Just so we're clear since I see a lot of comments here about stealing and "blatant" criminality.
He was ordered to private access at $2 per car, with no adjustment for inflation, across his property to a beach, by a government entity. This despite some reasonable case law on the idea that if you charge people to access something, you can change that price or go out of that business if you want.
In addition, he WON this case in CALIFORNIA at the beginning, though I thought on a bit of a ridiculous approach
To catch folks up, he's now been on a super long losing streak, and the US Supreme Court did not take up the case. It's a bit hard to see the state getting the road they want for $300K they claim it's worth, and they are passing law after law to try and get it. My guess is it ends up more in the 1.5M range?
Now if the government REALLY wanted to give the public access to nature - they'd ban all the STUPID parking restrictions near natural resources. Every rich area in California has some kind of state park or regional park maintained by all our government dollars, but the rich people living near it do this totally wild weekend only parking restriction on these major roads all around the entrance to the park, so no one but the rich folks living right there can access the park. It's kind of genius. You literally have a huge wide road, with parking on the sides NORMALLY during the week, but during weekends to keep poor folks from parking on the road and using the park, they ban weekend parking on this main road and all side streets for a few miles from park entrance.
I think that part of the article might be confused.
The Coastal Act requires that you provide access. It encourages cheap parking and other amenities and the owner can charge for these—as the previous one did. Improvements to these can also be requested/required if you want to further develop the property. However, I don’t think they force you to offer parking. This email from the city, which was part of the trial, mentions both the parking and the access, but only notes, repeatedly, that the access needs to be preserved:
Yeah, a lot of the details are getting lost in the noise.
Firstly, should the government give the person a right to charge at all for access to the beach? If they have the right, do they have a commensurate responsibility (provide a bathroom)? If they have both, how do we decide what the fair value is?
The problem is someone reading this thinks "no, don't charge, and no bathroom. That works for me!" Someone else thinks "Of course they should charge a fair amount. What are we? Animals?"
But this isn't supposed to be a battle of our moods and desires. Its supposed to be a principled discussion. What is the principle? At least VK puts one forward: he thinks private property rights should trump some others. Surf riders also has a principle: the public should have access to the beaches.
I agree with both. So lets say that we think private property rights should be respected AND beach access preserved. What is the best way to balance it? Perhaps the minimal private property rights consistent with beach access? Or the minimal access consistent with property rights?
As you have eluded, the entire case arises from a fundamental contradiction: You cannot charge for access if you want to provide equal access. Any non-zero access fee will exclude some part of the population. Once you fix the law by stipulating that private property owners must ensure free access to the beach, Khosla has no case. If borders of the private property violates the constraints set in constitution, those borders becomes invalid.
I'm amazed that general public is US is perfectly fine with government charging public to enter in to their own public land, sometime with outrageous fees that would be unaffordable by people on subsistence and who would like to live off the grid. No one takes an issue that public is already paying taxes for this! Using public lands is not a privilege but the fundamental right of the people. In many European countries it is actually prohibited to charge access to public lands in their constitution.
If the government REALLY wanted to give public access to the beach, they could have negotiated a footpath across this guy's property and build a parking nearby.
What parks are you talking about? Any park I'm aware of with parking restrictions has them because the roads are narrow and people suck at parking. They become so crowded that the road becomes impossible to navigate.
This article may have been on here yesterday and seems relevant [1]. For this guy it's probably not about fighting for what he believes is "right", it's all about winning. He bought land, a fight ensued, and now he relishes the opportunity to crush his opponent (average people).
> now he relishes the opportunity to crush his opponent (average people).
It seems to me that he's the underdog here: his opponents not only also have the resources to drag this fight on for a decade, they also have the state legislature and the governor on their side. At this point, the state is prepared to use armed force (which is what eminent domain ultimately is) to take his property, and if he tries to physically resist its agents will use violence to subdue him. Ignoring the accountable government, it's remarkable that an unaccountable non-profit has the resources to fight one of the richest men in the world for years, and it's sobering to think of how little chance you or I would have if a similar nonprofit attacked us.
I have no idea if he's legally in the right or wrong, although given that the state has had to change the law, it sounds like he was originally in the right. And I wonder at what point laws aimed at a single person's situation become too akin to bills of attainder to pass constitutional muster.
