I think it is great the company went the direction they did and I'm glad Brian is happy with it.
The commentary that I find frustrating is about the "retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces." The press does suck in many ways, but when you're own a massive chunk of a $65B company you should expect some negative press and be prepared. It makes him sound like he isn't open to dissent which is an incredibly privileged stance.
It doesn't come off as simply pointing out. How does he know it's obviously dishonest? The author likely felt otherwise. It just comes off as an entitlement that wasn't necessary.
Every company that continues to let itself get embroiled in Twitter's Political Topic of the Week is at such a distinct disadvantage it will ultimately fail. It's inevitable if you extrapolate. They won't survive the evolutionary process and will get selected out, only earning themselves a Darwin Award.
Imagine a rowing team where half the team rows in one direction and the other half rows another direction. They never agree on which direction to row and the direction constantly changes. Even if it's just a dedicated 5% rowing somewhere else, it's going to throw the whole boat off course. Or they're not rowing at all and just yelling at each other on Slack all day. Compare with a team that focuses on the mission, all rowing in the same direction. It's not hard to see who is most likely to reach the finish line.
The age old wisdom of not bringing your personal politics and religion into work is wisdom for good reason.
At least they would be rowing, but political activism is not work. Imagine going to the barber and instead of cutting your hair he would lecture you on the hardship of Guatemalan shepherds.
Barbers famously talk about politics while cutting your hair. This is like a quintessential part of barber shop culture. Barbers that don't talk about partisan politics normally talk about some parapolitical thing, like cultural gripes, or sports, or other things that have a pretty similar valence.
I've had my hair cut in like 5 different countries by dozens of different barbers who speak different languages, come from different generations, the barber themselves are male or female, and I don't remember the last haircut that didn't bring up something that was either explicitly or expansively political.
> Barbers famously talk about politics while cutting your hair. This is like a quintessential part of barber shop culture. Barbers that don't talk about partisan politics normally talk about some parapolitical thing, like cultural gripes, or sports, or other things that have a pretty similar valence.
That's not my experience at all with barbers. All they've ever talked about are topics that are considered safe for smalltalk, such as "what do you do for a living?". Of course this doesn't invalidate your experience, but I think your point about "quitessential part of the barber shop" may not be as universal as you think.
Dunno what barbers you go to, I've been to a lot across many states and talking partisan politics has never been a common theme among them. I can't remember the last haircut that did involve political talking, it seems mostly avoided. Maybe it's more common outside the US?
This definitely happens in the US. Grandparent comment is right, eventually there are topics discussed that are political, though may not necessarily be partisan. However, it'd be hard to see that if your definition of political necessitates partisanship.
Sometimes it was partisan politics. Trump came up pretty often, for better or worse, during those years -- I had a milestone birthday the day Trump was elected, so I remember a haircut maybe a couple of days before where that was a natural springboard.
Sometimes it was cultural politics. #MeToo came up a lot; a surprising amount of young male barbers want to talk about how they pick up chicks, which I've always found a little weird because I'm old and I'm married and I am really surprised they judge I'd be receptive to that kind of thing. One talked to me about how he saw a sex worker. Maybe that's not something you'd code as political. I remember someone mentioning the Aziz Ansari kurfuffle. Again, it's all politics baby.
My work overlaps with politics, and anyone who asked me about my work typically volunteered some kind of politics in response. If I told you I ran a polling outfit, what do you think your followup questions might be?
But what I'm saying is that partisan politics isn't the same thing as politics, which is one of the fundamental dimensions of the Coinbase story, and so it's pretty relevant. A woman who cut my hair in Los Angeles was telling me about her travel experience. Non-political. I talked about my travel experience. I wasn't from the states either, so I talked about where I was from. Wait, my hairdress is from a country that was affected by the Trump travel ban, and her parents were no longer able to visit her here, and her status -- though documented -- was such that she couldn't easily get back to see them and get back in the country. She wasn't going on an unhinged partisan rant about Republicans, she was just talking about a basic para-political topic in a pretty unobjectionable way. And that kind of thing happens very often.
Presumably you got a haircut during COVID. Did you talk about COVID? Isn't COVID (para-)political? Do you live in a city? Did you get a haircut that summer? Were there boarded up businesses because of the protests/riots connected to George Floyd? Did you talk about that?
Did you talk about sports? Most of the barber shops I'm in display ESPN. The worst was a place where I got my haircut in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and jesus christ, the "Go Big Blue!" is insufferable. Is sports para-political? Yes, in two ways -- as we're seeing with the NBA and vaccines and as we saw in 2016 with the kneeling and anthem protests and as we saw with LeBron's bizarre China apologism, and as we saw with the WWE doing stuff in Saudi Arabia, and as we saw with Blizzard and Hong Kong, and as we're seeing with the NCAA student pay dispute (had this particular conversation three or four times, in Ann Arbor, in Los Angeles, in Ontario Canada...) it turns out that sports overlap with politics a lot.
But let's say you avoid all of that discussion, and you just discuss teams. What I'm trying to say is that the kind of torturous, almost religious, tribalism that people hate when it comes to talking politics casts a shadow over a lot of other stuff. I hate talking to sports people who are nuts about a particular team and perform all the chest-beating bullshit surrounding it. It's not partisan politics, but it's the same kind of "why are you getting on with this shit?" implied by it. That's what the word valence means and why I used it.
I got a haircut in Kilkenny, Ireland recently. Fun little town. It's got a castle. It's got Cartoon Saloon animation studio. Since I wasn't getting my beard shaved, I wore a mask, so did the woman cutting my hair. Once she figured out I wasn't from Kilkenny (believe me, with my accent, it's pretty easy to tell I'm not Irish) she asked what I was doing in town. Just some tourism. She asked about how I found the barber shop, I off-handedly said "Well, I'm just a walk-in" -- side note, Irish people don't use review websites so it's impossible to find anything here -- and mentioned I saw a few other barbers but they were unmasked with customers and I'd rather not take a gamble. It was a pretty short exchange. I wasn't trying to bring up politics. Her question wasn't political. But I think you could agree, it has a distinctly political tinge, and it invited further conversation that could be more or less political depending on comfort level.
I am agnostic about Coinbase's decision to ban politics. Seems reasonable enough, and seems reasonable enough for workers to leave or stay on that basis. I think the kind of advocacy model of you demand what you want and I demand what I want and we see how it shakes out is actually a very good way to structure society. But I think a lot of their position relies on an extremely crude and unsophisticated view of politics: what it means is "We don't want to hear about the woke SJW representation intersectionality critical race theory BLM bullshit". So you end up with a workplace that absolutely tolerates discussing politics, just not a certain kind of boat-rocking politics that makes people mad.
That leads to the analogy that barbers cutting your hair aren't political, when really what is meant is that they are political, but they tend to be a little more subtle about navigating it, and because the relationship is transactional, mostly there's no ongoing stress about having to continue to work with them.
This is backwards, and the crux of why it's backwards lies here:
> Or they're not rowing at all and just yelling at each other on Slack all day.
I have never seen an office where you will not be fired for turning politics (or anything really) into a flamewar. Period.
And that's because companies past a certain size know they always have multiple "5%ers" rowing in the wrong direction.
If it's not politics it will be pay, if it's not pay it'll be the tech stack, if it's not the tech stack it'll be an exec everyone hates, it's not an exec it'll be a client that sucks, if it's not a client it'll be the...
So a company needs to be resilient to those disjointed efforts anyways, and being "mission focused" will never let you escape that.
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That's why even just pretending to care about these social issues puts you in a better place than a company like Coinbase.
Making statements for social causes costs nothing at all and those who don't agree with the statements generally have apathy towards them, while those agree are affirmed by the statements.
