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Larry Ellison Rejuvenating Hawaii's Sixth-Largest Island (Which He Owns)
McGruber writes "In June of 2012, we discussed news that Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief executive of Oracle, purchased the Hawaiian island Lanai for $300 million. Ellison now owns nearly everything on the island, including many of the candy-colored plantation-style homes and apartments, one of the two grocery stores, the two Four Seasons hotels and golf courses, the community center and pool, water company, movie theater, half the roads and some 88,000 acres of land. (2% of the island is owned by the government or by longtime Lanai families.) Now Ellison is attempting to win over the island's small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions. He and his team have met with experts in desalination and solar energy to change the way water and electricity are generated, collected, stored and delivered on the island. They are refurbishing residential housing intended for workers (Mr. Ellison's Lanai Resorts owns and manages 400 of the more than 1,500 housing units on the island). They've tackled infrastructure, such as lengthening airport runways and paving county roads. And to improve access to Lanai, Mr. Ellison bought Island Air earlier this year and is closing a deal to buy another airline."
Well, I hope that he manages to keep good relations with the natives or they will turn the tables on him. He had better have a backup strategy for this transaction.
Ezekiel 23:20
You know, for the lair.
This is the end result. Oligarchs. Trickle Down Economics was a scam.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
1. Buy property / imaginary property
2. Close it up
3. Anger the community
4. Wait for staff to quit
5. Replace existing features with unwanted bling
6. Force users of Island #5 to use the new facilities offered on Island #6
7. ?
8. Profit
[Rent This Space]
With enough money, you are the government. Haven't you been paying attention to U.S. history at all?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Well, I tend to think people go overboard with the whole private enterprise / government debate. I tend to lean a little towards private enterprise, if only because if I don't like a company I can boycott them and take my money elsewhere. Government, not so much.
I think the proper balance is to let private enterprise to the work, try to maximize profits, but under heavy government oversight and regulation, because corporations have no ethics or morals other than the profit motive - all other things and people are secondary. And if you notice, a lot of the whining coming from the corporate class is about too much regulation. Not a coincidence.
Ellison hasn't done anything but buy a bunch of stuff yet. And by the way, he bought most of the island of Lanai from another private enterprise.
Further, if the people don't like what Ellison is does with the place, what can they do, vote him off the island?
Anyway, might be worth keeping an eye on this project a little longer before you start your Galtian touchdown dance, roman_mir, the history of private enterprise owning islands really isn't all that pleasant, at least for the people who live in those places.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Seriously? Who is going to pave the roads in your city where the property belongs to thousands to millions of people and companies instead of just one?
It sounds to me like what Ellison is trying to create is a modern fiefdom in Lanai. Maybe the next thing you'll hear of him is referring to himself as the Prince of Lanai.
Ellison is one of the more productive people in the world, he was able to devise a machine that is his company, that makes him one of the most productive people out there. All of his employees, all of his properties, they are all extensions of this machine.
I'd put it a little differently. Ellison is a very clever man who has devised a way of diverting a fraction of the productivity of over 100,000 people into his pocket. That way is the Oracle Corporation. Indirectly, his company diverts a fraction of the productivity of about 390,000 corporate customers comprising the efforts of millions of people into his pocket.
Nobody ever accumulated great wealth any other way. The most you can ever achieve from your own productivity is to be moderately comfortable.
Larry is developing a plantation, not a municipality, so comparing this paragon of capitalist initiative with - say - the rest of Maui County is invalid. Lanai Island Holdings, LLC is just another plantsite, no different in principle than the Oracle Corp HQ. So, he's investing just for himself and David M. Based on his expressed plans, I for the most part it works out. But, it's reasonably obvious that this is a hobbyist pursuit.
The rest of the County is home to a variety of people, companies, and competing interests, so it makes sense that infrastructure that serves their common good is held as public trusts. Quite a bit of the work is contracted out to private firms, particularly when it requires occasional use of capital equipment it doesn't make sense for the County to invest in. But, by and large, private ownership of utilities and other public services hasn't proved to be anyone efficient than public ownership. Running such enterprises pits maximizing public utility against maximizing private return on investment, and the public loses if/when rent seeking in the part of a private owner perverts the direction of public policy.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Oracle is expensive, but if it were really overpriced then you'd see lots of cheaper alternatives. For a lot of workloads, something like PostgreSQL will get the job done for a fraction of the price. When you really need something at the high end, however, Oracle or a small handful of other companies will charge you similar amounts. The real problem for a company like Oracle is the same as the problem for SGI. In the '90s, a database with a few GBs of data was something you needed Oracle (or similar) and a lot of hardware for. Now, a cheap commodity machine can keep the whole thing in RAM for read-only queries and can write to an SSD (or a few in RAID-1) for a few thousand dollars, including the time it takes someone to set it up. The number of companies that have data of a size where an Oracle DB will work is increasingly small: at the very high end, you have companies like Google and Facebook that can't use any off-the-shelf solution, and at the other you have companies that can get away with cheap commodity hardware and an open source RDBMS.
