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Comment by munk-a | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that it's mainly unjust to have invested so much in growing it to destroy it. Mistakes happen and this is the right decision for now given the situation but it is wasteful.

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Well then the solution is simple: people need to stop making mistakes. We should all have perfect foresight, and never guess wrong about counterparty risk or changes in consumer tastes.

Agreed. And the single best way to avoid making mistakes is to stay at home and complain on the internet about everyone else's.

I see people finding too often that change is injustice, and this is strange.

I think I just have a strange personal definition of injustice - but the effort put into growing this orchard to destroy is could have gone to better projects. The fact that so much of an investment is being wasted is, to me, a misallocation of resources that were unjustly allotted to this failed venture. A more just outcome would have been these resources and efforts going to projects that actually yielded benefits to people.

I've noted this elsewhere but "injustice" was semantically baked into the OP so I retained that wording but my brain really stretched the term here to align better with "wasteful". I can certainly argue to their equivalence but I think if multiple people have gotten hung up on the term I've committed a semantic misstep.

It is important to not think of failure as injustice. Something not working out is not immoral. Carelessly wasting resources can be, but doing everything in good faith and something ending not at the absolute optimal time isn't wrong. No plan survives contact with reality perfectly.

The effort required to maintain the orchard when its fruit would go to waste would be even more destructive and wasteful, no? Which is really the greater injustice?

Yes - I absolutely endorse destroying the orchard at this point.

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