The magnificent Surfrider Foundation cracks billionaire's private beach fantasy!
Close your eyes for a moment. Imagine you could live the perfect surf life.
What would it look like?
Just you and a couple of hand-picked friends surfing empty waves all day everyday, correct?
Gotcha!
Your fantasy is in violation of the law according to a California District Court of Appeals. Read the story from SFGate News then feel free to amend your dream:
“A state appeals court ruled Thursday that a billionaire landowner had no right to block public access to a San Mateo County beach without first obtaining a permit, rejecting arguments that a forced opening would be tantamount to stealing his property.
The 50-page decision by the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco affirmed a 2014 ruling by a San Mateo judge who ordered Vinod Khosla to give the public access to picturesque Martins Beach, near Half Moon Bay, which Khosla owns.
It was the latest slap-down of Khosla in a long, increasingly heated legal dispute with the Surfrider Foundation, which sued the co-founder of Sun Microsystems after he shut the access gate leading to nearly 90 acres of his coastal property in 2010. The nonprofit group founded by surfers charged that the closure amounted to development, requiring a permit from the California Coastal Commission. A judge agreed, prompting Khosla’s appeal.
“The courts said exactly what the Legislature said: The public has the right to access the coast,” said Joseph Cotchett, the lead attorney for Surfrider, in a hastily arranged news conference in his Burlingame office. “It’s their ocean. It’s their coast. It is not some private billionaire’s.”
Yes surfing, surfers, Surfriders, and the environment!
Good: 1 Evil: 0
This might be a terrestrial victory but is it a moral one?
Are we really happy that a single tech billionaire’s property was taken near Martin’s Beach so that a mass of tech millionaires could invade come in? Was this fight about the ocean or our greediness for waves?
Let me poke a stick at our collective proletariat stance for a moment before we gloat too hard.
Are we really happy that a single tech billionaire’s property was taken near Martin’s Beach so that a mass of tech millionaires could invade come in? (On the side, I wonder how much Surfrider attorney Cotchett brings in?)
Was this fight about the ocean or our greediness for waves?
The Surfrider Foundation does some wonderful things, but this legal effort doesn’t sit well. This isn’t like Mark Z’s Facebook Kauai land grab. (Hawaiians Crack Zuck! Read here.)
After all, if the Foundation really cared about the preserving the environment, wouldn’t it be better if they fought to keep Martin’s beach away from unknowns and in the hands of a man who has the resources to keep its sanctity?
And don’t try to convince yourself if you started a giant tech firm that you wouldn’t be the proud owner of a private piece o’ shoreline.
Maybe this is where our thinking goes afield.
In America, we don’t really hate the rich— we want to be the rich! This thinking is common.
It’s the same reason so many rip mercilessly on King Kelly. They don’t actually dislike him; they wish they had his fame, talent, and 11 world titles.
Sure, it’s fun to play Communist with other people’s stuff. But while we don’t have the time to talk Adam Smith, we should consider what it will be like the evening when Elon Musk comes knocking at your front door with that smug smile informing you of your eminent domain notice to allow his hyper-eco battery train to save the average shmo from overcrowding.
Hey, not so cool, now, right?
Why? Because we aren’t billionaires. Our property is important.
Man, I’m glad that Khosla got his can handed to him. Not because of my elevated sense of duty to the environment but because I’m selfish and want to surf anywhere I please.
The same is true of Surfrider, and of you, I suspect.
Now, close your eyes once more and imagine a crowded beach jammed packed with high-tech daytrippers on custom-colored resin drip boards waxed by their assistants. Oh, and all your hand-picked friends can squeeze into the lineup, too.
See you at Martins Beach!
You may open your eyes now.
Best ski terrain in the world, stunning views, wonderful alpine sports, but, yeah, no surf.
Most surfers in San Mateo County aren’t millionaires, but the ones who do make that much are surfing at Linda Mar, not Martin’s Beach 🙂
If people don’t fight for public coastal access easements, then over time the right to an access easement disappears and the once public trails become private property.
