I was showing off my ocean art collection to crasch and xleste Sunday night, and I turned on my glowing rotating base for a glass jellyfish sculpture. During the day on Monday, the sculpture fell and knocked over a cup of water onto my desk and MacBook Air.

I came into the room 5 minutes later to see a scene of surprising disarray and mess, w/ water all over. I shut down the Air, dried it, opened it, dried inside, and put a fan on it. But it wouldn't boot, and its power adapter didn't light up when I attached it (although Shannon's MacBook Pro adapter did).

Fortunately, w/ the magic of Time Machine (my laptop backs up over the network to a dedicated FireWire disk attached to my desktop) I was able to access backups of all my files. And today I found an article from Apple that fixed the problem! I had to reset the "SMC (power manager)". Yay!

Ups: I'm super excited about:
* Specific people that are coming. I told Shannon "I could have a great conference just with carlcoryell". And I meant it - I mean, the conference is basically a series of "brain dump + brainstorm", and there are at least 5 people coming each of whom would make for a very productive day of brain dump + brainstorm about seasteading, just with them.
* The size - I'm expecting 55 people. We were shooting for 50, but afraid we'd only get 30, so I'm psyched. It's not big for a conference, but I think it's a great start for seasteading. There is going to be a ton of energy in the room!
* Parallel independent paths. At the conference we'll be working on, and hopefully making significant progress on, 3 totally parallel paths, each of which could get us to the future I want. I love not feeling dependent on any one route to success.
* The vision. I am totally passionate about this, and it's going to be so fun to spend a day enthusing and planning and visioning with people who *get it* - who understand why this is a brilliant (if weird) solution to a huge, messy, problem. Not an easy solution, by any means, but any half-decent solution to such a near-intractable problem as "government sucks" is a huge exciting potential win for the world!
* The help! I don't have to do it all myself - lots of people are doing lots of the work in making this happen. Mostly for free!

Downs: I'm bummed about:
* We started creating content late. We had been focusing on logistics, and not doing much on content, until we met w/ xleste a bit over a week ago. She had been suggesting meetings for a few weeks, and I wish I had taken her up on an early one, b/c it wasn't until meeting w/ her that I realized how much we hadn't done yet. This is going to be a week of very long days and not seeing my family much.
* We hired presentation consultants to make slides and graphics for my keynote. Due to the above, we got the process started late, and are rushed for time, and the results so far have reflected that - I'm not happy with their initial work. I gave a lot of specific feedback so hopefully the next round will be better, but we don't have time for many more iterations.

One of the reasons I'm passionate about seasteading is that I see it as a solution to one of the biggest problems of the human race - government and how it sucks.

What are the other problems that are this big? The main ones (in my worldview) that I can come up with are:

* Global catastrophic risk (things that could wipe out our species).
* Human nature / robot's rebellion / etc. (we are robots, the result of a blind algorithm, and that design affects everything about our lives).

Normally when I think about this, "Poverty" is the first thing that comes to mind, but I think there is a strong case that it is a subset of "Government sucks". I mean, you can end poverty for any million people by just letting them immigrate to the first world. Not clear if that scales to billions, but poverty is clearly the result of dysfunctional social systems (ie bad government).

What do you think are the biggest problems, stated in the most general terms?