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Zuckerberg Sues Hundreds of Hawaiians To Force Property Sales To Him (msn.com)
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."
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.
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.
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?
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 . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Although I'm not a Zuckerberg fan, the headline is a little misleading. Apparently for most of these parcels, the actual ownership is unclear-- the ownership is split sometimes among hundreds of descendants of the original owners, and in some cases it's not clear who owns it, or if they're even alive or if they're not, who the heirs are. This seems to be the only way to clear title to the land.
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.
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.
What's German for "Rich Pathetic Sociopathic Bastard..."?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Zuckerberg
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
Who knew that Hawaiians were just another kind of Native Americans?
Apparently everyone but the author. What a moron.
People have been saying it for years, but I really feel like this place isn't what it used to be. Here we have a terrible, click-baity headline followed by a terrible, lazily editorialized summary, none of which is "News for Nerds" or "Stuff that Matters."
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.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Go fuck yourself.
If I could do that I wouldn't bother messing about here on Slashdot.
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. It's rarely mentioned how these later waves likely destroyed previous cultures in the Americas, such as the Clovis people, 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.
sheesh! what is zuckerburg trying to do? start his own country? even if i was a billionaire i would not want more than maybe 1 square mile, heck i could find plenty of privacy in 20 acres of back wood land in rural montana or wyoming, build a nice warm mansion that looks like a GIANT log cabin in where it cant be seen from the nearby roads, and put up a chainlink fence around it topped with razor wire, and motion detectors & security cams
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If Hawaiians let us build our Thirty Meter Telescope, we will agree to cement Mark Zuckerberg into the foundation thereof.
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.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You might think so... I thought so, too, a couple decades ago when the broker handling my 401k touted some investment scheme involving land prices in Hawaii never losing value. I lost about ten grand on that one.
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
This. Despite the Power To The People headline, this is something he's forced to do under Hawaiian law if he wants to have any hope of a clear title to the property.
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.
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 get them to all agree on *anything* - selling or anything else. So the land sits there, of no use to anyone. The legal filing allows Zuck to pay the 300+ descendants for land they probably didn't know they had any ownership interest in, and weren't making any use of.
Why does it matter to him? It doesn't matter much, but consider if you owned a big house, but someone else owned the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and had the right to come in to the house to get to their medicine cabinet. That of course affects resale value, and it's just weird.
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.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
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!
Let's please not. The reason his last name means "sugar mountain" in German is because in the late 18th Century 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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Ha-ole literally translates into "without breath" as Hawaiians in the time of Captain Cook's encounter greeted each other by touching foreheads together and exchanging breaths (the honi). Cook, obviously not Hawaiian, was unaware of the custom and didn't greet the Hawaiians in this way and was assumed to be "without breath." The term entered the vernacular and today is a pejorative for Caucasians.
Closest to the truth I've heard. From what I was told by family on one of the islands where haoles are about as rare as penguins. It's roughly translated to "without soul" apon first seeing white skin they thought they were ghosts. Apparently cook should never have brought turkeys or Hawaiians might not have gotten curious if white meat was also better when it came to people. The last part was me just speculating.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
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 too. The land is now part of a nature park.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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[m].
And it's not just people who die intestate. I (sort of) own a piece of property with unclear title - a small parcel adjoining the piece I do have title for. Around 90 years ago, the then-owner sold a quit-claim deed for this piece to someone else, and it then got sold on through various people to me. However, his wife's name was also on the warranty deed at the time he sold it. She may well have not been alive then; people were simply pretty casual about probate in that time and place. Or she may well have agreed to the sale but not signed the quit-claim.
The upshot is that title is unclear. The husband and wife were probably joint tenants with right of survivorship, but they may have been tenants-in-common. In the former case the transfer could be contested by the wife's heirs; in the latter, the wife's heirs would still technically own a half-right in the property. (At least that's my understanding, but this is in New Mexico, where land ownership is even more complicated than usual. The title search for the piece I have title for goes back to a Letter of Patent from the king of Spain to "an inhabitant of the ultramarine colony of New Mexico". Three-cultures litigation over land ownership claims going back to the original Spanish settlements continues today, though fortunately my land isn't contested in that court.)
Anyway, if I want title and a warranty deed to this small parcel, rather than just the quit-claim, I'll have to file a Quiet Title suit. My lawyer says that in New Mexico there's something like a six-month waiting period after publication of the suit, to give potential claimants time to find out about it and marshal their evidence.
You might think no one would notice such a thing, but these communities tend to have extensive networks of personal relationships. Sometimes quiet-title suits go unchallenged, but often local lawyers will see them, know the families that might have a claim, and get in touch with them.
I dare say I'd end up with the title. The parcel is an enclave surrounded by clear-titled property and too small to build on (because of septic requirements), so it's not of much use to anyone but me or the other neighbors. But I might end up paying someone for their right to it. Such is property. And it'd be a win for them, since they aren't getting any use out of it now.
So the Zuckerburg situation may be the same thing. The article implies that at this point none of the owners are using the land. It's possible that many of them don't know they have a claim on it. They might well prefer to cash out.
Or they might not.
I'm no fan of the Zuck, and I am a strong supporter of indigenous rights. I'm also well familiar with the history of the US annexation of Hawaii. But I'd have to learn more before condemning this particular move.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?