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Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

This is an incredibly disingenuous and specious argument.

The discussion is about US wine production and consumption. You present the aggregate total vale of all US exports in US dollars to 6 significant digits. Does the variance of the volume of wine exports in litres even show up in those 6 signifcant digits?

Consider: (1) is six significant digits of precision justified, or is it insignificant accurancy? (2) Do those aggregate numbers take into account inflation? (3) Do those aggregate numbers take into account the (not insignificant) devaluation of the US dollar? (4) Do those aggregate numbers include both goods and services?

No, if you were to make an honest argument by quoting US exports, you need to limit it to the volume of US wine exports in litres. Misdirection can be a great tool of propaganda but is not a useful contribution to interesting intellectual discourse.

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I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.

What would be the reason to boycott wine only and not other US goods? What about the US wine industry is controversial that does not apply to the other industries?

So I wrote that there is no evidence of boycotts showing up in trade data, which is true.

Then, after doing some digging, so I pointed out that almost none of California wines are exported anyway. So obviously this cannot be the result of foreign boycotts.

So let's get back to the "incredibly disingenuous and specious argument", and start with the dictionary definition of those and go from there, because that accurately describes how I view your response.

> I responded to the claim that this was due to a boycott of US goods writ large, not a specific boycott about wine.

While boycotting iPhones might be difficult, taking the Cabernet one shelf over takes almost no effort or negative impact to the consumer. It's rarely more expensive to switch from a US wine e.g. French or Australian. It's sold in the same store.

For the specific example of Sweden, every single wine bottle in every store is sorted by country in the store. And it sits above a price sticker with the flag of the origin country on it.

That's wildly different from similar choices e.g. when you pick a can of Hellman's Mayonnaise, there's no US flag under it. But for wine in particular, the country of origin is almost always known to the buyer and involved in the process, even if Sweden stands out as an extreme due to the flag being under the bottle.

That's why I believe the boycott which isn't a boycott on US wine but on US products in general, is _most notable_ for wine or in some other case not notable at all because it's a small effect and consumers don't always know what is American and what isn't (Hellman's example). But for wine, everyone knows.

The difference between the general slump in wine sales (10%) and the decline in US sales (20%) could have more factors, such as price. But it's easy to assume - and polls suggest - that consumers really do avoid the US wine.

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