> No doubt this will get several downvotes because HN is in fact overwhelmingly populated by liberals with Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Please don't comment like this on HN. This is a place for curious conversation not fulmination and ideological battle.

You've entered a community that has clear guidelines and a clearly stated purpose and you've brought an ideologically combative energy, in clear breach of the site’s guidelines and intended use. This is only a place where people want to participate because others make the effort to contribute positively and raise the standards up rather than dragging them down. People have no trouble getting to the 500-point threshold to enable downvoting when they contribute positively to the site for a few months, with interesting submissions and thoughtful comments. We have tools anyone can use to report breaches if they want to earnestly show they intend to use the site as intended – flagging and emailing us (hn@ycombinator.com). We push back on anyone we see breaking the guidelines, regardless of “side” (we don't care about the side and often don't even know), and we're routinely accused of favoring the other side by people who refuse to take responsibility for their own conduct.

People have made these complaints for the site’s entire history and we’re routinely characterized as being biased in favour of “the other side” by people who mistake this as being a site where “side” matters.

The people who don’t make this complaint are those who use the site as intended - for curious conversation rather than ideological battle.

>People have made these complaints for the site’s entire history and we’re routinely characterized as being biased in favour of “the other side” by people who mistake this as being a site where “side” matters.

I get what you may aspire to have happen on this site, but it does not live up to those ideals. Probably thousands of people, sock puppets, and bots brigade in favor of their own opinions, regardless of what the rules say. The only people who will really feel left out by this are the ones like myself who don't agree "enough" with the hive mind. I would care a lot less if basic features of the site were not gated by points, as well. Half of the time I feel like I wandered into Reddit.

I reckon that the people who don't make this complaint are the ones who just agree with the hive mind and don't suffer downvotes. I know for a fact I could simply state the exact opposite of what I do in many cases, in the same abrasive style, and get at least neutral treatment. You won't even let my honest constructive criticism here go without downvotes. You aren't the least bit curious what normal users like me go through. You want to prescribe a view of my experience according to your own imagination.

You're expressing some pain about the situation you're in and I don't want to diminish that. I know very well that it's difficult feeling like you're a lone figure against a mob who are opposed to what you believe in, and that those in power are biased in favour of the mob.

The thing is, everyone feels like that when they are strongly committed to a particular position or side. Dang has written several times about the "notice-dislike bias" [1], in which you notice more strongly the views you most dislike, and feel like the environment is dominated by those views. We know that effect is real by the fact that we are routinely accused of “putting our thumb on the scale” in favour of the present US administration or in support of the politics/interests of Silicon Valley power figures (which we don't do and which we know very well would destroy HN – and thus, our jobs – if we did), whilst just as often being accused of being biased to the left.

Dang and I have been doing this job in some form for many years and we know more than anything else that the only way to keep HN thriving is to make it a place where all reasonable points of view can be shared and discussed. Yes, the community's ideology skews moderately left-libertarian, which you would expect of a community dominated by technology industry employees. But it's a bell curve, with the majority around the reasonable centre, and several of the top-ranked users on the leaderboard are notable for espousing conservative/libertarian positions, and we always want the spectrum of views to be represented here, otherwise there'd be little to discuss.

To your key points:

> I get what you may aspire to have happen on this site, but it does not live up to those ideals

Nothing in life ever lives up to ideals :) We can only try and push things in the right direction. The outcome will always be messy and imperfect, and we can only ever hope to make it less imperfect than it would be without our interventions. We think we get things about right if we're criticized roughly equally from either side.

> Probably thousands of people, sock puppets, and bots brigade in favor of their own opinions, regardless of what the rules say

We've become pretty good at detecting and killing inauthentic posts; it's surprisingly easy to detect manipulation once you've spent enough time reading all the threads and knowing what authentic discussion looks like. And we have software measures against voting, flagging and commenting that is biased or manipulative.

> The only people who will really feel left out by this are the ones like myself who don't agree "enough" with the hive mind

This isn't a place for feeling like you're surrounded by people who agree with you. It's for engaging in curious conversation and learning from different perspectives. If you're not on HN to be exposed to different points of view and learn from them whilst sharing your own perspectives in a spirit of generosity, you're not going to have the best time here.

> I would care a lot less if basic features of the site were not gated by points, as well.

We have to have some way of determining that people are committed to contributing positively to the community before unlocking privileges that influence what gets seen on the site. Just 2-3 interesting submissions can get you to 500 points. People can do that in a few weeks if they want to. But that relies on you being here to gratify intellectual curiosity rather than engage in ideological battle.

> Half of the time I feel like I wandered into Reddit.

People have been saying this since 2007 :)

> I reckon that the people who don't make this complaint are the ones who just agree with the hive mind and don't suffer downvotes

No, plenty of people take pride in being at odds with the majority. They accept that they're going to get downvotes and accept them with a little pride.

