President Donald Trump has picked Jim O’Neill, a former investor and critic of health regulations serving under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to take control of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, following a tumultuous week in which the agency’s director was forced out.
O’Neill, Kennedy’s deputy at the Department of Health and Human Services, will supplant Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist who had been the CDC director for less than a month.
Monarez’s lawyers said she refused “to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.”
Hahaha. I remember the 90s and how the Libertarian-inflected idea of building floating island(s) - seasteading - was all the rage with that bunch. Even as someone in the Libertarian mindset (as I was at the time), it seemed a bit out there, even for those with more money than sense.
I know the idea predated the 90s, but for some reason, it seemed to take on a different…tone…than some of the 60s utopian/futurist visions. It seemed a bit dark even back in the 90s and that was back when the (commercial) Internet still felt it had a lot of hope and promise beyond just “make shit-tons of money for the already wealthy”.
Ryan’s intro is a great sales pitch but the real story is in the tapes left by maintenance guys complaining about leaky plumbing and shit that never gets fixed just to save a penny.
Best part is some of them are still trying, Adam Something did a couple videos on it and frankly speaking shit hit the fan rather quick in several cases. Inclusing at least one instance where the Thai government boarded and seized one of the prototype badly build floating houses. I refuse to call it a house boat because it being a boat would imply respectable engineering quality.
They have moved on to Network Cities. They are working to make a city state somewhere near Singapore right now. It’s called Network School, for tech optimists and digital nomads.
It’s interesting to see where it’s gone. There are enough techbro billionaires and multi-millionaires now that if it were feasible at scale in the long run, someone would have pulled it off.
Yeah, I remember a lot of vague circle-jerk kind of conversations about it on USENET, and that was before a lot of billions were made by the likes of Thiel…I mean, besides the engineering aspect, I don’t know what would be in it for the typical human being who is not a decamillionaire+ to join up and be part of some weird cult/Ayn Randian human experiment? Just to be “free” of current nation-states and join a new one?
On a related note, I started reading The Sovereign Individual since it apparently inspires so much of these fucking whack-a-doodles with wayyyyy too much money than is good for the world, and … wow. I recommend everyone check it out since it’s quite the ride at least so far.
No wonder these dipsticks like the ideas in there, since it is hitting every note that someone with way too much money and notions of grandiosity would just looooove. I’m not sure how well this stuff dovetails with the likes of what Curtis Yarvin is spewing, but I think it doesn’t come in direct conflict with his “ideas”, LOL.
In a word - these people are fucking nuts. I’d love to see some way to wrest a lot of money, and therefore, power away from them, since they hold way too much sway over the rest of us.