Must be nice to have more money than brains. Most of us don't have enough of either.
The fellow throwing away the scope is generous, certainly, but other than that, he appears to be the antithesis of a hacker.
Apart from you, that is, who jumps straight to "he seems to have more money than me therefore he must be lazy and stupid". Maybe $2k isn't a lot of money to him and he has plenty of brains and you're just judging him by your different-but-not-more-correct standards?
Ad-hominem attacks are not the kind of thing Hacker News is about. Please keep that in mind.
Edit: keep in mind that his cartoon is mostly a bunch of whining about how he can't do this and can't do that because of how modern electronic equipment is made. Meanwhile, a friend in Portugal just used his homebrew wire-bonding machine to repair an 18 GHz YIG-tuned oscillator for me. (He failed this time, which is damned rare for him, but he sure didn't balk at trying.)
I do respect his generosity, though -- hopefully, some talented kid's going to get a nice present out of it. I try to help out in the same spirit when I can, because I benefited from similar generosity as a newbie.