Canthook

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, thinks the future likes in life on barges. You simply move the barge seasonally to where the weather is good.

You'd want solar power and some way to store the energy for nighttime. You'd also need a desalinization device, GPS, and some sort of satellite internet, "and you'd probably need some serious waste disposal gear."

He suggests that you want barges because you can start small and add on as you can afford them. He figures that you do well in terms of tax avoidance, and he's not sure how you deal with piracy.

This dovetails with a fantasy I've had for forty years. I didn't think of barges as expandable modules; I thought of used barges as being fairly cheap and roomy. I wasn't thinking about avoiding taxes, either, but the idea of being able to escape bad neighbors at any given time was appealing. I didn't think I'd end up with Sophia Loren, either.

And I was thinking inland waterways, like the Ohio River. People on regular houseboats spend most of their time moored where they can connect to electric and phone lines, where they can buy water and discharge sewage into treatment systems. Scott Adams is really a lot more ambitious than I'd ever considered.

Satellite internet would eliminate the need for a phone line; you'd simply use something like Vonage, but there's a problem with that on land - there's a lot of latency involved when your phone signal travels to Geosynchronous Orbit, and then back down to Earth. If two such barges were trying to talk to each other, they'd have the latency twice, and it'd be really hard to hold a conversation.

What's more of a problem is that you need to aim your satellite dish at the satellite. Every time the barge rocks, the dish is going to be pointing in the wrong direction. You could eliminate that problem somewhat by mounting the dish on some sort of gimbels, so that when the barge rocks, the dish doesn't, but that kind of solution only works in low seas. And if you were floating freely on the ocean, lazily following the Gulf Stream, you'd have even more problems as the orientation of the barge changes. Someone needs to develop a GPS-based mount that keeps the satellite dish pointed at the satellite, and I don't think anyone has, yet.

As the community of people living on barges grows, you'd develop the infrastructure to support them, things like hospitals and schools, according to Scott - but it seems to me that in order to make that work, you have to stick in close proximity of the hospitals and schools. Actually, I don't think schools would be much of a problem; homeschooling is a lot easier today than it was 40 years ago, due to the resources that have been developed, and it's only going to get easier in the future.

But bad weather is still a problem. I've seen too many episodes of "Deadliest Catch" to think the ocean is our friend. It's not our enemy either, but mostly, the ocean doesn't give a damn. My respect for the Coast Guard has grown as that series has aired. There are a lot of coast guard uniforms covering the bodies of genuine heroes, people who routinely risk their own lives to save the lives of unlucky seafarers and just plain damnable fools.

A few years ago, I started thinking back to the Mechanix Illustrated stories of the 1950s, about retiring in Central America or South America, where the cost of living is so much cheaper. In the Nixon administration, I started thinking about moving to Australia. Since then, I've heard wonderful things, and then terrible things, about living in Brazil, and I thought perhaps Sao Paulo might be a great destination, although I have to admit that I really wanted to spend a lot of time girl-watching at Ipanema.

People say America is the greatest country in the world, but Denmark and Iceland both have higher standards of living, greater health, more freedom, if only they didn't have the Canada problem: I just don't like the cold.

And a couple of months ago, a black-and-white rerun of "I've Got A Secret" featured a guy who had created his own country, from a reef island off the coast of Miami. There was only one problem: one or two weeks a year, the island was a foot or so underwater. But I could build a house on stilts, I suppose. When I looked for that country, though, it doesn't seem to be there any more. Maybe the US decided to invade, and they surrendered.

But there are these islands in the middle of the Susquehanna River, not too far from Three Mile Island. Some of them look big enough for a house. If I built a house on an island, it wouldn't rock in the wind, and I wouldn't ever have to worry about scraping barnacles. It wouldn't sink, either.

The thing is, though, that there's a stalker after me. It's a pirate, and right behind him is a crocodile that ticks, of all things. I better get Tinker Bell's advice about this.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
barges - Deadliest Catch - greatest country - houseboats - peterpan - satellite internet