It was a bizarre idea, in step with the tone-deaf nature of Google's leadership which seems to exhibit traits of megalomania. I like ambitious projects, I like people creating new things, but some of the words that come out people's mouths about creating places in the world to experiment without regulation, and that people's expectations of privacy are wrong, etc. It's just off-putting and some day when some other startup starts eating Google's lunch this barge will come across as the early signal that Google just had too much cash than was good for it.
Au contraire - I think we need more ambitious / divergent projects, and I think with this ambition and divergence comes the likelihood that you're going to piss a lot of people off, and I think that's okay.
"creating places in the world to experiment without regulation, and that people's expectations of privacy are wrong, etc."
Both of these sound like divergent and large scale, but they don't seem unreasonable.
People let the world in front of their eyes convince them of its permanence / correctness - when in reality we need to break some of our cherished beliefs to move forward.
You mean like "conserving" your beliefs against "progress". Hmm. Seems like we should invent some sort of political system where we can "conserve" on one end and have "progress" on the other end. They will meet in the middle and get absolutely nothing done. Brilliant!
While not cheap, these likely weren't an extravagant expenditure (probably a few hundred thousand each).
This seems like part of the noise of a company trying many different things and cutting their losses when it makes sense. The only real difference is that we don't see many of these other projects because they can fit in a building
From the article, new the barges would have been $4 mil apiece. Even if they got them for a song, that would still put each north of one million, and that's before you buy 64 containers gut them, weld them together and install windows.
Not saying this was a big loss for Google, but it wasn't "a few hundred thousand."
Comments
It was a bizarre idea, in step with the tone-deaf nature of Google's leadership which seems to exhibit traits of megalomania. I like ambitious projects, I like people creating new things, but some of the words that come out people's mouths about creating places in the world to experiment without regulation, and that people's expectations of privacy are wrong, etc. It's just off-putting and some day when some other startup starts eating Google's lunch this barge will come across as the early signal that Google just had too much cash than was good for it.
Au contraire - I think we need more ambitious / divergent projects, and I think with this ambition and divergence comes the likelihood that you're going to piss a lot of people off, and I think that's okay.
"creating places in the world to experiment without regulation, and that people's expectations of privacy are wrong, etc."
Both of these sound like divergent and large scale, but they don't seem unreasonable.
People let the world in front of their eyes convince them of its permanence / correctness - when in reality we need to break some of our cherished beliefs to move forward.
What if we like our cherished beliefs because they work for us and don't really want someone else's beliefs to trump that?
Then don't move to their seasteading platforms or use/buy products run from them?
ra-men
You mean like "conserving" your beliefs against "progress". Hmm. Seems like we should invent some sort of political system where we can "conserve" on one end and have "progress" on the other end. They will meet in the middle and get absolutely nothing done. Brilliant!
While not cheap, these likely weren't an extravagant expenditure (probably a few hundred thousand each).
This seems like part of the noise of a company trying many different things and cutting their losses when it makes sense. The only real difference is that we don't see many of these other projects because they can fit in a building
From the article, new the barges would have been $4 mil apiece. Even if they got them for a song, that would still put each north of one million, and that's before you buy 64 containers gut them, weld them together and install windows.
Not saying this was a big loss for Google, but it wasn't "a few hundred thousand."