T. Boone Pickens Farewell Letter
boonepickens.com
boonepickens.com
"Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health."
It's a good final letter and has good advice. Complicated guy, complicated legacy, but good advice.
Clever. :)
That statement and others show me the Pickens was trying to help others, to encourage them. I especially like the list of guidelines at the bottom of the page.
I’ve been reading One-Storied America[0], a book from 1935 by two Soviet humorists visiting the United States. The book echos this perspective on every page.
[0] you can find a good 1937 translation online under the title Little Golden America by Charles Malamuth.
"Indispensable men? The graveyards are full of them."
This. Many people don't realize that staying fit isn't a quest to live longer but to live physically better in the later ages.
I cringe when someone tells me stuff like "yeah but that dude smoked and never exercised and lived until 80s while the fit guy got cancer and it didn't help him" ... yes but you forgot to mention that living life in his body became a miserable experience since 45 vs. someone else who may have died in 60s of cancer but in fact spent something like 50 fulfilling years feeling great.
Staying fit may not save you from cancer or car accident, but but the life is so much better when you live in a fit body.
Obviously I don't think T Boone shares the legacy of violent dictators but my point is that those clutching their pearls here trying to categorically separate themselves from those who speak ill of the dead are not separate at all. They either don't believe what Pickens did was all that bad or they don't believe he did bad things. On their spectrum of "posthumous criticism" Pickens lies on the positive side of their personal threshold.
I don't know enough about him to pass moral judgement, but it seems like many others think that they do (after a quick scan of Wikipedia, meh, that's good enough).
It just seems crass to be flippantly judgmental when the guy just died, and in response to his last elegant / humble / insightful "post" to the world.
I'm also confused at the implicit viewpoints that, IMO, are at odds with the HN/YC ethos of "individual hussle/initiative/hack your way to huge growth/etc". I.e. if Pickens wasn't from another generation and another industry, I think he'd fit in very well with the HN/YC types (disclaimer/ha, I'm making an assumption that I just chastised others for doing).
Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.
Was Disney the conformist racist simpleminded backwater troglodyte they claimed, or were they?
It’s hard to not be bothered by the pettiness of the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat”. But I once felt hacker news had fewer of those voices.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/526061.Walt_Disney
I did after reading this article: http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Diane_On_Gabler/Diane_O...
The worst factual criticism that can be pointed at Disney was he was overly sentimental for a past that never was. He painted American history in such a way to present a "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism".
He was very much a man of his time, he wasn't known to use racial epithets - but was racially insensitive like most men of his era - he had several jews in his inner circle, and none of his employees (even the ones who didn't like him) would say he was anti-Semitic - but he allied himself with anti-communist groups that had a strong anti-Semitic bend to them.
I would argue on whole, he left the world a better place than he found it however, the technical improvements he and his company introduced to the world of animation left a huge and lasting impact felt the world over.
I also think it's a one-way street, because it's very asymmetrical. It's super quick, easy and satisfying to burn someone because they appear to be a hypocrite, but quite hard to make the counter-case, because reality is often messy and grey (such as this guy, who was both an oil man and a wind energy man). So fewer and fewer people will bother to do all that work to reply to negativity, which will naturally lead to more voice/upvotes on one side, which makes it even more onerous to reply etc.
Replace "HN" with "the world" and I'd agree with you. I think your average person is so exhausted by the shrieking of the the online naysayers that they just reduce their involvement. For example, I saw an article recently about Andrew Yang's very intelligent, classy response to those racist comments from that prospective SNL comedian, and then he was pilloried for "pandering to the white vote". While lots of folks came to Yang's defense, it was just sad that they had to.
I often think that the Internet has fundamentally altered the "freedom of speech" calculus in that it allows people to say outrageous things for attention, but largely ignore the negative consequences (i.e. social opprobrium) of those statements. I have no idea what the solution is, but I don't think it will get better any time soon.
For example, I saw a mini-documentary recently about people who may have harbored what I'll call "questioning/prejudiced" views, but then fell down the YouTube rabbit-hole of full on racist/Nazi/white-supremacist videos and turned into full-on racist conspiracy theorists.
The change is also due to the topics and topics sources constantly pushed into the discussion (often by very high-karma participants).
HN has basically become
NYT/BBC/WallStreetJournal/Vox/Slate/BuzzFeed discussion forum (for anything relating to environment/economy/politics).
Seems that more reasonable technical (although, narrower in scientific scope) discussion is happening on lobste.rs
In there, there is also publicly viewable moderation log, that helps to understand/evaluate how moderation decisions are made.
