Nickelodeon
Props to this kid, but while I respect the moral principle, I’m not so sure I necessarily agree with it in practical execution. If you were so committed to doing good in the world, why would you not take the money from the greedy and grubby advertising company and repurpose it towards the fight against the virus itself? Wouldn’t 17-Year-Old Robin Hood Fleeces Seedy Ad Company Out of $8 Million, Donates It All To Charity be a much better headline? Hell, you could keep a cool $500K for yourself to start a likely-world-changing business and no one would bat a fucking eyelash. You’d be a hero and you’d be a businessman! Not saying this kid is wrong, just saying I would have done it differently. Not all of us are playing chess though, kid, so keep your chin up.
Avi Schiffmann, a seventeen-year-old from Washington State, launched a homemade Web site to track the movement of the virus. Since then, the site, ncov2019.live, has had more than a hundred million visitors. “I wanted to just make the data easily accessible, but I never thought it would end up being this big,” [via The New Yorker]
Meet the 17-year-old behind https://t.co/pCQaM7zz40, one of the largest coronavirus-tracking websites in the world pic.twitter.com/fB7pgg8Jxg
— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) April 5, 2020
Again, don’t get it twisted, I’m half-kidding and I respect the hell out of this kid (such are the times we live in that I have to make it absolutely and overtly clear that me dunking on this clearly brilliant teen is meant to be taken as tongue-in-cheek). No one ’round these parts is going to claim I’m smarter than this teenager I’m a decade older than — I absolutely am not. This keep is going to grow up making Silicon Valley bucks while I continue to try and string together my thoughts about Marvel movies and shitty New York sports teams into coherent and entertaining sentences.
Butttttt, if you’d ask me who I’d rather be, I’d take the guy who built a virus-tracking website and donated millions to charity over the guy who only built a virus-tracking website. Then again, what do I know? I simply work for a website, I’ve never invented one.
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Eric is a New York City-based writer who still isn’t quite sure how he’s allowed to have this much fun for a living and will tell anyone who listens that Gotham City is canonically in New Jersey. Follow him on Twitter @eric_ital for movie and soccer takes or contact him eric@brobible.com