Larry Ellison Rejuvenating Hawaii's Sixth-Largest Island (Which He Owns) 297
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."
Re:impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Incredible (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org]
Re:impossible (Score:5, Interesting)
>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.
Re:impossible (Score:2, Interesting)
Having no mod points for "define murder", I will therefore expound on it: Since Roe V. Wade, the right not to be murdered has again been restricted to exclude a large class of people.
Moreover, the right to not be murdered was still only limited to "the right not to be murdered by the government without due process. " Sometimes evil politicians made use of it; Sometimes, as with the Downwind Experiments or the Tuskegee experiments, they ignored it. Recently, the Executive department of the government has pointed out theat they don't need to pay any attention at all to that right.
So theright not to be murdered is tenuous at best.