Zuckerberg Sues Hundreds of Hawaiians To Force Property Sales To Him (msn.com) 284
mmell writes: Apparently, owning 700 acres of land in Hawaii isn't enough -- Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, has filed suit to force owners of several small parcels of land to sell to the highest bidder. The reason? These property owners are completely surrounded by Zuckerberg's land holdings and therefore have lawful easement to cross his property in order to get to theirs. Many of these land owners have held their land for generations, but seemingly Mr. Zuckerberg can not tolerate their presence so close to his private little slice of paradise. Landowners such as these came to own their land when their ancestors were "given" the land as Hawaiian natives. If successful in his "quiet title" court action, Mr. Zuckerberg will finally have his slice of Hawaii's beaches and tropical lands without having to deal with the pesky presence of neighbors who were on his land before he owned it. Who knew that Hawaiians were just another kind of Native Americans? CNBC reports: "The cases target a dozen small plots of so-called 'kuleana' lands that are inside the much larger property that Zuckerberg bought on Kauai. Kuleana lands are properties that were granted to native Hawaiians in the mid-1800. One suit, according to the Star-Advertiser, was filed against about 300 people who are descendants of an immigrant Portuguese sugar cane plantation worker who bought four parcels totaling two acres of land in 1894. One of that worker's great-grandchildren, Carlos Andrade, 72, lived on the property until recently, the paper said. But the retired university professor told the Star-Advertiser that he is helping Zuckerberg's case as a co-plaintiff in an effort to make sure the land is not surrendered to the county if no one in his extended clan steps up to take responsibility for paying property taxes on the plots."
"The highest bidder"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who else is going to bid for land that's surrounded entirely by someone else's land, and subject to these kinds of legal encumbrances?
The man is a bastard and a prime candidate for an urgent visit from a large group of people toting pitchforks and torches, if anyone can find any in present-day Hawaii.
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paparazzi who want legal access to Zuckerbergs land?
Re:"The highest bidder"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this should backfire nicely.
They should get together, offer Zuckerberg a bid of ONE PENNY for his 700 acres, and no one else should bid on them.
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Who else is going to bid for land that's surrounded entirely by someone else's land
We could crowd-source, each have a small share of ownership and party on the land he wants!
Re:"The highest bidder"? (Score:5, Informative)
In general, in Common Law, if you buy land that has known encumbrances, then you inherit the obligations that go with that encumbrance. I have land that has a water easement on it so people up the road can pump water from a creek nearby. Since that was attached to the land when I took possession, I'm obligated to allow the neighbors to continue to operate water lines. I can certainly try to buy them out or otherwise offer incentive for them to voluntarily vacate the easement, but if I go to a judge and demand he terminate the easement and kick my neighbors' water lines off my property, I'm going to be shown the door. Of course, I'm not a fucking dirtbag, so I accept certain limitations on my ownership that I voluntarily took on, and don't try to push people off with threats of legal action.
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I live in town, I have two easements one on the roadside and one in the back for public access and utilities (aka alley in the back sidewalk in the front).
Re:"The highest bidder"? (Score:5, Insightful)
We have similar easements and accesses in my neck of the woods. One of the most contentious where I live is public access to lakes (I gather this is also an issue in Hawaii with access to beaches). Basically the law says that landowners are certainly allowed to own land up to the beach, but they cannot own the beach or any stretch of the water. There are some slight variances on this principle for self-contained bodies of water, like artificial lakes, but in general, you can own land adjacent to a lake or stream, but you don't own the lake or stream, or the immediate vicinity around it. Further, there are public access points to the beach, which often do cross peoples' property, but by law the property owners cannot impede peoples' access to the lake, nor can they attempt to block the access points. Further, if they build warfs or boat launches, well, they're doing so on public land, so while they may be free to locate those structures there, they can't prevent other people from using them.
Every year property owners around various lakes in the area try to block access trails, make absurd threats against people enjoying what constitute public lands, and generally be fucking assholes. That they bought this land knowing full well that they are not lawfully empower to prevent access is irrelevant. They're big crybabies who want to assert defacto ownership over land and water that explicitly does not belong to them, and never will.
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These arent people that snaked their way onto this land. They are people with a historical and ancestral right to retain their ownership and access.
This is no
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From the article :
Zuckerberg's lawyer, Keoni Shultz of the firm Cades Schutte, in a statement to CNBC said, "It is common in Hawaii to have small parcels of land within the boundaries of a larger tract, and for the title to these smaller parcels to have become broken or clouded over time."