So it's a win-win vs alienating those who would have been affirmed by playing it off as a distraction from the mission.
Why would you not do it and just enforce the fact that people need to be civil?
A specialized forum where some subjects can simply be ruled off-topic will be easier to moderate than a forum where you can talk about anything. That’s not to say there are no controversies left, but it’s easier.
Agreeing on a mission is a form of specialization. In the case of Coinbase there are likely plenty of debates about cryptocurrencies, and that’s controversy enough.
I mean that's just a well-dressed tautology: reducing what you can say reduces what you can moderate.
The point is the fraction of things you rule off-topic by becoming "mission focused" is infinitesimal compared to the the topics that can disharmony can form around.
It's in people's nature to find things to discuss, and eventually some of those discussions become debates.
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You might as well play both sides by allowing yourself to support causes, with the explicit understanding that doesn't give anyone free reign to shit on their coworkers for their beliefs.
That's just good business since beliefs don't have to be political...
Basecamp did this too and they were 100% right to focus on their mission. If people are constantly having Twitter cancel culture virtue signaling wars, your company will surely fail.
You ask for a day off for religious reasons so you can observe Yom Kippur.
That there is no company-wide shutdown for a holiday observed by 2% of the population is not some great injustice that requires waging a culture war in the office to remedy.
I think you're missing why people's religion and race matter in the work place. Asking for a day off for religous reasons is bringing religion into the workplace.
When people say "bringing religion into the workplace" they are usually thinking about setting up an office Christmas tree or hosting prayers before meetings. Reasonable expressions of religious sentiment such as wearing religious attire, praying silently to oneself before meals, and taking leave for religious holidays are generally not included. The boundary line is usually drawn at "does this pressure coworkers to act in accordance with specific religious beliefs."
I think the reality is that Coinbase is so obviously a rocketship that the CEO could say anything and they’d have no trouble with recruitment or retention. Existing employees have stock grants worth millions, and new employees are getting great offers. The people who will take these jobs are generally going to be bullish on crypto. If you expect crypto to become a bigger piece of the economy in the future, it would be crazy to give up the opportunity to own a bunch of Coinbase stock. I’d spend a year listening to Brian Armstrong tell me that my thetans need adjusting for 5000 shares of Coinbase.
Coinbase has an rsu policy where you are not granted some number of shares each year but rather some dollar amount. So if my offer letter says I get $50k worth of rsus each year, and then Coinbase’s stock increases 10x, i’m still just going to receive 50k
1. You get $X of stock grant when you join. This gets converted to number of stocks based on the value of the stock when you join and then the stock vests over the next 4 years. So if you get a stock grant of $400k when you join and the price of the stock at joining is $1000, you get 400 stocks that vest over the 4 years.
2. You get $X of stock grant when you join. This grant gets divided into $X/4 over the next 4 years. The number of stocks then gets decided each of those 4 years based on the value at the start of that year. So let's say you get a stock grant of $400k. So you get stock worth $100k every year. If the stock is at $1000 for the first year you get 100 stocks for the first year. If the stock goes up to $2000 at the start of second year, you get only 100 stocks. If it goes down to $500 for the third year, you get 200 stocks. So upside is capped. You will only get stocks worth $100k each year.
2. is what followed by Coinbase and Stripe. Some other companies are moving that direction as well. 1. is followed by FAAMG.
Coinbase is different. The conversion to stocks doesn't happen at grant-time value for all of the grant. The conversion happens at the start of every year of the grant life. So if the stock goes up in the first year, you get fewer stocks for the second year (equaling to grant/4 in value). See my other sibling comment in this thread.
50k is the grant amount and usually reflected by a 30 day average look back from grant date. From grant date your 50k worth of stock can go
up on down based on the stock price.
> It's a story as old as time: investors (and employees with equity) will put up with just about any yahoo and their dictates (and noxious politics) as long as the money keeps rolling in.
It's a tech company, it's not a YMCA nor a progressive PAC. Obviously, a large number of people here just can't tell the difference anymore, but that's only a cultural issue, not a technical one.
The only thing obnoxious here is the people not realizing they can't have their way everywhere and can't impose their stupid petty identity politics everywhere they go.
COIN has lost 25% since IPO (in that time, GOOG, FB, MSFT, AAPL, HOOD are up, PP is even, and SQ is down marginally), and their offers aren't particularly better than <anywhere else>, so it doesn't seem like this is true.
Like, even if you think crypto is going to be super relevant, there's tons of other cryto startups. Coinbase has or had first mover advantage, but that's no longer an enormous advantage.
Coinbase’s stock is currently approximately equal to the IPO price and the IPO was six months ago. Coinbase and Robinhood (another rocketship) both experienced a pop after their respective IPOs and later dropped back down near IPO price. This isn’t a particularly relevant metric, in my view. At the IPO, the rocketship factor is already priced in. Look at the company’s trajectory over the decade it has existed.
> Coinbase’s stock is currently approximately equal to the IPO price
Coinbase is down a little over 27% since IPO, at a time when the wider US stock market is up around 10%. That's not "approximately equal" in any meaningful way.
> At the IPO, the rocketship factor is already priced in.
I'll agree with you here - there was a ton of hype and the IPO price was largely based on an expected rocketship trajectory that failed to materialize. Its extremely telling that many of their executives have cashed out 100% or nearly 100% of their available stock options.
If you got stock for free because you work for coinbase, does it matter much it went down? I mean it's still around $250 each, that quickly adds up.
> their offers aren't particularly better than <anywhere else>
citation needed, I mean 'anywhere' is a big space. I'm seeing north of $100K on a quick google, that's a lot more than most places pay. Or are you speaking from a privileged, SF-blinkered position?
"Stock for free" doesn't equate since it's stock-based compensation. To some degree you expect it to retain its value and generally go up. Some companies might create an expectation of a greater appreciation even. But it's not a "oh I get paid X for my salary and then so much more for free." If you get stock at any company you compare those offers and the expected outcomes financially. There is a reason salary+stock is considered "total compensation."
And in terms of it "not mattering that it went down." Of course that matters. Companies do things to keep comp consistent but if the stock does go down quarter over quarter people see that as a personal loss and a possible sinking ship. They can work somewhere else that is more stable or eve n has a positive trajectory. I have know people who had a family to think of and moved to a Apple since it's much more reliable.
Correct, and it has more room to grow than FAANG. By that I don’t mean it’s undervalued - but rather that the implied call option you get from a 4-year grant is more valuable.
They don't do 4 yr grants anymore. You basically get a recurring 1 yr grant, so your upside now is limited to just that year. It trades risk for upside.
What do you mean by stock for free? Do you only consider the base salary as the actual salary and stocks as bonus which could be $0? Because that doesn't make any sense...
> If you got stock for free because you work for coinbase, does it matter much it went down? I mean it's still around $250 each, that quickly adds up.
That's where the "isn't better than other offers" part comes in. If you get 40K in stock from Coinbase or 40K in stock from Robinhood, and one went up and one didn't...
> citation needed, I mean 'anywhere' is a big space. I'm seeing north of $100K on a quick google, that's a lot more than most places pay.
I'm speaking as compared to the list of stock tickers I listed.
> Or are you speaking from a privileged, SF-blinkered position?
If we're at the point where Coinbase can't hire "privileged" employees and is having to settle for ones who don't have other options, I think that makes my case for me.
Where in your analysis do you talk about how these other crypto startups have (1) easier onboarding/KYC than COIN, (2) access to more coins to trade (3) better tooling (4) better fees (5) etc. etc. ?
Just want to say how ridiculous this is from a European perspective.
I know nothing better than for any company to be mission focused. You go to work to do work. And you do so with a degree of neutrality, as you can't pick your colleagues, yet still need to cooperate with them.