> He frames the struggle in the Silicon Valley patois of contrarianism. “I’d rather do the right hard things now that I’m in,” he says, “than the wrong easy things.”
Based on his fallacious belief that he knows what is the right thing in a societal domain outside of his subject matter expertise.
And yet every commentator here thinks they are an expert and that Vinod is wrong.
Vinod, at least, has been actively involved in the litigation, has probably read the briefs, knows the issues and the laws well, etc. The commentators here (including you) that assume he is wrong and just full of hubris have likely only read a few articles that poorly summarize all of the history and complexity of the case.
That’s not to say I have a view on the underlying case. He may still be an asshole and wrong. But maybe he’s right.
But that hubris is where progress originates from. You can't separate one from the other, unfortunately. You have to be that stubborn about things you believe you are right about, in order to prove the world wrong. (Even if it is him that is wrong in this instance.)
'“A billionaire is a bad word in this country now,” he says, as his tea cools. “And that pains me.”'
Maybe if fewer of them thought of themselves as being better than everyone else and, more importantly, stopped acting like they thought that way, their reputation would improve.
But I don't believe that pains him. This isn't new. We've seen this kind of attitude in the wealthy time and again here in the US and every other society where a wealth gap as big as ours has existed. The results tend to not favor anyone, but the very wealthy tend to lose the most.
>created Java, the programming language that formed the
>foundation for much of today’s internet
How did Java help the enable the Internet?
There’s a discussion to be had about it’s significance to programming languages, but I don’t see how the Internet would have flourished any less without it.
Seems it could be argued Java was an obstacle to the Internet w.r.t. it’s role in the history of various fat tech ideas that tried and failed to become a defacto browser standard.
With all due respect to his successes, I’m not quite sure which of those is the source of getting credit for creating the foundation of the Internet.
Sun didn’t invent HTTP and didn’t sell the only computers that could run a web server.
It's a good time to be a lawyer. These days there are lots of highly paid shareholders and investors with massive egos, unlimited free time and 0 concern for society.
With increased automation, we will all become lawyers.
We will make a living litigating against the minions of other rich people to seek damages from whoever it was that spilled their drink on the billionaire's carpet... It will not be about the money; it will be a matter of principle.
The ridiculous part is that the law existed prior to his acquiring the property. He could have (and arguably he should have) known his obligations ahead of time. Even if he didn’t understand the California law, at the very least he could have questioned the existence of easements for coastal access and/or the possibility of some kind of “squatter’s rights” on the grounds that surfers and beachgoers have been using that path for decades.
No, I’m not buying that this is an unfortunate surprise for him. He picked this fight intentionally.
His hypocrisy is beyond baffling. "A billionaire is a bad word in this country now" - and you are doing exactly what to mitigate this? Become a professional Mister Beach Asshole (tm)? Just a lucky billionaire with a giant ego.
“Here’s the thing about Vinod,” Mr. Kaul said. “He just doesn’t care.”
This is what's frightening. A person with billion dollars have enormous leverage to wield his will, beliefs, principles - whether wrong or right - on public. They can buy large properties on whims, put up walls, close roads, setup perma-construction zones and make them disappear from the map for all intent and purposes. They can buy up political system to put in place laws that can hurt thousands for generations, hurt environment, empty out valuable resources. Even if they are mistaken in their beliefs, they can outspend opponents in litigation driving them to bankruptcy. All the while any losses in these fights is not even noticeable to their fortunes.
I'm not against capitalism but I think there is a fundamental bug in our system that gives rise to these symptoms. Perhaps in hundred years this "bug" will get fixed and our future generations will look back on us marvelling that billionaires existed in our world just like we marvel Pharaohs existed in the previous age.
IIRC, people want to use a road on his private property to access the public beach part. So Khosla is saying, come to the beach all you want, but not by using the road on my private property. Cute.
Maybe the state should just launch eminent domain like proceedings and let courts decide on the price. He's not saying (that all) the beach is his, just don't come through my land to go to the public part. It has the same effect but it's different.
People are legally entitled to use the road on his property to access the beach, which is slightly different.