This is why companies like IBM and Oracle are focussing heavily on business applications and vertical integration. They may be expensive, but there's a whole class of medium sized enterprises for whom it's a lot cheaper to periodically give a huge pile of money to Oracle periodically than it is to have a large in-house IT staff.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
On the other hand, with private enterprise, boycotting them is about all you can do, which sucks if your whole life is there. If someone bought your county and made your life unbearable, would you consider moving away an acceptable remedy? What if that meant leaving your friends and family and maybe the business that you worked your whole life to build.
He's got money for this, but no money to give me contact with an Oracle support engineer on my continent who speaks English, and can reach me in a timely fashion.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Private companies may exist to profit for the most part, but the fact is that competition forces them to become efficient and sacrifice profit.
Ellison is a clever man who helped invent the modern RDBMS, which is the basis for much of today's information technology.
What have you invented lately?
"Henry Ford was a clever man who invented the otherwise useless automobile, which helped him to divert the productivity of his newly created workforce into filling his personal pocketbook"
"Edison was a crafty fellow who invented this light bulb thing which wasn't very useful, except to divert the productivity of many workers into fattening his own wallet"
"Einstein was a cunning patent clerk who came up with this stupid Relativity thing, which wasn't very useful to anyone except Einstein, because it allowed him to cleverly gain the confidence of the so-called scientific community, while also turning him into a household name."
"Slashdot was invented just to provide an outlet for too-clever-by-half Tinfoil Hatters (Haters?)..."
claiming that "we cant give away products for free. it doesnt make business sense", oracle president larry elliosn announced that his ownership of the island now extends to the air people breathe. "if they are breathing my air, i want to somehow try to monetize and get a return to your shareholders" ellison said.
happened under a republican president, the son of Reagan's vice president, whil the treasury secretary was a former Goldman Sachs CEO.
you are hereby banned from ever complaining about 'socialist democrats' ever again. ever.
if I don't like a company I can boycott them and take my money elsewhere. Government, not so much.
What's stopping you from moving to a country that has a government more to your liking?
Benevolent dictatorships are fine as long as you agree with the king/laird/CEO/ whatever.
Fall out with him and you'll lose your house, your job, and all those related to you might suffer. Rich people running islands is not a great long term plan. Ask the population of Eigg in Scotland, for example. All good until your nice rich person gets bored with his toy and neglects local services that people need, or sells it to a Bad Rich Person, etc.
I would have though US citizens, of all the places in the world, would have a historical perspective on what happens when uncaring kings run your country, and what the poor but honest citizens should do to resolve the lack of decision making power.
Very curious. Of course Ellison might be a lovely chap and improve the situation - it sounds like people do need improved services... but one man owning an island and having no accountability on his decision making power over people's homes and jobs, this makes me nervous... it's not like the people living here can change employers or move down the road if they are unhappy, it's an island. I'd be interested to hear his thoughts about the democratic processes, how the local people have the option to veto his decisions if they disagree, and so forth.
If he's really in it for the long term, wouldn't it make more sense to go for independence from the USA and ask the people to elect him as their President?
"God-Emperor" is probably more suited to his tastes.
Don't you know? As part of a collective you can steal from the rest and give yourself a nice subsidy. You can force an obligation upon the rest of the people and give yourself a nice entitlement.
That's what 'civil rights' are there is no such thing, there are only individual rights.
There are no 'women rights', there are no 'gay rights', there are no 'children rights', there are no 'minority rights', there are no 'disabled rights', there are no 'worker rights', etc.etc.
There are only individual rights and when some group (any group) is given what the modern collectivist state likes to call 'civil right' what it actually does it puts an obligation upon some people to provide entitlements to some group. This is the exact opposite of the meaning of the concept of 'right'.
A right is only a meaningful concept in the context of a relationship between an individual and the State, not 2 individuals, not an individual and a business. A right is limitation of authority of the collective to destroy rights of an individual.
