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Comment by mistrial9 | Hacker News Reader

.. as a US citizen, I find some ugly humor in someone from the world of "private equity" , hinged on inflated asset valuation a.k.a. fraud, pointing a finger at a single, sole proprietor of a BREWARY making one obviously bad offering.

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The rare genuine ad-hom. The comment above explained their reservations about the crowdfunding issue for this brewery, and those reservations were extremely straightforward. Also, this kind of personalizing of arguments is forbidden by the site guidelines. Take it to Reddit.

To his credit, mistrial9 is making a substantive argument in pointing out that cjlars is cherry-picking data. And while I don't personally hold private equity in poor repute, I can see the irony in someone from that world expressing skepticism about unrealistic valuations.

The OP never said their example wasn't an outlier, they were just making a point that these things happen.

Regardless, you can't just respond to a specific example with broad generalizations. It's textbook 'whataboutism'.

OP recommended avoiding an entire asset class based on the example, so I think OP was guilty of generalizing here. The child comment also generalized about PE and its practitioners, which I agree was not a strong argument, but I don't think invalidates the entire post.

Since when is "whataboutism" forbidden and who cares? It is just a stupid Internet meme to shut down discussions.

(it is my intention to comply with site guidelines)

You are comprehensively wrong. You are wrong about what the comment "essentially" does, you're wrong that they used anything as a "podium", you're wrong to quote them saying something they didn't actually say, and you're wrong to point out your personal problems with a commenter or their background, a point, again, amply supported by the site guidelines.

there are PE deals that are genuinely value-creating. i worked for a company that blossomed under (partial) PE ownership (until it was sold and the new owners bungled it). the problem is that the incentives and the actors in PE are often aligned against this sort of win-win deal.

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