Apple CEO Tim Cook to donate his fortune to charity
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Not everyone "can" or "afford" to think of rest of the world because they are to0 helpless to give away the money instead of making ends meet.
It is really difficult to fill the shoes of Steve Jobs and get out of the shadow, and not only he has maintained the dignity of what apple is but Tim Cook has certainly made a name for himself and it is very nice to hear that we have such good people in this world.
It makes me fall in love with Apple more. #Respect
Did you read the article, or just the headline? There are more CEOs "like him".
"More than a hundred" have signed up to give away their wealth to charities, including Bill Gates, who started the pledge along with Warren Buffet. Of course, around here Bill Gates eats vitriol, because of some business practices in his history and despite his generosity and charity work. Meanwhile, Apple openly conspired to keep industry wages low and gets "#Respect"?
This is not to take away from what Mr. Cook has decided. It's great for the world. But let's not put him on a pedestal without at least acknowledging there are a slew of wealthy individuals doing this, some of them real pioneers of the idea.
You should look past the silly things and understand the message / purpose of the comment
I'm not the OP, but it bothered me too. It goes against HN's general discussion style.
What? The use of terminology specific to social media?
1 - HN is social media.
2 - 'OP' is a term as associated with social media of a certain nature as the use of '#'
It 'clearly' states this: It makes me fall in love with Apple more. #Respect
No quotes. He/She was using it seriously.
Same with retweets.
Adding the hashtag at the end of what you are trying to communicate puts salt on the wound as lyke w tottally cud write like whateves and you'd understand but lyke its not cool, ya know? #whatisdecorum
"Of course, around here Bill Gates eats vitriol, because of some business practices in his history and despite his generosity and charity work. Meanwhile, Apple openly conspired to keep industry wages low and gets '#Respect'?"
There are absolutely some individuals who engage in this hypocrisy, but I would not paint all of HN with that brush. Quite the opposite. I regularly see posts downvoted in to oblivion for failing to compartmentalize opinions about Bill Gates, Microsoft CEO and Bill Gates, Philanthropist.
This is probably true, but I can't recall seeing it in many threads I read. On the other hand, I've seen comments (albeit, downvoted), on these very forums, calling for Mr. Gates' death. I'm serious. That's unbelievable in what is otherwise a highly intelligent tech community.
My post probably comes off as "Who cares?", and that was not my intention. This is amazing of Mr. Cook. But let's not attach it to "Apple is so great!"
What Gates is doing now as a philanthropist is great, and he gets plenty of credit for it here on HN, but it doesn't erase the past.
In an ideal situation, the CEOs themselves would run the charity, like Bill Gates. Of course that is not possible in a majority of the cases.
If all the CEOs could donate to for example Bill Gates foundation and Bill Gates lead the foundation in deciding where to focus the huge amount money, i think that would go a long way
On a social level, Tim Cook's fortune, donated, has the bigger impact.
Both gestures deserve respect.
Consider the problem from the perspective of the global poor, who have a few different "target customers" from which they can solicit funds.
From this perspective, it's not particularly helpful for CNN to run a story about a walmart cashier giving $5 to the Salvation Army, because even in the best of all possible worlds (let's say 100% of walmart cashiers see the story, and there's a 100% conversion rate, so all of them donate $5!), it's just not that much money. Walmart employs about 2M people - best of all worlds, that $5/each amounts to $10M. That's nice and all, but it doesn't move the needle.
Conversely, if all the "fawning" over Tim Cook, Buffett, Gates etc. gets just one more billionaire to donate his/her wealth, the impact on global poverty is just thousands to millions of times larger than that.
It boils down to what it is that you're trying to accomplish: are you trying to get more money devoted to helping the poor, or are you trying to adjust allocation of social status so that it flows toward people who have altruistic attitudes (regardless of their ability to deliver)?
I'm fortunate not to be living at under $1/day, but if I were, I know which one I'd pick.
If you gave $1 billion to the bottom 10% of just Americans, they'd each get around $33.
This isn't to detract from charitable giving, or from Cook. It's admirable that he's doing it. But let's not underestimate the scale of the problems of the world, either.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-a...
But it'd been even cooler if we could help solve some of the harder problems.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather be unimaginative than fabulously, unimaginably rich but also selfish about it.
Wow, I did not get that from the quote.
I certainly got from that that Jobs views philanthropy as the land of retirement for the unimaginative.
Forget, for a moment, the hypothetical of what Jobs would have done. Maybe he would have grown into someone who gave a single fuck about the poor, but in this statement, he called out that caring as beneath him.
That's a value we should condemn, just as we should praise Cook for his stated intentions.
Sorry - you have made this up out of whole cloth. It's not what he said, and not a reasonable inference.
By calling Gates unimaginative Jobs was referring to the fact that he didn't have any more ideas about how to advance the computing industry which is why he had left to do philanthropy.
He wasn't criticizing Gates for caring, rather he was criticizing him for not having more to contribute to the industry.
"I am creative, so I stay in computing."
"Gates isn't, so he left."
"Leaving computing for philanthropy is for those who aren't as good as I am."
Do you really read that statement differently? Do you not see it as honoring creativity over philanthropy?
I don't know what to say to you then. I guess we just disagree on how to read this sentence. I think 90% of readers would agree with me, and I assume you think 90% of readers would agree with you. We seem to be at an impasse.
As an aside, I really wish there was a tag in the headline when auto-play video is in a link... I tend to open up several articles and the respective comments in tabs in the morning... the chrome indicator helps, but would be nice to know it was going to happen.
I think it's great, and I didn't personally pick up on CNN trying to pull anything sleazy here.
By every scientific definition, yes, we are.
I've had this debate with others before, and "self-made" overall tends to mean that an individual did something in isolation. I.e. It plays into the narrative that "no man is an island" and that we all owe our gratitude to the society we were part of, as if the society had some direct doing in it.
Suffice to say there's not enough information to say anything definitively. It's not like Tim is paying for his nephew's college next week and then donating everything to charity. One could reasonable expect this to be in reference to his fortune when he dies. Not what happens next week.
But we don't know because all we have is a blog spam re-write of something we can't see.
It's linked from the CNN piece.
People typically save money for their kids. The 'mothering' or 'fathering' instincts are so strong that we protect resources for our progenys. It appears that Tim Cook may never have a real progency. So what will he do with all this money? He could give it to his nephew. Maybe. He gets a thank you card from them. But his 'parenting' instincts are not triggered by it. So he has to do something else with it, like donating it to Charity.
Fucking billionaires [https://youtu.be/iko4s3CfBi0?t=44s]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-02-13/apple-supply...
While it's not slavery in the traditional way, it sure is when you pay workers virtually nothing for a product that's overpriced.
Think a situtation where you'd be an administrator for Amazon and you're getting $10/day just because you live in <x> country, while your other _only_ option is to - as you said - "go away and grow some rice".
While this is a completely legal action, would you say that it's also ethical?
But no, whenever a f*cked up situation is not near our own precious asses, it doesn't matter. They can go out and grow some rice.
> The suicide rate at Foxconn during 2010 remained lower than that of the general Chinese population at the time,[6] as well as all 50 states of the United States (U.S.).[37]