This doesn't mean you can't say anything at all, it means you shouldn't be overly divisive or confrontational. A company isn't your personal Twitter playground.
If you do have something political to say, a grave social justice error in the company's policy for example, you can still be reasonable about it. To mention it respectfully and proportional to the issue, rather than going nuclear.
I work in a tech hub in Europe that has 80 nationalities, people from all walks of life. Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
It's a joy actually, to work with people wildly different from yourself, whom you normally might not meet if it wasn't for work. We don't even have rules on politics, because they're not needed. Nobody brings politics or activism to work.
This brand of aggressive identity-based political activism really is a manifestation of the deplorable state of US politics. It's really quite rich to take home 200K a year and feel oppressed. Such a thing is only possible in the US, the rest of the world laughs at you.
I used to work with kids in an international program. I had a hard "mission focused" rule. Most of the social justice type advocacy talk about political topics would be banned under this rule (along with a lot of other stuff about back home like what they owned etc).
Kids whose parents would have hated each other getting along well, making friendships, etc. In the long run, seeing this humanity in each other (I think) will contribute more to some large benefits than always going to war on every issue.
Some examples - Student (jewish) whose dream was to join IDF to kill "terrorists" vs kid whose parents were palestinian (and hated jews). The kid who talked trash about blood transfusions for some reason - with a friend whose medical form had a history of them. Some crazy wealth disparities (the private jet kids with the extended passport filled with stamps vs kid who saved mowing money to go on program).
Stripped of all the baggage from back home (and with no cell phone / internet access etc), working together (outdoor program), no parents spoiling them (for the spoiled ones) or whaling on them (one or two parents from south still do this) - very cool to see what happens (in most cases).
As a European living and working in the US: your comparison is very shortsighted.
European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions (all of these things are, gasp, political! incidentally)
By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance. Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone! Is it really any wonder that “politics” ends up being an issue in the workplace when your employer literally controls your access to healthcare?
All of this stuff is emblematic of a deeply unhealthy relationship with employment in the US. Despite widespread agreement that this arrangement is bad, the US political system is broken enough that changing it feels all but impossible. CEOs like Brian are taking a hard stance against the effects while ignoring the causes.
You’re right that such a thing is only possible in the US, you’re just wrong about the reasons why.
> European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions (all of these things are, gasp, political! incidentally)
This isn't what is debated here. What is debated is whether Coinbase should display a Black Lives Matter flag on its website and whether employees should be debating about Black Live matters, "Free Palestine", ICE and immigration policies or other wedge issues on the clock.
In Europe the very premise of that question would be completely absurd, and thanks to that both right wingers and left wingers can coexist in the same workplace by behaving professional. This is almost impossible today in the tech sector in USA.
This is a lazy stereotype. European nations generally spend more on welfare, but the social justice stuff, which is now a defining part of the current "left", seems to be overwhelmingly produced in and exported from the U.S. and plenty of locals resent it as an inorganic cultural import. The entire obsession with "whiteness" looks extra weird on a continent where the population has been mostly white since the Stone Age, but yes, some of our less than stellar intellectuals still try to transpose (and impose it) here.
Also, compared to the U.S., Europe is decidedly more tribal. There is a sense of national identity forged by foreign occupations and attacks, especially among the smaller or weaker nations, that produces a lot of entrenched, insecure nationalism. Americans, being the top dogs of the world's pack for generations, generally do not understand how nationalism can arise from conditions of humiliation and victimhood, or only limit this understanding to their own black population, thus misunderstanding the European political currents a lot.
If a quarter of your population was forcibly deported to Siberia (which happened in the Baltics recently enough that witnesses are still alive), you will be a lot more jaded and distrustful than if you have no concept of such threats.
That’s true for economic issues, but Coinbase wasn’t facing tension from those. This whole thing is on the social side, and there are definitely hot-button social issues Europe faces that aren’t brought up at work (e.g. migrants)
> The reason it’s absurd in Europe is because Europe is a very “left” leaning region (its more that America is just so wildly conservative and in the pockets of capitalists). Many European countries do not have a political party that is even as right leaning as the Democratic Party within the USA.
Europe isn't "left" leaning at all. Most of Europe is culturally conservative. It's just like unlike the USA, Europeans believe in strong central governments and even the right usually don't question welfare state.
But it says nothing about Europe and wedge issues like homosexuality, immigration, ...
The fact the far right in countries like France for instance have high voting scores should dispel any sense of Europe being "left leaning".
> Many European countries do not have a political party that is even as right leaning as the Democratic Party within the USA.
This is completely false. Every European country has a far right party, that holds "traditional" view on wedge issues and is opposed to the US made idea of "diversity".
I don't know why americans think Europe is somehow "left leaning", this has never been the case. The divide is more along the lines of "globalists" which are classical liberals and pro EU, and nationalists/isolationists, which are anti-EU, anti-globalism. Both camps have their socially liberal and culturally conservative parties.
No I'm not missing any point. You are making up a point that has absolutely nothing to do with the actual situation at Coinbase.
The political debate at Coinbase was never about "safety net" at all. It's about petty identity politics. You are trying to make the discussion about "safety net" when that discussion has nothing to do about "safety net" at first place.
What do employees demanding a company makes a statement about "Black Live Matters" or "Free Palestine" has to do with "safety net"? Absolutely nothing.
We're talking about US Tech workers here, which are already well compensated by their employer.
Black Lives Matters is important because companies discriminate against black people and there is police discrimination and brutality against black people and whoever the police deem undesirable in the US, not just in one or two regions, but in every sizeable city in the US. So it's hard to see your friends discriminated against and employers (the only entity with enough political power to effect change in the us) making the problems worse. And amazon and other tech companies fund city council seats and fuel tons of money to defeat referendums that hurt their profit. Yes, ideally politics would be fought over outside the corporate sphere but due to politicians mostly only listening to corporations in the US at the federal and city level, that isn't possible.
I don't see how at-will employment is related here.
This is Coinbase. The vast majority of the employees there are not stuck in a job they wish they could leave but can't. These are some of the most privileged employees in the world.
The bigger issue is like the OP stated, the state of politics in the US. How does at-will employment relate to issues like not working with certain government institutions because you disagree with their purpose?
Coinbase isn't trying to avoid political arguments over healthcare, they're trying to avoid employees rallying together and changing the company to further their personal political beliefs.
> European countries literally have no legal concept of at-will employment. They have strong social nets that make quitting your job much easier, and more prevalent unions that fight to improve working conditions...
> By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance. Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone!
I think this is an argument in favor of what Brian is doing at Coinbase, though. The problem is that in the current political climate, people are intimidated and discouraged from becoming politically engaged out of fear that if their views are unpopular enough, even many years in the future, their coworkers will circulate petitions to get them fired.
If we as a people were capable of civil disagreement and didn't do things like circulate petitions to get our coworkers fired, maybe it wouldn't be necessary for Coinbase to do what they did.
I think we're mixing up different political topics here.
The one I think you're talking about is the US workers' struggle to defend or increase basic worker rights. Which indeed is a political struggle of workers versus management.
If I'm not mistaken, the Coinbase case is about social justice types of topics like feminism, BLM, trans rights, colonialism, the like.
My point is that positions like Brian's require there to be a clear and bright line between "political" and "not political". I think it's at least slightly easier to draw that line in European workplaces where the nature of employment is not as politically fraught.
Just to take two of your examples: feminism and trans rights. Both have healthcare implications. Your employer controls your healthcare. Should the healthcare provided by your employer cover birth control? Abortion? Conversion therapy? This mix is inevitable.
We might as well call it what it is: troublemakers.
