9 ms·

Vinod 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

Vinod 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 ago
It'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 ago
  With 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 ago
    Morals have always been compromising to profits. The VCs will just find someone without moral scruples to make their money for them.
    - jkmcf 7y ago
      Not mention ethics, but we were probably already assuming they were compromised.
  - NelsonMinar 7y ago
    Keep looking, you've almost grasped it...
- diminoten 7y ago
  I'd bet literally tens of dollars it has no material impact on his fund.
- flattone 7y ago
  I wish we could measure "asshole-ness" then we could have asshole tax
  - luckydata 7y ago
    this lawsuit is essentially it.
    - flattone 7y ago
      But I mean like a literal like TurboTax question what was your asshole score last year
      - bdcravens 7y ago
        Given the effort Intuit puts into fighting off free e-filing, they'd be conflicted adding that question I think.
        flattone 7y ago
        Would their resistance matter when the government hears the potential dollar amount? I'm in the United States I don't know where you're from but if we had an asshole tax our government would be the most incomprehensibly rich entity in the universe.
      - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        So... a social credit score?
        flattone 7y ago
        Good point. :/
        SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        I actually think it could work in principle, but maybe you should only get a tax break if it's unusually low and otherwise nothing happens.
- bhb916 7y ago
  "Beaches and rivers belong to all of us." This seems like an arbitrary distinction. What makes you think this and not something like "all geographic features belong to all of us"? What makes beaches and rivers so special that rights suddenly don't apply?
  - groby_b 7y ago
    What makes you think this shouldn't extend to all geographic features? Why do we have property rights to land? Owning land merely means being the last in a line of people who enriched themselves on the backs of others by taking common property and depriving everybody else.
    - riantogo 7y ago
      I'm curious to know what alternate, practical solutions there might be. The current system mostly work. Are you proposing no one can own land and hence no one can build exclusive homes/establishments? Anyone is free to build anywhere and pray no one else wants to move in at will? How will such a system work?
      - madhadron 7y ago
        The place to start looking is Journal of the Commons. Communal ownership with limited privileges of individual use have been a regular feature of mankind's societies for a long, long time.
      - satyrnein 7y ago
        The Georgist or geolibertarian positions on this center around a Land Value Tax, sometimes believed to be the only necessary tax. Someone does own the land, but is taxed at a rate that captures the entire value of the (unimproved) land, so in some ways it's more akin to rent, which neutralizes some of the historic advantages certain groups enjoyed. This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use. That's just scratching the surface, though!
- yumraj 7y ago
  You may think so, but in the end money wins. A lot of people even take Chinese money, even YC opened China office for a while, which they closed a couple of days ago.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rchaud 7y ago
  > It'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. And therein lies the rub. Many entrepreneurs will not care about stuff like this because his money is still green. The Uber CEO just the other day referred to the Kashoggi killing as a "mistake". Adam Neumann grew up in Israel but is happy to take money from the same pot KSA uses to fund extremist groups, and publicly claims that MBS and Jared Kushner (!) will save the world. For some people, Greed > everything.
  - LegitShady 7y ago
    Imagine if everyone who disagrees with you was greedy. People couldnt hold those views for other reasons, and you're definitely not making a caricature instead of discussing reality. Have a great day!
    - rchaud 7y ago
      > Imagine if everyone who disagrees with you was greedy. Didn't say it was everyone, gave two examples of two well-documented individuals, and said that this would be true of "some" people.
- whydoyoucare 7y ago
  Do you realize your statement merely comes across as "virtue signaling" than anything else? Thanks for a post-lunch chuckle! :-)
rayiner 7y ago
The debate is absolutely about property rights--the fact that the State of California doesn't have any basis to prevent him from putting a gate on his own property: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2193&context=elq https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art.... California courts have already held in this case that there is no "public trust" access to the beach, due to the peculiarities of land titles that originated in Mexico before Californian statehood. A California court of appeals has now held that the State's other hook, the idea that the property was "dedicated to public use" is also baseless. That's what this article is about: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF > That said, we have been tasked here with reviewing a trial court’s application of the common law of public dedication, which is the sole legal basis for Friends’ remaining claims in this case. > We have endeavored faithfully to follow the prior holdings of our Supreme Court and fellow appellate courts in applying common law of public dedication principles here. However, we have not attempted to extend the public dedication doctrine beyond the common law parameters previously recognized by court decisions in this state. As strong as the coastal access policies of our state are, we do not understand them to empower us to do so. There is no "rightful public access" to this property.
- iron0013 7y ago
  Just so everyone knows, Khosla's legal strategy, which rayiner is parroting with such wide-eyed credulity, is widely considered an absurd grasping-at-straws and has already been shut down by most judges it's been put in front of.
  - harryh 7y ago
    On the "dedicated to public use" issue Khosla won at trial and (as the bloomberg article says) also won on appeal. So it seems like at least some judges have agreed with him.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    I'm literally just describing rulings of the california appeals courts, as described in the Berkeley legal journal article referenced in my post and TFA. Khosla lost a bunch of intermediate court rulings, and the Supreme Court denied cert with respect to collateral proceedings involving the Coastal Commission. But in two california appellate court wins, he knocked out both bases on which Friends of Martins Beach was claiming the right to public access of his beach. What's left?
PowerfulWizard 7y ago
I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect. And although I have to take him at face value, my initial impression was that it was a case of the risk-logic that is required to do VC: betting heavy on a high value longshot. If we wins the property is even more valuable due to the privacy element and because he has shown how costly it was to achieve. If he loses he just takes his beating and moves on.
- luckydata 7y ago
  Is this the world you want to live in?
  - PowerfulWizard 7y ago
    In terms of morality the government directly controls one third of the economy I want to live in a world where they legislate wisely and enforce laws effectively in a clear and transparent way. In terms of reality I can only observe and describe.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    > I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect. Yes, absolutely. I’m a high taxation statist. But tax me, spend it in whatever public services you want, and then leave me alone. This sort of case-by-case exercise where state and municipal governments impose random unfunded mandates on individuals is incompatible with the idea of “government of laws, not if men.” The government shouldn’t make anyone keep running a public beach just because there used to be one in the property. Especially where there was no public vote, just an agency making a case by case decision.
    - TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
      This

