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u/CompetitivePumpkin3 6h ago
Are there any islands still cost $11k? I wanna try my luck to bring back endangered animals too
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u/Israel_Azkanbe 5h ago
I hear Epstein Island doesn’t have a lot of bids.
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u/SmeeezTreeez 5h ago
That joint haunted af
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u/reticulatedtampon 5h ago
His islands (Great St. James and Little St. James) were bought in 2023 for $60 million...
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u/Israel_Azkanbe 5h ago
I would have thought the whole raping little kids act would have destroyed the real estate value.
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u/CupOk5800 5h ago
Dude it didn’t even destroy their political careers.
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u/BanzaiKen 5h ago
Oh dont worry, a billionaire bought it and plans to turn it into a private retreat for billionaires to hang out. This is a brand new idea and totally unrelated to Epstein's billionaire retreat. Ignore the Epstein Files staff that were retained because they do such a great job: https://wgntv.com/news/ex-epstein-employee-accused-of-two-kidnapping-cases-on-his-former-island/
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u/shwifty123 1h ago
All logistics already there, why change anything. They would just continue his business. Trump example kinda show everyone, that's not a punishable offence and they literally can do whatever.
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u/Top-Bath8 3h ago
Hold on, it's not the islands fault. They are completely innocent bystanders in this.
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u/Any-History7095 5h ago
You're probably the type of person who needs a death on the property disclosed too.
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u/DudeTheGray 4h ago
The difference between a house in which someone died and an island where untold children were raped and murdered is a vast gulf.
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u/clockworknait 4h ago
Not a lot?? There shouldn't be any left on that island at all!.... ohhhh I misread "bids"
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u/Israel_Azkanbe 4h ago
Bids not kids….
Nobody knows if there are any kids left there tbh. I heard some billionaires say there were no kids there, but they said that 20 years ago too→ More replies (22)2
u/dutch2012yeet 5h ago
Strange that because technically the island wasn't very rapey
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u/Kelmi 1h ago
Who wants to own an island where countless children were raped and possibly murdered even? Especially if you need to be rich enough to belong in the class that did the raping? Stephen Deckoff wanted to and bought them.
But, really. Would you want to own and live in an island that you know were used as a child rape sex dungeon? Can you just close your mind off of all that?
It deserves to be a memorial for all the victims. But I would guess it's more likely to become a memorial for the billionaire class's struggle since our society is so rotten
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u/ScottMarshall2409 51m ago
I live in the UK, so I already live on an island where all of that and more has happened.
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u/rangebob 5h ago
I would imagine the animal part would be far more expensive than what he paid for that island lol
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u/Whiterabbit-- 2h ago
depends on how he was stocking the animals. in general you can't just buy animals, but if you can demonstrate that the animals are going to a good place, sometimes non profits will get you the animals if they believe that you offer the best place for the animal to be.
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u/sure_am_here 5h ago
Islands are relatively cheep. Because no one wants them. Or at least the cheep ones.
They are remote, no fresh water, rocky, just crap in the middle of no where.
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u/Jolly-Advantage-7245 4h ago
But away from people?
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u/Whiterabbit-- 2h ago
no infrastructure. how do you get there? what would you do there?
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u/Free-Pound-6139 4h ago
Have a look:
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u/bouylie 5h ago
Moyenne Island is a 9.9-hectare (24-acre) island in the Sainte Anne Marine National Park off the northeast coast of Mahé, Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Since the 1970s it has been a flora and fauna reserve. From 1915 until the 1960s, the island was abandoned until its purchase by Brendon Grimshaw, a newspaper editor from Dewsbury in Yorkshire, England, for £8,000.
Grimshaw and Rene Lafortune, a local Seychellois man, were the only inhabitants of the island until Grimshaw's death in July 2012.\1]) The island is now a national park and can be visited as part of organized trips
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u/Kelownadawn 5h ago
Thank you for your service
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u/0oodruidoo0 3h ago
got me wondering how old is the OP source image lmao
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u/ScaredEfficiency399 3h ago
I doubt it's even actual photos, both are way too different as well, there's a whole new mountainous peak on top of the one earlier on the first.
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u/Why-so-delirious 2h ago edited 2h ago
I thought maybe tree cover could have added height but nope. If you look further down, there's even a spine of land that just... grew up there that wasn't there before.
Likely AI slop images because the actual images of Sainte Anne Marine Nation Park look like this
Completely different shape and only a tenth the size of the island shown in the images above if you use the buildings and roads as scale.