Yes! I agree with a commentator here!! I love Switz., and at one point I looked into getting citizenship there. It is one of the hardest countries to earn citizenship in if you are not family; you have to live in a particular canton for around 10 years, speak the language perfectly, and be held in high regard by your neighbors in order to be approved.
I think that is limiting for the US, as we do benefit from new ideas, and people on the make, but wow, its nice to see someone with a rational immigration system.
Sorry, why would I come up with a new rationale, when you haven’t answered the first, and turned an example of the issue into a “cherry-picking” straw-man fallacy “zika-zombie nation”?
-Um, no, if we had an immigration system like Australia, we’d be able to talk. The point is, and you haven’t yet answered it, is that with people not paying into the system but taking out of it, it doesn’t matter one whit whether the money is coming from the insurer or the govt. its still economically unsustainable.
I’ll put it another way. Imagine there was a land bridge between Australia and Indonesia, and your parliament passed a law saying that Indonesians could get free healthcare if they made it into the country. Your 2% off the paycheck would increase dramatically. Either that, or your govt. would have to borrow massively to fund it, and become insolvent. Balancing a budget, and the cash has to come from somewhere.
-You are committing the classic baby-bathwater here. Because there are some problems with the system, chucking it all out is better. And I dispute that in fact healthcare outcomes are superior simply because they have Universal systems.
-Despite the issues with premiums, there is much to recommend the closer to “market” version American healthcare, including a far higher proliferation of advanced tech., groundbreaking treatments that the rest of the world copies, and excellent outcomes if you get a really shitty disease, like Cancer, a disease in which American survival rates lead the world.
We could go back and forth here, and you can unjustifiably accuse me of any number of moral outrages, but I’ll leave the conversation with this: When you paddle out to your perfect Aussie point break, and there’s a set wave coming through that you have priority on, do you get pissed when the Brazzos drop in?
Maybe you don’t get pissed. Maybe you paddle to priority just to give it up to someone who didn’t earn it. Then you’re a better man than I, and you’re better than your own nation’s policies.
“In other words”, that’s putting it mildly.
A more accurate description would be that you took my words, looked them up in a thesaurus, chose the antonyms, wrote them out on a piece of paper, cut out the words, pasted them over a printed out screen shot of the shittiest Chopes wave this contest, cracked one off over them, set the paper on fire, got some coke, mixed it up with the sperm-paper ashes, snorted it, and, in your hallucinatory state, stabbed at a dictionary with a broken surfboard, screaming HODOR, and then randomly chose from the surviving pages the words which comprise your comment.
it would be better that 1000 people die who pay taxes their entire lives than to have someone who wasn’t born here to get their treatments paid for by people that have been paying their taxes
When he started liking fish dicks.
Well, its been thought of here as well, but no one has had the political will to see it through, scared shitless of being called -ist or accused of an -ism. Also, is it is against the law for a hospital to refuse care in the US, so they have to provide care for whomever walks through the door, regardless of their ability to pay, for however long they have to stay there. Of course, hospitals get paid by jacking up the cost of care for those with insurance.
A good example of this is the first case of a Zika baby being born in the US, in which a Central American Illegal immigrant arrived pregnant, had her baby delivered for an absurd sum due to the complications of the disease (all free to her), and then, because her baby was born in the US and was therefore a US citizen, got her citizenship as well. Now, the insurance consumer, me, is responsible for the care of the child until it dies, projected at well over a million dollars. And there are millions upon millions of illegal immigrants (and many legal) who do the same kind of thing.
By way of comparison, looking at reports, there are apparently as few as 64,000 illegal immigrants in Australia.
Yes, my preexisting conditions make me feel like a loser. Way to rub salt into my weeping vagina!
on the dole, no doubt
Wrong! I am a hand model.
