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Comment by chimi | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem bigger than United -- which has a lot of problems. This is what you get when you subsidize bad companies that need to fail. United needs to fail so someone better can take over. The moral hazards are ruining the country.

I saw it recently with farmers struggling from the drought. Compare this farmer: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417774n who has acres full of hay that don't do well in the drought to this farmer who planted a solid base of drought tolerant sorghum http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7417664n in addition to his corn. The second farmer is diversified. He's making smarter decisions with his farm, but because he wasn't hit as hard as other farmers who aren't making good decisions with their land, he's not going to get as much compensation for failed crops. That first farmer needs to go to work for the second farmer so he can learn better and more profitable methods of farming and we will all benefit -- including him. Watch the two farmers. Look how worn out the first one is compared to the second one. The first farmer is working harder the second farmer is working smarter. We need to reward that.

The same thing with United. United Airlines was the largest recipient of cash grants from the US after 9/11, getting $774.2 Million [1]. If the US hadn't kept United alive over the past 10 years so an Airline that cares could fill the void, this little child may not have been left stranded at the airport by a company full of employees who don't need to care.

http://www.laane.org/downloads/ShortchangedStudy.pdf

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Ryanair isn't subsidized. It's a bad airline that doesn't need to fail because it makes money. It's one of the airlines in Europe with the worst customer service track record. The same is true for lots of other compenies with terrible customer service.

On the other hand, there are many state-owned or subsidized airlines that have very good customer service.

So whether or not United needs to fail, I think the problem runs far deeper than subsidies.

Ryanair isn't a bad airline. It's a fairly good airline in terms of moving passengers around. They are completely honest, even proud, to offer literally no customer service and comfort.

Look at the comments here: http://www.airlinequality.com/Forum/ryan.htm

Not one is about Ryanair failing to deliver the service they've sold (as the article is very much about United failing to) - they're all about people being disappointed about a £25 flight on an airline that prides itself on not caring one bit about your comfort ... not caring about their comfort. All of the extra charges complained about are loudly and clearly announced as part of the ticket buying process. Don't bring a 20 kg bag on a flight when your ticket clearly says "max 15 kg, excess charges apply", then complain about excess charges being leveraged.

If you want service, comfort and flexibility, fly BA and pay for it (or EasyJet, they're usually very good IMO, and usually priced in the sweet spot between Ryanair and "proper" airlines). If you want to get to the beach in the cheapest possible way, everything else be damned, fly Ryanair.

Agreed. People only feel "screwed" by Ryanair because the are used to flexibility, and Ryanair are not flexible. "Oh I'm 2kg over, but that's not a lot, so they'll let me away with it.... What do you mean I have to pay €40?" "Oh they'd have to let me take my handbag, so I'll bring a massive one... what do you mean only one cabin bag?"

double agreed. however, it does bug me charging on weight for baggage when fat people pay the same price as extremely lightweight people. Someone who's 105 pounds with a 52 pound bag gets charged extra, while someone who's 290 pounds but has a 49 pound bag pays no extra charge. Dunno quite how they'd ever get around it, but it does bug me. And I say this as someone who's got a few extra pounds of his own :)

Weigh each passenger and charge proportionally.

And then employ very small thin people for any work that requires foreign travel?

Seriously the implications of that are boggling although I suppose modern technology makes it possible to do so.

"Proper" airlines generally aren't very picky about the weight of your luggage, so it probably wouldn't apply to them, only to airlines like Ryanair that are.

I don't think it's a good solution, but I can relate to to bitterness of being charged for a 2 kg overweight and then getting stuck in half a seat because the person next to you is the size of a cow.

http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/blog/3801241/should-obese-pas...

Some airlines do have policies in place for such situations.

The only reason I presume Ryanair haven't done it yet is because I presume there would be some law against it.

Ryanair makes it possible for a work colleague of my sister to commute from Cork to Liverpool (4 day work week, digs while in Liverpool). You get what it says on the packet.

My wife and I once flew the length of the UK return for under £4 on one of their sales deals.

No typo there, under £4.

And I used to commute Glasgow to London once a week and would regularly pay for for the train from the airport to the centre of town than for the flight.

And if you take the train from London to Glasgow, it is currently £120 for a single ticket, whereas I can book on British Airways for a flight tomorrow for £74.

Should probably be a bit fairer to the train as you can get better deals than that and pay a lot more on BA. I've paid £80 for a first class return and I've paid more than £250 return on BA (both London - Glasgow).