...
"In some cases, co-owners may not even be aware of their interests,"
Start with the understanding that the declaration is from an atorney for Zuckpunk. And even given his obvious and perfectly legitimate bias he makes no claim that the statement is all inclusive. It is not a blanket assessment. It is not predetermined that all property owners have the same situations, knowledge of ownership, desire for ownership, or unpaid tax liabilities. It instead suggests that while a person wi
May not be as bad as the clickbaity headline says (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA, it seems like these are old titles, many of the people who inherited them have no idea they "own" these properties, and thus haven't been paying property taxes on them since 180something.
I don't much care for The Zuck, but before taking off on the all too predictable partisan political tears, people should inform themselves on which Supreme Court justices ruled which way on the Kelo decision.
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You're not reading TFA correctly, because if they have " no idea " they own them then obviously they aren't crossing his property to visit property they don't care about.
The editors should have fixed the summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have high expectations for the quality of the content on Slashdot, but this summary is particularly bad.
Regardless of what your stance is on this matter, the fact remains that the summary is highly biased and editorialized, to the point of the entire submission being rubbish.
Crap like
and
and
and especially
should have all been removed, and doing so would have made the submission far more informative and objective.
The "Who knew ... just another kind of Native Americans?" junk is particularly stupid. The people called "Native Americans" today are just the descendants (ignoring how many of them are also descended from Europeans, sometimes proportionally more so than from non-Europeans) of the most recent waves of migration to the Americas from Eurasia [wikipedia.org]. It's rarely mentioned how these later waves likely destroyed previous cultures in the Americas, such as the Clovis people [wikipedia.org], because that wouldn't fit with the leftist narrative of today's "Native Americans" being perpetual victims.
The editors should have seriously reworked this submission's summary. Perhaps it would have been better just to throw it out completely, it's so inherently bad.
This summary and all of its obvious bias just makes those against Zuckerberg's actions look like kooks and extremists.
Re:The editors should have fixed the summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
It lends credence to the deniers, who can denounce everything you present in your argument if you stretch one or two facts.
It is the polar opposite of fortuitous that this strategy is regularly employed in important debates like global warming and minimum wage.
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...even when in the right...
That's precisely the question under consideration though, isn't it?
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Nonetheless, you wouldn't allow the brainwashing you withstood, at the hands of Disney (when the evil hunters killed Bambi's mum) to stand in the way of feeding your children. If you had to.
So it seems, good and bad are fungible.
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It's rarely mentioned how these later waves likely destroyed previous cultures in the Americas, such as the Clovis people
So you're saying that today's Native Americans are carrying a "red guilt"?
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The "Who knew ... just another kind of Native Americans?" junk is particularly stupid. The people called "Native Americans" today are just the descendants (ignoring how many of them are also descended from Europeans, sometimes proportionally more so than from non-Europeans) of the most recent waves of migration to the Americas from Eurasia [wikipedia.org]. It's rarely mentioned how these later waves likely destroyed previous cultures in the Americas, such as the Clovis people [wikipedia.org],
Clovis and Folsum were "cultures," not races of people. There is precisely zero evidence that anybody "wiped out" the Clovis culture.
because that wouldn't fit with the leftist narrative of today's "Native Americans" being perpetual victims.
Heeeeere we go. A typing toolshed. Cool.
Re:The editors should have fixed the summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, if you go through the history of the Americas, you find a lot of records of one group pushing out another, as well as some pretty good evidence that groups did indeed get wiped out. (Proving it tends to require there be written records.) Pushing out native peoples is not a European invention; until modern times it and weather were the driving forces behind all human migrations, and it still drives a lot of migration to this day.
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You're missing a critical point, dickhead: That still makes it wrong
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You're missing a critical point, dickhead: That still makes it wrong
No, I'm not missing it, I merely was presuming that the readers' IQs were sufficiently high that explicitly stating the obvious would be an insult to their intelligence. It doesn't need to be a European invention to be wrong, and the person I was replying to was denying that it happened in the Americas...which I suppose I ought to explicitly note is wrong--oh, and inherently racist, not for the least because some of the evidence we've got we have because the Natives themselves told us.
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It is not the number that is bad, if he sued a single person to force them off of their ancestral land, then their is no punishment too hefty for him.
