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Vinod Khosla Wins Ruling Threatening Public Beach Access
- joyeuse6701 7y agoMaybe someone ought to make a nice business out of this. Ferry interested parties to this exclusive public beach as part of an interesting tour about history and minutiae of treaty and law.
- ronilan 7y agoHe should always be referred to by his full name: Vinod “Gatekeeper” Khosla
- sharemywin 7y agoSomebody should create a charter service to the beach.
- jackhack 7y ago"Thank you for choosing Streisand Effect Charter Service, providing daily access to the hotspots of entitled Billionaires who abuse the legal system since 2019..."
- azinman2 7y agoCan someone who isn’t paywalled summarize?
- hodder 7y agohttps://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
- baobabKoodaa 7y agoWhat do you think this article is, some kind of public beach or something?
- jermaustin1 7y agoBasically a panel found in favor of an earlier Judge's ruling that because the previous owners charged a fee to enter the property, it isn't a public road/beach, but instead a permitted use road/beach, giving the owner the right to not permit ANYone to enter the property.
- hendzen 7y agoThere are no private beaches in CA. It's just the road that is private, the beach is public land.
- seren 7y agoIf you disable javascript, you can read the article.
- gpm 7y agoIf you use ublock origin, blocking javascript breaks bloomberg's paywall. You can do that for bloomberg.com (and nothing else) by opening the site, clicking the ublock icon, and clicking the bottom at the far bottom right.
- felipelemos 7y agoAnd with the additional advantage that the site loads faster.
- jddj 7y agoAlternatively, using just Firefox: stop (X) the page loading after the content has loaded but before the giant JavaScript bundle has downloaded, and then enter reader mode.
- Analemma_ 7y agoOpening it in a different container (with a right-click) also works.
- jackhack 7y agoHow ironic. Breaking the paywall on a billionaire's newspaper to read an article about a billionaire's paywalled beachfront.
- nathanaldensr 7y agoSo because I have to pay to get into a public park or reserve, it's suddenly not "really" public?
- jermaustin1 7y agoA "public park" is simply owned by a public entity, it does not mean you get unlimited unrestricted access to it. If the city/county/state/fed decided to wall it off and not allow anyone in it, it would be their prerogative. If I (a private individual/entity) owned a 60 acre flatland park, and one day decided not to allow people on my land, is that not my right as land owner? If we allow a person to own the beach, then it is their property to disallow trespassers. The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach.
- daenz 7y ago>The better question would be why do we allow ownership of a beach. Devil's advocate: why do we place such a high value on a "beach" vs any other kind of land? Is there something extra precious about where the water meets the land?
- learc83 7y agoYes there is. Just look at the average property values of beach front property, riverfront property etc... There are other "special" types of land as well with additional value that governments have decided to regulate differently.
- cjonas 7y agoThe amount of public land that is locked in by estates (basically making them private to the estate holders) is astonishing.
- majos 7y agoI'd never thought about this before. How do property rights apply to enclaves? If I own all the land encircling another piece of land, what prevents me from barring access to the encircled piece of land? Are there laws forbidding this?
- dragonwriter 7y ago“Easement by necessity” is one major way it is dealt with. https://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/necessity-and-permissive-easements.html https://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/necessity-and-p...
- learc83 7y agoIf someone owns the encircled piece of land they can sue to force the owner of the surrounding land to allow access to the property. Usually they will be granted an easement to allow them to do so. If you're interested, it's commonly referred to as landlocked property.
- Haga 7y agoSo all the public needed to do was transferring a circular piece of beach to the billionaire?
- ceejayoz 7y agoThis does happen, and it gets messy (to the point of murders). https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/21/public-land-battle-private-landowners-montana https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jan/21/public-l... https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/wilks-brothers-fracking-business.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/22/us/wilks-brothers-frackin...
- saluki 7y ago
- option 7y agoWhat a pathetic person he is.
- option 7y agoA recruiter recently emailed me about a startup whose “Series A was backed by Khosla” like it was a good thing! I actually replied to him that this is a show stopper to me. Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board. Do the “right” thing - especially here in the valley, if you work in tech you have a lot of choices
- MS90 7y ago> Few years ago I did not join Theranos after looking at their board. Based on your track record, I fully expect an update to come out where it turns out this Khosla guy's 89 acre property doesn't actually exist, it was actually 8.9 acres magnified with an extremely elaborate mechanism of smoke and mirrors.