But yes, the train can be terrifyingly expensive if you can't pick and choose your time (though I also find it more productive - no putting away your laptop for take off, no security, just sit down and do stuff).

Actually, there have been numerous cases where Ryanair has decided to not cover expenses for cancelled or delayed flights, something they are required by EU law to do. (You'll find posters stating those rights put up by the aviation authorities at most airports, and most other airlines abide by them.)

Many of the fees and extra charges can't be avoided (like an internet booking fee and credit card fee) yet they're usually not included in the advertised price.

And many of the extra charges (like if you forget to print your boarding pass but have it on an iPad) seems almost designed solely to get more money out of people.

What are you talking about? Ryanair is great, it's pretty much always on time, you get what you pay for (which is little, it's a knife that cuts both ways) and because there are only a few people operating each flight (from checkin to trollying around peanuts, which you pay for, so that you don't pay for you neighbour's peanuts if you don't want any) so it's always clear who to ask when you have something to ask.

Ryanair is no frills but is INCREDIBLY punctual. Punctuality beats cushiness in short-medium length flights ( < 5 hours ) IMHO.

Think of Ryanair as the libertarian airline. Them fucking over the passengers not clever enough to figure out the rules or causing exceptions makes it a particularly joy to fly with them as you do not subsidize others' inefficiency.

1st, $8b in theoretical subsidies after September 11th isn’t material when an industry has $100s of billions of debt and equity. Delta and United have about $65b alone. AIG’s bailout was $182B.

2nd, It is inexcusable for a human being to not help a young child regardless of the company they work for. However, the other stories about airlines being terrible with customer service are dumb. In general people are stressed out when they fly and they project it on staff. I see it every time I travel. People are mad about weather delays, mad about gate changes, mad, mad, mad. If I had to deal with that as an employee every day, I wouldn't be freindly either. What is the point?

3rd Most airline employees are making 30% less than they were in 2001. People’s retirements have been wiped out and they cannot change jobs in the industry because doing so would require they start at the lowest pay offered at a different company and wait until their seniority number allows them to climb. They work for zombie companies in which the employees have limited opportunity to help meaningfully change the business.

When I fly, I am nice to the staff and they are nice to me. I recognize the complexity of the daily achievement of getting people from place A to place B via air and I am extremely happy with today’s price point.

[added] Most people on HN hate the TSA, can you imagine having to deal with them every day on your way to work?

To address your second point, how is it that Southwest can consistently provide friendly service? They have to deal with the same stressors that their competitors face.

Don't underestimate the importance of leadership and management prowess in how employees perform.

South West management hedged fuel in a risky financial bet which paid off when fuel prices unexpected skyrocketed in the mid 2000s. This risky bet led to industry leading profitability. Once South West's hedges came off their profitability has declined. They are not burdened with the same debt because they had profitability for so long. They also do not maintain a hub and spoke system which keeps their costs down.

Because management got lucky with a fuel hedge, their employees did not have to take pay cuts like the rest of the industry and have not lost their pensions.

For additional information read this (ignoring the stock price stuff, just for a little history)

”Mr. Alukos says the AirTran acquisition makes sense in the context of rising fuel prices. For many years, Southwest hedged rising fuel costs better than any other large U.S. airline, saving $2-billion from 2004 to 2008 by his estimate, something that “overshadow[ed]any of its other cost-containment measures.” Those contracts have gradually expired, and the current hedges are no longer a significant cost advantage, he believes.” Source: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ide...

[added] I didn't really answer your question, but I believe that number 2 combined with number 3 to create the problems we are seeing at most airlines. People can handle a lot until they realize when they get home they have no savings, no retirement and no future.

Southwest has been around for 45 years. I haven't looked at their P&L for those years, but I doubt that their key to longterm success is due primarily to hedging at the turn of the century. Hedging fuel costs is simply a part of doing business in the transportation field, whether it's shipping, airlines, trains, or trucking.

Also, many posters have said that Southwest is non-union. This is incorrect. Their pilots are part of a union, just not the ALPA.

The airline industry has dramatically changed since the days of PanAm and Braniff. Ticket prices have been brutally cut, yet the "premier" airlines have been poor stewards of their image and reputation, and relied a lot upon heavy regulations in the industry that protected their turf. Unions have done some damage, but poor management has been the biggest culprit.

