Sorry to interrupt the regular proceedings here with an off-topic post, but I have just discovered the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen: A bunch of Redditors are talking about getting their own motherfucking island! Reddit Island! Where they will live, and farm algae, and give each other massages, and all the other things you do on an island of your own.
Naturally, the discussion is extremely Reddit-tastic. Here, after one Redditor says he may have found them a perfect island, PlutoISaPlanet asks the obvious question:
girls? are there girls there?
You need to read the entire discussion that follows, which will also help to explain why they may have trouble getting girls to sign up.
Bludstone, meanwhile, raises some practical questions:
As there is -still- no reddit island business plan, there is no real reason to be looking for physical islands yet. We need a comprehensive mathematical analysis on how to make a profitable (or at least sustainable) island living.
And ive said that since day 1.
Later in the discussion – which you also need to read in its entirety — he accuses his fellow Reddit Island enthusiasts of being a bunch of unserious dabblers in the fine art of island-utopia-making:
You need a comprehensive plan, contracts vetted by lawyers on both sides, etc.
Honestly this whole project has screamed AMATEURS from the start. Its a real shame since its a cool as hell idea.
One enthusiastic newbie has some questions, including:
Property buying and selling, rights, early adopters, etc’, what’s the current consensus on that? If I “donate”/”pledge” $100 right now, will it assure anything for when the time comes? Will I get a small place where I can build my hut? or will I get a 2 bedroom apartment in a 50 stories high sky scraper?
In still another thread, Reddit Islanders reject one island in Florida – on sale for $42,000 — as too small, though one suggests they could build a tall tower on it to accommodate more Redditors.
Another frugal Redditor suggests they could start out by building houses out of old shipping pallets!
But if you’re going to need a shipping container just to get the pallets out there, another asks, why not just live in the shipping container?
People, I cannot tell you how enthusiastic I am about the prospect of a bunch of Redditors moving to some tiny island in the middle of nowhere to live in a shipping container.
EDITED TO ADD: ArchangelleDworkin of SRS is on the case, and it turns out this post isn’t quite as off-topic as I thought. In fact, it’s totally on-topic, as she shows with this collection of horrible shit the Reddit Islanders have been saying about women (while lamenting the fact that their never-going-to-happen island project would be a total sausage fest).
If you follow her links you’ll discover even more poop that she didn’t even bother to link to. On Reddit, there is literally too much poop for ordinary humans to catalog.
Also, I totally stole her Reddit island graphic.
They don’t sound like they get outta the house that often so what could they need to “get away from”?
Maybe deep down they know that they’re jerks and that being away from a computer would do them some good but lack the will to just walk away and do a paint by number instead.
One of their suggestions is to ‘order babes online’. Apart from making women sound like my delicious chicken bhuna and naan bread dinner from the online takeaway service, how would your average, uh… babe… get to the island? Owning/renting a boat or Cessna isn’t cheap.
Unless by ‘babe’ they mean ‘RealDoll’. You can order those online. (And those were a concept I thought would stay in shojo manga for a few more decades…)
They talk about girls like we’re a resource.
Can we get the island piped for hot and cold running girl?
+1. Whenever anyone starts talking about “access” to women/females/vagina/sexist slur-o’-the-month I get squicked out.
…however, their naïveté is pretty adorable. It really is like kids planning a five-story fully electrified treehouse when they don’t even have a tree. (It also, less adorably, reeks of “never had to consider the basic mechanisms of survival” privilege.)
Lots of tall about Bitcoins and Liquid Democracy and vertical farming… not so much about fresh water and sewage handling.
These guys are going to be so bummed out when they realise that Amazon.com does not delivere “babes” to remote islands without a functional government.
They also don’t seem to quite realize that people have lived independently on small islands for a very long time now, and you might be better off copying their basic infrastructures rather than reinventing every possible wheel with algae farms and Bitcoins.
