It's a parody of your comment, which ascribes all environmental regulation to NIMBYs. If you blow a raspberry and someone blows a similar one right back at you, maybe you earned it.
>It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.
e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.
You did not include the more equivalent quote from the OP in my view:
> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development
This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.
A charitable reading of their comment would be that they meant NIMBYs write and use environmental regulations to stunt development, rather than that there is no such thing as a legitimate environmental regulation. It's definitely poorly phrased in a way that lends itself to the uncharitable interpretation, but their subsequent remarks are very clear that they don't agree with that.
As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.
Let's look at the opening of the two comments which clearly mirror each other in tone and structure.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.
latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...]
[...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith
You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'
I don't think that taking umbrage with a rude part of a comment can be called missing the point because another part of the comment was better. Am I missing yours?
And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.