I can see this being weird if the access rights were addded after you bought the land, but if the easement long predates your ownership, as it allegedly does in this case, I don’t really see why “property rights” should be allow you to wiggle out of it. That easement is part and parcel of the property you bought—-it may have cost even more if it weren’t included!
From the article I assume the issue is going around Martins Beach Road in Half Moon Bay, CA.
This road is roughly half a mile long.
Paving it would be around 100k. Add the lane marking, gutters, sidewalks, ADA-friendly ramps, brail plates on each crossing and the bill can easily get up to half a million.
Is it fair to slap someone with a half a million bill just because "he's rich anyway"?
If it is in the disclosure when you buy the property, or basic law your real estate agent should inform you of, yes, rich or poor. If his agent never educated him he should sue his agent for negligence.
That said, I have walked that road many times. There are other properties there that require a road so he would not need to pay for everything. There is already garbage pickup service there so I assume like any other private road it would need to be maintained by all the property owners for basic services and emergency access.
The issue was that he kept the gate locked and was trying to have the police aggressively evict pedestrians. There is a small parking lot at the beginning of the road and if he had been a decent neighbor and allowed people to park there and walk, I doubt this would have ever become such an issue. But he took that path of most resistance.
Morally I think open access to beaches is the right thing. It is a public asset and the beauty a reminder of how important our stewardship is. On the other side of the coin, having been there over the years and now seeing how the public is trashing what was a super pristine amazing place with litter and feces, i would give him the right to charge a $10000 cleaning fee to anyone caught littering (or worse!)
My impression was that the law requires access. Upgraded infrastructure can be part of a quid-pro-quo for other development in the area, but the coastal comission can’t, as far as I know, insist on improvements out of the blue.
Disappointing this comment was flagged. It's all that really needs to be said, and sums him and the article's thesis on him quite nicely. The world would be a terrible place if it were filled only with Vinod Khoslas.
Hopefully the newer generation can jettison the decades of systemic libertarian propaganda and fabricated individualism that justifies self obsession and sociopathy to instead build a society that is more humane and connected like most human societies are supposed to be. And we can see very early signs on it.
No one is threatening your individualism, if you don't like other people and the concept of cooperative society you can always go and live in the forest alone. This is possible for every single human being on the planet but no one takes it.
Because this fake individualism generates its identity not on the rugged individualism of standing alone but taking advantage of all the resources, benefits and skills of millions in societal human cooperation and then stand apart merely to legitimize petty self interest and exploiting others without remorse. In essence all the benefits of cooperation but none of the responsibilities.
This is people like Vinod Khosla in a nutshell and if your society is full of such 'individuals' and legitimizes their ideology you have to consider whether you have a 'society' worth fighting for. What is the motivation? Because these kind of individuals do not believe in the larger good, only self interest.
At the end of the day, everyone's only in it for themselves one way or another. People at the top want to secure their spot, people at the bottom want everyone to share, and there's some people who are up but can't sleep at night if someone think poorly of them.
But in all cases, it's all different sides of the same coin.
[+] [-] privateSFacct|7 years ago|reply
He was ordered to private access at $2 per car, with no adjustment for inflation, across his property to a beach, by a government entity. This despite some reasonable case law on the idea that if you charge people to access something, you can change that price or go out of that business if you want.
In addition, he WON this case in CALIFORNIA at the beginning, though I thought on a bit of a ridiculous approach
To catch folks up, he's now been on a super long losing streak, and the US Supreme Court did not take up the case. It's a bit hard to see the state getting the road they want for $300K they claim it's worth, and they are passing law after law to try and get it. My guess is it ends up more in the 1.5M range?
Now if the government REALLY wanted to give the public access to nature - they'd ban all the STUPID parking restrictions near natural resources. Every rich area in California has some kind of state park or regional park maintained by all our government dollars, but the rich people living near it do this totally wild weekend only parking restriction on these major roads all around the entrance to the park, so no one but the rich folks living right there can access the park. It's kind of genius. You literally have a huge wide road, with parking on the sides NORMALLY during the week, but during weekends to keep poor folks from parking on the road and using the park, they ban weekend parking on this main road and all side streets for a few miles from park entrance.