People that are so politically activist at work that they dis-proportionally impact the business. By sowing division, distracting from the work, spoiling morale. And sometimes worse, like stealing data or airing dirty laundry publicly.
I'm not going to touch the morality of it, I'm merely painting the picture of what it is.
There's more companies where this is an issue, Google had plenty such incidents, Basecamp, Facebook, the like.
I can't help but feel like you've made your mind up and aren't interested in listening to any other perspective. Your reply addresses absolutely nothing in the post it's replying to. Perhaps we just leave the conversation here, I don't see it going anywhere fruitful. I wish you all the best.
I'm open to different perspectives but you're not even on topic. Let me simplify it even further: Brian fired the woke.
The thing you're talking about, worker conditions, is not what the article is about. It's not a different perspective, it's an entirely different topic.
If Coinbase employees didn't feel they can weigh in on what their health insurance should cover, I would certainly agree that's a problem, but I'd be very surprised if that's the case. Armstrong's announcement acknowledged that there will be some cases where political engagement is inevitable because it intersects with the company's business. Remember that this position came in direct response to an incident where Coinbase employees demanded that the company publicly endorse a specific political slogan on the topic of police brutality - regardless of how blurry the line is in general, I hope we can agree that Coinbase's business doesn't have much to do with the police.
You can afford pretty much anything you need as a trans person by working a year as a software engineer. Healthcare is bad in the USA? Do medical tourism, they have great doctors overseas.
Medical tourism is not convenient or even guaranteed to be a trusting experience. Two things that would be very important for many high ticket medical procedures.
Why should any insurance cover elective procedures? You could also add things like beauty surgeries, hair transplant, lasik surgeries etc. (I know that EU insurances often cover birth control, but I think that's mostly because it's a drug prescribed by a doctor so it fits into the framework... I don't think it should cover birth control (except maybe for young people before they start working) - that's not insurance, it's just a subscription service so you're better off buying it directly.)
"Elective" in "elective procedure" doesn't mean "optional and potentially frivolous." It just means "not emergent", or put differently it means you won't die if you don't have it right now.
Kidney stone surgery is elective. Cancer resection is elective. Most heart surgery is elective. Most brain surgery is elective.
I assume you're not arguing that health insurance shouldn't cover these things, because that would be extremely foolish. It may, though, be worth acquainting yourself with at least the basic terminology of the field about which you want to argue, because overlooking this point makes you seem as if you don't really know what you're talking about.
To the best of my knowledge, there exists no term in the medical lexicon denoting the category of "interventions 'tomp believes should not be covered in some or all cases by health insurance."
Neither of us is going to convince one another; you very evidently have strongly held opinions about how medicine should be practiced, whereas I know some things about how it is. That being so, I see no point in continuing this line of discussion any further. Should you feel otherwise, I hope you enjoy it.
Ensuring patients are able to access the treatments ordered for them, or at least trying to do that, qualifies as part of the practice of medicine. That's why medical practices have billing departments to deal with insurance on the patient's behalf, rather than requiring cash up front and letting patients figure their own way through the reimbursement process.
The problem isn't that I'm misrepresenting your arguments, such as they are. The problem is that, instead of finding out how this stuff actually works and understanding why it works the way it does, you prefer to continue insisting on your opinions, which are as apparently uninformed as strongly held.
I don't see what you hope to achieve by this save wasting someone time, and my test suite just finished running, so it'll have to be someone else's time from here.
Birth control is prescribed by a doctor for a wide variety of things, including chronic health conditions. If you think insurance shouldn’t cover birth control because it’s consistent, do diabetics also not deserve to have insulin covered, or high blood pressure people their statins?
I'm not sure whether you include trans healthcare among "shouldn't be covered", so here's my 2 cents:
- Most of Europe prescribes hormones upon a medical indication. This leads to bad gatekeeping; I've been told to see 3 different professionals before starting hormones.
- Anecdotally, I'm on grey market hormones while waiting, without any bloodwork - before starting those hormones, I've had suicidal ideations on a daily basis.
- This seems to be backed by data as well: Ideation rates are reported to be 37-83% and attempt rates are reported to be 9.8-44%. [0]
Given the frequent outcomes of depression and suicide, I think it's fair to say that trans healthcare is not optional and should be fully covered.
I'm not arguing about politics, I'm putting in question the whole idea of making voluntary (not sure if that's the correct term - definitely not elective as I was corrected above) medical procedures available through insurance. Insurance is meant for unpredictable and unforeseen exceptional events. Wanting to have beauty surgery, or contraception, or lasik surgery, etc. isn't such. You could still argue that these should be covered by insurance, but that's simply economically inefficient - you're essentially paying for a subscription service, with the middle man taking a cut - why not just buy it yourself?
I see the confusion. American health insurance doesn’t really fit the term insurance as you define it above. I agree, insurance should be for catastrophic events. But in the US, a health plan is expected to cover all your medical expenses, minus co-pays or deductibles. Perhaps there should be a different term for it.
Obviously it is. But for people defending all kinds of status quo, it's a political act just trying to change it. Trying to keep it as it is, it's seen as "normal" or apolitical.
I always hear this argument that the employer controls your health care in the U.S. and it is quite wrong. The employer MAY offer one or more options for a subsidized health care plan in which the employer contributes some or all of the cost of the selected plan. There is zero requirement for an employee to select or use such a plan, and there is absolutely nothing stopping an employee from seeking an alternative plan or additional uncovered treatments through other means available to them.
Maybe there is a point to be made about the overall cost of health care plans being too expensive for an individual to afford without the employer subsidy, but that is orthogonal to "employer control" of healthcare.
> Maybe there is a point to be made about the overall cost of health care plans being too expensive for an individual to afford without the employer subsidy, but that is orthogonal to "employer control" of healthcare.
No, it's not. A choice in which the alternative is unattainable (or simply worse) is a Hobson's choice, and the direct result is that Americans with full-time employement are dependent on employer-subsidized healthcare.
> Companies with great policies can sometimes retain employees on that basis alone!
So I recently quit a FAANG and they sent me a COBRA notice with the cost of their insurance benefit. You can get great FAANG insurance for about $10k a year, which is peanuts for a Silicon Valley engineer. We need to dispel the myth that Silicon Valley engineers are working for health insurance.
We need to dispel the myth that everyone that works at a Silicon Valley company is an engineer.
Coinbase in particular will have legions of support people (who do you think answers the phone/customer emails?). I would bet that $10k (or maybe $15k for a family) is a meaningful fraction of the annual compensation for many roles at Coinbase.
COBRA means you’re still getting insurance through your (former) employer. How much does the same insurance benefit cost if you buy it fully on your own?
In my experience you can’t even buy a similar plan as an individual. And definitely not at the same price.
Apples to apples comparison is very hard because the plans are all different. But having bought insurance from the state marketplace it two US states, I'd say around $500 USD/month.
This matches my recent experience. I researched plans on Washington state's health marketplace and found that while the available plans were generally much cheaper than COBRA, their coverage for out-of-network or out-of-state care was limited (e.g. "emergency" care only, where the definition of emergency is vague and up to the insurer). And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.
I couldn't find a marketplace plan that didn't give me real doubts about the possible financial impact of traveling to other states(!) so I decided to suck it up and pay for COBRA for peace of mind. Of course, COBRA will run out after 18 months, but I plan to get another corporate job before then.
TL:DR if you have (or recently left) a fancy corporate job here, you have access to a group plan with nice coverage. If you have to buy an individual plan, it seems you cannot get the same level of coverage even if you're willing to pay for it, and the available coverage leaves you with the risk of huge medical bills if you suddenly need healthcare while simply traveling within the country.
> . And even if you are careful to get taken to an "in-network" hospital, there are plenty of horror stories about inadvertently getting treated by an "out-of-network" provider while inside and being on the hook for the entire bill.