To me the change started happening in about 2014 where public deplatforming/takedowns became normalized in Software tech sector.
However, I also agree that this type of change at HN, accelerated in more recent years.
The level of discourse around those topics is abysmal.
Mainstream topics allowed from any source so long as they meet that criteria or presents "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." This site has never been exclusively for technical topics. Flagging stories merely because you don't find them interesting, because they're mainstream or because they come from a mainstream site is an abuse of flagging privileges. You can just ignore such stories, hide them, upvote the content you would rather see or post more of such content.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. _If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._
Highlighting added for emphasis.
If you don't believe me, talk to the admin and the guy who made the site[0]. The problem here is not the mainstream nature of articles being posted, but the low effort being put in by commenters. Plenty of tech-related stories have plenty of garbage comments as well. Most of the discussion around RMS has been a dumpster fire.
And I agree with my parent poster -- lobste.rs is a much better curated feed of interesting topics to me -- I'm not on it yet, because I sort of feel that I've made an investment here in the community.
When I visit the site it seems like I need to already know what community to join. Which sticks me with the problem of not knowing which to join. Googling was not helpful.
Is this the sort of thing that I have to know someone to invite me and kick start me into use?
I guess I’ll eventually get around to joining irc chat to get an invite. But I suppose this is useful for filtering out slackers like me who can’t figure out how to join :)
I've been around HN for almost 10 years now and what has happened on HN is noteworthy. In the "old" days, Hacker News was literally called Startup News and startups and the whole optimism around them was celebrated. Even though there were some famous examples of kind of chopping down an idea -- it wasn't done in some kind of anti-capitalist, political way, but in a typical "nerdy" kind of way. Here's probably the most famous example:
> I have a few qualms with this [Dropbox] app: 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. 2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue. 3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? [1].
Now, if we did a Show HN for Dropbox today, the negative comments would be something similar to this:
"Why would you want to store files on a cloud on that generates a huge carbon footprint and support some VC-backed "n-ist"* company that doesn't support government-owned health care and only exists to make profits for shareholders? And besides, there's $preferred_Javascript_framework that can do it without having to conform to the anti-competition walled garden or have any need to use S3 and support Amazon's unfair labor practices."
The "old" way wasn't questioning the act of making money from an invention (capitalism,) while the "new" way has gotten all kinds of pseudo-woke. It seems like "new" HN has become severely anti-capitalist and more interested in shitting on the very system that created (and continues to create) some of the most important, useful technology the world has ever seen. There's a lot of nonsense, for sure (i.e. Juicero,) but then again there was a lot of nonsense in the 1800s [2] and other periods of great technological accomplishment. It's normal to have a bunch of noise with the signal.
We literally can order almost anything from anywhere and have it brought to your door. There are cars that drive themselves. There are aircraft that fly themselves. There are affordable watches that you can use to make phone calls and actually do an ECG. That's amazing. But rather than critiquing the tech in typical nerd-debate fashion (like old Hacker News,) instead there is a distinct group that would spend time attacking Apple's tax strategies or Amazon's carbon footprint. That's significant because it marks a change from the days where companies like Apple were seen as "creating the future" instead now, they are seen as "obligated to pay for a country's social programs because they're so big." That's just nuts. Rather that promoting tech companies of all sorts and sizes and promoting the creation of the future, instead a lot of words are written demanding that those companies pay more to governments. That those companies should somehow be penalized or punished for being successful (from building things people want and find very useful.)
I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion (because circa 2019 Hacker News,) but I feel like the problem here is that as Hacker News went more international, many of the afflictions endemic to Europe have become a bigger influence here on Hacker News. The indefinite pessimism of Europe [3][4] has infected this community specifically and much of Silicon Valley in general. Essentially the indefinite pessimists have pushed out the optimists. Perhaps there's some hope though and the pendulum will swing back to the Definite Optimism of the 1950s and 1960s -- guys like Elon Musk, the late Steve Jobs and a few others seem to have been trying pretty hard to bring back the excitement and optimism of building the future. However, for every Musk, there are dozens of "leaders" who care to preach Doomsday predictions and FUD rather than moving full speed towards building something really cool and useful. Airplanes are a canary here. Flying from Singapore to London used to be considered amazing. Now instead of celebrating human mobility at a scale never before possible (and taking advantage of the opportunities that brings for peace, understanding, and commerce,) instead people lament the carbon footprint and shareholder value of the airline.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil [3] https://zakslayback.com/pessimism-optimism-definite-indefini... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/03/european-count...