(Former Marshall Islands resident… Funny, the Marshall Islands have women who actually just live there because it’s their home! They don’t have to be rented or imported or anything! But they do all this unglamorous stuff like catch fish and farm taro, not cool technical manly things like argue on the Internet about libertarianism.)
The elderly British guy with his own island I like. He’s so cute when he kisses his lost turtle! Yay for conservation, and following a passion that helps keep you in good shape as you get older. He looks great for 86.
I’m curious as to how the Redditors propose to maintain internet access on their island treehouse.
That little tiny turtle!!
@Cliff, well, those islands weren’t set up by people like the redditors, so I can guess that deciding to move there of your own free will is much more appealing. A woman on reddit island would probably be fearing for her life 24/7.
Reddit island would be like Pitcairn Island v2.0?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial_of_2004#section_2
For some odd reason I’m reminded of “[torrent of misogynistic invective]. Have sex with me!”
Oh, the Reddit Island subreddit. It is a thing of beauty. There’s one guy with a semi-realistic idea of how it could be done; he lives in Belize and suggests they build a resort and live off tourist dollars. Everyone else is working on the awesomest pillow fort the editors of Omni magazine circa 1988 could design.
Pecunium — “Imagine the shock when they discover there is no internet.” — they have a plan for that! Some expensive satellite system…no sign of medical care though (priorities, they’ve got some)
Ruby Hypatia — “Now how would those shipping containers hold up in a tropical storm?” — could hold up well if they were planning this logically, they can be welded straight to the foundation if you build container homes like normal homes (people do this, I’m not jut making shit up) — they’re supposedly strong enough to ride out a wildfire in, though I wouldn’t want to test that one.
Lady Zombie — happy (belated) birthday! (and yeah, the photoshopper of that sign is an ass)
Another MRA — “Get back to talking about MRAs so we can all laugh at what a moron you are” — what, don’t like it when we’re proving you to be the fools you are?
Just for the record here shipping container homes really are a thing in the real world, usually built similarly to how houses are but as faster and cheaper pre-fabs — they’re sustainable architecture because they’re all over the place already anyways. I’m a bit annoyed these redditors are giving a bad name to the environmentally friendly cargo container home. The island part is absurd, but using shipping containers as the basis for a house really isn’t.
And now I have a geek brain crush on turtle guy, that’s doing island habitation right, and my biggest actual concern with this little reddit project — they’re going to pick an island and then wipe out the native species. The turtles are adorable, but protecting them, and helping them breed even, is awesome.
Argenti: That’s not a plan, it’s a pipe dream. That satellite system is 1: slower than anything they are expecting, and 2: expensive to maintain. It also works less well the further N/S one gets.
This reminds me, in some ways, of the “White Orchid Project”, which was a different (and much worse) sort of Island Paradise plan. It was, I hope, a scam more than an serious effort.
The idea was to, “rescue” child prostitutes from SE Asian countries, ship them off to an island, train them to be some sort of philosopher king, and have them go back to where they’d been kidnapped from and take over the gov’t so it would become enlightened.
After that, it got weird.
“That’s not a plan, it’s a pipe dream.” — fair enough, I was more noting that they had at least thought of that, unlike, say, cholera and e. coli — the dual lack of sanitation and lack of medicine will prove fatal if they ever manage this (which, thankfully, they won’t). “White Orchid Project” sounds weird in general, I’m sure the stage between that and “Profit!!” was really weird though. What’s N/S though? North/South would be the most obvious guess?
Their order of planning is killing me — http://www.reddit.com/r/redditisland/comments/uuuyr/wohaa_guys_just_a_minute_there_with_the_money/
“things like construction equipment for necessary infrastructure (clearing roads, commercial dock, marina, etc) will come out of the collective pot. if someone needs something special to build their personal structure that’ll have to come out of their pocket.”
