that in the U.S. already between high and low tax jurisdictions (e.g. California and Nevada) if it was as simple as tax optimization. I think for the ultra-wealthy there are other considerations than just taxes including visa agreements between nations and stability/rule of law (I know Henley & Partners does a brisk business selling citizenship to Chinese/Russians because they want to have citizenship in a place that won't throw them in prison or take all their money if they say the wrong thing). All that said, I do think that we'll end up with something like what Malka Older posited in her books with rather small Singapore style jurisdictions all over the world but probably catering to a range of people (e.g. the talent city in Nigeria currently in planning, manufacturing hubs, tourism/remote work hubs, etc.)
If that happens, “regular” democratic countries will take countermeasures. The market will remain where the masses are, after all. Someone has to buy those iPhones.
Sounds awesome. Citizens don't owe anything to the government, we shouldn't be born with a liability towards the government, we should be born free and be in total control of our finances, and be free to choose the hosting city that offers us the most.
Indeed! Powerful individuals should be free to exploit their fellow man without any interference from the plebs banding together! There's a Galts' Gulch in Chile that you might be interested in. They have no government at all there.
Do you hold money in a bank? Do you buy goods and services from corporations? You realize that you are not contracting with an individual when you do this, and the bank or corporation will continue to have your account in their (computer) systems long after any specific individual has left the company, because it doesn’t belong to any specific individual?
Everywhere you go, you enter into agreements with the people who are affected by your actions.
Money is just a paper or digital asset representing how much other people or organizations owed you and cleared by sending this asset.
Even property ownership itself is just a result of laws passed by certain jurisdictions. They vary from place to place and are balanced against other rights. Property rights make sense for small amounts of property but as you come to “own” larger and larger amounts of capital, you simply expect the system to scale indefinitely, without changing, but that is not necessarily a reasonable expectation. Just like you can’t just scale up an ancient ship and expect everything to work.
What you’re really saying is that someone owes you the safeguarding of your large amount of money because they are being paid some of this money to do so. You want to be able to unilaterally centrally plan where it’s going to go, including sending massive amounts out of a town or community just because it found its way into your accounts.
But all your “principles” ironically are just extrapolations of rights and affordances given to you by a state or other organization that has been running things in an orderly manner. The reality is the other way around - no organizations owe you the safeguarding and enforcing of a monopoly on the unlimited use of {insert resource here} while you unilaterally get to exclude all others from using this resource more productively. You want to centrally plan how the resource will be utilized and you get upset that your “slippage” (eg progressive taxes) is getting bigger and bigger!
I don’t think you voluntarily chose the city or country you were born in. Taxation is like paying rent. Would you use this argument to say that you get to squat rent free in an apartment because you were brought there after birth by your parents and you never signed a lease? The only reason you don’t think about this is because the apartment complex is small. The larger the organization, the more likely it is that you were born there. And you just have to realize that this organization doesn’t “owe you” anything other than the rights it has agreed to guarantee all its citizens.
If you want to find a jurisdiction that will be willing to enforce your property rights above every other right of all its citizens, you’re welcome to try to immigrate there, leaving your family and others or taking them with you. Maybe the Honduran cities are such a jurisdiction, or the high seas, but you’ll probably find they are not. And the jurisdiction you are moving from has no obligation to let you move any arbitrary amount of money out of it.
You don’t really choose where you live unilaterally. Wherever you go, people have already formed organizations and have jurisdiction with laws, and by moving there, you have to agree to abide by those laws. If you have ever traveled, you’ll know this is the case!
And no, it’s not “stealing” when it’s according to the laws of the jurisdiction. And furthermore, stealing implies that it’s your property to begin with. You should look up the difference between Sovereign/Alloidal title and Fee Simple. Read up on property laws. Your revenues are simply numbers in the account of a banking system chartered by your jurisdiction.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. High-wealth individuals need organizations to enforce their property rights. At the same time, we have gravitated towards democratically managed organizations when it comes to running our cities and states. That is why, for example, there are rent control laws, easements and many other restrictions on what you can do with your property. It’s what the majority of the people want, although the few who amassed a great deal of the currency may not.
My question is ... why does any organization owe you to enforce your monopoly ownership of resources and let you unilaterally exclude others from using them? Is it better for society to let high “net worth” individuals to centrally plan where the resources will be diverted, and at a whim move arbitrary amounts out of a town, emptying it of jobs and resources?
