
T. Boone Pickens Farewell Letter - cgoodmac
https://boonepickens.com/?p=2343
======
throwaway5752
"Learn to analyze well. Assess the risks and the prospective rewards, and keep
it simple."

"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.

------
bshimmin
I loved this tweet from him a year or so ago:
[https://twitter.com/boonepickens/status/953398294172102658](https://twitter.com/boonepickens/status/953398294172102658)

~~~
protomyth
He had some real winners on Twitter, his exchange with Drake was pretty funny
[https://www.businessinsider.com/oil-tycoon-t-boone-
pickens-o...](https://www.businessinsider.com/oil-tycoon-t-boone-pickens-
owned-rapper-drake-hard-on-twitter-this-morning-2012-5)

------
jedberg
> If you are reading this, I have passed on from this world — not as big a
> deal for you as it was for me.

Clever. :)

------
RickJWagner
"It’s your shot now."

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.

------
dmitryminkovsky
> Don’t look to government to solve problems — the strength of this country is
> in its people.

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.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
Thanks for giving me another interesting book to add to my list :)

~~~
dmitryminkovsky
Glad to hear. I’m two thirds of the way through and it’s so interesting.

------
everybodyknows
The quote from "Indispensable Man” reminds me of this from Charles de Gaulle:

"Indispensable men? The graveyards are full of them."

------
michalu
_> 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._

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.

------
DubiousPusher
I find it mesmerizing that people on this thread have a problem with the
criticism of a highly influential person upon their death. I mean were people
bound to say only positive things when Augusto Pinochet and Robert Mugabe
dusted off?

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.

~~~
creaghpatr
The man in the arena will always command a respect the gravedancing haters
will never know.

~~~
DubiousPusher
I'd hate to live in the authoritarian minded society that applied this maxim
universally.

------
stephen
The comments on this thread are terrible.

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.

~~~
martythemaniak
I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or
thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people,
companies, technologies etc. I used to think it was mostly just specific
things, like anti-Musk sentiment because a lot of people find him grating, but
I now think its mostly just a reflection of the general anti-tech that's very
much in vogue.

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.

~~~
75dvtwin
I do not think the change in tone/civility and is due to the 'comments' only.

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.

~~~
busterarm
I've been flagging mainstream news topics hard all year, but I think there's
just a few of us actually trying to keep the site to its stated goal.

The level of discourse around those topics is abysmal.

~~~
krapp
The stated goal of Hacker News is "Anything that good hackers would find
interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's
intellectual curiosity."

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.

~~~
busterarm
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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.

~~~
krapp
Probably, not definitely. Mainstream news covers plenty of stories which would
be relevant here.

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.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869)

~~~
busterarm
Right. I'm not saying definitely no politics, but there's a ton of political
content that is not really that interesting (like the two stories that were
just on the front page about the US drone strike killing pine nut farmers in
Afghanistan that are sliding down the ranking fast). It has been a growing
trend. Maybe I spend too much time on the site, but I usually see most of the
threads that get flagged/dead.

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.

------
oh_sigh
I wish there was a block user feature on hn. Frankly, with about half the
commenters in this thread, I think I would be better off if I didn't run
across their inane comments on any subject any more.

~~~
specialist
100%. Back in the day our offline mail readers (for BBSs, CompuServe, BIX) had
"twit filters" (black lists). An essential feature missing from most online
forums today.

~~~
prepend
I used to have grease monkey scripts for reddit years ago before mobile, but
it just was too clunky. I want a way to quickly apply dom actions on my mobile
browser that should do the trick.

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”

------
simonebrunozzi
I had no idea who this guy was. Quick excerpt:

> 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".

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler)

~~~
imgabe
> "If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".

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.

~~~
dbingham
He took them from the employees of Microsoft who's work helped make those
shares valuable.

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!

\----------

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.

~~~
marcinzm
Salary is how companies distribute value to employees and Microsoft paid it's
employees. Many people would prefer cold hard cash over stock that may be
nothing but fireplace lighting material in five years. Likewise making 30%
less this year because the company did badly for reasons in no way related to
you doesn't sit well with many people either.

~~~
dbingham
And the difference between that salary and the company's revenues (the value
the workers created) is the profits. Which the shares represent a right to.

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.