- Guest42 7y agoI remember driving by Solyndra being impressed by their building/mission and wanting to work there.
- CrazyStat 7y agoMy brother applied for jobs at Theranos several times--he was in the biomedical engineering area--but somehow it never worked out (once they apparently lost his application, another time they cancelled an interview at the last minute, etc.). Dodged a bullet there.
- MS90 7y ago"Biomedical engineer? He's gonna figure us out. Quick, cancel his interview!"
- api 7y agoSometimes this can keep you away from turkeys like Thereanos, too. Petty jerkitude is a contrarian indicator.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gruturo 7y agoThe Bloomberg article about this is itself paywalled. Sad, but poetically fitting.
- ceejayoz 7y agoThere's no California law enshrining the right to read a news article. There is one for beaches.
- khazhoux 7y agoBloomberg is creating content. Their article is presumably of value to people. Hence, they're charging for it.
- throw_m239339 7y agoBloomberg also wants to have it both ways, they want their content to be referenced on Google, and a select number of people to share the articles they read for free, while disallowing others to do the exact same thing. Fortunately no nobody can prevents people from screenshooting and sharing the screenshot for free instead of the article directly. Bloomberg can't have it both way.
- throw_m239339 7y agohttps://i.imgur.com/k23xtZz.jpg https://i.imgur.com/k23xtZz.jpg A screenshot. If something is posted here and HN expect people to have a constructive discussion about its content, then that resource should be free to read or HN doesn't really want people to actually discuss the content of the source. HN can't have it both ways.
- gorgoiler 7y agoIt’s a shame to read about these legal arguments that hang on technicalities (whether previous access was tied to private parking or not) as opposed to what surely must be the actual issue: the public’s right of access to the scarce national resource of beaches.
- ISL 7y agoTechnicalities are part have having a rule of law. The legislature (or at the formation of a governmental system) is where the issues get debated and the law determined.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y agoAnd a local government that loves to create laws will always be inundated with lawsuits related to their technicalities.
- mikepurvis 7y agoSurely that's the role of the courts? The legislature is there to provide broad guidance in the form of laws; it's judges and juries who agonize over these details and enshrine them in case law.
- CryptoBanker 7y agoStudies have shown time and time again that the courts treat the wealthy and the poor differently...
- 0-9 7y agoThe law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to exclude the public from their private beach compounds.
- mikepurvis 7y agoNot arguing that the arrangement is just or fair, only about what the intent of it is.
- mdszy 7y agoTime to find out the exact borders of what is considered "his" beach and crowd the ever living shit out of it, just outside of what could be considered "his". "I'm not touching you!"
- Guest42 7y agoHNers assemble! Build an app/api for that....joking...kinda
- eddyg 7y agoYourCoast: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yourcoast/id1439933107 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yourcoast/id1439933107
- Guest42 7y agoThat’s awesome! I was thinking a little more nefariously though about one that would inspire people to collaborate and visit “his” area and perhaps “celebrate” with drums
- mikeyouse 7y agoHe doesn't live there - has never lived there - and has said he will never live there. He's just completing the lawsuit "for the principle" of it which is as insane as it sounds.
- kens 7y agoUnder the California Coastal Act, everything below the mean high tide line is public. But that's not the issue here; the issue is getting access to this beach.
- LinuxBender 7y agoSo you could bring in house boats and floating docks. This is common in some regions. I am not sure if the coast guard would have any say in it though. How bright of dance / disco lights are you allowed to have on a house boat?
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago> the three-judge panel upheld a trial judge’s ruling in Khosla’s favor, finding there was substantial evidence that the previous owners didn’t intend to dedicate the road for public use because they charged fees. Why does it matter what the previous owner(s) did? The law states there must be public access to the beach. This is an 89 acre parcel of land, providing not even a single access point sounds like the owner could be blocking an appreciable amount of ocean frontage.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> The law states there must be public access to the beach. Can you not access it by boat? Does that count?
- ghaff 7y agoNot sure why the downvotes. It's actually a reasonable question, the answer to which can vary by state. The details vary but, in some cases, having only water access to property--even if not an island--is considered access for purposes of the law. (For example, I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land.)