Let me put it in stark terms. Should a city allow a few individuals to buy up arbitrary amounts of its fresh water reservoirs, removing them from being collectively managed? Once that they “privately own them” should the city allow the individuals to pollute them for profit, subsequently moving out and taking the profits from externalizing the costs to the people living there? It may result in “more revenue” to the city in terms of job creation, and cheaper goods, but can do you agree there is a trade-off?
Okay, you claim 50% taxation is beneficial for all. It's highly debatable.
But the point it's that taxes should be phrased and understood for what they are, a whitewashed extortion. It has no proportion at all with costs of running a rule of law society. Be grateful that we take just 50% from you because we could take everything!
Just replace the word “taxation” with “rents” and imagine that each city is owned by an individual and it’s their own private property. Suddenly this becomes OK under anarcho capitalism, right? Such private cities exist, eg Walt Disney World.
So now, imagine that each city’s owner chose to “go public” and sell shares of the city to each citizen equally, and they put in place bylaws. So now you have a democratic society.
In fact that is how cities like Boca Raton came to be owned by the residents. How is paying taxes to the city of Boca any different in your view than paying rent to locate your business in Walt Disney World?
Well you paint a very gloomy dystopian picture, with scarcity and fighting for every square inch.
This issue is present in any political system, even full egalitarianism, increase population by an arbitrary amount to reduce land per citizen to an epsilon.
Provided you are a good neighbour, it will always be possible to find space to rent at the marginal cost, without a rent-seeking political class.
Agreed, if anything more migration opportunities would be much better for those who are poor. A semi-recent article put the value of free movement globally at an additional $78 Trillion for the global economy
No wealthy person became wealthy on their own. Almost by definition they participate in a market, which can only be established by some kind of state-like entity to prevent descent into chaos.
The marvels of modern life are all due to the stability and infrastructure provided by government. For one to rise to a high level of wealth by exploiting public resources, then simply abscond with their pile of gold, is to breach the social contract that enabled them to rise so high in the first place. It's pulling up the ladder.
Does it really matter? We live in a time where there’s no necessary relationship between the government that you pay taxes to and the one that supports the people who pay you. That’s what remote work makes possible. You’re suggesting that free movement is wrong and that people owe a debt to whichever government they happened to be raised under.
What is the reason for the US to charge an exit tax to someone that was born in the US, is raised and makes a fortune in Chile, and then that person decides to renounce his/her US citizenship ?
I disagree that it’s a government in itself that makes this possible. I believe it’s the restriction of predatory governmental practices that allows for a flourishing free market. A descent into chaos is prevented by an impartial legal system and police force, neither of which technically require a government. Chaos erupts when there is no fair third party to appeal to for resolution of disputes or protection from violence.
I think part of the idea is that weapons systems have changed such that if another country invades, what exactly would they capture? Laptops? Maybe the people - and then what? You're going to make them be as productive as they were but working for your regime? Plus, small nations with asymmetric warfare opportunities - e.g. you're a small city and you have a big aggressive neighbor, why not create a bunch of cyber attacks that can be triggered at any moment rendering the value of any attack moot or negative. Agreed for islands where the intrinsic value isn't the human capital this might be a serious concern, but I doubt it for a place like this.
I think you're being sarcastic but exactly! It basically worked for North Korea and I bet Ukraine wishes they held onto theirs these days. But idk if even something as powerful as a nuke is needed, you just need some measure that makes attacking the place less valuable than not. Personally, that screams cyberwarfare to me (e.g. yeah you can take our city but by the time you do I will have shut down your electric grid and financial market for a few days) but who knows
To avoid taxes they need to relinquish ownership of the land. At which point, how does them having lots of stuff and good times on their island affect the rest of us?
This sounds like end-of-history talk. In 500 years, the world will not look like now + sci-fi tech. There may not even be money in 500 years.
It's also strange that getting places in 3 hours rather than 2-3 days is the radical change you predict. If people can get anywhere quickly and cheaply, the posited ultrarich would have to spend an awful lot on security, which will bring up their travel times/costs.
There is no money now. What is the definition of money? A timed deposit? An entry? It's a relationship, an IOU. That's why we need PR people (Central Bankers) to keep the faith. They don't control 'money' because what is it? Where is it? The Eurodollar market is not even calculable.