This is no longer legal in any state as of July 1st of this year.
> Bans out-of-network charges for ancillary care (like an anesthesiologist or assistant surgeon) at an in-network facility in all circumstances.
I got a plan from the marketplace in Washington state for around 550/month. It was called a Silver plan, but it didn't cover very much. I kept getting bills a year after my services for things that I thought were covered and that my doctor said would be covered. And I looked into the benefits sheets while choosing my healthcare. Yes, I didn't get the highest priced one, but if Silver doesn't cover very much, I'm not confident "Gold" will. Also my experience with some corporate plans is that even though technically things are covered, sometimes the waiting times of a few months for urgent things mean they basically aren't.
>"We need to dispel the myth that Silicon Valley engineers are working for health insurance."
The OP was referring to US companies in general not FAANG companies, which are outliers by many measures. If you read the sentence before the one your quoting it provides the context:
"By comparison employment in the US is messed up enough that if you leave your job you lose your health insurance."
Also smaller companies generally pay significantly more per employee than a megacorp does. And this is the amount one assumes when COBRA kicks in. Also for 10K I'm guessing you have an individual plan and are not covering family dependents which would also add significantly to the premium.
> Is it really any wonder that “politics” ends up being an issue in the workplace?
It's still a wonder for me, I don't follow your reasoning at all. How does this force people into being antagonistic and fighting over politics in the workplace? If anything, this should put a pressure on workers to not stand out and keep their mouth shut, so that they wouldn't risk loosing coveted employer-provided insurance.
I don't get it. You argue that employment is more tenuous at US companies for various reasons... therefore employees want to stick their necks out by engaging in politics? Shouldn't we expect the opposite?
Aside from that your comparison with Europe is quite flawed (there are plenty "at-will employment" type of constructions possible here, you don't get unemployment benefits if you quit yourself, etc.) these are all tech workers who have new employers lining up to hire them. They are not blue collar workers in an Amazon warehouse who have to relieve themselves in a bottle and get terminated by an algorithm for failing to meet quota's.
But besides all that I fail to see how any of what you just said are arguments to make the workplace a political Twitter-style fight pit?
You make at least three times as much as people in Europe, while the cost of living isn't three times higher. You can save this money in case something bad happens. If you're a minimum wage worker that's a different story. But we're talking about software engineers here. A standing desk and wrist exercises solve most of your possible work-related injuries.
I was going to post this, but couldn't have said it better.
The stakes of a job are quite a bit higher in the US, and it goes beyond healthcare.
The quality of a great many social foods in the US, from primary schooling to transit access and many others, are governed by your job. The social safety nets that exist kick in only at the extremes, of destitution (Medicaid) or age (Medicare).
Coinbase hits a unique intersection of outrage here since it provokes vitriol from both people who hate cryptocurrency, and those that are outspoken progressives, both of which are large demographics on HN.
Like when you think about it, how is this a big deal in any way? I think the fact that people are making a big deal out of it is a bigger deal than whatever Coinbase's internal practices are here.
Can you name a company in, say, the top 50 largest companies by market cap that isn't run by scumbags? The intent of the question is to divine whether you think Coinbase in particular is a problem, or whether you have a problem with big companies in general.
> If you do have something political to say, a grave social justice error in the company's policy for example, you can still be reasonable about it. To mention it respectfully and proportional to the issue, rather than going nuclear.
> Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
This really sounds like you are blaming the black employees at Coinbase for standing up for themselves, and that if they just sat back down and took whatever hand they were being dealt that there would be "zero tensions"... which I guess hinges awkwardly on what you mean by "tensions"?
I encourage you to read this article--which, FWIW, I'm sure is one of the articles Brian Armstrong here is calling a "hit piece" in his Twitter thread--as this wasn't merely some abstract issue of "politics": black employees at Coinbase felt they were being actively discriminated against.
I don't get why people struggle so much dealing with black people? Like just be empathetic and assume the best. I guess so many people are just racist. It's just crazy.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Having worked in both (EU and US) I have seen both sides. I saw the trend (identity based politics) starting to appear in tech in Europe, for example "we shouldn't try to win business from company X due to their stance on issue Y" came up multiple times in company all hands (500 person company).
That’s disappointing but I suppose it is to be expected since the Internet allows cultural exports at light speed. I am reminded of the recent warning from the French education minister (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threa...):
> French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.
One thing that I've noticed is that Americans are hyper-focused on raising awareness. Most people should realize that Coinbase making a statement about BLM would lead to zero progress towards the advancement of Civil Rights. However, for some people, it's so important that they'd sacrifice their job for it.
I mean, that makes sense. Culturally, that society has, at crucial times, decided to “just follow orders” even when the orders were reprehensible. It is not particularly surprising that Europeans don’t rock the boat.
Nobody brings politics or activism to work and that has yielded certain outcomes over the last century.
I actually prefer the mission-focused thing but I wouldn’t be convinced by the Europeans who are notorious conformists.
Saying you're a mission focused company and this being somehow controversial is ridiculous. Every company should be mission focused.
As his post demonstrates, it turns out to not be controversial at all. A handful of people left and after a few weeks the Twitter mob stops. Then you're left with reasonable people to do the job, which is the point of any company.
> I work in a tech hub in Europe that has 80 nationalities, people from all walks of life. Any ethnicity, sex, gender, sexuality, religion and political conviction you can think of and we all get along just fine with zero tensions.
I’m sure this statement is not true, (racism and sexism don’t exist in Europe now?) but even supposing it is, there are very few companies in the U.S. that are this diverse. And the state of our labor rights in comparison to the EU is atrocious. In the first place, at-will employment, a right wing policy, is to be blamed for how easy it is to fire people for political reasons.
It’s easy to strawman an anonymous group of “aggressive identity-based political activists”, much more difficult to reckon with the real differences in the political economy of the EU vs the U.S.
Sure there are. Have you walked into any FAANG office? There are a huge variety of West/East European nationalities and East/Southeast Asians. That's representative of over half the world's population right there. You can probably find an engineer from every single one of the ex-Soviet countries in an NYC Google office.
I suppose by diversity you mean the right kind of diversity then?
"Diversity" can be so confusing and misunderstood.
The example I gave, extreme diversity, is not the standard in my country, this tech hub is the exception. I've also worked in teams consisting of only white men.
The inconvenient reality is that I couldn't detect a meaningful difference in the quality or quantity of output in either team. As said, I did enjoy the increased diversity from a personal perspective, so there's that.
The reason for the roughly equal output is that the team of white men was also diverse. Pointing at a group of people with the same skin and concluding they're all the same is ignorant. It's factually untrue. Likewise, assuming a team is diverse/better due to them having a mix of ethnicities or other aspects, may also not be the case.
Don't get me wrong, there are cases where it matters, but also cases where it doesn't.
FAANG is not the tech industry. Are you saying every company has as large and international a recruitment pool as Google? But again, that’s what this convo is really about — the perceptions and prejudices that tech libertarians develop based on the perceived behaviors of less than 1% of employees at 5 tech firms. Hilarious.
In the past I worked at a telecom company which had representation from Russia, Japan, China, India, Britain, and America on my team alone.
And I'm guessing you want tech companies to hire more black and Latino workers because that's what every diversity pundit says. You know those demographics are overwhelmingly domestic and not international?
My skepticism of the starry eyed and incredibly convenient anecdotes of endless diverse and equitable workplaces from you and others has absolutely nothing to do with my own political beliefs. Your insistence that that is what I want despite the fact that I have not even mentioned specific race based diversity quotas says a lot about your beliefs and prejudices though. Keep tilting at the windmills — I’m sure the world in which nobody mentions politics that don’t align with your worldview or the worldview of their employer will be a better one. And of course, under such a regime, nobody will ever be fired for their political beliefs again, after all the only thing separating us from that are those pesky “diversity pundits.”
"Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act."
I have heard the same thing about knitting and breastfeeding. Hard disagree; this is the kind of mission creep that takes over your entire life if you aren't careful.
"Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't."
So they stopped a performative action whose real impact is debatable. Employees likely won't forget the history of U.S. slavery even if their employer stopped running special events to conmemorate it.
> Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act.
Are you arguing that for instance working for a machine tooling company such as MAG is an inherently political act? If so, how?
What about working on a farm. How is that political?
What about working as a contractor for building homes. How is that political?
> The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions.
I know many in silicon valley that disagree with critical social justice (CSJ) that work at companies that have been successfully taken over by critical social justice activists to push the CSJ doctrine.
Are you arguing that those people work with their woke colleagues and a woke company for political reasons? If so, how?
> He didn't simply ban politics at work, however: he just refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. Prior to that Coinbase had Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't.
A lot of enterprises are regulated by politicians, so of cause they have an interest in better regulations, but what we are referring to here is radical activism for a social revolution.
Activist employees turning companies into vehicles for doing activism for a radical social revolution like critical social justice is rather new. Most agree that this is inappropriate and disruptive to the core company mission. Most of us are tired of our woke colleagues and their constant focus on politics over the company mission, always whining. I understand that you disagree with this.
> It's not radical any longer, and it's nowhere near a revolution that is being asked for.
How is the DEI agenda not radial? What has turned it from radical to non-radical?
For context what I mean by DEI is: Diversity (hiring activists of all identities - a black conservative is not diverse), inclusion (censorship of people resisting CSJ DEI initiatives), and Equity (redistribution of outcomes based upon identities and adherence to CSJ) agenda.
> This is a straw man.
How is it a straw man to argue that trying to change how every aspect of a society is organized is radical? How is it not radical to change it from a liberal individualistic republic into a collectivist identity-based society run on critical social justice? Seems pretty obviously radical to me.
If you are arguing that it is not as radical yet as the October revolution, you are correct. However, that is just a matter of revolutionary stage and degree of radicality.
> Millions are in the streets for basic human rights. This isn't a fringe position ("radical") and it's not an unreasonable demand ("revolution").
The ones fighting for human rights against critical social justice activists measures are a vastly larger number of people. These are in the school board meetings fighting against critical social justice, in the streets and political venues fighting vaccine mandates, etc etc
It is not human rights to force something into somebody elses body, indoctrinate kids into critical social justice, locking down a country and world for over 1.5 years, printing vast amounts of money to pay for your political measures forcing someone else to pay for it through massive inflation and taxes. These are means of population control and cultural revolution.
>I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem?
I want to point out that this is a perfect example of how absolutely mind numbing and toxic it is to interact with a lot of these "woke" types. OP made an benign comment ("I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.") and its taken in the maximally worst way possible. There's no nuance, and no room for debate or discussion, where you immediately assume that the people you interact with want you dead or worse (your "existence").
If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem, because none of my coworkers or company leadership accept the legitimacy of trans identity. It isn't that the person's physical safety is in danger (necessarily), but merely being present makes them the subject of politics. And those politics are generally hostile. I have a trans friend who was qualified for an open position, and I asked her about it, but it was clear there was no way she would even be applying.
Now, I'm thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, in a much smaller town than most posters here. But I think this kind of thinking is toxic wherever you work. If you push out anyone who might challenge the structure (formal or informal) of your company without taking a good look at who that structure is serving, you're going to reject a lot of good people. And you're going to reinforce any existing biases already in the company.
I'm in South Korea. We don't have many trans people here, the mainstream feminist movement is anti-trans, and most of the mainstream Christian movements are anti-LGBT. (My boss is Catholic.) Despite this, when we had a trans person visit my workplace ... absolutely nothing happened. They had lunch with us, nobody said anything about their gender, sexuality, or appearance, and they never mentioned it. Conversation was the same as for non-trans visitors.
Now, I don't know if this is because the people in my workplace are especially tolerant, if they were afraid of confrontation, or if they lacked a lens through which to interpret the visitor, but something sounds really weird to me about your workplace. Are the people in your region so vocally political as a matter of course? Are you in the bible belt? What does it mean to acknowledge the existence of a trans person?
I work for a company run by evangelical Christians, and this extends to probably 80% of the company. Certainly the only people taking about religion are the evangelicals. Management attends explicitly Christian "leadership retreats". Among other things, I would not be comfortable attending these events. Officially discussion of religion and and politics is discouraged. In practice that means the conservative culture warriors are vocal about whatever issue they're worked up about.
For the trans people I know, "acknowledge the existence of" them basically means to treat them according to their self-understanding as communicated to you. Usually that means using the name and pronouns that they identify with and not asking invasive questions. The idea is, roughly, that you are acknowledging that they - the person in front of you, a real physical body presented according to their self-understanding - exist. Dead naming or using a gender assigned at birth would imply that you are making their identity subject to your own model of the world, they're an abstract notion to you. Or, worse, that you are addressing a person that doesn't, in their conception, exist. It's imprecise language, perhaps, and not every person experiences it the same way.
Frankly, none of what you said is relevant to my point. What I have a problem with is the immediate reversion to the most caustic framing possible of a person who disagrees with you.
> If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem
Maybe my problem with this is a semantic one, since I’m a student of language, but describing it in this way is legitimately insane to me. Insane in the sense that I don’t think the word “existence” is being used in a way that means what is meant by e.g. OP in this case.
"Insane" is a pretty charged word for a person deeply concerned about jumping to the most caustic framing possible.
I can't say that I know how every person means the things they say, but "my existence is political" is a relatively common statement, and I have never understood it to strictly mean that "I am alive subject to political whims." Every time I've encountered it the person saying it described how the mere act of being somewhere was enough to get people unhappy with them or to make someone else feel threatened. That regardless of what they did they were treated like a threat.
> I can't say that I know how every person means the things they say, but "my existence is political" is a relatively common statement…
This is in fact not a common statement, and is only found in select coastal cities with high populations of people who have elite educations. More than half of the country has no idea what you’re talking about.
So have you encountered this phrase before or not? If not, why are you so confident that the person you are talking to is the exemplar of some hyperbolic, overreactive activist and not, say, someone talking about an experience you are unfamiliar with? Why do you assume there is a fixed, single meaning to a word or phrase when, simultaneously, you understand that other people may have no idea what it means?
The issue is that it’s possible for that person to not “be political”, even typical in large parts of the world, so if the person thinks they always are, they’re not seeing correctly. Insane is way too strong a term but such a person does risk their misperception harming relationships and wasting good opportunities.
Sure. A person's existence may "be political" in certain spaces and not others, and it is helpful and necessary to be able to sort out where your existence challenges other people, whether it should, and whether you are projecting undue fears onto other people based on a biased history or an unexamined worldview. It is further useful to examine your worldview to understand what is fundamental to your self-understanding and to your beliefs. Sometimes you write a sign or a headline and it doesn't include the nuance that you exhibit in the world around you.
If you "are not political" in a space it is because you do not challenge it, either because you agree with the existing culture or norms or have decided that it is not worth the cost of doing anything about it. If someone else does challenge those norms or that culture, they become political, but if that comes from something that is fundamental to their identity their choices are to either suppress that part of themselves to fit in or to stick out, "be political", and experience whatever reactions to that challenge.
My claim, here, is that creating workplaces that "are not political" is a way of enforcing the authority of people who already have it, and encouraging people not to challenge what they may see as unethical or inequitable practices in a business or other organization. It is a form of authoritarianism, soft-sold under the guise of civility.
