Tim Cook Appears Alongside Trump in Re-Election Campaign Ad Shot | Hacker News Reader

Tim Cook Appears Alongside Trump in Re-Election Campaign Ad Shot

daringfireball.net

73 pointsmrzool45 comments

"A low moment in Apple’s proud history"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#Criticism_and_contr...

I think Apple has done a lot worse in its "proud history" and is still doing it.

It's as if corporations were guided by only one principle make money, a lot of money.

There has not been any change in how big tech companies deal with hard decisions. It's just people who ate PR, brand management and empty corporate speak about values getting getting deserved reality check.

Without a doubt Tim Cook is very strongly socially liberal and anti Trump as long as it's does not hurt business opportunities or the future of Apple.

>Without a doubt Tim Cook is very strongly socially liberal and anti Trump as long as it's does not hurt business opportunities or the future of Apple.

So in every way except those that don't suit him!

Disappointing. Even beyond the question of malfeasance, there should be at least three policy areas I can think of off the top of my head that Cook should be opposed to:

* Constant disruption of international manufacturing and trade relations with a chaotic assembly of policies (as Paul Krugman has pointed out, each individual policy you can, in principle, adjust to. But policies changing on a weekly level are impossible to plan for: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/opinion/trump-economy.htm...)

* Anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric making it harder to hire from abroad (one can debate whether this benefits US workers—I would argue not—but it's certainly not in Apple's self interest).

* Anti-LGBT policies and rhetoric. It's admirable that Cook consistently avoid making things about himself, but I think you ought to draw the line at collaborating with politicians who question one's very right to exist.

> It's admirable that Cook consistently avoid making things about himself, but I think you ought to draw the line at collaborating with politicians who question one's very right to exist.

Does Trump really question the right of gay men like Cook to exist?

Holy shit, right after Trump said that "Apple may be exempt from tariffs".

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/trump-a...

Correlation does not imply causation /s

The main alternative seems to be Warren who openly proposes policies to dismantle Apple, among other companies. So it makes sense that he'd go all in to prevent her from being elected, it's his fiduciary duty after all.

> Warren who openly proposes policies to dismantle Apple

I don't think this is true. Can you provide a source or quote from her?

https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18257965/elizabeth-warren-...

"Apple, you’ve got to break it apart from their App Store. It’s got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They don’t get to do both at the same time. So it’s the same notion. "

I wouldn't say that goes so far as to "dismantle" Apple, but it is definitely a proposition to affect perceived anti-competitive practices. I am not sure where I come down on such question, can you describe the benefits and drawbacks of Apple controlling the App Store?

I don't get it. They created the app store. Developers are choosing to be part of Apple's ecosystem. The ecosystem for Android is absolutely terrible in comparison. Even free apps don't compare to Apple's free apps. That's the dumbest thing I've heard.

This sounds like a push to allow a third-party App Store on the iPhone, or at least to allow iPhone users to install binaries not directly approved by Apple. That's not the same thing as dismantling Apple.

From the guidelines on what to submit to HN: "If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

This does not fit that criterion.

Don't you think it's insulting to tell a crowd of people that they are not intellectually stimulated by something? I don't find it intellectually stimulating either, but I wouldn't declare something so personal and subjective as factual ("it's not" vs "I don't think it is" or "it isn't for me"). It's antagonistic for no reason.

This is a blog post about a twitter post about a picture. The whole article can be reduced to "tim cook good, trump bad, why in picture together?". HN cannot become reddit, we have to hold our bar higher than blogspam about politics.

It seems a legitimate debate to me to what extent a company should acquiesce to governments of all sorts.

And it's a question that Apple, in particular, has to debate over and over again. iPhone unlocks for the govt? If so, what governments? Allow apps that facilitate protests in Hong Kong? Tolerate or even facilitate oppressive manufacturing or mining conditions?

These are not easy questions for a company that has so many world wide dependencies. And, for some of these questions (unlocks, manufacturing, mining), Apple has decided to take a stand on ethical principles rather than convenience.

Intellectual curiosity is not constrained to geeky stuff.

Corporations, politics, and corporations' political stances and alliances are very interesting, and could be much more "disrupting" and life changing than some new technique or gadget.

A smart Silicon Valley leader plays The President well.

That is all.

If the President is re-elected partially thanks to that, then it's the President who played the "smart Silicon Valley leader".

Or rather, it's two smart people making alliances of opportunity to get what they want...

It sounds like fact checked news, but is it?

I would hate to give anyone mentioned in this article an example of the time they were falsely accused of something by an actual fake news source.

https://daringfireball.net/2019/10/correction_regarding_an_e...

> It sounds like fact checked news, but is it?

Um... which bit do you think is wrong?

So this is the new fact checking, after the outrage machine is in full swing?

I think everyone has seen how this works with alt-right social news blogging, and we've already seen this blogger feed the flames with false accusations retracted later.

I don't agree with the likes of Zuckerberg (though I think even he is backtracking) that fake news can be algorithmically detected precisely due to this example blog. There is no proof of work in fact checking, so outraged "left"/"right" bloggers is worse than no information.

If there's something to feed to the media do so, if there's something to feed to special prosecutors or the SEC even better.

> So this is the new fact checking, after the outrage machine is in full swing?

No, like I legit don't have any idea what you're talking about, or if you're even responding to the right article.

The claim:

Tim Cook Appears Alongside Trump in Re-Election Campaign Ad Shot in Mac Pro Plant in Austin

The fact check:

The first line of the linked article is to the video tweeted out by Trump: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/11973161062364815...

Beyond that, I have no idea where you're going with this.

This topic will go down very well.

Perhaps there's some "quid pro quo" going on here? Tim appears in Trump's campaign ad, Trump rolls back trade tariffs that could affect Apple?

The kind of quid pro quo that happened when I gave apple money and I got a phone in return?

But why do we think the real Cook is "left-wing" and the hypocritical one is "right-wing", not the other way round?

inb4 Tim Cook changes his name to Tim Apple

But we all know Tim Cook didn’t like a second of it. He’s balancing his personal feelings with his duties of loyalty and care (he owes to Apple Inc).

Tim Cook is doing the best he can in a garbage situation. He’s not rolling over for Trump, but he’s also not antagonizing Trump (which I know a lot of people want to see).

Cook’s being savvy. Cook is crushing it. Gruber got this take wrong. Gruber is letting political feelings infect his job as a journalist.

> Cook’s being savvy. Cook is crushing it.

This isn't being savvy. This is realizing you were on the receiving end of another "I'd like you to do a favor for us though".

So what?

Flagged. This isn't very intellectually stimulating and a poor take to say the least.

I wish HN just sticks to tech instead of politics all the time.

"Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ok sorry dad.

People constantly act so surprised when liberals in the business community are tolerant of fascists, but this is naive and just shows how unfamiliar someone like Gruber is with historical events.

The New Yorker just published a great piece about exactly this:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/11/11/liberalism-acc...

Criticism does not imply surprise.

For if it did, we’d have to assume that you are surprised by behavior you yourself describe as constant. And I don’t believe you are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com