Floating Houses Designed For Low-Lying Countries 173
Zothecula writes "Venice may soon be sharing its 'Floating City' moniker thanks to a research project developing 'amphibian houses' that are designed to float in the event of a flood. The FLOATEC project sees the primary market for the houses as the Netherlands, whose low-lying land makes it particularly susceptible to the effects of rising sea levels. Such housing technology could also allow small island-states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans that are at the risk of disappearing in the next 100 years to maintain their claim to statehood through the use of artificial, floating structures."
Re:uh-oh (Score:2, Insightful)
'Floating houses' get 30 million Google hits so either this idea has been very successful in a very short time or it's very old news.
What could it be....
Re:Is it just me, or does this look like (Score:4, Insightful)
And doesn't Floating city sound terribly prone to be destroyed by hurricane?
If it truly floats, redesigned rather.
US gov't insurance (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of problems would go away if the US would simply get rid of its government flood insurance program. If you want to build a house somewhere its likely to get flooded, and its too risky for a private insurer to cover, and the bank won't loan without insurance... it won't get built. .
Re:Claim to Statehood? (Score:4, Insightful)
Too much legalese.
The current international law is just a collection of all the contracts and agreements that have proved to either work well enough to be enforced or to be of so theoretical nature that no one ever had a reason to challenge it.
So whenever a situation occurs that was never part of the considerations around those rules, the rules will be written anew. There is no Supreme World Court (ok., there is the International Criminal Court, but it is ignored by the U.S.), which decides case law and provides some sort of continous interpretation and development of the rules.