I agree in part that poor management has been the problem at many airlines, but the another real problem is that the airline industry has high fixed costs in a perfectly competitive environment. Before the airlines were deregulated in the 80s, ticket prices were high, everyone made money. The 90s ushered in low oil prices with strong US economic growth (good for cyclical businesses).

After deregulation oil stayed cheap until the mid 2000s. For whatever reason, South West hedged far more oil than industry practice and when oil went up dramatically in the mid 2000s the airline benefited dramatically. I have looked at their 10Ks, Qs, (P&Ls) and have studied the topic in some level of depth.

South West has a great culture, which could be unrelated to their profitability, but no one knows that for sure. Their profitability has far more to do with fuel hedging than any other single factor. My argument which cannot be proved, but I hope is considered is that the culture has more to do with the employees being compensated well, and the airline seeming stable than the reverse.

Southwest employees participate in a profit-share program which allocates a substantial amount of profits to an employee pool. Thus, the better the airline does, the better they do (financially).

I've only been to the US once, and I really wasn't sure how I would find the 'service industries' (waiting, bar staff, shop staff) always asking if I 'had a nice day' etc. I thought I would find it cloying and draining.

In reality I generally felt VERY well taken care of by everyone I met in retail or service industries - EXCEPT for the airlines.

We flew BA, London to LAX, and as ever BA were fine. We then flew Delta to Hawaii, and I couldn't believe how rude, unhelpful and almost angry these people were. I mean coach drivers in the UK are grumpy but these were something else. When my partner requested the gluten free meal she had confirmed with the check-in staff, she was told they didn't have anything and was given a bread roll (!!!) and an apple as a replacement.

Returning we flew United Airlines, and again they were curt, unhelpful, and generally annoyed that we were there on their plane.

I couldn't believe that these airlines could be operating in a country that prides itself so highly on service.

As the parent says, these are companies that need to be built up again from the ground up - subsidizing them is not helping them.

The unions are the big problem along with a lack if accountability. They can break baggage laws, for example, with impunity leaving the passenger little recourse except to attempt to sue in federal court.

That's not the union, that's the business. I guarantee that they would have no trouble getting rid of anyone, even a union employee, for stealing baggage: simply calling the police and charging them would take care of the problem. It's just that in the absence of government regulation[1] or a market with more competition, it's cheaper to pretend bag theft doesn't happen and let passengers pay for private insurance.

At this point, our best chance is probably convincing people that the bag theft rings are ripe for terrorist exploitation and we need point-to-point video tracking to prevent mass mayhem.

1. e.g. banning the “we reimburse everything at $2/pound & $0 for anything which uses electricity" clauses in every airline's ToS

BA is just as bad as any other US-based carrier. Surly staff are everywhere.

In reality I generally felt VERY well taken care of by everyone I met in retail or service industries - EXCEPT for the airlines.

One problem might be the scale of the company.

Your examples of service industries are restaurants, bars, shops. Owned by franchises or small business owners. The boss is frequently behind the counter, filling in. Bad apples are noticed. And easily replaced.

Delta / United / American are huge businesses. You just don't see a small airline with one or two airplanes, with the CEO loading baggage and flying the plane. Bad apples get lost in the noise.

If my theory is correct, simply replacing Delta with another company is not going to fix the problem for long.

FWIW the last time I flew Southwest Airlines the staff was courteous, had a sense of humor, efficient. I will choose SWA over the competition when I have the chance.

(edit: content)

I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions.

If every farmer planted a diversity of crops to account for all likely weather scenarios, then the average productivity would drop, as most crops would turn out to be unsuitable for the weather that occurred.

It depends - surely, studying the weather (how much snow there is on the mountains in winter affects how much water there is in the rivers in the spring) can reduce, if not remove, the risk of crop failure. Perhaps you have the choice of a more expensive drought-resistant crop and a cheaper one that isn't.

Breaking the feedback loop by subsidizing failed crops doesn't create any incentive to invest effort into making good decisions in these areas.

You're making the assumption that winter snowpack has a dramatic effect on farming success. Sure, it helps fill the aquifers when it melts, but farmers depend on rainfall (at least in the US) as much as they do on irrigation. Heat also makes it hard for crops to grow successfully, regardless of how much water they get through irrigation.

The returns a farmer receives depends also on the price the crop can receive. Barring futures contracts, for widely-traded crops such as wheat, soya and corn, this will depend on the global market, i.e. not only the local weather, but also the weather in Brazil, Australia, etc.