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I don't much care for The Zuck, but before taking off on the all too predictable partisan political tears
I know the GOP lately doesn't seem to stand for anything but billionaires, but I don't think zuckerberg quite qualifies as a "partisan" issue yet...
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the county is likely within its power to seize the plots
I don't know how Hawaiian law works. But in my state (WA), unclaimed property is protected forever. Counties (and other parties) might be able to file a lien for fees, taxes and other obligations owed. But I don't think they can just 'take it away'.
and sell them to cover the costs
What costs? For unimproved land with no services, the cost to the county is zero. Even then, once the property owner is identified, they have the right (at least in my state) to make good on back taxes and fees.
What is it about having money... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is it about having money that turns people into such assholes?
I mean really, 700 acres? How can someone not find sufficient privacy for their family on 700 acres, even if it contains a few parcels he doesn't own?
Re:What is it about having money... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let the record show that Zuckerberg was an asshole long before he had money.
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Let the record show that Zuckerberg was an asshole long before he had money.
I don't think being an AH is strictly a prerequisite to getting rich, but it certainly seems to help.
Re:What is it about having money... (Score:5, Interesting)
Ironically, the bigger assholes here are Zuckerberg's attorneys, and they're being assholes to Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg doesn't need to sue anyone, nor does he need to track down the owners, nor does he need any fucking attorneys to acquire ownership of that land, and he doesn't even need to buy it.. All he needs to do is pay the back taxes on it, continue paying the taxes on it, and live there 20 years while improving the property, and ownership of the land passes to him via Hawaiian adverse possession laws. [findlaw.com]
Mr. Zuckerberg, your attorneys are fucking you. I hope you can enjoy it as much as everyone else is.
Ownership split between 300 heirs (Score:3)
As someone else said, Zuck's always been an asshole, long before he had money. In this case, the headline is utter bull, Zuck's doing something else assholish today, but the legal proceeding isn't what the headline claims.
As the article says, there are four half-acre parcels, owned by more than 300 descendants of the people who lived there 150 years ago. That is, each little parcel has about 80 owners, several of unknown whereabouts.
There's no chance anybody is going to track down all 300 descendants and ge
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even if it contains a few parcels he doesn't own?
That depends. Do you spend money buying land when the title of pockets of land is unclear?
Maybe look into the details a bit and realise that no one is actually living on the land. Heck some of the people in the target of the suit are actually dead. It's not a privacy issue as no one has been on his land, and entirely a case of "I bought something, but there's a few little black marks no one can identify, aren't being taxed, and the government hasn't ownership of them, courts please clear the situation."
Ther
Weird title uncertainty (Score:5, Interesting)
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Actually it isn't unclear at all. The owners (usually dozens or hundreds of them) are joint owners in all regards except that they can't unilaterally decide to sell the parcel.
What is unclear is how to divvy up the property taxes. Hawaii's property tax system is the second worst in the country, in terms of complexity. (Minnesota is still king, for totally different reasons.) But the software they use is perfectly capable of managing arbitrary numbers of co-owners per parcel.
I'm pretty sure Hawaii switch
If it was me... (Score:5, Funny)
I wish I owned an acre of land right in the middle of where he wants to build his house. I'd put a big barbed-wire fence around it, park the biggest, ugliest, smelliest old trailer I could find on it, demand continued access rights and refuse to sell at any money.
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and refuse to sell at any money.
Yeah. In reality you'd cave at the first offer.
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Native people are native? Shocking! (Score:5, Informative)
Who knew that Hawaiians were just another kind of Native Americans?
Apparently everyone but the author. What a moron.
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Native Hawaiians are Polynesians, not natives of North/South America.
No connection except that they are both "brown".
Editorial Summary is Terrible (Score:5, Informative)
Really, does this impact us in some way that I'm not seeing? At least with stories about Steve Jobs's megayacht, there was a cool megayacht to be interested in.
Re:Editorial Summary is Terrible (Score:4, Interesting)
Relax - it's BeauHD, who is the absolute shitposter of Slashdot.
It helps if you scroll through the editors, and pick and choose what to read. Assume that anything where BeauHD was the editor is going to be a cobbled together, misleading, politicized shitpost.
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That yacht is a damn fugly thing, though.
There's not enough "Stuff for Nerds" (Score:2)
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Interesting capitalization (Score:2)
Referring to Zuckerberg as "Him" makes the title of the article sound like he's being deified.