'Civil right' is the exact opposite of an actual right, 'civil right' relies on destruction of actual real individual rights, it's Orwellian doublespeak.
roman_mir
The problem with Oracle is two-fold. Large organizations have products chosen by buyers, not developers, and PostgresSQL et al do not buy lunches, golf outings, or vacations. In addition, many people after having Oracle around for a bit make the mistake of using it as more than just a database, putting business logic, etc, in their database layer using Oracle's proprietary extensions. This makes it extremely difficult to switch products. Oracle can raise prices quite a lot and people pretty much have to keep paying. This is why typing your business to a proprietary product or format with a single provider is generally a very bad idea.
Ellison is a clever man who helped invent the modern RDBMS, which is the basis for much of today's information technology.
Oh please.
Ellison is a clever man who implemented parts of a modern RDBMS. The invention happened elsewhere, and without Ellison the field would have been advanced at pretty much the same pace. He is noted mainly for his business acumen and inhuman practices to achieve his goals.
That's as stupid as saying Steve Jobs invented the iPod, the Mouse, the Desktop, or Multitasking. He didn't.
Ellison has a history of being just terrible. When the San Carlos airport cite him for breaking noise ordinances when he flies in during "quiet" hours -- you know, waking up uncounted residents in the area -- he just laugh and pays the fine, over and over again. Now he's suing the airport in San Jose airport so he can do the same thing to that city's 800,000 residents.
Hawaiians can expct zero consideration from this proven douchebag.
Tom Geller
Privately financed infrastructure projects! Ahh, in the 18th century, that was called royalty. The lord of the manor controlled everything, paid tribute to more powerful entities, and exercised his droite de seigneur over the realm. This is all lovely until the lord succumbs to the moral cancer that invariably comes with that level of power, or until their finances fall apart and another mobster (err, I mean titled landowner) takes over. At that point Lanai will become a miniature, tropical Detroit.
This is disgusting, and it's probably worthwhile to point out that Oracle is among the largest and most successful gangster-based business enterprises on the planet. Go ahead and buy an Oracle product-- it will never go away. Get used to the license audit shake-downs, the version lock-in, the upgrades that cost more than the now-obsolete earlier version. Oracle embodies everything that's wrong with late-empire monopoly capitalism, and Larry Ellison is the grinning goof-ball poster boy.
And for the record, Oracle makes a fine piece of database software-- software so good, it finances Larry's wildest dreams.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
They won't grant me citizenship.
The way to solve that was to have 50 states and very little federal law thus creating competition among the states for population, which directly correlates with their tax revenues. Now that the federal government took over everything and made most of the states indentured servants, finding another country is the only real option left if you don't like your government's way of managing things.
Mind the frickin' laser...
Wrong. Ellison did not help invent the modern RDBMS. The concept of a DBMS started with Charles W. Bachman and later Edgar Codd refined the concept into the relational model. Please vacate my lawn.
It's not the difference between civil rights and individual rights, it's the difference between Civil Rights and Natural Rights. Natural rights are rights that exist due to the fact that you exist, they are often called "God Given Rights" by the Theists. Civil Rights on the other hand are Government Given Rights and what Government gives, tyhe Government can take away
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Ellison didn't invent the Oracle database, he bought the efforts of those who did. Larry Ellison is the same as every Afghan warlord, Saudi princeling, or Russian oligarch-- a twisted parasite on the planet. His efforts did not create productivity, they stole productivity.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
It sounds like Mr Ellison is on his way in creating his own Jurassic Park. He'll probably use *nix too so the kids can help out.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
He's really just trying to create a stable supply of virgins to toss down Mauna Loa's throat. The only thing that produces more hot air than Larry Ellison is a volcano. And he's working to stop that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
AFAICS he's just hedging his bets for societal collapse, Island paradise, food and energy self sufficiency, supply of servants ...
and If I don't like Larry and I live on that island I can boycott him. Wait, no. I can't. He _owns_ the entire island. Seriously, can we all just just read the wikipedia article on the railroad trusts and call it a day? Oh, and vote. We can vote. Heck, I'll bet the number of successful changes due to election dwarfs the number of successes from a boycott. Can anyone name me the last successful large scale boycott?
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That depends entirely on what the private company is offering. If the private company owns the only road between your house and your job, how are you planning on boycotting?
At least with government I know their motivation for building and maintaining that road isn't a 60% gross profit margin every quarter. You can argue about inefficiencies but I can tell you first hand there isn't a fortune 100 company in this country that is anymore efficient than our federal government. Size breeds inefficiency, it's just a fact of life.