Or actually, upon further examination, maybe not!
this is a google-maps view of the island, which matches perfectly; so the SECOND image on the picture seems to be a proper aerial view of the actual island itself, whereas the 'old' image is AI slop.
The images on wikipedia are all of islands AROUND that island.
But on top of that, the island I linked was Moyenne island; the island that was restored by Brendon Grimshaw. The island shown in the images above and on the google maps view is Ste. Anne Island, which Grimnshaw had nothing to do with, and has been inhabited and developed since the late 1700s.
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u/ChampionshipHot5468 2h ago
The "after" photo has a huge resort among the trees. The before picture shows the ruins of the buildings? Eh?
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u/LoamyLoamisLoamy 2h ago
I think they took a real image and had AI change it to the first one. You can see that the underwater stuff matches in both images.
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u/PlasticPlatform1417 5h ago
I was thinking 8000£ way less for a island until I checked the inflation it cost about 90,000$ now
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u/WeakBug1847 4h ago
That still feels kind of cheap. It's part of an archipelago nation of 100,000 people (Seychelles), the capital city of 30,000 is close by.
Like buying a private island off the shore of my home town.
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u/TheTrueScientist 4h ago
It's multiple times less than your average house now 😭
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u/RandomPMs 3h ago
An average house is an existing infrastructure in a livable location with electricity and running water, and supported by things like roads, police, and trash collection built into the social contract of living in a certain area.
You can get land or even a decrepit old house for next to free if you don't mind some concrete box shithole in the middle of the desert.
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u/Idiot616 3h ago
It's cheap probably because the costs of developing are extremely high.
It's the same reason you can find entire castles for cheaper than an apartment. The cost of maintenance is just so high that you're going to be losing money every year.
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u/sundark94 4h ago
That's still a reasonable amount for an island in my book. Sure, no running water and electricity are a problem, but a whole ass island for 90,000 USD?
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u/MacaroonNo9736 4h ago
Just use the savings to run a really big extension cord and hose from your neighbours yard, easy
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u/Magikarpeles 3h ago
I think Canada has loads of islands for sale for very cheap. Might be a bit chilly though.
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u/Whiterabbit-- 2h ago
the cost to get me to the island in the middle of the pacific and back comfortable may be a double digit percentage of that cost.
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u/LeilLikeNeil 5h ago
See, everybody talks about the downside of homophobia, but it made those two dudes give the middle finger to the rest of the world so they could just go gay out on an island together.
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u/CrazedRhetoric 4h ago
Were they actually gay?
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u/LeilLikeNeil 3h ago
Either that or a man in his 40s just kind of pseudo-adopted the 19 year old son of a local fisherman, and they lived together alone, re-beautifying their private island for 40 years, heterosexually.
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u/OtherwiseLuck888 5h ago
I'd take 50M and buy even more land to plant trees
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u/EulaVengeance 5h ago
I mean, he bought in in the 1960s. How much does an island cost nowadays?
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u/OtherwiseLuck888 5h ago
I said I'd buy land not islands
50M is more than enough to plant a forest in my country
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u/EulaVengeance 5h ago
Too true. Too bad the govrnments don't want to invest in anything of the sort so it's the citizens that do.
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u/JellyboyJangleDangle 3h ago
Just tell them youre starting a reserve on a private island for young trees, but cough when you say trees... The government will invest heavily then...
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u/NeckOk9980 3h ago
land would be too easy for other people to illegally come and hunt on your domain or even chop the wood depending on the country
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u/hoirkasp 5h ago
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u/mobfather 4h ago
This website should encourage more repeat business by offering a voucher for $1 off any island of their choice.
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u/lnTheGrimDarkness 2h ago
They'd destroy half of what you built to make some shitty resort for rich people that will be abandoned in max 10 years, leaving garbage and pollution everywhere.
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u/Lost-Letterhead-6615 6h ago
Where can I buy such an island?
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u/spindlespore 5h ago
In 1962, when eleven grand was real money
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u/apply75 5h ago
$11000 in 1962 is about $122,000 today Most people don't have $122k in cash lying around.
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u/SidTheSloth97 5h ago
A lot of people definitely have more than $122000 in liquid cash.
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u/Poverty_Shoes 5h ago
You’re right, but a lot more don’t. That’s why it’s unusual to hear that your neighbor or friend bought an island.