You don't need to be a billionaire to find that attractive. Work remote, have a nice climate and a city that runs efficiently? I'm guessing you'll have lots of people find attractive (I'm one of them).
The question will be mostly whether it's an actual state or more of a vacation/work travel location. If it's an actual state, they'll have to deal with all the annoying stuff, like running their own prison system, running whatever level of welfare programs they want. If it's not, they can just "deport" people and let their home countries deal with them.
Banishment from the city state is a convenient and humane punishment so long as it’s not abused. If a portion of your assets are invested in the city it also makes for an effective bond against criminal activity.
That's true, as long as there's something else surrounding the city that is happy to take those people of the city's hands. If there isn't, you can really only banish them by driving them outside the 200 mile zone and abandoning them there. The "humane" part kind of falls away in that case.
It's going to happen much sooner. Generations > millenials and overworked immigrants won't be subsidizing aging boomers' pensions and real estate wealth forever. They 'll either move elsewhere or turn many european countries to tax havens
Btw the wealthy have already taken their stuff, live in their yachts or multiple houses around the world.
It feels like the world is in a weird place at this point in history. We've left a world of city-states (mostly) where laws, wealth and society were hyper-localised and conflict was probably more frequent, but we're not quite at a point where the whole planet is represented by a single government. I imagine this will happen when we are properly multi-planetary and our ability to defer governmental roles to machines is sufficient, given the already visible cracks in the cultural seams that larger sovereignties create (I'm thinking situations like Catalonia, Hong Kong, Scotland etc.).
Until then we're at a point where governments are too small for us to have free movement across continents and truly beneficial globalisation, and too large to represent minority cultures adequately. I think this reversion to city-states will continue to grow across the world as governments struggle with their size and powerful individuals who are not politically linked chafe at the legal bit. Can't really tell whether it's a good or bad thing yet.
Small things dont blow up and cause huge collateral damage.
Restaurants go out of business all the time. 1 collapse doesn't do anything.
However, 1 monster entity collapsing (LTCM, Lehman, AIG, any pharma today, or Amazon, Google, or 1 ship blocking a key waterway, etc) and its pandemonium.
City states may have warred more frequently, but they never led to the type of destruction that you saw with WWI, WW2 or the french wars of revolution.
Its wise to have resiliency by decentralizing central power, even if it costs a bit of convenience to the individual.
I tend to agree with you. I think on the whole moving to more city states and fewer monoliths probably suits the way humans operate both as individuals and communities more. I also think we're probably at a point now where doing so won't lead to small scale wars city states experienced in the past, or at least far less frequently.
> when our ability to defer governmental roles to machines is sufficient
This baffles me. I’m genuinely curious what this would look like to you. Would you please describe how you imagine this to look like? What makes it beneficial to give governance power to machines? What fundamental changes (technological, social or otherwise) have to happen to get us there? And lastly, what components make up the plumbing of a system like this?
I honestly have no idea how this would work mechanically; I'm talking about a point in the future where we are a fully multi-planetary species with governmental bodies across planets, so the level of tech that's assumed here is already reaching the level of magic.
If we don't assume magical AI, machines are never better than humans at social decision-making so I can't see the President of Earth being a machine in this scenario. What machines are better at is information gathering and processing, which would allow them to synthesise minor political events happening in one corner of the world more effectively than any person and then present findings to a human to make decisions on. In other words it wouldn't be machines doing the governing, but they fulfil governmental roles in that they make increasing bureaucracy efficient enough that a body of humans could realistically govern at a global level.
This isn't necessarily a good thing. China already has an incredible level of surveillance and info gathering ability within its borders and while their governmental structure allows them to be very effective and decisive with it, I don't think it's a good thing for corruptible humans to have that much power. Cue our magical AI.
This reminds me of both the non-fiction The Sovereign Individual, people moving to lower tax rate jurisdictions, and also, William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels where mega corporations set up archologies where people live and work and governments are irrelevant.
My wife and I considered several years ago moving to a low cost tropical area and decided not to because the US government makes it very difficult to do banking while living elsewhere, and we decided to not be so far away from family and friends.
If you enjoyed those books I highly recommend Malka Older's Infomocracy series which talks about micro-states and an overarching government authority which controls 'information'
As a fellow American I agree it's a bit of a pain to move and do taxes in several places (and potentially be liable for taxes in multiple jurisdictions depending on income) but with a good accountant it's not that bad and getting bank checking (not savings) accounts abroad isn't too hard.