- mrguyorama 7y ago>I believe in Maine it's OK to own a property that doesn't have a legal right of way by land. Maybe that's state law but legal easement is required in many municipalities, for example Kennebunkport will not let you surround a property with other people's property with no access to public property (the road)
- yourapostasy 7y agoIt would be ironic if Khosla woke up one day to find a continuously-growing fleet of recreational and commercial boats including party barges with beach anchors, lights, speakers, generators and tons of booze using the beach, ferrying anyone who desired it to get to the beach from nearby beaches/docks, turning it into the worst destination party-scape he was trying to avoid tepid versions of in the first place. He just made it clear via the case that water access was permitted, he doesn't privately own the beach itself, and there are plenty of waterborne partiers in CA who would take him up on the "offer" of partying on an "exclusive" beach. People pay big bucks on cruises to get to "exclusive" beaches, and there are any number of "entrepreneurs" who will jump at the chance to turn a quick dollar to ferry people to exactly such a beach (albeit created through a legal technicality than natural features), plus throw in the gratuitous "ogle a billionaire's house" in marketing schticks on top to goose the customer buy rate. There might be a corollary of the Streisand Effect at work here...
- ec109685 7y agoIt would be ironic if a mega billionaire bought the land surrounding his land and worked with the county to route the road around that surrounding property.
- sjg007 7y agoThat would include highway 1 so it is not actually feasible.
- vaseem 7y agoIrony is not lost, just like this pay-walled article
- cde-v 7y agoThe rich are just begging to be eaten up these days.
- CryptoBanker 7y agoLiterally
- chopin 7y agoIf you don't have bread, eat cake.
- dang 7y agoMaybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- frankbreetz 7y agoIs this not a text book case for imminent domain? Can't the government just "buy" the land from Khosla?
- thrownaway954 7y agodude... that dude is 64?!?!?! he looks like he's 84. dude must of had a tough life. while it sucks that he wants to restrict access, i can see where he is coming from if this was a private beach to begin with and the original owner allowed the public to use it. it also says in the article that the original owner would charge for parking so that strengthens his case. can't hate on a dude from wanting to do with what is rightfully his.
- hendzen 7y agoThere are no private beaches in CA by law. He owns the only road leading to it, which the previous owner allowed people to drive through for a small fee for many years.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y agoIn France, la Loi littoral guarantees public access to the shoreline, everywhere. Or at least it should since it's often compromised by private interests. But it's still quite good for anyone who likes the sea, ocean and coasts. I'd love France to also have a "right to roam" law like Norway. Are there such laws in your country? How well is it enforced?
- Tomte 7y agoGermany has a similar right, not for coastlines, but for forest. Everyone may enter the forest. Private owners may not forbid it.
- narag 7y agoSpain is the same. There are some loopholes, like limiting land access with an "eco tax", but that's useless against boats. I watched recently on tv a program attacking "party boats" that took a lot of young people, many of them Brits on holydays, to a closed beach frequented by Hollywood celebs, with all-you-can-drink included.
- wil421 7y agoIn most states no. It’s a feature not a bug. Property rights are considered sacred. Plenty of people don’t want the government telling them what to do on their property. It’s bad in this situation but good for owners in plenty of others. Fort Walton county is one of 2 counties in Florida where the property owners own the beach to the high tide line. You’re allowed to walk on the beach around the water line but not setup on the beach. The Sheriff and county decided they want to change it and is now suing all the beach owners in Fort Walton (my wife’s family being one of them). The Florida governor signed an emergency Bill that they couldn’t just take the land all of the sudden they had to go through the courts. The Sheriff’s office came out and said they would stop issuing or enforcing trespassing on the beach and lesson beach patrols. The home owners legally own the beach. The county officials want to take it from them without paying anything and change the uniqueness of the county that drew home owners in the first place. I can see both sides but the county government and Sheriff can’t just decide one day they want to take property. No vote or anything just we want to take it. My family owns a condo in the next county over. It’s a lot more noisy and I can see why home owners were draw to Fort Walton in the first place.
- irrational 7y agoI don't know the area, but could someone setup a little business nearby ferrying people to and from the beach on a boat? How much did the previous owners charge for access? Would the same amount of money per trip make a ferrying business viable?
- dr_dshiv 7y agoIs there a ferry service?
- slowenough 7y agoIs it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach.
- chasing 7y agoIs it so preposterous? Let the public have access to their beach.
- slowenough 7y agoIs it so preposterous? Let the rich dude have his slice of private beach. It's not very caring to the rich guy. It's not like there's no other substitutes people could use to get their beach fill. But for him, it's right there. Come on, where's your empathy for the guy?
