Re: [FH] Alarishi Sovereignity

Laserlight,

On Sun, 16 Jan 2000, Laserlight wrote:

> >> >> The permanent departure of the last citizen means the
> >> >> sovereignity's charter becomes void and the real estate
> >> >>reverts to Alarishi standard law
> 
> I was lying awake last night and thinking about this--this was
> not the cause of the lying awake, just in case you're about to
> start feeling guilty--and it occurred to me, "how do we define
> when the sovereignty lapses?"    It's either when there are no
> citizens in residence, or when you stop paying the lease (if
> it's a natural body instead of a ship or habitat).

i wasn't aware there was a lease; my bad.

i assumed that citizenship was as defined by the sov. all it needs to
know
is that there is at least one citizen who is head of state, and who it
can
contact if it needs to.

> But what if
> you have a low population habitat, and they leave (eg while the
> life support is being overhauled)?

no problem - they're still citizens, just not in residence. if i visit
my
aunt in vancouver, i don't lose uk citizenship when i leave the uk.

> How long do they have before
> they have to come back?

depends on the habitat's rules.

> Are we going to make everyone register
> on New Year's Day to keep track of our citizenry?  Alarish,
> libertarian capital of the universe?	Any time limit is
> arbitrary, so scratch that concept--we want to avoid arbitrary
> government as much as possible.

right.

> Of course, if you have no time limit, someone could claim a
> number of asteroids and just visit them occasionally--but you
> pay lease for any natural body, so if you want to stock up on
> planetoids, why should we care whether anyone is actually there?
> We're still getting paid, after all.

even if there wasn't a lease, you might not care if there were
residents.
say i establish the republic of tom, claim a rock, set up a mining
robot,
and live out my days in the Smoke Ring Hilton as a perpetual visitor.
the
sov is being useful and productive, so where's the problem? the real
issue
is with sovs which have valuable territory and aren't exploiting it.
this
is dealt with by your lease.

another suggestion might be some sort of market scheme whereby people
could forcibly buy your land, so unless you were using it productively,
and thus had cash to defend it, someone else would get hold of it. maybe
if someone goes to the imperial property court with an offer, if the
holders can get together enough cash to beat the offer, they keep it
(and
don't need to pay), whereas if they can't, they have to accept the
offer.
it's a rather mad scheme, but it might work. the tenants might also be
able to get loans from other parties interested in them staying there,
eg
trading partners, which of course would be purely paper, as the money
would never actually be spent, whether the tenants get to stay or not. i
can't decide if this is communist or libertarian, though. it's probably
just bananas.

> And if you build an
> artificial hab, why shouldn't you own it in perpetuity?  Subject
> to salvage if everyone dies off, but we can crib that from
> maritime law.

right so.

> His Imperial Majesty is tentatively going to retroactively award
> sovereignty status to MHE Corp's planetoid, despite its zero
> citizen count.

hmm. don't do that unless you have a pretty solid explanation of why a
zero-population sov can exist, whilst they aren't incredibly common
(there
must be business advantages to setting up various empty sovs).

> Congratulations, I think.

i'll keep the bubbly on ice just for now.

peace,
tom