burtonator 7y ago

It'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 ago
With 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 ago
  Morals have always been compromising to profits. The VCs will just find someone without moral scruples to make their money for them.
  - jkmcf 7y ago
    Not mention ethics, but we were probably already assuming they were compromised.
- NelsonMinar 7y ago
  Keep looking, you've almost grasped it...
diminoten 7y ago
I'd bet literally tens of dollars it has no material impact on his fund.
flattone 7y ago
I wish we could measure "asshole-ness" then we could have asshole tax
- luckydata 7y ago
  this lawsuit is essentially it.
  - flattone 7y ago
    But I mean like a literal like TurboTax question what was your asshole score last year
    - bdcravens 7y ago
      Given the effort Intuit puts into fighting off free e-filing, they'd be conflicted adding that question I think.
      - flattone 7y ago
        Would their resistance matter when the government hears the potential dollar amount? I'm in the United States I don't know where you're from but if we had an asshole tax our government would be the most incomprehensibly rich entity in the universe.
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      So... a social credit score?
      - flattone 7y ago
        Good point. :/
        SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        I actually think it could work in principle, but maybe you should only get a tax break if it's unusually low and otherwise nothing happens.
bhb916 7y ago
"Beaches and rivers belong to all of us." This seems like an arbitrary distinction. What makes you think this and not something like "all geographic features belong to all of us"? What makes beaches and rivers so special that rights suddenly don't apply?
- groby_b 7y ago
  What makes you think this shouldn't extend to all geographic features? Why do we have property rights to land? Owning land merely means being the last in a line of people who enriched themselves on the backs of others by taking common property and depriving everybody else.
  - riantogo 7y ago
    I'm curious to know what alternate, practical solutions there might be. The current system mostly work. Are you proposing no one can own land and hence no one can build exclusive homes/establishments? Anyone is free to build anywhere and pray no one else wants to move in at will? How will such a system work?
    - madhadron 7y ago
      The place to start looking is Journal of the Commons. Communal ownership with limited privileges of individual use have been a regular feature of mankind's societies for a long, long time.
    - satyrnein 7y ago
      The Georgist or geolibertarian positions on this center around a Land Value Tax, sometimes believed to be the only necessary tax. Someone does own the land, but is taxed at a rate that captures the entire value of the (unimproved) land, so in some ways it's more akin to rent, which neutralizes some of the historic advantages certain groups enjoyed. This tax is essentially paid to the public to compensate them for being excluded from the land. The tax moves up as the value of the land increases, so idle landowners do not capture the value themselves, and may be forced to sell to people who will put it to more productive use. That's just scratching the surface, though!
yumraj 7y ago
You may think so, but in the end money wins. A lot of people even take Chinese money, even YC opened China office for a while, which they closed a couple of days ago.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
rchaud 7y ago
> It'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. And therein lies the rub. Many entrepreneurs will not care about stuff like this because his money is still green. The Uber CEO just the other day referred to the Kashoggi killing as a "mistake". Adam Neumann grew up in Israel but is happy to take money from the same pot KSA uses to fund extremist groups, and publicly claims that MBS and Jared Kushner (!) will save the world. For some people, Greed > everything.
- LegitShady 7y ago
  Imagine if everyone who disagrees with you was greedy. People couldnt hold those views for other reasons, and you're definitely not making a caricature instead of discussing reality. Have a great day!
  - rchaud 7y ago
    > Imagine if everyone who disagrees with you was greedy. Didn't say it was everyone, gave two examples of two well-documented individuals, and said that this would be true of "some" people.
whydoyoucare 7y ago
Do you realize your statement merely comes across as "virtue signaling" than anything else? Thanks for a post-lunch chuckle! :-)