That said, we don't like to see unfair voting on HN, and any time you feel a comment has been unfairly downvoted, you're welcome to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to point it out and we can look into it.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The global population is not dwindling yet. At the current derivative of birth rate it'll keep keep growing for 50 years. Of course many places will experience a demographic crisis well before the global population falls.

The vandalism was not anti-EV, was performed by a tiny number of extremists outside of any sort of Democrwric politics, so attributing it to both sides" doesn't make a lick of sense.

It's not like elected Democratic officials were saying "we hate EVs, everybody go out and vandalize Musk's businesses." There is no political movement among democrats to avoid the technological transition that the rest of the world is enthusiastically taking.

There is no comparison, the idea is absolutely ludicrous.

I would’ve respected the Democratic politicians more had they spoken out.

I think Fetterman did, to his credit. I don’t remember any others.

Ok so now we are asking people uninvolved to a tiny number of incidents to jump (how high?) on things they have no control over. Instead of focusing on the politics that is actually their domain: the unconstitutional destruction of institutions mandated by Congress by an out-of-control executive branch that is breaking the law. Let the FBI and police deal with local property crimes.

And even if more Democratic politicians condemned it, how would you hear about it? What media do you consume that would let you hear that voice? And what does your respect translate into?

Even asking Democratic politicians to condemn the violence shows that you are placing the onus on Democrats for something that they did not do. It's very strange behavior.

I’m thinking the Republicans were affecting EVs through legal means, while the firebombing anti-Musk vandals were acting like anarchists.

Any worthwhile politician should find it easy to pick a side on that one.

Right, and materially - what do you think damages EVs more? A few fires, or structural policy choice deliberately intended to destroy the industry?

Yes, we can truly both sides everything. But we can't just claim things are the same when they're obviously not.

It's clear, and indisputable, that most EV adoption is coming from green policy, particularly around the economy. And who is most responsible for that? The explicitly pro-oil republicans, or not-them?

I’d love to have a nice EV, but for me they don’t make economic sense. I think that’d true for many.

Subsidies don’t seem to have permanently changed that.

We’ll also soon see how efficiently fully run down electric cars are to deal with at scale. They could be more harmful than we know.

The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.

We know this because the people doing it are explicitly pro oil. Trump has gone on a few times now about how much he loves oil.

And, to be clear, the subsidies didn't go away, they moved. If we want to talk subsidies, oil is at the tippy top of that list. It's disingenuous to just ignore it. I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.

> If we leave the market alone, people will allocate resources where they are actually needed the most

If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago. They're one of the most, if not the most, blessed products by our government. They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.

>The policy choice to stop subsidizing EVs while, simultaneously halting their adoption from overseas, was intended to deliberately hurt the industry as a whole.

Chinese EVs are a Trojan horse. Even if they weren't, we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.

>I mean, for fucks sake, MOST of the corn grown in this country is just so we can turn it into gas. Do a deep dive on that.

I know that. Ethanol somehow reduces certain kinds of supposedly harmful emissions, and it gives farmers someone to sell their corn to. We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve. If we had crop issues, rest assured that they would probably stop using ethanol until things got back to normal.

>If we left the market alone, we would've abandoned gasoline cars a long time ago.

We had EV cars a hundred years ago and abandoned them. Petrol works better. People could be encouraged to use electric trains or something but it turns out that city life is not practical or desirable for everyone.

>They get every special treatment, bailout, and subsidy in the book. Down to even the streets. 25 trillion on interstates alone.

Every country prizes its auto industry (if it has one) because it is related to nearly every other production capability. Building all the shit the military needs from scratch down to the raw material supply chain is not something that can be done in a hurry. Also, I don't know if you knew, but the interstates are used for rapid shipping and military movement. Trains still exist but they can't compete with trucks on highways for most things.

> we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.

This already played out with Japanese cars and it turned out it was the quality rather than the cost that was hard to compete with. I'm going to bet that EVs from Asia will be better built than anything made in the US or Europe before too long (if not already). They'll manufacture at scale and work out the kinks.

Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.

You're oversimplifying (to be fair, so did I). There is usually a cost/quality tradeoff. In the long run I think every major country could figure out how to make things with any given level of quality, and have certain costs in the same ballpark. But our labor costs are higher than nearly any other country. Chinese labor is currently very cheap.

>Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.

Just because some people online claim they want $10k EVs doesn't mean they would buy them. It also doesn't mean that we could make them for that price, at any level of effort. We pay auto workers WAY more than the Chinese pay theirs.

Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas. We do not allow garbage vehicles to be imported. Neither do other countries. Of course, forcing people to buy cars at higher prices or different quality points inhibits domestic innovation. But if the industry dies because of ideological purity, we would be worse off as a nation than we would be driving cars that cost slightly more or lack certain features.

> some people online claim they want $10k EVs

I wasn't really thinking about cost, but quality, when I made the comment about what we should be doing. Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.

> Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas.

I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars. The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality. Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.

>Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.

I agree but I don't think it is possible to maintain an advantage in process or scale permanently in general. If you expect other countries to never figure it out, you're wrong. But there can be a situation where higher local costs in some areas are offset somehow by transport costs or strategic subsidies for domestic production.

>Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.

China has many protectionist policies, some of which they have leveraged to steal technology from foreign competitors. The Chinese people are not very happy with their vehicle options, but they do not have the option to buy foreign either for the most part. To give you an idea how unhinged it can be in China, I've heard of campaigns to force everyone to discard perfectly good appliances and scooters to stimulate their economy and eat up excess product. It's a bad move but that's how they roll.

Foreign cars cannot be imported en masse to China, and even the cheapest Western-made cars are more expensive than the average Chinese buyer wants to pay. The cheapest new car on the US market is about $25k I think, and the average is closer to $40k.

>I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars.

I think you'd be better off buying cars from neighboring countries. Anyway, I think every country that can support car manufacturing should do so for strategic reasons. What I was referring to is US-specific rules about what kinds of cars can be imported. Imported cars are usually the more luxurious models due to the rules. The rules as I understand them involve listing out features that each model has. Bare bones and low-quality cars are rejected even if they could be useful to someone, because this strikes a balance between letting people buy what they want and supporting local industry.

>The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality.

They are cheap but low-quality and no doubt infused with Chinese spy/sabotage tech. I'm sure that they can eventually improve on quality, but ultimately countries in the West that produce cars now need to guard their own industries against insurmountable foreign competition. Nobody can beat the Chinese on price, generally. Their government will eat a loss to put competition out of business, because they want to take over the world. So the best we can do is act accordingly.

> We need to support farmers because a market spread too thin on farming means people would starve.

People would not starve if we stopped the ethanol mandate. In fact, corn prices would fall because the government would no longer force ethanol to be mixed with oil. Less demand would decrease the price.

I'm obviously talking about maintaining spare production capacity. Far worse things than higher prices would happen if we actually had crops fail. If the government stopped requiring ethanol, there would be fewer farmers (although a few might convert to other crops, some land is not suitable for many different crops).

The perps were patriots, resisting a murdering (among others, destroying USAID) sociopath committing mass treason against the government.

There were also like maybe a dozen actually destructive cases. No one got hurt. Total property damage was maybe a half million dollars? We're arguing over the dumbest pittances of nothing, even if we add an order of magnitude here. This is ridiculous.

Personally, your post seems to be strongly condemning, as if this was some absurd nightmare situation. I find it just ridiculous cowardice to pretend like this was an actual scary and bad problem. I'm not sure how many 9's of non violent peaceful protest it was, but it was a lot of 9's, and very little actual harm.

Yes, a brand had it's image destroyed. It did it itself. Telsa's leader set it's brand's name on fire. Molotov'ed itself into kingdom come. From which it seems impossible to recover. A brand that was early in on EV's. But it seems facetious and ridiculous blame this political suicide in public, with nazi salutes and chainsaws, on the left. Get real man; you have to be joking. The left didn't slow this down; what kind of a fool do you take us for?

Yeah, indeed, glad you came around; how did this poor nation vote for this crazy crazy crazy shit?

Legally, that’s how.

The pendulum goes back and forth. The right is in power now, so the left will point out deficiencies and promise improvements. If enough people believe things could be better, than the left will win power in the next election.

Then the cycle starts over again. It works wonderfully, and the USA has prospered because of it.

Sometimes immature people do crazy things because they’re narcissistic and want to try to circumvent the rules. They could do the right thing and try to bring change legally, but through either stupidity or lack of morals they instead go outside the law. People all across the political spectrum should view such people as a liability to us all.

Alas the pendulum just tore down 1/3rd the white house & Congress.

No respect in the slightest for this nation. The cycle starting over here is a bunch of disgusting plutocrats & Federalist Society nut jobs trying to strip America bare & argue up is down to ignore the bill of rights.

It's not legal. It keeps being shot down. The DoJ is fully in the pocket of the white house which is maybe technically legal but was a deeply deeply disturbing idea even a decade ago. What's happening now is an insult to law, and the terrormongers in power are at war with the justice system, because they have no respect for the law & want to abuse it.

A couple cars getting a bit messed up doesn't scare me at all. To be afraid of the people, to cower and scare as if it's gone great evil? It's so so so so small a trial, doing such little against our society and law. Imo to compare the two feels a farce.