Logic, rejected

{summary}While reading an article on Bloom Energy's new Bloom Box technology in InformationWeek, I came upon the following comment from one "willdeans": Something that requires $400,000,000.00 in Venture Capital = public domain?!?!? pde louraille950, your incentive system is an enemy to all people who want clean drinking water and enough food for their families. I hope the ingenuitive men at Bloom and their backers earn so much money others continue to stick their necks out to bring new technologies to market. Whatever portion of your tax dollars were spent ensuring Bloom could do their work it is less than the subsidies provided to single welfare mothers so that they can continue to crank out the next generation of rapist, drug dealers, and car thieves. If you want to complain about where your tax dollars are going tell it to the morbidly obese woman on food stamps. He was responding to a comment by another reader which questioned whether the "secret sauce" in use by Bloom (which, according to the article, "stems from [K.R.] Sridhar's work years ago at NASA") should actually be in the public domain, but obviously willdeans doesn't really care about whether or not the tech should be in the public domain as he is far more interested in making this a discussion of government entitlements and other programs for which our taxes are used. I usually don't respond to idiotic statements like those made by willdeans, but his comment inspired the following response which, unfortunately, the comment system at InformationWeek rejected. So here it is: I realize it's off-topic, but it always amazes me when people say ill-informed things like "If you want to complain about where your tax dollars are going tell it to the morbidly obese woman on food stamps." Even a modicum of investigation into that causes of obesity will tell you that it is caused by cheap calories (here in the U.S., most likely in the form of high fructose corn syrup made prevalent by our government's subsidization of corn which makes it cheaper to buy than it is to produce... but that's another matter altogether). The fact is that people on food stamps have little money to spend on food and, unfortunately, the inexpensive foods available here are heavily processed and not really "food" at all. Have you read the label on Kraft singles, for instance? It's not "cheese" but rather a "cheese food product" because it isn't a real cheese at all. In fact, if you read the ingredients of most inexpensive foods, you'll find they contain very little of the items we would actually consider to be food in the first place (fruits, vegetables, meats, etc.) and are instead filled with food byproducts and chemicals. So, if you're really upset about people on food stamps and other welfare being unhealthy and overweight, you should really be railing against the food industry itself (or the government regulators that should be holding them to decent standards, but my guess is that you don't care much for regulation) rather than the people who are just trying to feed their family when they work a crappy job that doesn't pay enough to cover their rent, food, and health expenses (which are, of course, exacerbated because they aren't eating well). Of course the fact that you also believe that "single welfare mothers ... crank out the next generation of rapist, drug dealers, and car thieves" leads me to believe that you don't think much before you speak and that you are probably just regurgitating the talking points you hear from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh (of course who can blame you when the U.S. education system doesn't teach kids how to reason because it's too busy teaching them to regurgitate the answers to standardized tests), so this argument is probably lost on you. But perhaps someone else will see this message and be inspired to do some research before repeating such an asinine statement. Of course the chances of willdeans ever seeing it are probably slim to none (especially since InformationWeek's articles don't support trackbacks either), but I suppose there's always hope.