The article left me with many questions about the legal situation. How much autonomy do they have? Abortion is a crime in Honduras, under any circumstances. Can someone step onto this land and have an abortion, free from the jurisdiction of Honduran federal law? And what about security? This is a country where land is sometimes taken by force by gangs, who bribe officials to transfer title and occupy it with their own guard forces.
As far as I understand, it's a city with laws. The city is in Honduras, so national laws apply as well as city laws. The Próspera laws[0] don't mention abortion, so the Honduran ban on abortion would still seem to apply.
My understanding is that basically much of the criminal code will remain the same, I watched a few of the founder interviews a while back but don't have exact quotes. They have a little reddit which has many other links though
The article seemed to say that they can set their own tax and minimum wage rates, which means that they are exempt from some federal law. I was wondering about the limits of this sovereignty.
This looks like material for a political campaign (we are doing tech stuff!) with the benefit of making money at consulting/building stuff at tax payer expense.
There are several pain points for people who want a remote, independent and flexible setup.
1- Residency: Visas and residency are a big headache. Almost every country makes it difficult to move there, and also unpredictable.
2- Passports: People moving from disadvantaged countries (poor) are often for the look out for an alternative passport.
3- Low taxation: Preferably close to 0 with direct taxation for infrastructure.
4- Online Infrastructure: Can you make a company online? Is English available? Are there services that make companies, take care of accounting online?
5- Banking: Can I open a bank account? A merchant account? Online options for banking.
As it stands, this program (or private city) provides nooone of that. It is just a 3.560 pages[+] of Spanish (or Portuguese?) that probably have nothing to do with your business or professional/life situation.
If you mean material for a political campaign for a national Honduran party, I don't think so. They've been involved in charter city stuff basically since Romer posited the idea years and years ago.
On basically all the other points I agree, I really wish they were solving for residency/passports which are a nontrivial component of choosing where to live (especially for a long time). I pinged them about residency and citizenship options for people in Prospera some days ago and the answer was essentially that they're looking into it. Other countries have citizenship by investment programs (which I know have some ethical implications but at least provide clarity on legal pathways to becoming enfranchised in domestic politics).
you could solve for 1 and 2 , via some kind of airport or helipad, or even a port.
I would think that would be far easier than a VISA / RESIDENCY rule change. Those things are usually deeply interwebed with the bureaucracy, and there's bound to be someone dissatisfied with a "special people" not subjected to the red tape everyone else is subject to.
As per several news pieces[1], and human rights and internal organizations[2][3], Honduras looks like one of the last countries I would consider to move. Political unstability, rampant violence, and poverty.
You may also want to avoid the United States. Several national governments and organizations such as Amnesty International have issued warnings against travelling there due to several factors, including corrupt and violent police, level of violence in general, dangerous prison system, etc. Also, border control routinely denies entry for obscure reasons.
Have amnesty traveled internationally? Corrupt police overseas are routine- ie, almost every interaction involves cash pmt on spot usually w no receipt for various fines and fees.
I’ve been stopped plenty of times by cops in US and have never had to pay a spot fine in cash
I think you are confusing corruption (which amnesty supposedly claims US police are leaders in) and violence.
I've actually traveled internationally and worked in tough areas. US police / customs etc are not corrupt (relative to developing countries I've traveled in). This really makes me lose confidence in Amnesty unfortunately.
The US is relatively violent compared to developed peers and has some insane pockets of violence (east st louis etc). No question about that. This is stark when traveling to Asia or Western Europe - even "bad" areas in places like Germany are ridiculously safe relative to "bad" areas in the US. And that includes interactions with police (often unarmed overseas vs jumping on your back with a gun in the US).
I don’t think I’m confusing those two things, but may be using “corruption” in a slightly different way than you are. You may be less likely to be solicited for a bribe when pulled over for speeding in the US; but police literally getting away with murder is the very definition of corruption in my view, even if the courts give it a pass with dubious arguments about immunity.
That's kind of crazy of Amnesty to take this sloppy approach to their definitions. While systems are not perfect by any means, the US is in a totally different category with respect to corruption, rule of law, judicial independence, even conviction rates than other countries. We have a trial by jury here - does Amnesty not even look at what is going on in other countries with judiciaries that are actually totally corrupt?
