[sis_list] The Maine Solution - Updated

> > This is the kooky part. You're proposing creating a new nation, and
> > moreover, naming it after yourself (or so it will seem to observers).
> > This looks like simple megalomania and is easily dismissed, along with
> > whatever else the advocate of this idea might have to say. It's in
> > this that you do more harm to our cause than good.

A little advice from one "nut" to another:

If you continue to sound "nutty" (as, alas, you currently do) to potential
financiers who do NOT already inhabit the wonderfully incestuous world of
folks already sold on LEO colonization and its planet side precursors, you
indeed do the cause more harm than good.

Lists like these are a great place to either work the nuttiness out of your
system by laying your ideas for both compliments and criticism before folks
who've probably already researched most of them...OR to get used to the fact
(as I have done) that much if not all of your start-up funding will be
bootstrapped (as I intend mine to be). Bootstrapping is long, hard work --
I've done it before in another industry -- but it does have the advantage
that you never really do "sell a piece of your dream" in the sense of having
to substantially revise it to an investor's tastes.

Word to the wise: THINK SMALL, at least to start with. It really doesn't
require heavy-hitter investors to jump-start a modest live/learn/work
Intentional Community embedded in an existing urban areas. The urban option
neatly sidesteps the elephant-in-the-living-room "but where will our
Citizens find work?" quandary that plagues geographically isolated
start-ups!

Good luck (I think!) -- spike
http://www.orioninitiative.com -- We're starting small with a Lifelong
Learning Center, planned to be open absolutely no later than 2015 to both
resident learners (grade school through senior citizen!) and as a source of
seminars/summer programs/research populations germane to Gifted & Talented
issues. We make no pretenses to being a nation-State (heaven
forbid!!!)...but as long as we're running space-happy spookybrights through
the premises it stands to reason that they ALL get a bracing baptism in both
intellectual and sociopolitical self-reliance (minarchy).

p.s. (Hi, Ed Minchau! GEEZ I miss you. Anyhoo. If either my nuttiness or my
utter sincerity about it need vouching for here, you're certainly the man to
do the vouching :-D)