Think of it this way: it's a trade-off, like almost all reliable systems have to make. Would you rather have, for example, a server that runs with maximum efficiency but has a high risk of failure and extended downtime or one that is reliable with a 99.9% uptime, but isn't as powerful as the first one?

"I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for a farmer to plan which crops to plant based on rainfall predictions."

It's good enough to offer insurance to farmers for when harvests will fail. This exists, I know because I (even if only at arms length) work in this field.

Agriculture is boom-and-bust, precisely due to the unpredictability of the weather, infestations, etc. It's more predictable today than in the past, but there is still a lot of guesswork going on. There are sophisticated mechanisms in place for mitigating this, such as the futures market and insurance.

I'd wager that the "compensation" the hay farmer mentioned above is part of an insurance-type scheme. Maybe like this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/drough...

The insurance plans I've seen were based upon historical data, and didn't take weather forecasts into account. (My family is in farming and ranching.)

I'm not sure how these insurances are sold to end users at small scales. I'm involved in building crop harvest forecast systems to be used by insurers who insure large businesses (think multinationals) who need resources from mostly Asian and African countries for the production of their goods, e.g. palm trees. So this use case is different in scale from your example, our work is mostly in risk modeling on a large scale.

That said, if I were selling insurances, I'd want two things: data to justify or explain my rates to my customers, and data to make predictions of my own risk and/or profit margins. The two might be correlated in a highly competitive and transparent market, but I have a hunch that these insurances are not, and that there isn't a whole lot of pressure to work on a cost plus pricing model, so that these insurers can work on a value-added pricing model.

Exactly. Anyone that thinks farming in the US is a matter of pulling out the almanac and hoping the rain will match expectations is naive at best.

Here's the thought process a farmer goes through in deciding what to plant:

1. What's the expected market price for corn and soybean. 2. What is the cost of crop insurance? 3. What's the current rainfall estimate? 4. What's the cost of water via irrigation and the cost of the irrigation equipment. 5. What's my field rotation state? 6. How much is fertilizer? 7. What subsidies are in effect for the various crops? 8. How is my cash flow?

And so on. The stereotype of farmers either being stupid hicks or suckling at the teat of Federal subsidies is ridiculous. The technology farmers use is amazing, and the factors they have to consider are multi-variate.

Sometimes farmers get screwed, and sometimes they make a fortune. Subsidies (as well as futures and other hedges) are a means of smoothing out the market so that farmers can stay in business while also providing for steady agricultural returns. It's not a perfect system by any means, and subsidies for things like ethanol drastically distort other markets, but to try and simplify it into Farmer A works hard but dumb and Farmer B is a smart, HN guy is just too simplistic.

So, context, I'm a libertarian. But, bear with me a moment.

Why are subsidies bad? They "distort the market". How do subsidies distort the market? They cause overproduction of the subsidized good. Where an efficient allocation would tend to fairly precisely match demand to production (more precisely than any other known way of doing it), thus allowing the rest of the capital to go do other useful things, a subsidized good overinvests capital into producing the subsidized good, thus producing an opportunity cost to civilization due to the misallocation of resources into overproducing a good rather than doing something else more useful.

What is the result of farming subsidies? An excess of food. What is food? Food is one of the fundamental foundations of civilization. No food means total chaos in a matter of days. What does precisely producing 100% of the expected target food production means? It means the slightest bobble in production translates to shortages, and as we all know, shortages happen, and in particular, black swans will happen. A free market does not blindly assume everything will be swell and does build in some buffer against expected disaster, but the buffer can always be exceeded and the free market makes it very difficult for a given producer to make their own buffer larger, lest a competitor eat their market share.

Suddenly, a bit of "overproduction of food" doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Ideally we'd be storing the excess as much as possible, though regrettably food doesn't store as well as you'd like. Still, I'm actually in favor of a certain amount of food subsidy.

The ethanol subsidy is still stupid, and given subsidies may be bad on the grounds of being excessive, or because the interest group has captured the regulator and are managing to harvest the surplus directly instead of via overproduction (which is the result we're actually trying to produce for once), but in general, I'm not actually against a bit of overproduction of the foundations of civilization.

Oh, I'm libertarian in many ways as well, but generally agree with you on farm subsidies with the exception of ethanol. I think it's criminal for us to be taking some of the most productive farmland in the world, and growing corn on it to burn in our cars. It's a net negative in terms of energy, and is almost solely due to Iowa having an inordinate amount of influence due to the timing of their primary.