I understand. The trick is that a person can believe and practice all that and still not actually be any sort of meaningful political or ethical challenge to their coworkers, even though they imagine so. Leaving the only available challenge to be trying to work with someone who doesn’t understand themselves or their environment.
Companies are publicly committing to a priori support of one or the other of the conflicting views rather than do the more difficult work of helping someone get past this, in the US, but in other parts of the world it seems possible for culture to exert itself and heal the misperception over time.
If a conservative person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem, because none of my coworkers or company leadership accept the legitimacy of conservatism. It isn't that the person's physical safety is in danger (necessarily), but merely being present makes them the subject of politics. And those politics are generally hostile. I have a conservative friend who was qualified for an open position, and I asked her about it, but it was clear there was no way she would even be applying.
Now, I'm thousands of inches away from Silicon Valley, in a much larger town than most posters here. But I think this kind of thinking is toxic wherever you work. If you push out anyone who might challenge the structure (formal or informal) of your company without taking a good look at who that structure is serving, you're going to reject a lot of good people. And you're going to reinforce any existing biases already in the company.
No, we didn't - I've very deliberately avoided making any allusions as to what group may feel impacted by this, because it is applicable to any outgroup.
I do, however, think we both know exactly what you mean when your condemn this behaviour - but very explicitly call out only a particular group for it.
Do you imagine that marginalized people go around worrying about what the political opinions of their coworkers might be?
It sure isn't what I do. It sure isn't what my wife or her friends do.
Each of us has a lot of woke white colleagues who are super concerned about everyone's political opinions, though. Super concerned that we know they have good ones, super concerned that everyone thinks the same as they do.
A black woman at our institution took it upon herself to send a letter to her very white department explaining that their obsession with the hidden racism of "brown bag seminars" wasn't helping any actual black people.
It hasn't made our woke white colleagues any less exhausting, but I appreciated her speaking out.
If you can’t prove something, there’s a strong possibility it’s not real. There’s a reason that we require proof when you accuse someone of wrongdoing.
I’m all for addressing concerns. But how is anyone supposed to address a concern like “there are vague imperceptible threats to my existence all around me which I can neither articulate nor provide evidence of”? What, exactly, are you proposing Coinbase or any or company should do, specifically?
> I’m all for addressing concerns. But how is anyone supposed to address a concern like “there are vague imperceptible threats to my existence all around me which I can neither articulate nor provide evidence of”? What, exactly, are you proposing Coinbase or any or company should do, specifically?
That's the whole idea behind "microaggressions", anything can be deemed a threat, it only depends on the alleged victim's perception, it's cunning, like every 'intersectional', it's full of sophism, doublespeak, newspeak, absurdity yet a lot of FAANG adopted this framework without thinking. Well now they have to deal with activist employees who are there just to betray or embarrass their very employer and harass other employees into ideological submission.
This seems like a gross abuse of the phrase "mission focused" to mean "operating for profit with total blinders on to the wider world". With a very appropriate photo of the 90s Bulls being a group of self-serving egomaniacs who put winning above everything else. My current employer (a non-profit) uses the term "mission focused" to mean "we are serving the public good even when it isn't profitable and acknowledging our role in society". I think the latter is what younger employees are increasingly embracing to some degree. The former is still creating the most successful companies because they operate without a conscience.
This kind of post only works if you get to judge their mission statement as insincere. Could you, without looking it up right now, identify what Coinbase's mission statement is? What specific actions do you think they've taken that you read as being misaligned with their stated mission and caused you to only believe they care about profit?
He defined mission-focused in the original memo pretty clearly and succinctly.
> What is the scope of our mission?
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.
It's not operating with total blinders on the wider world, becoming profitable as a startup often requires having a vision of positively changing the world. Armstrong wants people who care about the mission quoted above, period. There are people who are passionately committed to this, yet have totally different opinions on abortion, marginal tax rates, racial politics, bail reform. There's no reason to think you can predict any of these for an individual based on adherence to the mission statement.
Achieving change on the one thing that matters to everyone also requires that you have viewpoint diversity on the things that don't, because your current and potential customer base sure does. To the extent that mission creep enforces conformity across a range of issues, you narrow the range of people who would be comfortable working at your company to an increasingly small pool, and you limit access to the sort of insights that lead to a better product.
The alternative is to have separate pillow companies for conservatives and liberals, which is ridiculous.
I think saying that work and politics are completely separate is naive and a cop out to avoid responsibility. You joke about pillow companies but as far as I'm concerned MyPillow is run by an insurrectionist and an undemocratic authoritarian. Similarly I will not participate in an organization that doesn't value diversity, honesty, and our environment. I would not, for example, feel comfortable working somewhere like Chick-fil-A knowing the owner opposes human rights. Some people have decided that basic decency or acceptance of reality (ie vaccines or climate) are a political opinion when they're not. And companies who think it's not their problem are also wrong.
"For no benefit" is not an objective read. A lot of folks are benefitting.
IMO the environmental impact of crypto is also completely overstated. There are issues so much bigger than crypto's energy consumption that it's basically just a rounding error.
1% of global energy consumption is hardly a rounding error.
I'm massively excited for the potential of cryptocurrency, but there's a reason ETH is moving to PoS, and newer PoW projects aren't getting the same kind of traction.
- Decentralized payment infrastructure that can't be taken down.
- Currency that isn't issued by a government
- Open financial applications
- Pseudonymous payments (depending on the crypto)
- Infrastructure for fully transparent payments and analysis of value flows (governments and institutions should be using these)
- applications whose source can be verified. Even if a web application you use promises they handle your data securely and publish source code, there's no guarantee what they're running is actually what they've published. Decentralized applications can be interacted with and viewed by anyone (even if compiled to bytecode, you can verify the contracts they've published are accurate)
- Decentralized governance (the potential of this is massive, even moreso when coupled with decentralized identity)
- Access to financial instruments typically only accessible to institutions.
The most aggressive estimates I've seen are below 1% (maybe around half), which is quite literally a rounding error. Don't get me wrong I agree it's a lot, but it's a drop in the bucket on the global scale.
What about the fact that china is pumping out something like 1/3rd of the world's emissions?
What about excess livestock?
FWIW - I do agree that PoW is not ideal and will largely be phased out, but there are lower hanging fruit with regards to our climate change crisis than cryptocurrencies.
There are things within our control and things that aren't. Driving up the price of bitcoin will lead to more energy consumption, so I don't buy it, even though it might lead to juicy gains.
Livestock also lead to excessive greenhouse gas emissions, so I don't buy it either, even if it could lead to juicy steak.
Lots of lower cap proof of stake cryptos (and Ethereum, which is moving to Proof of Stake) are likely to outperform bitcoin in terms of percentage gains anyway.
It's a fact at the macro level. Individual speculators may profit but there's no benefit to the species. They don't even work as currencies because the transaction costs are so high.
There are cryptocurrencies where transaction fees (I'm assuming that's what you meant by 'costs') are actually very low, if not zero (see Nano).
The 'costs' of proof of work are indeed high though. The amount of energy consumed for one bitcoin transaction to happen is astounding. My point above is that there are numerous alternatives (which in my opinion are poised to topple bitcoin), which don't have these costs.
I disagree with 'no benefit to the species' (even bitcoin has many benefits). But the costs of bitcoin are also high, and the benefits can come without those costs.
The benefits are unrealized fanatasies about freedom from government that will never, ever happen.
The government, tax, justice systems and regulatory bodies are made out of people, you can't fool them with some "haha it's not USD" technicality like a sovereign citizen. It's all the same at the end except for a bunch of wasted energy.