rayiner 7y ago

The debate is absolutely about property rights--the fact that the State of California doesn't have any basis to prevent him from putting a gate on his own property: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2193&context=elq https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art.... California courts have already held in this case that there is no "public trust" access to the beach, due to the peculiarities of land titles that originated in Mexico before Californian statehood. A California court of appeals has now held that the State's other hook, the idea that the property was "dedicated to public use" is also baseless. That's what this article is about: https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF https://www.courts.ca.gov/opinions/nonpub/A154022.PDF > That said, we have been tasked here with reviewing a trial court’s application of the common law of public dedication, which is the sole legal basis for Friends’ remaining claims in this case. > We have endeavored faithfully to follow the prior holdings of our Supreme Court and fellow appellate courts in applying common law of public dedication principles here. However, we have not attempted to extend the public dedication doctrine beyond the common law parameters previously recognized by court decisions in this state. As strong as the coastal access policies of our state are, we do not understand them to empower us to do so. There is no "rightful public access" to this property.

iron0013 7y ago
Just so everyone knows, Khosla's legal strategy, which rayiner is parroting with such wide-eyed credulity, is widely considered an absurd grasping-at-straws and has already been shut down by most judges it's been put in front of.
- harryh 7y ago
  On the "dedicated to public use" issue Khosla won at trial and (as the bloomberg article says) also won on appeal. So it seems like at least some judges have agreed with him.
- rayiner 7y ago
  I'm literally just describing rulings of the california appeals courts, as described in the Berkeley legal journal article referenced in my post and TFA. Khosla lost a bunch of intermediate court rulings, and the Supreme Court denied cert with respect to collateral proceedings involving the Coastal Commission. But in two california appellate court wins, he knocked out both bases on which Friends of Martins Beach was claiming the right to public access of his beach. What's left?

PowerfulWizard 7y ago

I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect. And although I have to take him at face value, my initial impression was that it was a case of the risk-logic that is required to do VC: betting heavy on a high value longshot. If we wins the property is even more valuable due to the privacy element and because he has shown how costly it was to achieve. If he loses he just takes his beating and moves on.

luckydata 7y ago
Is this the world you want to live in?
- PowerfulWizard 7y ago
  In terms of morality the government directly controls one third of the economy I want to live in a world where they legislate wisely and enforce laws effectively in a clear and transparent way. In terms of reality I can only observe and describe.
- rayiner 7y ago
  > I think he said that he views it as a moral issue and he doesn't believe he should be compelled by the government to directly provide a public service, or something to that effect. Yes, absolutely. I’m a high taxation statist. But tax me, spend it in whatever public services you want, and then leave me alone. This sort of case-by-case exercise where state and municipal governments impose random unfunded mandates on individuals is incompatible with the idea of “government of laws, not if men.” The government shouldn’t make anyone keep running a public beach just because there used to be one in the property. Especially where there was no public vote, just an agency making a case by case decision.
  - TheMagicHorsey 7y ago
    This