James Stout

This is good.

This is James gets to download shit that he reads for no reason at like 11 o'clock at night.

There are nations in the world, states, that allow vessels to register under their flag, even if the owner of the vessel is not a citizen of that country.

It's called an open registry.

So if you hang out in the port, spend time looking at boats, look at the flags of the boats, you will often see flags of a few countries.

The most common ones are Liberia, Panama, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

The reason that boat owners might choose, let's say you, Garrison, have a boat, right, or a shipping company, Garrison Davis Boats Incorporated, and you don't want to register them in Canada or the United States might be to avoid tax liability, might be to avoid what you consider to be burdensome safety regulations.

Okay.

It might be to avoid the frustrating constraints of Canadian labor law, or it might be to avoid some ecological constraints on your boats, which your flag nation might impose.

And generally, flags of convenience have very little in the way of taxation and regulation, right?

And so people might choose to flag their vessel in Liberia, Panama, Public and Martial Islands, Hong Kong, instead to avoid some of those issues, right?

Now, the issue comes when you register your boat in Liberia and your boat is off on its way delivering things and then some pirates seize your boat.

They're not coming.

Yeah, yeah.

The Liberian Navy is not available to help you in that instance, right?

Now, because there tends to be very little constraint on flags of convenience, there's also very little constraint on what can happen on those boats, right?

So you could hire a private maritime security company and they could protect your boat.

And the chances are the flag of convenience country would not regulate anything that they did on your boat or the weaponry they held on your boat.

The RMI does.

The Marshall Islands does.