Yeah, I hear ya. Fuckin Occy has the Bell full faced motorcycle helmet modelling genre sewn up tight. What with that muscular chin and all.
Like chiseled stone.
That’s Kayne yo!
Wife is happy now. The come hither came at a price, however, and now I’ve put away all my clothes that were left on the floor.
As I was saying, Australia has a lot of reasons to recommend universal healthcare, chief of which is that it is surrounded by water. Coupled with a rational immigration policy (only those who can contribute and support themselves can come in), this means that most who use the system have paid into it, making it economically sustainable.
In the US, however, there are millions and millions of people who are here illegally, and regardless of your view on whether or not that is a good thing, they take far more out of the system than they pay into it. Universal health care would simply bankrupt the country with current immigration levels, legal and illegal.
You clearly have really skewed information on illegal immigration and how much they do or don’t pay into the tax base.
Hey, I’m just asking for an immigration system as well thought out as Mexico’s, Australia, and Switz.
BTW if immigrants want to wait their place in line, contribute, not take, then come onboard.
What if we took a break from war and the “military-industrial complex” a little bit and focused on the America and its people. How much would it cost to have affordable health care. I can only imagine at the dinner tables around the world the Dad’s and son’s chuckling at our condition. We are lying to ourselves and be lied to saying that we are the greatest country in the world. Something is not right.
An excellent point. Though, any country when you can go surf in the morning, and go through five boxes of ammo in the afternoon isn’t all that bad.
I can’t put my finger on it yet, but there is something or manything about your writing style that truly burdens the reader.
So, I’m jumping in. Is this a good thing?
You’re asking me how a watch works. For now, let’s just keep an eye on the time.
I don’t know what the heck this means, but I’ll take it. I’m just trying to give readers a good time…and put ’em back on their heels a bit.
I heard Chesapeake Bay is real nice…..is true?
Hey, I met a girl and had to stay. I shovel gravel for a living, so I’m rarely looking up. By the way, you are gifted.
Thats what my wife thinks, that I’m special. I wasn’t being down on Chesapeake btw, I heard it’s a special place.
You’re kickin’ ass. Its just that the Dead Whale despises giving direct compliments because its not becoming of a cetacean specter. The fact that he deigned to give his flipper corporeal form so he could type the comment is the biggest compliment.
The Dolphin Slayer article will be studied as the height of 21st century satire in a thousand years by the free people of The United States of Bigly.
When you’re a specter, you are often misunderstood.
For example, I made this short selfie audio tape. On it I’m giving you a direct compliment. But what you hear is Tommy Chong after Cheech ate more acid than anyone Chong had ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Oh Mullet, right now the kids are playing in the pool and I’ve nearly convinced the wife to do an afternoon delight. On the other hand I can reply to you.
I’ll try to do both and be brief. Universal healthcare in Australia may work for Australia, which has most of its population paying into the system, and an imm . . .
wife just gave me a “come hither”. I’ll try to be brief, back in five.
You know how much we pay for our healthcare? 2% or less of our income. To provide a system, that isn’t perfect, but covers everyone. If you want private cover, and you can afford it, nothing is stopping you. And most of the problems come from less than ethical fucknuckles pulling scams, which to my mind isn’t a failure of the system so much
Here’s a graph! Every surfer loves graphs.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
We are visual people after all. None of this high faluting word stuff for us.
Having experienced APPALLING health care in two of those countries on the top, and excellent care at the one on the bottom, I am deeply suspicious of those metrics. The US simply has far better diagnostic equipment, standard in many hospitals.
As I understood Mullet, in Australian health care, you have to contribute to the economy (maybe be a citizen?) in order to receive it. In Switz, it is definitely the case. The cost of US health care is greatly increased by people not paying into the system being allowed to take out of it, by law. Moreover, if you have low income, or have retired, you get hugely subsidized or free healthcare in the US.
