Talk:RELEASE: Beat high housing costs: homestead the high seas

Some thoughts

Here are my initial responses, ranging from trivial typing errors to some comments on the overall tone:

• Consider starting off on a positive note, rather than setting the stage with the worries over housing price. However, I currently somewhat lean toward the opening as it now exists; this is just another possibility.
• I like the clever twist in tying Seasteading to a solution to that problem.
• typo: "Aa study..."
• "...the median inflation-adjusted price of a Seattle house rose from $221,000 to $447,800. According to that study fully $200,000 of that increase was the result of land-use regulations."
  • instead of "rose," I'd say "more than doubled."
  • which year's dollars are those? "from $221,000 to $447,800, measured in today's dollars"?
  • Phrasing: "According to that study fully $200,000 of that increase was the result of land-use regulations. " -> "According to the study, fully $200,000 of that increase resulted from land-use regulations."
• "land-use regulations" or "land use regulations", it should stay consistent.
• "land based" -> "land-based"
• Tone: I love the voice of capitalism, but maybe some of the lines could sound more touchy-feely rather than celebrating the ability to avoid regulations. Or at least emphasize that the benefits of avoiding regulations and buying cheap labor and materials involve touchy-feely things like helping to end poverty.
• The Netherlands paragraph is excellent.
• Is there a good way to pre-empt some of the common but uninteresting objections? Or is it best just to ignore it? Or maybe it's even a bonus, having readers hypothesizing various possible outcomes of Seasteading...

Overall, I think it's quite good, and that it would make a useful press release.

--Daniel 03:33, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

Further thoughts

I think the other title is better, this one seems to specific. But i like the angle of how seasteading could potentially be a huge saving, instead of the money drain many people seem to assume it would be.

Eelco

By the way, it seems im editing your post rather than adding one of my own. Am i missing something? Could well be, ive never worked with wikis before.

Quick summary of some wiki-editing using MediaWiki (this software): First of all, we don't each have individual "posts", it's all just one big page. For legibility it's therefore useful to separate out each person's comments a bit so it's clear who's saying what, but there's no specific requirement as long as it's clear. Formatting is done using various special characters, or the buttons above the textbox. For instance, make various levels of headers by surrounding the text with different numbers of equal signs, or make a big heading by pressing the big "A" button. You can sign and timestamp your user name with a series of four tildes, or by pressing the signature button. Try playing around with it a bit, and you'll get the hang of it.

Also, there's a special feature of discussion pages, which you shouldn't expect to have known about: if you press the plus sign (+) right next to "edit" at the top of the page, instead of edit, then it will automatically set up a new section for you, to start your own separate part of the discussion page with a heading of your choosing. Hope this helps, and if you'd like more information there are lots of resources on the web. Maybe we should link to something useful from somewhere on the wiki. --Daniel 06:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)