My mom was a "cruiser" for many years...living on a beautiful, big catamaran sailboat. It was an incredible existence. Now, she's an angry liberal who sits in a luxury condo in Florida and watches CNN.

I watched a video on YouTube which seemed pretty authoritative who are those ships be sold too. According to the video those ships and many some what older merchant ships are being sold to breakers primarily in India. They showed so many many ships side by side beached and being cut apart and Chinese cargo ship being loaded with the scrapped steel from breaker yards. It a nice idea to buy one of those ships for a song but you need personnel to maintain vessels like that.

Government interference? If you tick off ~any~ government on the planet, all they have to do is pop a couple of holes in your waterline and its game over. I would prefer a sanctuary with rocks for cover.

Majesty was a great ship. It was brand new when we found out my wife was pregnant with our first child in '92, and we knew it was going to be a while before we got to travel again. We took a long cruise on Majesty of the Seas, and it was the biggest ship we'd seen or been on. As the last vacation we would take for several years, it was a great memory. Years later, when we took both our son and daughter, I think he got tired of us saying it was really his second cruise. LoL

I like the way you think...wish I had the cash, we'd never survive the pole reversal/micronova on the open seas in a boat like that though...but we'd be safe up until then.
We could, however, ride it out between two east/west mountain ranges on land though...that's how Noah did it.

$5Au thinks if enough producers banded together, it could be done.

The problem with a ship is that it has to dock at sometime to get supplies. I always thought being on my own private sail boat and sailing around the Caribbean leaving each small island nation before the local gestapo decided to begin taxing me would work. Then came the Covid19 fear and every government acting out their roles of masters of the human race. A man who had been sailing alone in the Pacific was not allowed to dock because: "He might have the pandemic with him!" I wonder if there is anywhere except deep in the jungle with natives the governments don't care to harass because it isn't worth their time. How to live in a parallel existence without being noticed. That is the question that could lead to Galt's Gulch.

Hmm, Majesty has 2800 person capacity with another 800 staff. There are 1200 rooms and suites. If we start at $50K/year for cabins, then there would be at least $60million for operating expenses and staff. I don't know what it costs to actually operate and maintain the ship, but $5million/month sounds like a lot to me.

According to the article linked above the ships have already been sold. Consider johnrobert2's comment - running a 30+ year old cruise ship is a BIG undertaking. On most of the cruises we have taken the crew numbers about equal 1/2 to 2/3 of the passengers. I like the idea, but reality starts kicking in when I think seriously about it.

One of these two ships, the Majesty of the Seas, is the very last ship I set foot on! My last cruise, (not counting the four cancelled ones since then) was on February 1, 2020. Of all my cruises - and I've been on a lot - this was my least favorite.

The way the ship is designed is a little nutty with a half-deck between decks 5 and 6. The ship structurally appears to be in good repair but yeah, way too much money for the likes of us. As johnrobert2 says, no way could we afford that. Oh and speaking of mechanical maintenance, the ship was barely able to overcome the headwinds on the passage up the Mississippi River to New Orleans. We were six hours late arriving back to home port, which of course inconvenienced those sailing behind us as well. The entire cruise was a cluster of the highest proportions.

But it's fun to think about. Right now, I'd pretty much take any cruise ship that would allow me aboard!

You can buy a condo on one of the world ships and live on the ocean away from all governments. I would be afraid of the pettiness of the government of your fellow passengers. HOAs are some of the worst governments.

That is an interesting proposition. Not sure if one can have a ship without a country flag, though.

Ooh. I like the idea of a cruise ship! I would sell the house and invest in that. N

If they were designed with sails ...

An interesting idea but fraught with problems every which way. The most obvious being the thing that's typically ignored by Libertarians: security. Unless in addition to the cruise liner you have an entire Naval battle group to escort you around, you will be literally blown out of the water by the first commie regime (or any other group of pirates,) that decides that it doesn't like the idea of a group of objectivists living freely and prosperously anywhere on earth, and notices that "Hmm, they're 100% defenseless."

The second problem is the thing that's already been mentioned here: The need to resupply, with everything from fuel to food to fresh water to simple nuts-and-bolts operating supplies like cleaning, maintenance and cooking products.

The other massive problem is that rational people - objectivists in particular - are not content to live their lives in idle, purposeless coasting. Aside from those who may be retired, every single passenger on this ship will want to be creating and producing. If they're hammering out software, novels and the like on keyboards it's not a problem, but how do you do industrial production, or even less infrastructure-intensive commercial production, aboard a cruise ship?

Though there are advantages to being mobile (though far less so in the era of inescapable surveillance,) the most logical location for any Galt's Gulch will be land-based.

And as an inescapable corollary, absent a real-world equivalent of the cloaking technology that concealed the valley in Atlas Shrugged, any real-world Galt's Gulch would need a significant military force to defend its freedom.

Are they nuclear powered?