I would be interested in some of the examples of tourists and visitors being killed by police - I pay somewhat close attention to that. There are issues of violence that really shock visitors to the US, including killings, but I hadn't realized the police were playing such a big role. Could you give some examples of visitors being killed by police (ie, the issue Amnesty is warning people over?).
In the US , you are not exposed at all to petty corruption, and the judicial system is mostly fair and works at a decent pace for all. However you are more likely to end up dead and or without recourse when the police turn hostile for whatever reason. The police is a guild that suceeds in protecting its members.
Elsewhere, down south, everyone is exposed to petty corruption, and generally, justice is far from fair and slow. However, you can pretty much get things done quickly ...with cash.
On the positive side, police don't go crazy on the avg person. They do seem to have some kind of respect to life. This is not because people are nicer, but because incentives are aligned : arresting or abusing the wrong person very quickly lands you in hot water, fired, with no income (lack of jobs) or even worse. Police mostly can't tell if a person is the son/daughter of some person with connections, and that is a positive externality.
The police is a profit-driven bureaucracy to protects its riches. Cross a "contract", or fail to abide by the rules, you are cut loose.
Police as a profit-driven bureaucracy can turn very nasty however when certain illegal industries use their money to leverage their power (drugs, etc). That's when you end up in situation's like Mexico's.
Most of the violent crime in Honduras is concentrated in the major cities, like the capital. A good chunk of the countryside is your run-of-the-mill rural Latin America (still rough to navigate, but not overtly violent). This tech city will be built on island, apparently.
My Grandma is from this island Roatan, the history of it is kind of interesting: The “native” islanders are largely descended from cayman islanders and long considered themselves British, although their opinion on the matter counted for little. It was a back water until it became a popular dive location relatively recently due to it’s proximity to some beautiful reefs.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadAs people "pop" like popcorn all over the world (becoming worth vast sums of money), they are going to become rapidly disincentivized from living in high tax jurisdictions.
They will ask why they pay so much in taxes when they could join a commune with other ultra high net worth individuals and buy better services than they would ever receive in a big city.
Once you can get to anywhere on the globe in under 3 hours for a reasonable sum of money, this will likely become the norm.
The wealthy will just take their stuff and go somewhere else.
No individual owes anything to the bigger group. That's the principle. In practice you see a lot of abuse, sadly.
Do you have a family?
Do you work for a company?
Do you live in a neighborhood?
Do you hold money in a bank? Do you buy goods and services from corporations? You realize that you are not contracting with an individual when you do this, and the bank or corporation will continue to have your account in their (computer) systems long after any specific individual has left the company, because it doesn’t belong to any specific individual?
Everywhere you go, you enter into agreements with the people who are affected by your actions.
Money is just a paper or digital asset representing how much other people or organizations owed you and cleared by sending this asset.
Even property ownership itself is just a result of laws passed by certain jurisdictions. They vary from place to place and are balanced against other rights. Property rights make sense for small amounts of property but as you come to “own” larger and larger amounts of capital, you simply expect the system to scale indefinitely, without changing, but that is not necessarily a reasonable expectation. Just like you can’t just scale up an ancient ship and expect everything to work.
What you’re really saying is that someone owes you the safeguarding of your large amount of money because they are being paid some of this money to do so. You want to be able to unilaterally centrally plan where it’s going to go, including sending massive amounts out of a town or community just because it found its way into your accounts.
But all your “principles” ironically are just extrapolations of rights and affordances given to you by a state or other organization that has been running things in an orderly manner. The reality is the other way around - no organizations owe you the safeguarding and enforcing of a monopoly on the unlimited use of {insert resource here} while you unilaterally get to exclude all others from using this resource more productively. You want to centrally plan how the resource will be utilized and you get upset that your “slippage” (eg progressive taxes) is getting bigger and bigger!
I choose the family, I choose the job, I choose what I consume and where I live
Unfortunately I can't walk away from being stolen 50% of my revenues every year.
If you want to find a jurisdiction that will be willing to enforce your property rights above every other right of all its citizens, you’re welcome to try to immigrate there, leaving your family and others or taking them with you. Maybe the Honduran cities are such a jurisdiction, or the high seas, but you’ll probably find they are not. And the jurisdiction you are moving from has no obligation to let you move any arbitrary amount of money out of it.
You don’t really choose where you live unilaterally. Wherever you go, people have already formed organizations and have jurisdiction with laws, and by moving there, you have to agree to abide by those laws. If you have ever traveled, you’ll know this is the case!