Not to mention water, power, communication (less so nowadays), etc.etc.etc. There are a *lot* of regional natural monopolies in the world, and where those are involved the free market pretty much guarantees that everyone gets shafted.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>the government restricts or doesn't restrict rights of everyone evenly.
Not just restricts, but protects. Abolishing slavery (insofar as we actually managed to do so) had nothing to do with government restrictions on rights, it was a matter of the government stepping in and eliminating socially supported private restrictions on rights.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Reminds me more of L Bob Rife ("Yeah, you know, a monopolist's work is never done. No such thing as a perfect monopoly. Seems like you can never get that last one-tenth of one percent"). And owning a whole island makes an aircraft carrier look a bit second rate.
because corporations have no ethics or morals other than the profit motive This is arguable.
But worse, is the unspoken assumption of the flip-side: "governments are moral and only have the public good at heart" -- which of course is arguable too.
Both public and private institutions are made of of people, and the culture of each organization can vary from what one would consider "ideal".
What is "ideal" is arguable.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Well, the Mr. House ending was the most favorable outcome New Vegas could have had. So there's that.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Let's explore that thought a bit.
Say the local islanders dislike Mr. Ellison's policies. Say, for example, that someone wants to start a local airline which competes with the ones that already serve the island. Well, the ones that serve the island are owned by Ellison, and any competition is going to eat into profits. Fortunately (for him) he also owns the airport, so he can just refuse to allow the 3rd party airline to fly there.
Of course this competing airline could start their own airport, but that's likely prohibitively expensive. And even if they had they money, Larry owns all the land on the island, so he can just refuse to lease them land on which to run an airport.
The inhabitants of this island are, for all intents and purposes, indentured peasants to Larry Ellison. He has an effective monopoly on their food, housing, and transport off the island, and they have only as much say in how he runs things as he feels like letting them have. If you honestly think that's a good way to live, then I'll be happy to purchase your house and vehicle from you and let you pay me rent (at a rate that I choose, of course).
Of course Lanai is an extreme example, but similar problems occur when you try to run certain types of infrastructure projects with private companies on the mainland. For certain classes of things like roads, water/sewer lines, and probably electric, the amount of space and planning required makes it prohibitive to build multiple competing services. You can't have a city based on TWO separate street grids. And trying to run more than one water system or electric grid through the same town would get intrusive and immensely confusing in all but the most sparsely populated areas.
So what you end up with out of necessity is either a government monopoly or a private one. You no longer have the ability to "take your money elsewhere" so the private company has zero incentive to listen to you. With the government monopoly, though, you get two major benefits: one, you're guaranteed a vote, and in a local government that means a lot more than at the federal level; and two, the government's goal is to serve the needs of the citizens, NOT to make a profit off them.
In short, you've grossly oversimplified the problem. Of course private corporations COULD own and run infrastructure projects. Nobody's disputing that. But it's highly unlikely that they would run it WELL in cases where competition isn't feasible.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Anyone wonder how all of this land came to be for sale ? And, how good his title is?
In the old Hawaiian monarchy set up by Kamehameha, the King owned all of the land. In the "Great Mahele" (division) of 1850, private land ownership was introduced, with 1/3 of the land going to the crown, 1/3 to the commoners, and 1/3 to the chiefs (the "ahupua" land, really a type of shared commons). Due to failure to follow through with paperwork, only about 1% of the "commoners" land was actually allocated to commoners. (I believe that there are only 4 acres on Lanai, out of 40,000 or so, that are actually available for fee simple purchase by the likes of us - that would be the old commoner land.) This old map shows the division into Crown and chief lands after the Mahele. This article describes how Claus Spreckels (a sugar baron) got fee simple for the entire island (minus the 4 acres, and some state land). Of course this was corrupt, but note the corruption appears to have occurred before the 1893 coup d'etat that destroyed the old Hawaiian monarchy and delivered the country over to the USA as a territory.
Does he have good title? I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc., but my guess would be no, not to all of it. The courts and political system in Hawaii tend to look very favorably to claims from Hawaiian natives about land ownership. There is an entire state bureaucracy, the Department of Hawaii Homelands, dedicated to returning crown lands (and other state lands) to Hawaiians. The DHHL has a land use plan for Lanai, which is full of more facts and maps about Lanai land history and ownership for those who are interested.
Here is my guess how this will proceed. Ellison will develop this and that and eventually do something that will seriously piss off Lanai locals, and then will be enveloped in clouds of lawsuits and political agitation until he sells the land. Having heard stories of the way he runs business meetings, and having had some dealing in Hawaii real estate at the Federal level, I think that predicting a collision is a good bet, and it would be highly unlikely to end favorably for Mr. Ellision.
