Your post is endemic of something I see a lot of on the Internet. You hide behind an account you just made, aggressively, lengthily and rudely responding to somebody who actually desired to contribute to the discussion without contributing much of anything yourself, without seeing the irony in any of this.
Actually I found it to be a pretty compelling and well reasoned indictment of grandparent's utter failure to consider the many complex factors that can lead to the necessity of subsidizing certain industries.
The criticisms could be absolutely correct, but the response doesn't "reason" anything.
The response doesn't actually demonstrate that the parent is incorrect or propose a complete alternative. It simply states that it is wrong without a shred of evidence or exposition, only vague phrases suggesting omissions.
That's not an indictment, just a wordy insult.
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I get the frustration with what appears to be shallow understanding of something turned into a sweeping judgement, but at least it's attempting something constructive. The response is pure aggressive arrogance.
The response points out several specific considerations that OP failed to take into account. Based on these it is not unreasonable to conclude that OP was making broad judgement about a field he had little knowledge of based on one news report. Making a broad generalization may represent an attempt to be constructive, but when that attempt is based on a number of faulty assumptions, I think that pointing out what those assumptions are and why they are faulty is equally as constructive, if not more so. The implicit assumption in OPs comparison is that the farmer who grew hay is a Bad Farmer and the farmer who grew sorghum is a Good Farmer, and so the Bad Farmer should give up farming or at least apprentice himself to the Good Farmer, so he can learn how to grow sorghum instead of hay. Never mind that the farmer growing hay no doubt took into consideration many, many factors that the OP clearly knows nothing about, and that a crop failure based on an unexpected drought could happen to anyone give that there is currently no way to predict what the weather will be several months from now.
> The response doesn't actually demonstrate that the parent is incorrect or propose a complete alternative.
There is inadequate evidence here to come to any conclusion.
It would be irresponsible of me to claim that I knew all the farmer's capabilities, costs, risks, weather forecasts, crop options, crop rotation requirements, etc. If I did that, I'd be guilty of exactly the same mistake as OP.
You did a great job of noisily pointing out that the parent is noisy, without generating much if any signal yourself.
You don't have to provide a conclusion, just presenting a theory about how to apply those data points that you keep rattling off would be something constructive, a starting point.
Thing is, that would be hard and expose something you created to criticism. It's much easier to simply sit back and poke holes in someone else's flawed theory while alluding to an ability to construct a better one yet demonstrating absolutely nothing.
My profile links to my Flickr account, which has my real name. I don't currently maintain a blog or anything more meaningful to link to. I use this nickname throughout the net. You can email me at <pick anything>@lusr.org. I'm not hiding anything.
The person I responded to frequents HN (according to their own words); it seems highly likely they know quite well how non-constructive their response was and specifically chose to use a throwaway account rather than stand behind their comment under their normal account.
The hypocrisy of your posts is almost overwhelming.
That said, my original constructive criticism got me hellbanned (as happens to nearly all people who post sentiment that could be construed as anti-libertarian), whereas your idiotic and unaware hypocrisy got you nothing.
Unshocking, given the faggotry of you and this site.
You know you actually did have a very good point and I even agree entirely with it. But the anger and aggression in your writing is such a huge turn-off that it was difficult to fairly consider what you said, and that was the gist of my facetious post.
Evidently some people agree with me. You can continue to be angry that your style of discourse isn't accepted, or you can do something about it and have people give your insight the time it deserves. I believe you're selling yourself short.