And no, it’s not “stealing” when it’s according to the laws of the jurisdiction. And furthermore, stealing implies that it’s your property to begin with. You should look up the difference between Sovereign/Alloidal title and Fee Simple. Read up on property laws. Your revenues are simply numbers in the account of a banking system chartered by your jurisdiction.
I just applaud fair countries that don't extort their own citizens.
My question is ... why does any organization owe you to enforce your monopoly ownership of resources and let you unilaterally exclude others from using them? Is it better for society to let high “net worth” individuals to centrally plan where the resources will be diverted, and at a whim move arbitrary amounts out of a town, emptying it of jobs and resources?
Let me put it in stark terms. Should a city allow a few individuals to buy up arbitrary amounts of its fresh water reservoirs, removing them from being collectively managed? Once that they “privately own them” should the city allow the individuals to pollute them for profit, subsequently moving out and taking the profits from externalizing the costs to the people living there? It may result in “more revenue” to the city in terms of job creation, and cheaper goods, but can do you agree there is a trade-off?
But the point it's that taxes should be phrased and understood for what they are, a whitewashed extortion. It has no proportion at all with costs of running a rule of law society. Be grateful that we take just 50% from you because we could take everything!
So now, imagine that each city’s owner chose to “go public” and sell shares of the city to each citizen equally, and they put in place bylaws. So now you have a democratic society.
In fact that is how cities like Boca Raton came to be owned by the residents. How is paying taxes to the city of Boca any different in your view than paying rent to locate your business in Walt Disney World?
This issue is present in any political system, even full egalitarianism, increase population by an arbitrary amount to reduce land per citizen to an epsilon.
Provided you are a good neighbour, it will always be possible to find space to rent at the marginal cost, without a rent-seeking political class.
https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2017/07/13/a-world-of...
The marvels of modern life are all due to the stability and infrastructure provided by government. For one to rise to a high level of wealth by exploiting public resources, then simply abscond with their pile of gold, is to breach the social contract that enabled them to rise so high in the first place. It's pulling up the ladder.
It's also strange that getting places in 3 hours rather than 2-3 days is the radical change you predict. If people can get anywhere quickly and cheaply, the posited ultrarich would have to spend an awful lot on security, which will bring up their travel times/costs.
The question will be mostly whether it's an actual state or more of a vacation/work travel location. If it's an actual state, they'll have to deal with all the annoying stuff, like running their own prison system, running whatever level of welfare programs they want. If it's not, they can just "deport" people and let their home countries deal with them.
Btw the wealthy have already taken their stuff, live in their yachts or multiple houses around the world.
Until then we're at a point where governments are too small for us to have free movement across continents and truly beneficial globalisation, and too large to represent minority cultures adequately. I think this reversion to city-states will continue to grow across the world as governments struggle with their size and powerful individuals who are not politically linked chafe at the legal bit. Can't really tell whether it's a good or bad thing yet.
Small things dont blow up and cause huge collateral damage.
Restaurants go out of business all the time. 1 collapse doesn't do anything.
However, 1 monster entity collapsing (LTCM, Lehman, AIG, any pharma today, or Amazon, Google, or 1 ship blocking a key waterway, etc) and its pandemonium.
City states may have warred more frequently, but they never led to the type of destruction that you saw with WWI, WW2 or the french wars of revolution.
Its wise to have resiliency by decentralizing central power, even if it costs a bit of convenience to the individual.
This baffles me. I’m genuinely curious what this would look like to you. Would you please describe how you imagine this to look like? What makes it beneficial to give governance power to machines? What fundamental changes (technological, social or otherwise) have to happen to get us there? And lastly, what components make up the plumbing of a system like this?
If we don't assume magical AI, machines are never better than humans at social decision-making so I can't see the President of Earth being a machine in this scenario. What machines are better at is information gathering and processing, which would allow them to synthesise minor political events happening in one corner of the world more effectively than any person and then present findings to a human to make decisions on. In other words it wouldn't be machines doing the governing, but they fulfil governmental roles in that they make increasing bureaucracy efficient enough that a body of humans could realistically govern at a global level.
This isn't necessarily a good thing. China already has an incredible level of surveillance and info gathering ability within its borders and while their governmental structure allows them to be very effective and decisive with it, I don't think it's a good thing for corruptible humans to have that much power. Cue our magical AI.
