<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>tsdlts</author><text>&amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s even relevant that it was not legal at the time&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Imagine setting the precedent that the government can unilaterally decide to steal your property based on something your great grandfather did which wasn&amp;#x27;t even a crime. Do you not see how such a power might be abused in future when you can retroactively punish people for laws where the ink has yet to dry and that they never even committed?</text><parent_chain><item><author>dusted</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn&amp;#x27;t know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it&amp;#x27;d not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea..&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d not be unreasonable to hunt down those responsible, and make them pay for cleaning it up. Sure, they&amp;#x27;re probably dead by now, but they probably left a lot of money.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s even relevant that &amp;quot;it was not illegal at the time&amp;quot;, they knew the stuff was toxic, and they chose to release it into the oceans, just because no one had explicitly made a law banning them from doing so.. Common sense should be the first law.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>L.A.&apos;s coast was once a DDT dumping ground, but no one could see it until now</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>macspoofing</author><text>The problem with your approach, besides the immorality of arbitrary post-hoc rationalization for punishment, is that it is not pragmatic. What&amp;#x27;s done is done, and you need people to get behind making it better. If you come out and push a policy that in part entails rooting and punishing those responsible (or even descendent of those responsible), you&amp;#x27;ll have people come out against it just for that reason and the environment will suffer. I would be one of those people, because I would never give that power to the kinds of people who would argue for the arbitrary execution of collective punishments on people today. If given the choice to fix environment&amp;#x2F;punish wrongdoers or do nothing, I would go with &amp;#x27;do nothing&amp;#x27;. It&amp;#x27;s why &amp;#x27;The Green New Deal&amp;#x27; is so terrible because instead of focusing on pragmatic solutions we can all get behind, it suffers from scope creep of socialist and progressive policies that have little to nothing to do with climate change and environment - and therefore I&amp;#x27;d rather have none of it.&lt;p&gt;To circle back on collective punishment - there&amp;#x27;s a reason why the North, after winning the civil war, has largely chose not to collectively punish the South - in much the same way that other regions which suffered through terrible civil wars where terrible crimes were committed, frequently choose to replace punishment of many of those responsible with something like reconciliation committees, where symbolic gestures are accepted in lieu of prison or capital punishment.</text><parent_chain><item><author>dusted</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s amazing how little some people have cared, this was not that they didn&amp;#x27;t know, they certainly knew, otherwise, it&amp;#x27;d not have resorted to hiding the stuff by dumping it into the sea..&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;d not be unreasonable to hunt down those responsible, and make them pay for cleaning it up. Sure, they&amp;#x27;re probably dead by now, but they probably left a lot of money.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s even relevant that &amp;quot;it was not illegal at the time&amp;quot;, they knew the stuff was toxic, and they chose to release it into the oceans, just because no one had explicitly made a law banning them from doing so.. Common sense should be the first law.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>L.A.&apos;s coast was once a DDT dumping ground, but no one could see it until now</title><url>https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-coast-ddt-dumping-ground/</url></story>