- Gabriel_Martin 7y agoThey can pay for his boots to be licked, no need to provide the service for free.
- orthecreedence 7y agoI think the person you're replying to is being facetious.
- slowenough 7y agoVVVVVVV---- Hello fren below! No i'm not. I mean it. And I think the humour is appropriate to the issue: trivial, and obvious.
- jtx22 7y agoThere's a ton of other public beaches already.
- chasing 7y agoIt's amazing how much he's willing to ruin his reputation over this.
- slowenough 7y agoYou misspelled admirable.
- Gabriel_Martin 7y ago*asshole
- slowenough 7y ago*asshole, that would be grammatically incorrect if you spoke English
- 14 7y agoCould one not walk up to this beach by foot following the road built? I ask this because the article said the previous owner charged for parking not access. If so I don't agree with the judges assessment because that would mean anyone from the public could just walk to this beach and use it as they are arguing it has always been open to the public which seems true to me from what I've read.
- option 7y agoFYI: khosla funded companies https://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all-companies https://www.khoslaventures.com/portfolio/all-companies
- cj 7y agoIt's a shame that so much energy is put into blocking public access to beaches. This was on HN ~5 months ago, related topic: "Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay hit with $1.6 million penalty for failing to provide public beach access" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20179511
- NetBeck 7y agoThis sounds like a job for The Boring Company.
- choppaface 7y agoVinod wants you to think this debate is over property rights, but it's really just a game of expensive cat and mouse between him and the government for his own amusement. The road in question services over a dozen homes, and he has no building or presence on his property, so logistically there's no warrant for the gate. The gate was re-opened (for at least daytime hours) a few years ago. The beach had previously been accessible to the public for nearly 100 years. The legal fees Vinod is paying are far greater than what he'd have to pay to maintain rightful public access. He likely didn't understand the access issue at the time of purchase (since he's never actually there!) and so this protracted argument was the only way for him to derive value from his purchase. https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-mateo-open https://sf.curbed.com/2017/10/5/16431150/martins-beach-san-m... https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach https://www.surfrider.org/pages/timeline-open-martins-beach
- burtonator 7y agoIt's also a horrible business practice for his VC fund. As an entrepreneur there's no way I would want to work with Khosla ventures. He just comes across as an asshole and a bully in this fight. Beaches and rivers belong to all of us.
- atonse 7y agoWith that stance (which I mostly agree with in theory, by the way), isn't it increasingly hard to do business with most VCs?
- OnlineGladiator 7y agoMorals have always been compromising to profits. The VCs will just find someone without moral scruples to make their money for them.
- jkmcf 7y agoNot mention ethics, but we were probably already assuming they were compromised.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- parliament32 7y agoUnpopular opinion but I'm kinda on his side on this one. It's a liability issue. If you open a "public access road" through your property, and there's a pothole that damages someone's vehicle, you can get sued. If you don't put up fences at the cliffs and some dumbass drives off the edge, you can get sued. If someone decides to camp at the edge of the road and a tree falls on them, you can get sued. Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault in the US. Allowing the public onto your property, especially when you're not making any money off of it (so you could, you know, pay for insurance like the previous owners definitely did) is a terrible idea.
- jtx22 7y agoMost reasonable opinions are unpopular on HN.
- thesausageking 7y ago> Anything that happens to people on your property is automagically your fault in the US. That's not true. California has a Recreational Use Statute (Civil Code Section 846) which makes private landowners immune from liability for people who enter their land, as long as they don't charge a fee. Most states have similar laws.
- harryh 7y agoThis case is misunderstood in a lot of ways. A couple of things worth noting: - The beach up to the mean high tide line is public land by law. No one, including Khosla, disputes this. - The sandy beach above the high tide line as well as a convenient parking lot was previously accessible to the public for a small fee. This is what Khosla wants to shut down and what Friends of Martin's Beach & The Surfrider Foundation have sued over. It seems fairly obvious to me (though perhaps not to others) that Khosla is in the right here. The private land is his. He can do what he wants with it. - Kind of in the middle of these two issues is actual beach access. FOMB has insinuated that shutting down the parking lot and access to the sandy beach constitutes complete removal of access to the beach. This, however, isn't really clear. FOMB could very well lose their lawsuit while beach access was maintained via a small road or walking path through Khosla's property. Despite what most of the press has indicated, the actual lawsuit isn't really about this.