If the US had an immigration system similar to Australia or Switz., the cost of healthcare would drop considerably.
After all, if the Foundation really cared about the preserving the environment, wouldn’t it be better if they fought to keep Martin’s beach away from unknowns and in the hands of a man who has the resources to keep its sanctity?
see, this is where you make a mistake. why does the coastline need a billionaire to look after it? the government isn’t capable? does this guy have a stockade on the property?
Fuck the mainland. When I’m a billionaire, I’m buying an island and will pick and choose my surf buddies with extreme prejudice.
Until then, I demand the right to surf wherever I want.
I love America, but why oh why is it so batshit crazy?
ummm……it’s the moonshine?
You’re saying it’s not the chemtrails and vaccinations. Controversial.
Vaccinations are futile when viruses have such a solid mutate mute air rotational game.
I guess I’m just locked in the old school down the line rail work zone.
I’m in the same zone Postie, but I never felt like I locked into it. Rather, age hobbled me into the zone.
Yeah, I tried an air once. Smashed my shin on the rail, blood, an hour of sanding, glassing and sanding later, I decided I needed the rails more than airs.
honestly, bourbon, firearms, earth moving equipment, and Levi’s are all we’re good at
Yes…Yes…Yes…and Yes!
Comic book movies too!
they’re terrified if we give people taxpayer-funded healthcare that it’ll be Stalin in the White House within a year
Um, we do give taxpayer funded healthcare. Medicare, medicaid, for example.
right, and we also bend over by giving up a giant portion of GDP compared to any other westernized country with similar heath outcomes. we don’t lead any category despite spending more than anyone. and i bet you know this, that’s the worst part.
Oh Bitter, I hoped we were getting along. This has the potential to turn into an excessively long discussion, and I did surf today, so I’ll try to be brief.
I agree with you that American health care is outrageously expensive, but the more govt. becomes involved, the more it costs. Consider Obamacare, in which premiums have increased more than 100% for many consumers. In fact, if you can point to one govt. intervention into healthcare that has had a net reduction in costs (rather than a shuffling around), I’ll buy a modest bikini to support Billabong’s new line of unsexy bikinis.
Here in the Socialist, Soviet Republic of Australia we can go to the hospital for free!
Plus you guys have bitchin’ waves, a small population, and Occy. Oh to have been born in Australia!
i agree, let’s strive for brevity. the premiums did go up, cause the O-Care policies weren’t shot full of exemptions, exclusions, no coverage for pre-existing conditions, ability to drop you for filing claims, giant deductibles and tiny limits like those affordable ones people thought were so great until they tried to use them. its been a free market this whole time, we’ve been getting ripped off for long before the black guy was president.
Well in it’s defense, Obamacare helped me get three essential surgeries, while during Bush’s reign of stupidity I was denied insurance because of preexisting conditions. Denied to even PAY for insurance. Therefore I am biased.
Wouldn’t it be better if you never wrote about surfing, or surf spots or anything related to surfing? Your greed for money has somehow been justified in your head and you think writing for some rag like Beach Grit is ok? You’re wrong. It’s not. Quit now and take whatever self respect you have left and go write for some snowboard mag or website.
Steve writes a thoughtful article that causes readers to question their assumptions and takes hits like this, but he’s a good writer, and brings a perspective to which few on this forum are regularly exposed. I salute BG for publishing a writer that is familiar with Adam Smith. Many commenters here would do well to understand that another view of the world exists, and indeed that their world is Smithian in nature.
I disagree with him as I think everyone should have access to breaks as long as they’re not shitting on the property owners daffodils on the way down to the beach, but hey, I’m not so insecure in my own opinion that I can only respond with venom.
Keep up the good work, Steve. I assure you that these comments are not representative of the general surf population, but such people are fearful to voice their opinion, because they are afraid of getting bile like Miki’s.
The first rule of surfing is you don’t talk about surfing… because when you do you sound like a kook.