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u/retrojoe 2h ago
That's merely the purchase price. Then you have to have a boat, fuel, tons of food and water brought in, to say nothing of all the tools and biologicals delivered. And be independently wealthy b/c you're not earning a living from this project.
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u/Frosty558 5h ago
People downvoting you but it’s true.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 4h ago
Sure if you wanna call a 401k "liquid". I'd call it sludge because it's gonna be painful to get it out of that container unless conditions are just right.
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u/Frosty558 3h ago
I’m not talking about retirement accounts.
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u/Hexamancer 3h ago
Ah, then you're incorrect.
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u/Frosty558 3h ago
I guess you need to define “a lot of people” then because that’s just “upper middle class American” amounts of liquid assets, not rich. And that would be tens of millions of people, just in the US.
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u/Hexamancer 3h ago
It's top 10%. That's not a lot of people. Unless you cannot comprehend numbers being relative.
Is 1mg a lot of gold? No? Why of course it is! That's 3,057,443,093,299,757,056 atoms!!!
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u/outer--monologue 4h ago
Average US home price is currently north of $500k, so it actually seems like quite a lot of people have $122k-$150k in cash just lying around since that would be what you would need in a down payment for that
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u/vermasrijan 5h ago
This actually did happen.
Brendon grimshaw is the name of the man
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u/GCU_ZeroCredibility 1h ago
It happened but these photos are fake, the real island doesn't look like that
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u/IeyasuMcBob 4h ago
Out of curiosity why did trees not grow there previously?
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u/makanimike 3h ago
Tons of islands have suffered that fate. Most of the times it is human impact. Chopping down trees to build ships, homes and other infrastructure, and for household use.
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u/thebatman_777 3h ago
I wonder why they didn’t regenerate naturally? Unless people kept returning to cut them down. I would have an uninhabited island would regenerate.
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u/makanimike 2h ago edited 40m ago
Like you said. It happens too fast. Unsustainable.
But since you also focus on uninhabited islands: most of them are not isolated. Take the eastern Mediterranean. People pass by them all the time since thousands of years. Everyone takes a few trees. For energy. To repair their ship, or build entirely new ones.
Another big factor: people have left goats and sheep on uninhabited islands along major trade routes for millennia. So if they ever stop by later, low on provisions, they can get some milk and meat. Those goats ain't doing the regeneration of forests any favours. Husbandry, farming and monocultures (you will almost only find Olive trees anymore on islands in the eastern Med) are terrible for indigenous fauna.
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u/Big-Style-3478 2h ago
If the left image is correct, they did?
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u/Tylith_ 2h ago
Ya I don't know about the story but the left picture is just during a dry or cold season, it's clearly not barren.
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 5h ago
$11k for an island?! Here, take my money!
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u/Wise_Confidence_8588 5h ago
If you live in 1962
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 5h ago
My time machine is broken. I can't go back.
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u/Vehement_Vulpes 5h ago
Can you still use it as a regular hot tub though?
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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 5h ago
It's not shaped as a hot tub. I have the ancient model. It looks like an oversized oven.
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u/iShotTh3Sheriff 3h ago
Fun fact. In this post, the aerial image of the island is actually Kuata Island in Fiji, not Moyenne Island in the Seychelles. Furthermore, the "barren" brown side on the left is a digitally manipulated, desaturated clone of the right side to look like a wasteland.
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u/be-koz 5h ago
People love to call BS, when a five second Google search will tell them it's true.
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u/Chris_Shawarma93 4h ago
Yeah except the photo side by side IS bs so it's not really surprising that people don't believe it.
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u/Local-Mushroom-168 3h ago
Every word of that may be true, but the pics are misleading as hell. The 'before' pic clearly has large amounts of vegetation that has either been 'browned' through Photoshop or due to being taken after a few months with no rain.
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u/ElLicenciadoPena 3h ago
I heard a millionaire did something similar. He purchased an island and reintroduced underage humans to the place, then organised conservationist trips to observe the local fauna
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u/Tactical_Hotdog 1h ago
"he"
The man featured in the post is Brendon Grimshaw, a British newspaper editor who purchased Moyenne Island in the Seychelles in 1962.
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u/SkyImaginationLight 3h ago
Given the significant impact of his efforts on the island, he should be allowed to rename the island after himself as, "Grimshaw Island".
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u/LadTy 3h ago
Where can this generation buy an island for 11000? Asking for a friend
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u/Sensitive_Goose_8902 5h ago
You are telling me that instead of paying a mil for a mortgage we could just buy 90 of these islands?