- Analemma_ 7y ago> It seems fairly obvious to me (though perhaps not to others) that Khosla is in the right here. The private land is his. He can do what he wants with it. You and Khosla are both wrong. If an area is designated public land, you cannot de facto prevent all access by buying up all the land around it and refusing to provide any point of entry; you must provide an easement (and you can even charge a small fee for it, if you want). This is a very well-established bit of property law, and Khosla is only weaseling out of it on technicalities.
- harryh 7y agoI covered access in my third bullet point. You are responding to something I said in my second bullet point. The conflating of these two distinct points is one of the core areas of misunderstanding surrounding the case.
- newman8r 7y agoMaybe I'm being pedantic, but when you own waterfront land in California, I wouldn't say you can generally do what you want with it. The CA deserts, on the other hand, make a property owner feel like they actually own the land. For example, the Coastal Commission just prohibited hundreds of homes in Newport Beach from putting outdoor furniture on the sand, on their own private property (hundreds of meters from the actual water).
- zaroth 7y agoPersonally I think Khosla is doing everyone a favor here. All the free publicity over CA’s right to public beachfront, and it’s great motivation for the legislature to strengthen the laws around guaranteeing that access. Without entitled billionaires fighting the system, it would be much harder to drum up support for stronger protections enshrined in law. They could call it the Khosla Act. In all seriousness, CA should enforce the law they wrote, not the law they wish they had. But also, good luck if Khosla wants to so much as upgrade a circuit breaker, if I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an opportunity for the local building inspector to require a new public access road to be put in.
- harryh 7y agoif I understand the law correctly, any permitted work on the property is an opportunity FWIW, this permitting process is precisely the law that Khosla is challenging. He asserts that the state government doesn't have the right to such fine grained and arbitrary control of private property.
- dawnerd 7y agoGuess that leaves one option, park a bunch of ugly boats right in his view.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mceoin 7y agoI like surfing at this beach. It is a shame an amicable solution could not be found. This is a big loss for the public.
- cryptica 7y agoIf this beach gets any more famous, someone will build a ferry to brings tourists to it via the sea.
- ralph84 7y agoNowhere else in the world other than California could Khosla have amassed the wealth he has in the way that he did. You'd think at some point he'd want to "give back", but I guess sociopaths gonna sociopath.
- tzs 7y ago1. My understanding is that the issue is getting to the beach, not being on the beach itself. Everything below the mean high tide line is public, but all routes to the public area pass over private land and in Khosla's case he's having success arguing that there is no easement. But that only applies to routes over land, right? I wonder why no one has started some kind of shuttle service that runs boats from a place the public can reach by land to Khosla's beach? Charge people $15-20 for the trip, and also offer snack and drink and suntan lotion sales, beach umbrella and beach chair rental and other things like that. 2. I haven't really been following this case, but I recall that at one point he was making an argument based on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which was the treaty between the US and Mexico that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. I haven't seen any mention of this aspect of the case in quite a while--was it dropped? It was this treaty that gave the US ownership of California (and much of the rest of what is now the western US). Part of this treaty was a guarantee that the US would honor existing property rights of people in those territories that were switching ownership from Mexico to the United States. The argument went something like this, I believe. Under Mexican law, private ownership of beaches was allowed, and many California beaches were private. When California became a US territory, those beaches remained private under the Treaty. When Calfornia became a state a couple years later, in 1850, its Constitutional provisions making beaches public did not apply to beaches covered by the Treaty. This seems like sound reasoning up to that point, at least in the case where the beach was still owned in 1850 by the same person who owned it when the Treaty was ratified. Where it gets iffy is dealing with changes of ownership. Usually in the case of real property you can convey all your rights to the next owner. You can probably make a decent case that this means that if one of those original owners sold their private beach to a third party, or passed it on via inheritance, it should stay private, because the right to convey such ownership was one of the property rights they had when it was part of Mexico, so should be covered by the Treaty. But what about the conveyances one step beyond that? Two steps beyond? Surely the intent of the Treaty was not to forever make Mexican property rules apply in former Mexican parts of the US. It was to provide a fair transition so that the current owners would not lose out as those territories transitioned from Mexican rules to US rules. I'd expect most beach property to have changed hands enough times since 1848 that it should be considered fully transitioned to US rules, and California law would fully apply.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- arcticbull 7y agoThe case against this here is fascinating. It’s basically a bunch of people who will likely never be able to afford their own beaches cheering on a billionaire as he takes the beach they currently have access to away from them because “freedom.” Yeah Mr Khosla, you take my beach! Wooo! You’re right, I shouldnt be allowed on there, I am the rif-raf after all. This is basically the problem in a nutshell: people voting against their own interests because one day they may be rich (they won’t though, probably, because if everyone was rich nobody would be) and when they get there they want their own beach too. So they give their beach away to the wealthiest, and now nobody but Vinod has a beach. If instead they just agreed to share the beach they’d all have it now, but of course that’s un-American, apparently.
