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Comment by danielharan | Hacker News Reader

Down-voters: explain, please?

You don't think the experience from this type of policy being tried somewhere else is relevant? That it won't backfire?

The way you explained it, it seems you're blaming the VCs for something that was government's fault (it was the government's decision to cancel the old visas, instead of keeping them in parallel with the new one).

"Blame" is the wrong way to think about any major policy decision. Instead, you want to think of the effects of the new policy - whether or not anyone intends to do harm (most people don't), will harm result? The grandparent poster's experience with a similar policy in Canada is very relevant there. I don't personally have a position about founder visas - I'm a U.S. citizen, so they don't affect me - but I do think that having all the arguments for and against, particularly concerning unintended consequences, is pretty important.

The way I understood the poster, the harm came from the government canceling the old investor visas. That seems pretty easy to fix: just add new visas on top of the old ones. The consequences of the way it happened were pretty clear: a bunch of people who previously would use the old investor visas (where you could put up your own money, I imagine) now can't. The effects of this decision shouldn't have been surprising to anyone.

The problem is that you and I don't control what the government does. Government stupidity is a reality that has to be factored into decision-making. And maybe there's a way around it in this case - perhaps whoever drafts & sponsors the Founder Visa law just needs to be aware of the potential pitfall and make everyone else involved aware of why there need to be separate founder & investor visas, most of the time stupid decisions are made because reasonable people don't have all the information necessary - but it's still really important to be aware of it so you don't create unintended consequences. Saying "Well, I had the right idea, it just turned out to be a disaster because of other people" doesn't stop it from being a disaster.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try to be more careful how I state things.

Also from the HN guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Asking people to explain downvotes is really a form of complaining about downvoting. People routinely downvote when they disagree.

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