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Comment by haywardsmyfault | Hacker News Reader

You could argue some of the land parcels in question are owned by growing numbers of family members with each new generation, and that therefore it's likely some (even most) owners wouldn't utilize the land. However, it's also interesting to digest this situation alongside Oxfam's report [1] on 62 people accumulating more wealth than half the world's population combined. Zuckerberg owns 700 acres of Kauai[2]. Why isn't that enough?

[1] http://www.oxfam.org.uk/media-centre/press-releases/2016/01/...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

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> Why isn't that enough?

According to the article, the owners of the parcels have the right to traverse the land he already bought. From the sound of the article, this is making a mountain out of a molehill.

He wants his privacy and, thanks to bizarre land ownership practices in Hawaii, these parcels are fractionally owned by hundreds of individuals making it impossible to make a traditional offer. This legal process, far from being abusive, is the standard process when dealing with these sorts of parcels since it clarifies who actually owns the properties. It sounds like once the list of owners is established by the court, he'll make a traditional offer rather than forcing an auction.

It's only Bizarre to you, it's not Bizarre to the people who own the property I'm sure. What's Bizarre is being forced to sell land that you've owned for generations.

Some of these pieces of land have hundreds of owners. In this case one of the owners has an interest of less than a one-hundredth of a percent. Most of the owners do not even know what they own. The legal fees to establish who has a fractional interest in the property would outweigh the value of the property normally for each individual owner, but with Zuckerberg footing to bill to find out the family tree all of the owners will benefit.

This sounds like the sort of thing where you have to sue someone to force the court to sort out legalities. Sort of like the RIAA/MPAA suing Joe Does that are associated with an IP to figure out who is on the other end of it.

If Zuck is using the court to force a sale, then it's a total asshole/dick move. If he's using the court to sort out ownership of land so that he knows who he needs to deal with to buy it (as a normal transaction), that's another story.

Something I learnt from the Martin Shkreli drug price increase story is that if you're going to defend someone who's being abused, first see if they even exist. Even then, see if their culture and laws make this an actual horrible suffering or not. What this isn't is some poor low income native being forced out of his house that he inherited from his family on land that he grew up on.

Given that some of the owners don't even know that they have an ownership stake in these properties, I'm not sure that's correct.

That kind of law exists in other places too, if your property cuts access to other people's property they have the right to cross it. It's not only in Hawaii, i've seen it in many other places , in Spain in rural areas is quite common.

Who has the right to 700 acres of privacy? I don't care how rich you are, there should be reasonable limits on what you can deny the public access to. In Sweden and Norway (and other places, I'm sure), they have a law called allemansrätten, which states that anyone has the right to roam on and camp on all land, as long as you don't cause any damage and reasonably respect others privacy. If the US had such a law, he probably wouldn't be engaging in this lawsuit.

Why should it matter how they use the land?

If they want to use it purely to irritate Zuckerberg, that's their business.

Maybe they'll organize using Facebook. An "irritate Mark Zuckerberg" group.

To take the discussion a little wider - land is a finite and productive resource unlike almost all other property. History is full of land reappropriation when it falls into ineffiecent use - whether as goverened as such or through violence when governments fail to do so. As a simple premise governments shouldnt allow land to remain significantly underutilised

Well that depends if your ideal society is one that optimizes for rights or one that optimizes for good land use.

Yes in a way. My point is really that land ownership should not be seen as a fundamental 'right' in the same way as other more fundamental 'rights'. Its actually treated this way in most international instruments (not as a right or given serious caveats) although in common conception many in the west assume otherwise.

> Zuckerberg owns 700 acres of Kauai[2]. Why isn't that enough?

"Enough" is not a word in some people's vocabulary.

Your argument is weird. How would mark zuckerburg use 700 acres of property? Who decides what effective use of property is? This is an absurd act of bullying people who may have otherwise had no desire or intention to sell their property, legal loophole or not.

That's right. There can never be a moral argument in the Randian "meritocratic" universe.

It's a well known fact that fuckerburg is a cylon and needs the 700 acres to build a fleet to go looking for kobol. The sooner he jumps out of the solar system the better for humanity. So my appeal to everyone is to please just give him what he needs.

> Why isn't that enough?

Who is to judge how much is and is not enough? Do you want an international tribunal allocating a "fair and equitable" amount of square meterage of various quality levels of real estate to individuals?

While there may be no legal entity making a decision on the question "how much is enough," people are allowed to make value judgements on the actions of others based on how much they personally think is "enough" for said others.

Who's to stop them? People seem to revel in rushing to judgement.

Yes, please.

Assuming you aren't joking, why would you trust the members of the tribunal? I have yet to see any evidence that humans have found a way to overcome the principal-agent problem in governing bodies.

Elected == accountable...generally speaking. Of course there would be corruption and errors. I would trust it over a hegemonic oligopoly though. Have to google the principal-agent problem though. I'm not familiar with that term.

> Elected == accountable...generally speaking.

How so? It's clear that voters don't know how (in aggregate) to make rational choices.

Given the (for a single example) well-known strong-arm get-out-the-vote collusion between Chicago's elected city officials and Chicago's regional street gangs, I'm not sure that I would trust a hegemonic oligopoly any less.

The book that this is based on is pretty interesting:

  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

> You could argue some of the land parcels in question are owned by growing numbers of family members with each new generation, and that therefore it's likely some (even most) owners wouldn't utilize the land.

Interestingly, there's a similar "dilution of ownership" in FOSS projects. Unless the project is operating under one of the nonprofits that foster/require copyright assignment for contribution, the IP of a FOSS project under a license like the GPL is effectively "owned" in part by every individual contributor. But each claim to the copyright of the work as a whole is very, very diluted.

If this petition went through, and the relevant case law were set, one could perhaps claim to be able to freely violate the GPL by creating a derivative commercial work, under the argument that because so many people each own so little of the project, nobody really owns it enough to be able to sue over it. (After all, nobody owns enough to be able to do other things requiring majority-ownership, like relicensing the project!)

The article makes it clear that this is standard procedure in Hawaii. No new case law is being created.

Oxfam's report [1] on 62 people accumulating more wealth than half the world's population combined

Measuring wealth is a pretty poor way to measure inequality.

If you're a recently graduated brain surgeon with $400K in student debt, you have less wealth than a homeless person with a $100 bill in their pocket.

Identifying one edge case doesn't really prove an argument. Net wealth is not a perfect metric, but is probably the best one we have.

You can be sure 95%+ of brain surgeons have paid off all their student debts and have a lot more wealth than a homeless guy, considering their median salary is $395k per year.

Those wealth statistics really are dodgy. Another edge case: you're earning so little that you don't save, but spend it all on food/housing/etc. Now your country's economy takes off and you suddenly earn 20% more. You're still spending it all, enjoying much better and healthier food. To those statistics, nothing changed.

Net income is a much better metric than wealth.

One edge case? Look at the debt levels in the US! There is a huge chunk of the population that has a negative net worth, mostly due to mortgage debt.

Is it fair to say all those people are poorer than people in India who have a few dollars to their name?

Well, show me a perfect metric that doesn't have similar edge cases?

For example, income has its own issues -- a retiree can have little income but a big retirement fund to draw down.

In an ideal world, you'd probably measure something like current net wealth + discounted expected future earnings, and maybe use PPP instead of GDP, except now you're trying to measure two things accurately instead of one, and making guesses about the future too.

Why isn't that enough?

Ted Turner would say that's not enough.[1]

[1]https://qz.com/615048/these-are-the-10-biggest-landowners-in...

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