- aetherson 7y agoIt seems on-the-face-of-it unlikely that any significant population imagines that they will one day be able to own a private beach, even if they are unjustifiably optimistic about their future wealth. I've been around a lot of people who have hopes about their level of future wealth, and that's not a level anyone thought they would achieve. So, look, have you considered that when you try to make common cause with the whatever non-super-elite class of people you're trying to make common cause with, you do it in a way that doesn't make you a patronizing asshole? Because you're assuming that people are too dumb or brainwashed to "vote their interests" rather than that they have a different conception of their interests than you do
- arcticbull 7y agoYou are of course right that I was being neither tactful nor political and wasn’t really expecting to sway anyone already committed to the idea. However I’ll ask openly and genuinely: what does anyone stand to gain by allowing a wealthy individual to cudgel away their right to access a large swath of beachfront as enshrined in the California state constitution? To what benefit to ones self can you possibly point?
- satyrnein 7y ago
- justinzollars 7y agoFew people are this small. The dude is pretty old (64 years). He'll probably only be able to live on his own for 10-15 more years. The beach will be open again when someone else buys the property.
- algaeontoast 7y agoCA really deserves a slow clap for this one... Can't wait to see them try to regulate their way out of this bit.
- drak0n1c 7y agoI know many of you are dismayed, but there is a silver lining of ecological benefits. Studies show that relatively inaccessible beaches and wilderness (whether public or private) have healthier ecosystems and less litter. For example, even mere regular trampling of sandy beaches impacts the food chain: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0161905 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- minimuffins 7y agoThere's a good Lucy Parsons quote about this type of guy.
- downerending 7y agoTo paraphrase the quip: There's a difference between rich liberals and the rest of us--they have more money.
- didibus 7y agoI see law the same way I see a computer program, and court as a computer. The current legal code is never wrong in what it does. It simply executes and terminates. The courts define interpretation and execution semantics for it. If you do not like the result, you've just failed at implementing the correct legal code. It's futile to blame laws and court rulings. Caveat to some extent obviously, since laws and courts have informal specs, it does mean that two different court (in my analogy computers) could end up on slightly different results. But most importantly we should focus on changing the legal code itself if we don't like the results. If anything, the bigger issue with laws and courts is the cost of execution. Just to know what outcome the current legal code results in given a concrete situation takes years, lots of money, tons of appeal, etc. If we could make that much cheaper and quick, it would greatly improve things. Think development feedback cycles. Imagine it took you years to test your code on a few scenarios? That's what happens with legislation today. So back to the article. It's not up to the courts to decide the desired behavior. It is only up to them to define the result of the currently described behavior. And it might seem in this case, the describe behavior maybe has a bug with regards to the desired behavior of some of the users...
- nothal 7y agoI think that the level of discourse in threads on paywalled articles is frequently disappointingly low. I think there should be a rule against articles on paywall.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/EF77s http://archive.is/EF77s
- pulse7 7y agoIn my country, no one can buy land up to 4 meters (13 feet) away the sea, rivers and lakes because it is a public domain. Because of this, tourists from other countries like to come here and enjoy every beach...
- sytelus 7y agoIf this irritates you then you should also read about how Larry Ellison owns 80% of a Hawaiin island. I can envision the world's prettiest places eventually closed to the public and existing for the sole enjoyment of billionaires and their future generations.
- paggle 7y agoCan’t the state eminent domain an access road and compensate Khalsa for the taking?
- plumednom 7y agoIt doesn't matter if he's right or wrong on a technicality. He will be up against the wall, with the rest of the oligarchs, when the revolution comes.
- nikolay 7y agoWell, he actually will lose much more money now, because we all know for sure what exact order of magnitude of an asshole he is.