Also, witness the affects of the sugar tariffs that have given rise to the widespread use of HFCS. If it weren't for these, we'd still have Coca-Cola flavored with real sugar. Instead we have to import it from Mexico...

An economics professor of mine said that, besides food subsidies, another reason rich countries have few famines is livestock farming.

There's a lot of energy lost in the process of feeding corn to cattle and turning them into burgers; you could feed more people by eating the corn directly.

So when there's going to be a corn shortage like this year, livestock go to slaughter ahead of schedule, which reduces the demand for corn, and increases the supply of meat.

On its face, eating meat is a luxury, but it actually serves an important function as a buffer against shortages.

If vegetarianism ever became a very popular lifestyle (I'd say, very roughly, if it was adopted by a majority), the risk of food shortages would increase.

>I don't think weather forecasting is currently good enough for //

That would be an interesting study. Take weather data and forecast data from the last n years and look at how good various sources are at prediction over various regions and timescales.

I'm sure it's been done?

Your farming example is ludicrous. We need hay as much as we need sorghum. We can't have every farmer planting only one set of crops based how they expect the weather to be. First, it would absolutely crash the market for that crop when the harvest came in, and second there would be none of the other crops that are necessary.

Not only that but you have to rotate what is planted in fields or you'll basically decimate the fields productivity.

The guy putting in hay just got unlucky this year. I grew up on a farm, this isn't unheard of. Also sorghum doesn't grow well in all areas, where I lived corn and barely/wheat/rye were the best crops. Sorghum grew, just not all that great due to growing season. We never ever planted the same field twice in a row with the same crop. Some years we left it fallow (nothing planted) to give it and the microorganisms a rest.

I think the parent poster lacks some fundamental knowledge of crops with his analogy.

That's why there is crop insurance. Humans, last I checked, can't control the weather, so we create systems to make up for that risk.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert.

You have no idea if the diversified strategy has a higher expected value, or if it's just a variance play based on heat, or if different weather conditions could've affected interplay in a different way. You have no idea what the crop insurances for different crops cost. You have no idea what the weather forecasts were.

You literally know absolutely nothing about the matter.

All you know is that you've got an ideology and that you see absolutely everything through the ideas of your ideology, selectively perceiving, remembering and interpreting events to confirm and reconfirm your ideology. And you're sufficiently arrogant that you think you can glance at a farm and know what tradeoffs they considered when they were planting their fields.

And that doesn't even get into the fact that if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US. Thus, it's fairly clear that while you'd like to pretend that your religion explains everything, it really doesn't.

Your post is endemic of something I see a lot on HN. You know nothing about agriculture, but you see a minor set of stories and you think you're a fucking expert.

What is with the create a throwaway account to insult people thing? Karma isn't worth anything why not burn it under your real username?

Frankly, HN is a better place if people value their accounts and their reputation. This is a Good Thing.

Some people value being able to mask their account to voice their true opinion.

It doesn't mean he's creating an account to troll necessarily, but to conceal his more reputable account from things we all know if possible; abuse. Something your parent doesn't seem to respect.

"I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

I've been struggling and failing for a minute here for a way sum this up. It's likely impossible as it's far from a simple topic.

Anyway, I tend to disagree. Reputation can do plenty to make a place worse - squashing dissenting opinions, incentivizing "gaming" of the system. I do my best to ignore these systems entirely.

Ironically this may increase your reputation, as honesty and genuineness are extremely valued traits.

Most corporations fail to realize this.

HN is a better place if people value their accounts and their reputation. This is a Good Thing.

Only if it makes them valuable members of the community. If patio11(just as an example no offense) logged out of patio11 and logged in as a string of throw away accounts, then him valuing his account hurts the community. It incorrectly values the patio11 persona. It improves engagement of someone who is actively trolling. It actively encourages others to engage in such behavior.

> if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US.

And where are your sources and analysis to back this up?

The original commenter at least linked to a few interesting articles to support his argument.

> And that doesn't even get into the fact that if you travel via air around the globe, nearly all of the airlines are absolutely terrible, not just the subsidized ones in the US.

Where does this come from? I find that most airlines around the world are absolutely brilliant.

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.

Not really.

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.

---

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.

Noise is not signal. Noise is the enemy.

Right.

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.

Ironic that you're not posting under a real name. And your account is only a hair over a year old.

Is it really relevant that his account is new? Or should HN put up a delay that you can only post a reply after your account has aged appropriately?

And this isn't a new thing for the internets. No one knows you're a dog...

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.

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