* where "n" is race, sex, gender, class, etc.
I think the older HN was more balanced - ie the famous Dropbox launch thread had both "cool, my mom will love this" and "lame, I already do this with rsync". But even on the more general topics of climate change or capitalism, there was a decent mix - I remember one of the very first articles on Jacobinmag made it to the front page. Even if you don't subscribe to any of their ideology, it was still good to get exposed to it and consider it.
I guess the worst thing that I could say about HN today is that it is not as interesting. As discussion becomes more monotonous and predictable, there's fewer new or surprising things that get brought up. I also think it's not really HN-specific, but a small website getting caught up in the zeitgeist.
Those comments are all now dead or nearly so and I wouldn't have even seen them if your comment weren't calling attention to them. Please don't do that. Just downvote or flag them and trust others to do the same. Otherwise we end up having another discussion about HN instead of about the submission.
> Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.
Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Just go look at any HN submission of any remotely controversial figure and you'll find terrible comments. It isn't new.
You're right; I was very early into this thread, when those comments were still at the top.
And also the mobile app I use doesn't have a down vote button, so my "I want to react" urge had to go through a new comment instead of the voting itself. I'll flip over to chrome and down vote there next time.
But the latter has always been an issue here. And there's still enough insight to keep me coming back.
I used to worry about creating an echo chamber by black listing people but now I’m just so tired, I’d rather have an echo chamber than a frequent “what the fuck is this garbage, oh it’s another comment by prepend”
> Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chaired the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. As of November 2016, Pickens had a net worth of $500 million.
So, it seems, a "financial" predator, possibly of the worst kind. Not a lot of sympathy for these kind of people.
Edit: to be clear, "late" philanthropists are a nice thing, but as Ricardo Semler [0] once said, "If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".
His main shtick was to propose a buy-out or merger, wait for the stock to rise on the news, dump it and then never follow through. That doesn't take care of 'struggling businesses', nor does it 'fix their management processes'. Your 401k might still agree but for wholly different reasons than you think.
Earlier in his career I'd say he was a lot better.
This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least partially targeted at aspiring company founders.
For example the money Bill Gates is giving away is mostly in the form of shares of Microsoft. Those didn't exist before he started the company (with others of course). He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?
Later on other people decided they also wanted shares of Microsoft and assigned them a monetary value. Did Bill Gates somehow force them to want the shares he had? To the extent that he "took" money it was in exchange for shares of a company that other people found valuable.
It's not inconsistent. Most founders are trying to create companies that provide economic value; one can believe that the creation of economic value is a good thing, while also believing that more of the economic surplus created should directly go to the common good.
The corollary is obvious. Tax the ultra-rich at high marginal rates to force them to contribute back to the society that made their success possible in the first place.
So a single person having that much can certainly be a good thing, or a neutral thing, or a bad thing. But it’s not something that I have to think about fixing.
The literature is really clear that taxing the rich won’t do what you think it will do. It’s also surprising because this sentiment somehow thinks the rich are not already taxed. Wealth is taxed during transactions, not at rest. And the rich buy stuff like all others.
Edit: Apparently this statement needs further clarification. What do those shares represent? A share of the profits. And what are the profits? Literally the difference between the company's revenues and expenses. It's literally the difference between the value created by workers and the salary the company paid them in return for that value.
So _of course_ Bill Gates took that wealth from the company's workers. That's what profit is!
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Now to expand on the broader idea, in a Democratic Socialist economy where the stock corporation is replaced by the worker cooperative, he would not have had the right to claim 500 million shares. Those shares would have been distributed to the employees of Microsoft based on some metric of contribution to the company. Or would never have existed in the first place, and each worker would have had a vote in how the company was run and the profits distributed.
In either method, Bill Gates would have gotten some still significant portion of the value the company created, but no where near the amount he walked away with in our current economy. The rest of that value would have been distributed to the company's workers in one way or another - profit distributions, shares, dividends, what have you.
In the minds of many - myself included - that is a much more equitable system. Bill Gates took the money from the people who helped create it in the first place. And he took a share that far out paced his contribution to the creation of that value.
He was able to do that because our economic system is set up around authoritarian companies, where the founders and CEOs have near dictatorial power (or oligarchical power with the board). And dictatorships are rarely equitable.
Can we at least agree that - whether voluntary or not - the share literally represent the excess value taken from workers?
Cause that's what I was saying in response to the question. Those shares represent the value taken from workers.
