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Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?

There are mechanisms for businesses to share confidential information with government officials, and keep it under wraps if the release of them could undermine their businesses, use these mechanisms instead of trying to make government communication opaque to the public in the name of "attracting businesses".

More government transparency is never, ever, a bad thing, the few exceptions where it might require transparency to be reduced need to be very clear cut to avoid being abused (as is common in the USA to call "national security" and redact a shit ton of stuff), the less transparent your government is, the bigger chances it's just being corrupted, no one wants that.

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> You are putting "attracting businesses" as a bigger priority than public accountability of the government elected by the public? Why even have the farce of a democracy if the purpose of government in your view is to attract businesses?

If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith. If someone (reasonably) suggests that what the government does to attract businesses is a matter of public interest, then naturally my reply is going to point out that not sharing all their commercially sensitive plans and positions is a good start. At no point have I even hinted that attracting business is government's highest priority. It isn't, but nor is "indiscriminately publishing every email ever sent to a public official" automatically a higher one.

There are indeed mechanisms to share confidential information with government officials. One of those mechanisms is that commercially sensitive information shared with public officials gets redacted from emails shared in the public interest. Like all mechanisms it can be abused, but the public is still better off from knowing the general gist that Elon had a lot of email exchanges with the governor, some of which have been published and some of which redacts stuff that was either sensitive business detail or very embarrassing than they are if a similar exchange took place through unofficial channels instead.

I don't have much to add here, I think we've reached the point where nuance is necessary, and "it depends" comes into play. This Abbot / Elon _seems like_ an abuse of confidentiality for competitive reasons, which itself can bring a bunch of other problems (like insider trading). But overall of course there are reasons for secrecy, and probably mechanisms to minimize that, like does the government REALLY needs to know details that would compromise competitiveness to make decisions? But we would go back to "it depends".

Anyway that's a lot for simplistic HN threads, and I enjoyed your replies.

> If you're going to respond to day old threads, at least try to engage with arguments in good faith.

I replied to a comment posted 9 hours before my comment, don't come chastise me, thank you very much.

I replied to what I read: you defending that communications between the government and businesses don't need as much transparency as possible.

The rest of the comment is just trying to support this absurdity in too many words.

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