This guy is a prick! Great article. With that being said I wish I had a way to preserve my precious Pleasure Point from the techies, hipsters, and blow ins! Hopefully in the future we will all be equipped with status bracelets; which electrocute us when we paddle around locals while on vacation or chandelier someone’s perfect tube. That would sort things out a bit!!
How many days a year is Pleasure Point really a “perfect tube”? Just curious.
But yeah, Khosla is an evil cunt, Martin’s Beach sucks like most of SM County, tech bros/hipsters suck worse, and Steve Van Rees is writing about California from the Chesapeake Bay, where the worst day at Martin’s Beach is an 11/10.
So Mariano… you’re ripping on the guy who’s article your printing? Since you’re obviously some kind of hard core guy with the ability to call people cunts and down other people coast from the east to the west why don’t you share a little bit about yourself. You must be some kind of special guy. Lets hear your bio. I have no doubt I’ll be able to think of a few names to call you.
I’m printing? I don’t work here. I have deep differences of opinion with the management. But I occasionally help Negatron keep this from devolving into the STAB comments section.
Dude talked up his Maryland credentials in some other post. Irony is he’s nowhere near the part of the country he’s writing about.
The waves really aren’t that good in SM County, barring a famous winter spot that gets very crowded. But it’s still better than Maryland 99.9% of the time.
What tech company do you work for?
Hey, I’m new to this forum, but you guys need to lighten up! have some fun. Criticizing the east coast is probably insulting to east coast guys. And Miki, you seem angry that you are not a writer or better surfer. Just relax and have fun.
You are one hell of a sarcastic- saturated asshole.
“i’m new here but here’s how you should run your operation…”
I think SJP warrior Nick Carroll would call that “Lairdsplainin'”
did you see NC’s response to DA on the “white man ruins everything” Inertia article? i’m calling him “fair and balanced”
whereabouts ?
http://beachgrit.com/2017/0…
sort by: newest
ok, response in the comments…I thought you were referring to a separate article by NC.
yeah, in the comments
Carroll’s a smart guy, and like any surfer that brings the board appropriate to the conditions, he knows that the “splainin” suffix is all the rage with the kids these days. It is a disconcerting sign of the times that the conditions called for that board. Clearly, with the comment you referenced, he’s the tits.
But he was wrong, really. I was being polite. I win for being sactimonius and fake! That is how this game works, right?
Yeah but i won the prize. Right?
yes, you won the “prize”
Now you’re getting it. Criticizing the east coast is supposed to be insulting to east coast guys… it’s a tradition in surfing. Ha!
But of course, in the same way one can say Mogadishu is a shithole, one can hold an opinion about a break they’ve not visited. Or are we only allowed to pronounce on spots we’ve surfed? I’ve surfed Huntington, but not JBay, so I guess I can’t really say JBay is better.
I’m not the one giving mandates about what people can/should do. Just pointing out that author hasn’t lived what Kearney and many have seen in NorCal tech-bro land.
That’s funny. I wish I worked for a tech company. I live in a hard core town with world class surf and people who know how to protect the secrets and their coast from endless and needless exploitation by the greedy fringe dwellers of the sport of surfing. I also shape and ride all my own board for myself and my friends. What WallMart board rack you get your “board” from? Ha ha.
You read my comment too fast mate. I said, “…in the future we all”. But to answer your question 0.
Caught my first wave at a little rock jetty just west of the Chesapeake Bay bridge tunnel riding a blue single fin Hanson. You want to talk about short period wind swell. That place has to be holding the world’s finest..
All the good writers are pricks, but not all pricks are good writers.
I was referring to Khosla. But I agree!
I honestly enjoy the company of random peeps out at my peak.
If I talk to them too much about what a kook I am, eventually they disappear, and I’m left going over the falls next to some other people I can bore. It all works out fine because even when I was a shit-hot surfer, I was also a social animal and enjoy sharing the stoke. Up to a point …