Oceania?

[bill.stewart@pleasantonca.ncr.com +1-510-484-6204]

The Oceania folks may or may not have been serious; I don't know
them well enough to judge.  If they were serious, they weren't
competent - nowhere in their literature did I see anything that implied
that the question "Can I look at your financial plans?" would
get a useful answer.  The primary gamble for Oceania is that
you could set up a country without having a piece of dirt to
anchor it to and get other governments to treat it as a government,
rather than getting the US government to treat it as a drug-running
boat on the high seas (i.e. target for Coast Guard piracy),
or getting some other government or free-market pirates interested.
(Secondary gambles are things like financial stability,
hurricanes, etc.)  One of their magazines had an article on a floating
hotel built by Sven somebody that's recently been anchored off Vietnam.
Rather than trying to raise $1B or so to build The Raft and gamble on
not losing it all to governments or other pirates, you could make the
same gamble by buying the floating hotel for $25-50M, which you might
even be able to talk some rich investor into coughing up in return
for a slice of the pie.  That'd be enough to knwo if it works,
get your satellite dish up, and see if you can convince a hundred
or so enthusiasts to move there, run a gambling casino, and make
back some bucks to pay some dividends for your investors and
hire a few mercenaries to protect the place.

However, they made some nice T-shirts :-)

A more serious effort was done in the early 70s by the Minerva
folks, who built up an island out of coral reefs in the South
Pacific (the UN tends to require 1 foot above mean high tide
to count as enough dirt to be a country.)  About six months
later the Kingdom of Tonga invaded and stole the place.

		Bill