Generosity, consideration and pragmatism, meet holier than thou, jealousy and chip-on-shoulder judgement. Welcome to the Internet.
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.