Let me be the first to say, "Holy Shit!" Is it me, or is off shoring getting out of hand?

Apparently, they have plans for 600 software engineers on this ship. Their major point of having them on the ship appears to be that they can maintain low costs to produce software, while only being 3.1 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. I am assuming they don't have to pay corporate taxes to any entity.

From SeaCode.com:

SeaCode presents an innovative service which offers the reduced costs of a distant-shore software development operation while providing the operational benefits and accessibility of a U.S. based onshore location.

Another SeaCode benefit is that 90% of revenue comes back to the U.S. instead of flowing out of the U.S. to distant-shore outsourcing locations.

But this just seems to be asking for a lot of trouble. Humanitarily speaking, since they are not actually in any country, who protects the rights of those 600 laboring software engineers? Does anyone have the authority to make sure that it's not (child) slave labor? No government agency can make sure that working conditions are safe and healthy.

From SourcingMag:

Before you think, "sweat-ship," hear them out. These workers, they say, will each have private rooms with baths, meal service, laundry service, housekeeping and access to on-board leisure-time activities. Picture the Love Boat with a timecard. Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi. Or they can spend time shopping in the on-board duty-free shop.

SourcingMag says that SeaCode will treat their workers fairly. That's great and all if we suddenly believed that corporations are honest and will regulate themselves. How many times have companys ran sweat-shops and claimed that they were treating their worker's fairly?

At first, I thought this was a joke. I am still unsure if it is.

Not too bright.

So this means the Coast Guard won't save their ass? Finally...about time we scurvy seadogs showed the RIAA and MPAA what REAL pirates are! YAAAR!

If they'll cruise it through the Bahamas, I know lots of people who'd sign up! ;)

How would this affect taxes?

Not sure this plan will hold water. I hope they've weighed all the options.

Dumbest idea EVER. I do not understand this infatuation with outsourcing professional workers. You can't tell me it's anywhere near as cost effective as they're making it out to be. (My own experience says otherwise.) I smell another crash of DotCom proportions...

But if they're going to do this thing, they should at least do it in style [slashdot.org]. By utilizing an inexpensive aircraft carrier [fleetairarmarchive.net] they could at least send these people home for occasional weekends and vacations. Under the proposed plan, they're basically prisoners on the ship unless they can manage to get a Visa to enter the country. Which, of course, negates the entire point of not messing with H1-Bs. And how do they think the government is going to react to having these people parked right off our shore? (Hmm... maybe they could refit the guns on the old carrier to keep the coast guard off their backs.)

Did I mention that this is a dumb idea?

...of a horde of unshowered, dropcloth wearing Indians chained to a deck with oars next to their keyboards...

(first post?)

Arg! Torpedo to the server room!

Now, with our awesome Slashdot power, we have now set fire to the servers on the ship, and it is in the process of sinking.

Good job, everyone! Now, World Domnination is within our grasp!

"Visa regulations" do not accompany "outsourcing". Visa regulations accompany the importation of foreign workers. The problems cited with outsourcing are mostly related to distance.

... I wonder what the tax implications for the workers are. And what happens if a crime is committed in International Waters? What about a guarantee of workplace safety and anti-discrimination policy?

I see lots of problems here.

L. Ron Hubbard ALREADY owns the patent to this! Just ask his friendly help desk people at the scientoloaserfgad
asdfasdfasdfa
ASDFAESRFA

NO CARRIER

I'd hate to be a coder on the ship during a good storm. We'll probably start seeing variable names like upanddown, backandforth, sidetoside, puke, makeitstop, and soseasick.

I totally want to set up a web server there and illegally distribute Windows ISOs from there, just so I can be charged with Piracy on the High Seas

From TFA: Staff can make the three-mile voyage into town in their off hours by calling a water taxi. Or they can spend time shopping in the on-board duty-free shop.

I've done my fair share of time aboard a ship, and let me just say that anchoring out and taking a ferry (or water taxi, or whatever you want to call the vomit inducing small craft that transport you to and from the port) a "mere three miles," is a much bigger pain in the arse than you might think. If you're lucky, they run once every 30 minutes. In a situation like this, it's more likely to be every hour, or every few hours.

Do some shopping during the day, and now you'd like to change and grab some dinner and maybe go out? Enjoy catching the ferry back to your boat and then waiting for the next one to get back to land.

Oh, and that moderate sized TV you just bought? Have fun carrying it up the brow.. not to mention just getting it off the ferry, which is probably using its own power to stay pressed against a barge tied alongside the ship. Oops, you slipped? That's a shame. Dropped your TV in the drink? Hope you have a good credit card company, and they believe you.

But I guess maybe it's better than the pay and conditions in the country you come from, and I'm just a spoiled American.

"International waters" don't start three miles off-shore. The US maritime claims are as follows:

Maritime claims:
territorial sea: 12 nm
contiguous zone: 24 nm
exclusive economic zone: 200 nm
continental shelf: not specified

In other words, they'd have to be at least 12 miles from shore, and possibly (depending on who's doing the interpretation) over 200.

Also, as far as I'm aware, the ship will have to be flagged somewhere, which means that it's effectively that country's territory when in international waters.

Someones tax man will find them.

I think the 200 Mile Economic Zone was intended to settle fishing disputes but I can imagine the politicians using it as the basis for taxing this venture. Another question I have is whether the country that the ship is registered in has the rights already to tax commerce that takes place on the ship. Are cruise lines not liable for taxes? Is there no Sales tax on a cruise booked on-line? Obviously there would be no Use tax.