[+] [-] mattkrause|7 years ago|reply
The Coastal Act requires that you provide access. It encourages cheap parking and other amenities and the owner can charge for these—as the previous one did. Improvements to these can also be requested/required if you want to further develop the property. However, I don’t think they force you to offer parking. This email from the city, which was part of the trial, mentions both the parking and the access, but only notes, repeatedly, that the access needs to be preserved:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw9SrI2nMR-WVVhiMVZtS3Rxd0U...
[+] [-] projectramo|7 years ago|reply
Firstly, should the government give the person a right to charge at all for access to the beach? If they have the right, do they have a commensurate responsibility (provide a bathroom)? If they have both, how do we decide what the fair value is?
The problem is someone reading this thinks "no, don't charge, and no bathroom. That works for me!" Someone else thinks "Of course they should charge a fair amount. What are we? Animals?"
But this isn't supposed to be a battle of our moods and desires. Its supposed to be a principled discussion. What is the principle? At least VK puts one forward: he thinks private property rights should trump some others. Surf riders also has a principle: the public should have access to the beaches.
I agree with both. So lets say that we think private property rights should be respected AND beach access preserved. What is the best way to balance it? Perhaps the minimal private property rights consistent with beach access? Or the minimal access consistent with property rights?
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
I'm amazed that general public is US is perfectly fine with government charging public to enter in to their own public land, sometime with outrageous fees that would be unaffordable by people on subsistence and who would like to live off the grid. No one takes an issue that public is already paying taxes for this! Using public lands is not a privilege but the fundamental right of the people. In many European countries it is actually prohibited to charge access to public lands in their constitution.
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevespang|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|7 years ago|reply
It applies in rich parts of town in general.
I'm paying MY tax money for these roads but only people with a residential permit can use them.
[+] [-] rademacher|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/rich-peop...
[+] [-] eadmund|7 years ago|reply
It seems to me that he's the underdog here: his opponents not only also have the resources to drag this fight on for a decade, they also have the state legislature and the governor on their side. At this point, the state is prepared to use armed force (which is what eminent domain ultimately is) to take his property, and if he tries to physically resist its agents will use violence to subdue him. Ignoring the accountable government, it's remarkable that an unaccountable non-profit has the resources to fight one of the richest men in the world for years, and it's sobering to think of how little chance you or I would have if a similar nonprofit attacked us.
I have no idea if he's legally in the right or wrong, although given that the state has had to change the law, it sounds like he was originally in the right. And I wonder at what point laws aimed at a single person's situation become too akin to bills of attainder to pass constitutional muster.
[+] [-] deanCommie|7 years ago|reply
Based on his fallacious belief that he knows what is the right thing in a societal domain outside of his subject matter expertise.
Silicon Valley hubris in a nutshell.
[+] [-] metildaa|7 years ago|reply
Worse yet, he has bought his way to citizenship and has attempted to steal a public beach, blatantly breaking public access law.
Edit: Holy shit he is squatting on land he has never spent a night at, and regrets the purchase of? What an insolent asshole!
[+] [-] berberous|7 years ago|reply
Vinod, at least, has been actively involved in the litigation, has probably read the briefs, knows the issues and the laws well, etc. The commentators here (including you) that assume he is wrong and just full of hubris have likely only read a few articles that poorly summarize all of the history and complexity of the case.
That’s not to say I have a view on the underlying case. He may still be an asshole and wrong. But maybe he’s right.
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garmaine|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidlls|7 years ago|reply
Maybe if fewer of them thought of themselves as being better than everyone else and, more importantly, stopped acting like they thought that way, their reputation would improve.
But I don't believe that pains him. This isn't new. We've seen this kind of attitude in the wealthy time and again here in the US and every other society where a wealth gap as big as ours has existed. The results tend to not favor anyone, but the very wealthy tend to lose the most.
[+] [-] siruncledrew|7 years ago|reply
wipes tear with $100
[+] [-] naringas|7 years ago|reply
probably true but only because they have the most to lose
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhitneyLand|7 years ago|reply
>foundation for much of today’s internet
How did Java help the enable the Internet?
There’s a discussion to be had about it’s significance to programming languages, but I don’t see how the Internet would have flourished any less without it.
Seems it could be argued Java was an obstacle to the Internet w.r.t. it’s role in the history of various fat tech ideas that tried and failed to become a defacto browser standard.