As to it being voluntary, it's not. There's a massive power differential in the negotiations. That's what unions were meant to help solve, but unions can't really solve that power differential (they were never strong enough) and they've got their own problems of corruption and power.
The idea behind a worker cooperative based system isn't that workers take stock as payment instead of cash. They still get a cash salary. They also get ownership of company and a right to decide what happens to the profits.
There are several approaches to how you design that system. In one you do away with the concept of stock (ownership shares) altogether - it's a one person one vote system. In another you keep the concept of ownership shares and workers earn shares in proportion to their time at the company. Maybe you keep an aspect of negotiation and the shares they earn are tied to their negotiated salary.
But you no longer allow outside investors to purchase ownership of the company. Or founders to maintain a controlling share long past the point where their contributions have been matched or outweighed by the rest of the company's employees.
In this system we recognize that companies, like countries, are communities that should be run democratically by the people involved in them for the people involved in them.
This doesn't make sense. This would imply that a Microsoft employee had more money before working at Microsoft than they did after working at Microsoft. That is objectively not the case.
That's what it means to take something. Someone else has something. You take it. They don't have it anymore.
When an employee works at Microsoft he creates value. He didn't have that value before he did the work, he created it through the work done there.
Microsoft pays him a salary in return for his value.
However, the salary Microsoft pays does not match the full value he created. The difference is Microsoft's profits. The company is taking those profits from the workers who created the value in the first place. They didn't have that value when they joined, they created it there, but it's still taken from them at time of creation.
Those shares represent a right to a share of those profits. Stock shares literally represent a right to the excess value taken from the workers who created it.
So who did Bill Gates take that money from? The workers who created the value the money represents.
And this is how you wind up with massive wealth inequality and all the problems that creates.
People recognize the problems with wealth inequality. The recognize the problems with unions (which have their own power problems and corruption problems). They recognize the problem with having the government redistribute the wealth (which is still better than allowing the inequality to continue to grow).
But we're so ingrained with the idea that the way things are is the way they should be that we rarely talk about a pretty obvious solution - let those who generate the wealth have democratic control over what happens to it at the time of generation.
Will I be liable for a company's losses under your system?
Perhaps I could sit at home alone and write fragments of Windows kernel code by myself. These would be of very little value to me. However, they might be of tremendous value to Microsoft who has the whole rest of the Windows kernel and licensing agreements to distribute it and a sales staff to sell it and etc and etc and etc.
So I trade my fragments of Windows kernel code which do not benefit me very much to Microsoft. In exchange Microsoft gives me money, which is much more useful to me than code fragments because I can use it to buy food and shelter. I have actually received something that is of more value to me than the thing I gave up. The code fragments on their own could not have gotten me food or shelter.
Microsoft on the other hand, gave up money that is of less value to them than these code fragments. They can use the code fragments to create more value than they could with the money by combining them with their other assets. Value is relative, not absolute. Nothing is being stolen by paying someone a price they agree to for something, just because you have a better way of making use of it than they do.
It's not a universally held belief that a company founder must try to make as much money for themselves as possible.
Entrepreneurs, like everyone else, have values, and some of the values are in conflict with some of their actions. I have a hard time imagining anyone (excluding sociopaths) who legitimately believe their actions don't create any conflict with their values. Discussing the conflict between "I want to start a company" and "I believe there's a maximum amount of wealth that one can morally or ethically acquire" seems super relevant to the audience here.
> He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?
I don't think it's worth getting hung up on whether anyone "took" wealth versus created it, because I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. I would argue MS "took" money from people via unfair bundling practices, many of which were anticompetitive and landed the company in hot water. If you want to be simplistic, MS under BG took money from everyone who was forced to buy a windows license despite not wanting or needing one, at the very least.
I am hung up on this because I do think they're mutually exclusive. You can't create something that already exists. You can't take something that doesn't exist. Something has to exist in order for you to take it. If you created something, it impossible that you have taken it.
The quote implies that there is some big pile of money out there and rich people are just greedy people who take more of it than everyone else. While poor people are ... polite I guess? and only take a little amount. If someone honestly believes this then the only question is, why don't you just take more of this money? I mean it's apparently all just there for the taking and the only differentiating factor of the rich is their willingness to take more of it, right? There couldn't possibly be anything else that rich people do that results in them being rich.
You admit you’ve never heard of him, then read Wikipedia, and feel sufficiently armed with the knowledge required to self-righteously proclaim judgement on the life of another human being.