Messing with Madame Pele (Score:2)
Zuckerfuck is playing with fire... Literally fire and lava..
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Someone got *paid* (Score:2)
One of that worker's great-grandchildren, Carlos Andrade, 72, lived on the property until recently, the paper said. But the retired university professor told the Star-Advertiser that he is helping Zuckerberg's case as a co-plaintiff in an effort to make sure the land is not surrendered to the county if no one in his extended clan steps up to take responsibility for paying property taxes on the plots."
Someone got paid to betray his kin and I bet it was big enough to matter.
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What it doesn't say is if he let go of his claim on the land or not. He probably just wants it all to himself.
700 acres??? (Score:3)
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Re:700 acres??? (Score:5, Funny)
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1 square mile actually is almost 700 acres (640 to be exact). 20 acres is actually a pretty small tract for viewshed protection, unless you're in a forest. Heck, the Walmart in Albany, NY is 12 acres, and that doesn't include the parking lot.
Let's deal (Score:5, Funny)
If Hawaiians let us build our Thirty Meter Telescope, we will agree to cement Mark Zuckerberg into the foundation thereof.
Re: Let's deal (Score:2)
Can't we just skip the whole build a telescope part?
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Typical. We get two things we want and screw the natives over.
Fucking Scumbag (Score:2)
Zuckerberg is a scumbag. That is all.
Bullshit summary and article (Score:5, Informative)
The lawsuit(s) being filed are to determine ownership of the parcels of land. Not to force the sale of the land.
Zuckerberg is suing to find out who owns the land so that he can negotiate to purchase the land from them. Right now he can't purchase the land because no one knows who owns it.
He is not suing to force the sale, he is suing to make the sale possible.
this is God's will (Score:2)
Clearly Zuckerberg has more right to this land that the native Hawaiians whose family have had rights to it for generations. After all, Zuckerberg is a Jew and in the book that the Jews wrote it clearly says that God will always side with the Jews over all others no matter what. This is called "The Covenant". Jews have a long history of taking the land that they want from other people who it belongs to. Not just the Palestine settlements where they kill the Palestinians who are living there and then "settle
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lol +1
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I see your god and raise you a Pele. Let's see whose has more power come next eruption.
Rely on the army (Score:2)
They have a lot of experience nuking tropical paradises, why not put their knowledge to good use finally? There's only one owner and if you time it just right, he'll be gone with the wind after the test...
Dear Mark Zuckerberg (Score:2)
Please go fuck yourself you spoiled little bitch....
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Informative)
I think "Schwanzlutscher" is what you are looking for . . . but Arschloch is more appropriate, in this case . . . I'll try to think up something better, or ask some friends, since I am fluent in German, but not a native speaker . . .
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Funny)
What's German for "Rich Pathetic Sociopathic Bastard..."?
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Funny)
Zuckerberg
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More interesting is probably the term that Native Hawaiians are using to describe him, which would be "haole".
"Reiches, erbärmliches, sociopathisches Miststück" - Miststück literally means "piece of dung", but it is also used to describe a bastard, doing dick-headed piece-of-shit type things.
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Informative)
More interesting is probably the term that Native Hawaiians are using to describe him, which would be "haole".
Well, he is haole. The meaning of the word in the Hawaiian language is really "foreigner" but in common talk here, it has come to be a sometimes derisive term for a Caucasian. It can be, but is certainly not necessarily, racist or derogatory, and it isn't either of those in the true Hawaiian meaning of the word.
The Zuckerberg development was the lead front page story in today's Star Advertiser (our local Honolulu newspaper). It seemed to be to be presented in a negative light, as in, here goes another rich haole from the mainland grabbing Native Hawaiian land. It's easy to see it that way but in Hawai`i hardly anything is simple or straightforward, and I'm reserving judgment until I learn more about it, though siding with Zuckerberg would be pretty distasteful.
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Um, actually, the polite translation of haole is 'foreigner.' It's not at all a polite thing to call somebody--it's an outsider who steals from the group, usually feeling entitled to it. (That this is also the word used for all white people should tell you a lot about how Native Hawaiians feel about white people.)
So, really, still accurate!
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Zuckerberg (Score:3)
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Not just haole, he's even an asshaole.