With all due respect to his successes, I’m not quite sure which of those is the source of getting credit for creating the foundation of the Internet.
Sun didn’t invent HTTP and didn’t sell the only computers that could run a web server.
[+] [-] gaius|7 years ago|reply
If the web had been built on NFS they might have a case.
[+] [-] pg_bot|7 years ago|reply
Why would anyone want to be a business partner with him after reading this?
[+] [-] cmsj|7 years ago|reply
FTFY.
It's easy to be an asshole for an extended period of time when you can outsource all of the assholery to professional assholes.
[+] [-] jondubois|7 years ago|reply
With increased automation, we will all become lawyers.
We will make a living litigating against the minions of other rich people to seek damages from whoever it was that spilled their drink on the billionaire's carpet... It will not be about the money; it will be a matter of principle.
[+] [-] gonewest|7 years ago|reply
No, I’m not buying that this is an unfortunate surprise for him. He picked this fight intentionally.
[+] [-] JauntTrooper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yizahi|7 years ago|reply
“Here’s the thing about Vinod,” Mr. Kaul said. “He just doesn’t care.”
Yes, we see it clearly.
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
I'm not against capitalism but I think there is a fundamental bug in our system that gives rise to these symptoms. Perhaps in hundred years this "bug" will get fixed and our future generations will look back on us marvelling that billionaires existed in our world just like we marvel Pharaohs existed in the previous age.
[+] [-] oneplusone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Amygaz|7 years ago|reply
But lobbying and narcissism only go so far...
[+] [-] vertline3|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|7 years ago|reply
Maybe the state should just launch eminent domain like proceedings and let courts decide on the price. He's not saying (that all) the beach is his, just don't come through my land to go to the public part. It has the same effect but it's different.
[+] [-] mattkrause|7 years ago|reply
I can see this being weird if the access rights were addded after you bought the land, but if the easement long predates your ownership, as it allegedly does in this case, I don’t really see why “property rights” should be allow you to wiggle out of it. That easement is part and parcel of the property you bought—-it may have cost even more if it weren’t included!
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
Is it fair to slap someone with a half a million bill just because "he's rich anyway"?
[+] [-] rficcaglia|7 years ago|reply
That said, I have walked that road many times. There are other properties there that require a road so he would not need to pay for everything. There is already garbage pickup service there so I assume like any other private road it would need to be maintained by all the property owners for basic services and emergency access.
The issue was that he kept the gate locked and was trying to have the police aggressively evict pedestrians. There is a small parking lot at the beginning of the road and if he had been a decent neighbor and allowed people to park there and walk, I doubt this would have ever become such an issue. But he took that path of most resistance.
Morally I think open access to beaches is the right thing. It is a public asset and the beauty a reminder of how important our stewardship is. On the other side of the coin, having been there over the years and now seeing how the public is trashing what was a super pristine amazing place with litter and feces, i would give him the right to charge a $10000 cleaning fee to anyone caught littering (or worse!)
[+] [-] mattkrause|7 years ago|reply
My impression was that the law requires access. Upgraded infrastructure can be part of a quid-pro-quo for other development in the area, but the coastal comission can’t, as far as I know, insist on improvements out of the blue.
[+] [-] anentropic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seattle_spring|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] titzer|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hackeronezero|7 years ago|reply
The thing i notice here is that the belief system which got him that money, now he's using his money to support that belief system.
Don't see anything wrong with this.
His is the public case, many people might be acting like this behind the public scrutiny.
[+] [-] throw2016|7 years ago|reply
No one is threatening your individualism, if you don't like other people and the concept of cooperative society you can always go and live in the forest alone. This is possible for every single human being on the planet but no one takes it.
Because this fake individualism generates its identity not on the rugged individualism of standing alone but taking advantage of all the resources, benefits and skills of millions in societal human cooperation and then stand apart merely to legitimize petty self interest and exploiting others without remorse. In essence all the benefits of cooperation but none of the responsibilities.
This is people like Vinod Khosla in a nutshell and if your society is full of such 'individuals' and legitimizes their ideology you have to consider whether you have a 'society' worth fighting for. What is the motivation? Because these kind of individuals do not believe in the larger good, only self interest.
[+] [-] shados|7 years ago|reply
But in all cases, it's all different sides of the same coin.