Toilets guys, you need toilets! I know of one that’d work for this sort of thing — Sun Mar — any of their no-electricity lines, and yes, that’s a 1.5k toilet (it does, however, solve the cholera problem, sorta…until their non-air tight buildings flood out anyways) *has actually considered homesteading and realizes it’s a full time job*
Yes, N/S = North and South.
Geosynch satellites are circum-equatorial, not circum-polar, so the further one gets from them 1: the harder it is to line them up; eventually they are occluded. 2: The more interference their is from the atmosphere. 3: The greater the lag time from send/receive/resend
Gotcha, sounds like they’ve thought out exactly one point then — girls.
Pecunium — “Imagine the shock when they discover there is no internet.” — they have a plan for that! Some expensive satellite system…no sign of medical care though (priorities, they’ve got some)
On the opposite extreme, there are guys insisting they won’t need electricity at all, like the one who suggested they just bring battery-powered flashlights.
This is the meta-problem that’s quickly and hilariously emerging: beyond their shared libertarian ideals and love of rape jokes, they all have completely different concepts of this island paradise. You’ve got back-to-nature types who want to live off the land with no plumbing or electricity trying to hack out a plan with technocratic utopians who want helicopters, hydroponic farms, superfuels, and space colonies. (To be fair, skepticism has been expressed about the space colonies.) A thread about firearms revealed that half the islanders want to ban weapons, and half refuse to come unless they can bring their gun collections.
But they all agree they won’t need a governmental body or police force. I mean, how would disputes ever arise?
I believe all the lulz go right here.
“You’ve got back-to-nature types who want to live off the land with no plumbing or electricity trying to hack out a plan with technocratic utopians who want helicopters, hydroponic farms, superfuels, and space colonies.”
Hey reddit? You can build your own rainwater collection system and solar water heater, and solar panels are getting reasonably priced…might want to consider hand crank flashlights instead of burning through batteries…and you’ll miss indoor plumbing within the first week or two. Also, cholera — do seriously consider proper toilets, outhouses on islands will poison your groundwater, should that be drinkable in the first place (not that you can generally get to it without an electricity powered drill anyways, do have fun drilling hundreds of feet by hand though I guess).
“But they all agree they won’t need a governmental body or police force. I mean, how would disputes ever arise?”
This is just epic — they can’t decide now on weapons, but don’t think they’ll have disputes in person?!
“But they all agree they won’t need a governmental body…”
As long as they realize that they would still be answerable to whatever government has claim on the island. Libertarians hoping to create their own utopia have come across this same problem – every bit of land on Earth (except Antarctica) has been claimed by one nation or another and none of them are willing to give them up thanks to the sheer amount of space off the coasts of those islands it gives them control of.
If they aren’t anchored down, they can withstand wind speeds of up to 100 mph. If they are anchored down, they can withstand wind speeds of 175 mph, which would be what you’d have with a category 5 hurricane. I would say they are probably safe, but if they wanted to be extra sure and have a structure that guarantees survival for the strongest hurricanes and even tornadoes, then they would want an above ground Dupont storm shelter with Kevlar (maybe not to live in all the time, because they’re costly, but just to survive storms).
I also realized that most of the Redditors in this plan are probably in the same age range. Have they planned for how they will get care when they become elderly? Will they have babies on the island or will it be a one generation thing? Well, I know the answer is it’s not going to happen anyway, but this is yet another flaw with their plan.
I have a solar powered flashlight. You can put backup batteries in it, but it’s not necessary. It produces more light than a hand crank one, and the LED light is supposed to last a lifetime. They are cheap at Lowe’s.
solar powered flashlight sounds so wrong, but I’m half not surprised, Ikea has little solar lights — I’ve never really liked the hand cranked ones, so I’m making a mental note of that. (Only suggested it because getting batteries, on an island with no shops, in a storm? Not Happening)
Are those wind speeds cargo specific or wood home ones? The anchoring is different is why I ask (the former can be welded together and to the foundation supports, but I’ve never seen numbers on how solid that really is)