And while you're at it, why not just drop a super long anchor out at sea, declare your cruise ship to be an artificial island, and petition the U.N. to recognize you as an autonomous state? [luf.org]

it's all fun and games until Hiro Protaganist shows up and carves a hole in the hull with his chain gun on steroids.

This must be a fake ....

Notice how their first "Company News" lists an Article-FORBES with no link. If you go to Forbes.com and search their site for "SeaCode" you get: "Sorry, your search for SeaCode did not return any Documents. Please revise your search and try again."

Besides, 3.1 miles makes no sense as your not in international waters.

1. To code in the sea.
2. To live in sea.
3. To live by the code of sea.

Rrrrr, it be a pirates life for thee

Imagine a passed over supertanker refitted with lots of small decks (a la being John Malkovitch). Fitted with UV lighting and irrigation many plants could be harvested in international waters. Customers would
arrive via boat.

Eventually some pissed govt sticks a torpedo in it.

Sea++.

Thank you. I'm here all week.

You get to live on a cruise ship in international waters, and work "below the radar", so to speak. What a great way to lie low until the heat cools off. Shoot, forget running there AFTER the feds are looking for you, it seems like a great place from which to RUN all kinds of criminal activity.

steve

Scurvy.

sailing the ship to india seems a bit expensive. on the other hand if they stay a few miles off of LA, the indian coders will need to fly into LA, get admitted into the US, and then take a boat to their cruise ship. something tells me the immigration officers at LAX will not like that.

in addition to that, if they want to go anywhere once they are on the ship they have to either enter the US without a visa, which is a felony and will get you banned for 10 years, or find a way to get a visa while on the ship. good luck!

Here's what I'd like to see.

Week 1: Operations launch. Works getting done. Going well.

Week 2: Work is better.

Week 3: Pirates came in and confiscated all our computers and electronic equipment. Called the coast guard. I think I heard them laughing in the background.

Week 4: We've drifted into China due to a complete lag of navigation or ship control systems. I, for one, welcome our new communist overlords.

I've wanted to do something similiar on a small scale for a *long* time now, I run my own consultancy and do most of my work for clients remotely, there's no real reason I need to be land based to do any of that stuff, so I started looking into maybe buying a houseboat on a local river, with the advent of wireless internet it was entirely practical to do so, and I thought that I could travel up and down the river and drop anchor closer to clients and thus have a shorter commute in the event that I ever did need to make onsite visits. That turned out to be a fairly feasible idea with no obvious gotchas, you run diesel generators for excess power requirements with a large battery pack hooked up to solar and wind generators, and you're fairly self sufficient when it comes to low end energy requirements.

This is from a twenty five year old guy that had lived all his life on land, and I have to say I consider myself a fairly practical person, so something about the entire idea just kept hitting me the wrong way, it had that "no, this is pie in the sky, it can't happen" feeling to it, and I just couldn't figure out why. I went into dramatic levels of detail in speccing out the lifestyle, you can purchase water generators which will create freshwater from seawater using nothing but energy (provided from the aforementioned power infrastructure) and there's plenty of storage room in a houseboat for food, which is pretty much the only thing you cannot harvest directly from your immediate environment.

That last statement triggered my attention and I thought, well, what about the ocean? What does it really take to make ocean passages on the high seas? or even just clinging to the eastern coast of Australia? If all the provisioning you've done so far works for a houseboat, why wouldn't it work for an oceangoing vessel?

So I looked into that some more, and found it very interesting indeed, there's an entire subculture, admittedly mostly of retired people, that live onboard their sailing yachts, travelling the world mostly at leisure. They had all the facilities that I had imagined you would need for a life at sea, large capacity batteries, solar and wind generators, backup diesel capacity, watermakers, etc etc etc, and lived almost entirely self sufficiently, travelling where they wished, when they wished.

This sounded like a pretty ideal lifestyle to me, I'm actually currently in the process of saving up enough money to buy a suitable vessel for precisely this purpose, investigating further I found that catamarans provided a very good level of stability and comparitively low preparation time, as monohull vessels would tend to have a more severe angle of keel whilst under passage, catamarans were a better choice for a real working environment.

The only remaining hurdles are *absolute* global internet access, and raising enough money to buy the catamaran itself, I've tentatively decided on a Perry 57 catamaran, as I figure if I intend to spend the rest of my life on a vessel, I had best get something I'm not soon going to tire of.

I hope by the time I purchase the vessel broadband global satellite access may be a step closer to reality, if not it will likely be mostly hugging various coasts for doing actual real work rather than wandering the ocean blue at a moments notice and entirely on a whim, but even that is a hell of a lot more freedom than a five day a week desk job back on terra firma.

All I can say is, it sounds crazy, but it isn't. The only reason I can come up with that this deep seated belief that it really is insane remains with me is that we're conditioned from birth to believe that the infrastructure modern society and government provides us with in order to aid our survival is so complex that we could never hope to sever that link, because if a large amount of people really did do this, it would greatly reduce the current "democratic" and utilitarian justifications for the absolute power of modern government.

Don't take my word for it, though, if you're feeling restless, ill at ease, whatever, investigate it yourself, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results of your enquiries.

If you are going to be on a ship, why not stay 3 miles of the coast of Bermuda?!

If they'd just cruise the baby around the world for a year or so I'm sure they could get a boat-load (ha) of programmers who'd be happy to work for a very low wage. I'd be tempted to work for low pay for a year in exchange for the opportunity to see the world and travel to exotic locations. Slogan: See the world, meet interesting people, and replace them with small shell scripts!

Ever try reading a book as a passenger in a car? What happens to you?

Now, imagine a computer screen and a gently rocking boat, and a programmer's work week. You'd need an IV drip bottle of Dramamine to survive this gig.