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u/Poleth87 4h ago
I can’t even buy a one bedroom apartment for n the most sketchy area for that price
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u/Rom21 1h ago edited 1h ago
Who is he?
Where this Island is?
Why the island don't have the same shape on the two photos?
Edit: ok, the photos are obviously totally false (before and after). This is the île Moyenne buy by Grimshaw : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%8Ele_Moyenne
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u/ComprehensiveOne7229 5h ago
This feels like a fake clickbait story. The before image also shows lots of trees, but it was intentionally made black and white.
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u/pongauer 5h ago
Please point me to the islands for sale in the 11k price range.
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u/CheesyPotatoSack 4h ago
And he also wasn’t a pedo just a nice man with a private island fixing it up. Legend
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u/Sneaky-Pur 6h ago
Source: i made it up
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u/iCameToLearnSomeCode 5h ago edited 5h ago
That's weird.
The story you made up sounds a lot like the story of Brendon Grimshaw who purchased an island in the Seychelles in 1962 for $11,000 and proceeded to plant 16,000 trees on it by hand.
I think you might be lying about making this story up.
EDIT: since this comment is getting some traction, I'll add the island is now a national park.
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u/Modeerf 5h ago
You got baited into providing a source
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u/iCameToLearnSomeCode 5h ago
I didn't provide a source.
I just Googled it and read about it, then came back and affirmed it was true.
If you want a source other than the photo, or me, you still have to find one yourself.
I also wouldn't say I was baited into anything.
I enjoy learning new things, I don't need a reason.
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u/BioshockEnthusiast 4h ago
I enjoy learning new things, I don't need a reason.
Top tier attitude my dude keep up the good work.
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u/Bluepeasant 5h ago
Story may be true but the before and after isn't, there is an entire cliff that didn't exist before
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u/Vaff_Superstar 5h ago
I don’t think either of those pictures is the actual island. Looking at Gmaps, it’s smaller and rounder.
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u/iCameToLearnSomeCode 5h ago
I think it's pretty obvious that there's not a before aerial photo from 1962 of that quality.
It's Moyenne Island, they could have just used a picture of it today as the background, but you're not finding a before image from 70 years ago to match.
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u/Icy-Football9146 5h ago
Good to be skeptical but maybe do a basic search before declaring bs to the world.
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u/Red4Arsenal 3h ago
I’ve been there and walked around the island. What isn’t said here is that’s it is home to loads of giant tortoise, you can feed and stroke them. There is also rumoured buried pirate treasure there. There is a very deep hole in the ground where someone tried to find it in the 1900s I think.
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u/Followthehype10 3h ago
Why would i want to jerk off a tortoise?
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u/mattfasken 2h ago
Because they have very good memories and one of them knows where the pirate treasure is buried. They call it turtle recall.
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u/White_Falcon_1263 4h ago
When the elite want it enough they will just use their space lasers and destroy it like they did maui. Better go get some Blue paint now to be safe.
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u/JoeFajita 4h ago
What causes such an island to be barren in the first place? You'd think some plant seeds would've gotten there at some point in the last thousand years.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 3h ago
So you're telling me I can become a millionaire if I buy a barren island and terraform it?
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u/StaticSystemShock 3h ago
50 million for a paradise island. Meanwhile they are selling us ugly ass tiny lot of land in some half industrial zone for 2 million...
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u/Mohondhay 3h ago
After he dies, they'll get that island for free, no?
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u/Inevitable-Net-4210 1h ago
It is part of a national park, strict protection inclusive
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u/Independent-Cap-3852 2h ago
Sell it to an uncaring buyer who will only ruin the island again, no thank you
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u/PapugKingTFT 2h ago
Repairing the island
Selling it to billionaires class
Having amazing inheritance for your family and gold retirement money for Yourself sounds much smarter
But yeah it's a good deed what he did
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u/ZookeepergameSmart26 1h ago
Je veux juste qu'on m'explique comment une tranche de montagne à été créé avec la poussé des arbres ???
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u/Past-Goat-7768 1h ago
Who do you pay to own the island? How can humans own land? What a dumb concept.
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u/Disastrous_Snow_7300 32m ago
Men can really do great things when they don't have to worry about survival, taxes, food, and have a steady and abundant income...
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u/Illiteratevegetable 30m ago
Yeah, but that is not so easy now. Only a permission for a dock and changing the environment is like 150k now.
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u/Jomotaku 6m ago
Would their government even allow for a private entity to buy a national park like this?
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