My wife and I considered several years ago moving to a low cost tropical area and decided not to because the US government makes it very difficult to do banking while living elsewhere, and we decided to not be so far away from family and friends.
As a fellow American I agree it's a bit of a pain to move and do taxes in several places (and potentially be liable for taxes in multiple jurisdictions depending on income) but with a good accountant it's not that bad and getting bank checking (not savings) accounts abroad isn't too hard.
[0] http://pac.hn/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Prospera-Legal-Code...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Prospera/
https://archive.is/2paor
There are several pain points for people who want a remote, independent and flexible setup.
1- Residency: Visas and residency are a big headache. Almost every country makes it difficult to move there, and also unpredictable.
2- Passports: People moving from disadvantaged countries (poor) are often for the look out for an alternative passport.
3- Low taxation: Preferably close to 0 with direct taxation for infrastructure.
4- Online Infrastructure: Can you make a company online? Is English available? Are there services that make companies, take care of accounting online?
5- Banking: Can I open a bank account? A merchant account? Online options for banking.
As it stands, this program (or private city) provides nooone of that. It is just a 3.560 pages[+] of Spanish (or Portuguese?) that probably have nothing to do with your business or professional/life situation.
[+]: http://pac.hn/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Prospera-Legal-Code...
On basically all the other points I agree, I really wish they were solving for residency/passports which are a nontrivial component of choosing where to live (especially for a long time). I pinged them about residency and citizenship options for people in Prospera some days ago and the answer was essentially that they're looking into it. Other countries have citizenship by investment programs (which I know have some ethical implications but at least provide clarity on legal pathways to becoming enfranchised in domestic politics).
I would think that would be far easier than a VISA / RESIDENCY rule change. Those things are usually deeply interwebed with the bureaucracy, and there's bound to be someone dissatisfied with a "special people" not subjected to the red tape everyone else is subject to.
I would not like to live there.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/26/the-spiralling-cris...
[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/hondu...
[3] https://freedomhouse.org/country/honduras/freedom-world/2020
I’ve been stopped plenty of times by cops in US and have never had to pay a spot fine in cash
I've actually traveled internationally and worked in tough areas. US police / customs etc are not corrupt (relative to developing countries I've traveled in). This really makes me lose confidence in Amnesty unfortunately.
The US is relatively violent compared to developed peers and has some insane pockets of violence (east st louis etc). No question about that. This is stark when traveling to Asia or Western Europe - even "bad" areas in places like Germany are ridiculously safe relative to "bad" areas in the US. And that includes interactions with police (often unarmed overseas vs jumping on your back with a gun in the US).
I would be interested in some of the examples of tourists and visitors being killed by police - I pay somewhat close attention to that. There are issues of violence that really shock visitors to the US, including killings, but I hadn't realized the police were playing such a big role. Could you give some examples of visitors being killed by police (ie, the issue Amnesty is warning people over?).
A few paper reports doesn’t even begin to describe the real risks in Honduras. By comparison, US is a regional heaven.
There is a reason people are paying everything they own and more to get smuggled into the US.
In the US , you are not exposed at all to petty corruption, and the judicial system is mostly fair and works at a decent pace for all. However you are more likely to end up dead and or without recourse when the police turn hostile for whatever reason. The police is a guild that suceeds in protecting its members.
Elsewhere, down south, everyone is exposed to petty corruption, and generally, justice is far from fair and slow. However, you can pretty much get things done quickly ...with cash.
On the positive side, police don't go crazy on the avg person. They do seem to have some kind of respect to life. This is not because people are nicer, but because incentives are aligned : arresting or abusing the wrong person very quickly lands you in hot water, fired, with no income (lack of jobs) or even worse. Police mostly can't tell if a person is the son/daughter of some person with connections, and that is a positive externality.
The police is a profit-driven bureaucracy to protects its riches. Cross a "contract", or fail to abide by the rules, you are cut loose.
Police as a profit-driven bureaucracy can turn very nasty however when certain illegal industries use their money to leverage their power (drugs, etc). That's when you end up in situation's like Mexico's.
It works as follows: For anyone living in a high-crime ,or high unemployment,or failing public school zone, offer :
- A paid one-way trip(bus fare to any destination and a prepaid debit card to buy 2 luggages), for each member of the household.
- Limit 3 free trips per taxpayer household.
- Limit 1 household trip , every 365 days.