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Jewish Surnames (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's please not. The reason his last name means "sugar mountain" in German is because in the late 18th Century [wikipedia.org] the various Germanic empires forced all Jews to have surnames, instead of being known as (e.g.) Yeshua ben Youssef -- a patronym, not a surname. If your family was on bad terms with the local magistrate then you might have had a surname that was actually insulting rather than merely ridiculous. So unless you're interested in reviving a particularly vile brand of antisemitism, please let's not give this man an insulting surname, even if you think he deserves shame and ridicule.
Re:Jewish Surnames (Score:5, Insightful)
So does being Jewish give you a pass for being an A*hole? Finally I understand Israeli behaviour.
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Being Jewish gives you a pass on nothing. It means you've already had your family name changed to something stupid.
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... the various Germanic empires ...
During the 18th century there was only one German empire.
Re:Jewish Surnames (Score:5, Informative)
Let's please not. The reason his last name means "sugar mountain" in German is because in the late 18th Century [wikipedia.org] the various Germanic empires forced all Jews to have surnames, instead of being known as (e.g.) Yeshua ben Youssef -- a patronym, not a surname. If your family was on bad terms with the local magistrate then you might have had a surname that was actually insulting rather than merely ridiculous. So unless you're interested in reviving a particularly vile brand of antisemitism, please let's not give this man an insulting surname, even if you think he deserves shame and ridicule.
There was nothing specifically antisemitic about these name changes. Efforts like these were a general trend during the enlightenment. All kinds of minorities and even entire nations were forced to change their age old naming conventions. This happened in large parts of Scandinavia for example where people were forced to abandon a traditional naming convention so old that it predated written history and replace them with the continental first/last name tradition. Various governments also tried to systematically exterminate minority languages and cultures such as Slavic languages in Germany, and Celtic languages in France, the UK and Ireland. The same happened to Native Americans in the US where the government even resorted to forcibly removing native children from their families, raising them in boarding schools and subjecting them to brutal discipline if they spoke their own language.
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Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Informative)
RTFA. Ownership of a grant total of 8 acres entirely enclosed within Zuckerberg's land is unclear. Nobody lives there. Nobody's paid taxes on the land in decades. The lawsuit basically says, "step up or shut up." If anyone actually steps up and says, "It's mine, here's the taxes and the proof I own it," then it doesn't get sold.
Re:Zuckerberg (Score:5, Informative)
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Then the problem is that to generate a clear title, the land must needs be sold. I would think that there would be some process to require those with a claim to either come forward or abandon their claim, without any need for a buyer whatsoever, unless the legal system is pretty much deliberately set up to force the sale of family lands.
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That's exactly the purpose of all these filings.
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There is a (potential) buyer involved here. It shouldn't be needed, and in fact I'd argue that from an ethics standpoint, it should not include an outside-the-group buyer. (If it's a group of people who have claims who want to buy out the rest, meh.)
Re: Zuckerberg (Score:3)
Thats not an unusual. People who die without wills in a few generations can leave land as a lot of tiny patches divided among descendents with no real idea which patch belongs to who.
My great-grandfather owned a farm near Thabazimbi but none of his kids lived there and over generations the divides got tinier and tinier. A few years ago I was contacted by the government who wanted to add the farm to a nature reserve, asking my consent to give up title to my tiny share. I gave it, all the relatives I know did
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Only in America could socialism be equated with liberalism...
Re:Typical (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article, these are parcels of land that no one lives on, but more than one people *own*. What his case is doing is forcing the land to be sold so that those owners can come forward and get paid for it. Most owners don't even realize they own the land.
So no one is being *forced out of their homes*. Basically they are getting money they didn't realize they had.
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Go fuck yourself.
If I could do that I wouldn't bother messing about here on Slashdot.
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Thou shalt not covenant thy Zuckerbergs land.
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Not so much refuse to pay as aren't aware they owe taxes on properties they weren't aware they owned.
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Not paying tax for years makes you forfeit your land?
Dibs on the Trump Tower!
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It's the plot of about a dozen A-Team episodes. Usually the asshole gets his ass handed in the end.
Why can't life follow TV a bit more?
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He's a bit late, 80 years ago they would not only have given him a bit of land but also a decent job and protected him day and night.
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He does behave a lot like a little kid who got a credit card without a limit for his birthday, doesn't he?
But that's pretty much what happens with people who never had to earn money.
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I don't really think we have to wait that long, there's already a sizable portion of the population that considers FB nothing less than the worst transgression of privacy since the fall of the iron curtain.
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Are you high, dumb or willfully ignorant?
Honest question.