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I thought he was pretty douche until i got to the part where it says he bought the land... if he bought the land whats the beef?
by apalmer 10y ago
I thought he was pretty douche until i got to the part where it says he bought the land... if he bought the land whats the beef?
- rosser 10y agoWould you be so sanguine about "if he bought it he can do what he wants with it" if he were upwind of you, and kept a pig farm or something? What if your child were allergic to bee stings, and he kept bees on land he owned near you? Ownership isn't a free pass to do whatever you want, and the neighbors can suck it.
- darpa_escapee 10y agoThere are people here who think property rights trump all rights and even form ideologies where all rights stem from property rights.
- rosser 10y agoThere are also people here who think climate change is propaganda, and probably even some that think the moon landing was faked. That doesn't make any of these things true.
- darpa_escapee 10y agoI agree. However, if you posted on Prison Planet something that might seem blasphemous to that line of thought, you might run into some backlash. Here, you might run into someone who thinks your property rights trump the rights and needs of others. I'm not one of them.
- Shivetya 10y agostill I would love to know what the restrictions for that parcel of land is. are they unlawfully restrictive? The problem is that in many areas the land use restrictions are very similar to regulated businesses, there to protect those who came first and don't want competition or others near them. While I think a shipping container is absurd I want to know, what is the restriction on building a house there?
- threeseed 10y agoMost councils/cities won't allow you to just dump a shipping container on a bit of land. It's unsafe. If you can properly secure it, demonstrate its structural integrity, fire safety etc then it's usually fine.
- jessaustin 10y agoThe only thing unsafe about a shipping container is that one could (with some difficulty) climb on top of it and then fall off. Or I guess someone else could lock one inside, but that seems like a voluntary violent action rather than negligence per se.
- tedks 10y agoAt the same time he is doing neither of these things. It's hard to make the case that something that you find subjectively visually unappealing is the same as a pollutant or allergen. Though, even under those circumstance, how would you feel if you were a beekeeper who had carefully curated and bred your hives for years, you moved, and all of a sudden your bees, whom you see as lovely helpful animals going out and literally making flowers bloom every day, are ordered destroyed because your neighbor has an allergy? Ownership isn't a free pass to do whatever you want, but it's equally false to imply that nobody has any ability to assert their own interests, or as is the case here, novel ideas over the status quo. I think ownership really does make a big difference here because if he were just dumping a container into a park because he can afford a shipping container and moving it to a park, that'd be very clearly dickish. If he built a wooden gazebo after buying the lot with lots of hostile armrests so that the homeless couldn't shelter there, nobody would care at all and the neighbors would probably love it. It seems like he's done a slightly more flamboyant and slightly more humane version of the gazebo. Putting glass in the windows was a bad move from the start, but they're probably better as shutters or open-air anyway. In a year, it probably wouldn't be bright red at all, because local graffiti artists would have covered it larger pieces and it would look exactly as the community of humans using the parkspace dictated. (Assuming he doesn't just paint over the graffiti, which would truly be a dick move.)
- rosser 10y ago> It's hard to make the case that something that you find subjectively visually unappealing is the same as a pollutant or allergen. The same, no. But on the same spectrum — namely, a property owner acting unilaterally, his neighbors' concerns be damned — absolutely.
- tedks 10y agoIs the entire range of action that ends in asserting one's own volitions over another's so reducible? What makes this "unilateral" besides there being opposing interests? This isn't even always (maybe not even typically!) wrong -- if the Westboro Baptist Church moved next door to me it's not like I'd be wrong in acting unilaterally, my neighbors' concerns be damned, in say flying a pride flag.
- ascorbic 10y agoSlightly OT, but I'm allergic to bee stings and a former(!) beekeeper. I'd have no problem with my neighbour keeping bees, and I'm in the UK where plots are tiny. Unless you're right next to the hive, most bees aren't going to bother you. A fence is enough to keep them away: they fly up and over it, then most of them will fly right over your garden. A few will stop to pollinate your plants for free. Bees aren't like wasps: they don't sting unless you're threatening the hive or about to crush them. Don't fear the bees!
- sten 10y agoThank you for this. In my city we're fighting a slow battle against bylaws that make bee keeping illegal for very stupid reasons. People need to calm down. You're more likely to die of lightning strike than bee sting in the US.
- ghaff 10y agoA lot of towns actually have right to farm bylaws. There are some restrictions--I think it's a 5 acre minimum acreage in my town. So I agree with your general point but agriculture is considered normal use of property in many places.
- ScroogeMcDoug 10y agoWouldn't a pig farm fall under different regulations than a residential plot of land?
- verytrivial 10y agoI agree with a number of other replies to the "what's the problem, it's his land!" perspective. Are people really that unaware that they are sitting in a room on land benefiting from an extremely long debate about how land owners can and should use that land?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rosser 10y agoWhere's the debate in this case? All I can see is Rhinehart mushroom-stamping this hilltop with an ugly container, which he refuses to clean up or maintain, and then thumbing his nose at anyone or anything who disagrees with him, including black-letter law.
- messick 10y agoThe likely reason he was able to buy the land for only $25k is that no structures are permitted to be built. I'm sitting about 3 miles from there, and a whole lot of $500k houses around here get bought and razed for new construction.
- superplussed 10y agoIf so, that needed to be explicitly stated in the story.
- Overtonwindow 10y agoGovernment egotism and abuse of power. That's all this is.