Caterina.net: How disorienting

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{ Sunday, August 17, 2003 }

How disorienting

The World, by Residensea, is a cruise ship that you live aboard. I mean, you buy an apartment on it and live there while it moves around the world from San Francisco to the Tierra del Fuego to Antartica to Tallinn. What a peculiar way to live! Studios are $900,000. 3-bedrooms, $4,342,000. You can choose from interiors by designers from London, Olso and Milan.

LINK | 8:11 PM | TB

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{ COMMENTS }

"Glance out the window…instead of the lane leading down to the mailbox, it's Sydney, Hong Kong or St. Tropez on the horizon." Well, sure, but glance down the corridor and it's still your horrible neighbors, and they aren't dying any faster than you are.

Meanwhile, our apartment goes round the world once a day, and we have a fine view of the sun and the moon and the stars.

Eeksy-Peeksy | August 18, 2003 12:42 AM

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There are probably tax advantages to living aboard the Residensea, in addition to the opportunity to eat 11 buffet-style meals a day.

C. Maoxian | August 18, 2003 1:55 AM

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"Tax advantages" of that sort are always immediate, short-term advantages for a particular payer (more money to buy disposable crap) but short- and long-term disadvantages for the world (less money for school budgets, etc.). If they're buying floating homes just to avoid being paying members of society, I sure hope the Unlove Boat doesn't suddenly sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench while all residents are having a "Screw the Poor!" party down near the engine room and all the crew, staff, and tourists are out on the deck for lifeboat practice...

Eeksy-Peeksy | August 18, 2003 5:24 AM

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I sense a touch of class envy, Eeksy-Peeksy. It's an interesting question which government should be collecting taxes from a group of people who are more or less always in transit.

Should the Bedouins in NW Africa be paying taxes to the government of Egypt or Libya? Should they file in both countries? These are the fascinating questions that international tax advisors tackle every day (sometimes accepting sheep in payment).

C. Maoxian | August 18, 2003 7:42 AM

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A couple of thoughts:

This is the sort of thing that must delight Alvin Toffler (if he's still alive), the "futurist" and author of the 70's-era books Future Shock and Third Wave. My vague recollection of Toffler's futurism doesn't turn up much if anything where he was on the money. He did predict very mobile lifestyles, tending to focus on things like modular apartments which would be plugged into high-rise towers like upscale sci-fi doublewides. (I have no idea how that would work -- would you wait six months for your apartment to be shipped over when you got reassigned to Tokyo, or would you hire a supersonic helicopter to deliver it the same day? And would all your belongings be bolted in place so they wouldn't tumble around en route? Engineering was never Toffler's strong point.) Instead, as far as I can tell, the world's rootless folk mostly seem to shed their belongings and buy anew with each move and even the rootless generally avoid sci-fi modernism and shoot for a suburban lawn-and-shrub aesthetic, however tacky and soulless it turns out to be. But he'd *love* a floating condo complex.

The tax-haven thought reminds me of a story I think Paul Theroux has written twice, a modern man-without-a-country tale in which a poor rich guy sheds his US citizenship in favor of a mail-order passport from Togo or some other third-world state happy to have anybody with a few thousand in fees. The catch is that he starts being treated like a Togolese every time he tries to cross a border or deal with a local bureaucrat and learns that the advantages of being on the privileged side of neocolonialism are more than worth the taxes he'd been paying.

Prentiss Riddle | August 18, 2003 9:03 AM

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> I sense a touch of class envy

Wrong. It's not envy to point out robbers and hope that they get what's coming to them.

I'm wondering about people who live within tax-dependent states -- all states, including the places that spawned and continue to support Wall Street, the City, Harvard, Oxford, and all other centers of wealth -- but who later want to avoid paying the costs of those benefits, people who live their lives within societies paid for and worked for collectively, and who then try to bugger off with their skimmings when they see a chance to avoid paying for the next generation of their type.

If someone is educated on such a floating city and builds a fortune on that floating city, then let the floating city decide whether to take or leave its share to pay for the physical and human infrastrucure that helped to build that fortune.

But when you benefit from one society and then run away to another, but still try to drive on your nurturing society's streets and profit from its institutions without paying for it, you're a leech, a thief.

Eeksy-Peeksy | August 18, 2003 12:09 PM

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Did you see the money required to live on this ship?

Thinking about this, I can't help but think of the scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, when dude eats until he explodes.

Capitalism may have just eaten one more wafer-thin mint.

| August 19, 2003 10:25 AM

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Hrm. Can you get reliable, always-on, high-speed Internet connectivity?

Jim/Abulafia | August 19, 2003 5:56 PM

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Couldn't someone have told my parents about this before they sold their house and left to sail around the world on their tiny 50' spindrift? sigh.

Ferra | August 19, 2003 10:07 PM

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Oh my god!

I'm driving to work today. I live in Portland, OR, USA. We have a huge river right through the middle of the city, and what do I see? The World.

It is not as big as you might imagine. And it was a little shocking to have never heard of this thing as of yesterday, and now I can go see it during lunch! If I wanted to, that is.

Furious | August 20, 2003 8:07 AM

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I'm in Portland too. Thanks for the tip! I have to see that beast because lord knows I'll never see the inside.

bill | August 20, 2003 10:28 AM

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Also in Portland and I have to say it was quite a shock to come upon the ship rather randomly. I beg to differ with the earlier poster -- I think it's massive and the Willamette looks a rather little river with it in it.

| August 21, 2003 3:03 PM

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