Yeah, those hundred thousand employees would have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO if they didn't work for Oracle, because apparently according to you software designers and programmers and salespeople basically have no value until some industrialist tells them what to do.
That's not the problem. The problem is, as the summary said: "Now Ellison is attempting to win over the island's small, but wary, local population, one whose economic future is heavily dependent on his decisions."
In other words, the local population now pretty much lives at Ellison's mercy, and once he dies at the mercy of whoever inherits him. A privately owned society is a nightmare where you depend on the benevolence of your local feudal lord. And perhaps Ellison is benevolent and smart enough to think long-term; that doesn't change the fact that these people now depend on his whims. And that's a terrible way to live.
Pure capitalism/libertarianism is the dictatorship of whoever has the most money. This is a perfect example of that. And that's why privatizing vital infrastructure is a bad idea.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
1. so there was no dotcom burst?
2. when was the first CDO created?
3. when the GOP controlled both houses of congress and the presidency in the early 2000s, why didnt they repeal it then?
4. im not saying clinton wasnt involved, but the guy tried to blame the whole thing on 'communist democrats' which is what they call, "a fucking lie written by a stupid asshole" in the business.
Hmmm... your argument is that no entity besides a government can own property, counteracting every dictionary definition of the word "own", every legal understanding of the word "own", and every use of the word "own" going back hundreds of years.
Who's spouting hyperbole?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Given that your idiosyncratic definition of "ownership" can, by definition, only ever apply to a sovereign government, it's not a term that is likely to come up for conversation very often. In the meantime, we would need some other term, which could apply to the state we currently call "ownership", an everyday situation which frequently comes up in conversation, as it involves billions of people.
Gee, I have an idea! Why don't we use the common, everyday word to describe the common, everyday situation, and invent some complex, specialized, technical term to describe this rarefied form of national-sovereignty "ownership" you have in mind?
People keep saying " look at the Monsanto Protection legislation," but pretty much no one actually looks at it.
What they really mean to say is look at this particular proponent's / opponent's spin on the legislation. I have not read the Monsanto legislation, I'm quite open to it being a travesty, but I did read (well much of it, skimmed some) the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Nowhere did it say that corporations are people, that phrase was coined by the opponents of the decision as a wonderfully successful attempt at framing, manufacturing a narrative. What the decision actually said was that groups of people have the same speech rights as an individual person and it does not matter if that group is a corporation, a labor union, an advocacy group, an activist group, etc.
well yeah if by inventing you mean copying from the germans.
not sure if ellison did that with the db though!
wait a sec jobs copied his algorithms from fraunhofer and his design from braun... I think I found the key to success in america.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Why stop at Standard. Let's talk about AT&T. You know, where long distance fees never went down, and you had to RENT your telephone because they wouldn't support attaching a phone to their network that wasn't owned by them. But, but, but, monopolies are good!
Regardless, your non-sensical Standard rant has NOTHING to do with my point: which was the history of Larry. If you spent 30 seconds dealing with Oracle, you'd see that lowering prices, only to raise them when a market is cornered is EXACTLY how he operates. Throwing around insults when you're too ignorant to do even a basic fact check of the "CAPITALISM FIXES EVERYTHING!" bullshit is an infantile response that sounds like it's coming from someone who's too emotionally unstable to have a rational discussion. IE: You.
As for energy prices falling, that had nothing to do with standard, and everything to do with discovering larger and easier to get at oil reserves. But why let the details get in the way of your fantasy?
Funnily enough, in the UK at least, the people most reliant on welfare are those most likely to support government attempts to cut welfare entitlements, even though they themselves are likely to suffer due to those policies. This seems to be a result of the constant demonisation of welfare recipients in the newspapers most likely to be read in lower-income households.
Owen Jones is particularly good on this.
Some reasons that the modern welfare state keeps growing:
- People keep having children
- Cuts in state funding of social investment programmes (such as parenting education initiatives, adult education classes, social housing construction etc) reduce the chances of people in the lowest income brackets from being able to find work that will lift them out of poverty
- The national minimum wage (in the UK) is less than the living wage, so work in many cases does not pay
and at any rate it was 23 years ago. Not really a "recent" example... I'd also argue that corporations have much tighter control today. They do learn after all. I remember when Pakistan and India had that dust up where a bunch of Pakistanis launched a major terrorist strike. In the 80s that woulda started a war, and we were all expecting it. Except a war would be bad for all the corps using cheap Indian/Pakistani labor...
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