Cryptocurrency is programmable money. People interact with each other using money all day, and this is a technology that augments human interaction. Just because the most vocal narrative are the unrealized fantasies you mention, doesn't mean there's not a benefit to this technology. Frankly, I'm shocked how the supposedly future thinking tech crowd on HN lacks so much creativity when it comes to cryptocurrency. Anyway, it's here to stay for a long time even if they legislate it to oblivion.
Thank you, my response would have been along the same lines. Regulation will come, but it's not going to be a united global front. From an economic perspective, stifling innovation is problematic, and countries that embrace the potential of cryptocurrency are going to reap rewards.
Even though there are a fair share of 'sovereign citizens' among cryptocurrency types, there are many who just see the potential for integration with existing infrastructure. Personally I'm more socialist-leaning, and want governments to embrace technology that will also empower them to provide sweeping social benefits for their citizens in a transparent way.
I'm not sure what you're responding to, but I wasn't merely suggesting that a benefit of cryptocurrency is the ability to fool the government, though privacy-coins certainly are an important tool in areas with oppressive governments.
At the same time, the leading crypto platforms enable an amount of transparency that isn't possible with traditional financial institutions.
The wasted energy argument has already been addressed, and is specific to proof of work platforms which are the minority of the top 50. After the ETH2 transition is complete, it's likely proof of stake crypto will have a larger market cap than proof of work crypto.
The goal in Western capitalism is to create wealth for stakeholders. Those stakeholders can then get involved in politically impactful projects as wealthy individuals if they have a conscience. As competitive, innovative companies they will bring wealth and better lives to their communities long term.
There are many good reasons for this system.
Wanting companies to play politics means they will be choosing sides of a political establishment or party, and it is divisive to our society. You should not want to divide our society even if you think you're obviously right and they're obviously wrong. America does this more than any other nation, arguably because their media constantly does it. Shoving politics at others is still fundamentally divisive.
You are assuming only the wealthy should drive politics. The employee driven politics is happening because they don't have money to shape politics and this is the only way they see of having an effect. Not saying it is good, but the idea the money buys politics kind of leads to this.
So does a "Championship team" mean you get paid like a champion? Or does it just mean you have to work like a champion, and get a 1% raise when you're working like crazy?
Just curious because I don't know coinbase that well.
> How could something be so negative in the press, but turn out to be incredibly positive with every stakeholder.
The question of our era! Certainly "every" is misapplied in his quote, but his core message of overwhelming private positivity in light of negative press is worth pondering.
I actually think this has a pretty obvious answer. The "press" consists of the same people rambling on Twitter: woke anxious 20 year olds who, instead of going to therapy, insist that instead that's who they are and it's the entire world who needs to change. At the same time, the people who can see through the bullcrap are happy that they can finally do their work.
The press are trying to tell a story. If that story will sell better taking a negative angle on an event, then the story will be negative. It's not personal, or even political (depending on the organisation). It's just business.
Charitably, “don’t want to be distracted by politics” means “the status quo works for me”. This doesn’t mean anyone at Coinbase is ill-intentioned, but given the status quo, there’s a lot of people it won’t work for.
No, it means "if the status quo doesn't work for me, I focus on changing it outside of my work". Like I work out outside of my dining room and sleep outside of my garage.
People bemoan the dissolution of boundaries between work and personal life, then go around passionately advocating for the further dissolution of those boundaries.
I wrote this in an email turning down a chance explore opportunities at Coinbase.
> To me, diversity and social justice are critically important. I have the luxury of being selective in where I put my time and energy and it is important those values align with my career. I appreciate aspects of being "mission focused" but I think that there is a gulf between my personal values and Coinbase's values such that I would not be comfortable in the environment.
I can't speak for anyone else but I think I'm not a terrible engineer and I definitely ruled them completely out of the realm of places I'd be willing to work.
I think that's the system working as intended. Coinbase decided to focus on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence (which is also what companies do when they try to meet diversity quota). You don't agree with their consensus, so you explain them so they have data and a chance to reconsider, and you can go in a company that aligns more with your values. While I don't doubt at all your technical competence, I doubt your are irreplacable (I'm not irreplacable too, and most people are not of course, this is not "against" you), so that's just the market doing its thing.
I have a biais for people that are honest about their values, so I'm glad about their move, but I understand not everyone shares my biais.
Coinbase decided to focus on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence (which is also what companies do when they try to meet diversity quota).
Companies trying to meet the diversity quota very much do not focus on pure raw technical competence. In fact, to suggest so, borders on gaslighting.
Sorry, the way I put it wasn't clear, but that was my point. Only putting "also" to indicate that is an error on my part, it's easy to interpret my statement in the exact opposite way. What I meant to say was:
"Coinbase decided to focus on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence. Companies that try to meet diversity quotas are also focusing on consensus rather than pure raw technical competence. These companies and Coinbase are similar in that way."
Sounds like their policy of discouraging wokes, who want to use their job as a cudgel for their own political views, from applying to their company is working.
That's not a fair interpretation of their comment. There are lots of middle ground between "wokes, who want to use their job as a cudgel for their own political views" and the people that Coinbase wants to recruit. Pretending that there is no middle ground is a tactic often used by the people you describe as "wokes". They were reasonable in their answer to Coinbase, I don't see why you need to peg them as an extremist.
What do you know about OP? What if OP is an extremely productive programmer who lives to build product and has a huge impact, but also cares about black people or LGBTQ+ people? So he's worthless to coinbase? Thats insane.
> You can have opinions and simultaneously not feel the need to express them.
I have a ton of opinons, fully formed, in formation, and very occasionally the polar opposite of opinon I held strongly a few hours earlier that have never seen the light of day.
> What if OP is an extremely productive programmer who lives to build product and has a huge impact, but also cares about black people or LGBTQ+ people?
Then they are not compatible with Coinbase's culture, and Coinbase seem to place more important on cultural fit than on raw ability. It's nothing new, really. How do you think an interview at one of the big FAANG goes if you show some controversial opinions? You're rejected for lack of cultural fit. Coinbase's difference isn't in their practice, but in the values that they focus on.
I agree with all of your points, but also point out that a small vocal minority can really ruin the culture at a company and be quite divisive. That is true even if most of us would get along and most of us just want to focus on work. So you have to do something about the social justice crusaders. In some sense, this type of widespread culture wars within companies is only possible because we have so many monopolies and therefore you can destroy a lot of value and still have the business not only remain viable, but grow.
So it very much depends on whether we solve the problem of monopolies. Make progress on that front, and firms wont be able to support these types of employees because they'll be driven out of business by competitors in which employees are not attacking each other but really are just focusing on work.
That's a good point as well, though I'll bet the 'ruinous minority' may not screw everything up along classically ideological lines. More likely bad acting, corruption, general toxicity.
The folks pulling the late nights on projects and delivering great results - normally the issue is to get them to stop talking about work all the time (happy hour?!) - not to get them to start talking about a social justice issue around microaggressions or whatever!
I’m not sure why you think people who care about justice draw that energy from the same pool that motivates their work, as if it’s a zero-sum calculus. It isn’t. People who think about things systemically tend to apply that perspective in all of their practices. And that’s the value.
The problem is when people who care about justice harasses co-workers because those co-workers doesn't care as much about justice. That has a very negative effect on those co-workers regardless if this has a negative effect on the harasser.
You’re right, a lot of people also know that the biggest impact then can have is participating in their local community and not by joining in on shallow sloganeering.
And there’s another more pernicious problem. People can care deeply about justice but have very different views on how to achieve it. It takes more than a lifetime to sort some of these issues out, and anyone with a bit of maturity has had their mind changed enough to have a bit of humility and know it’s not something you can or should do at or through work.
The problem with the sort of political activism that passes for personality these days (not limited to one side) is that it conflates bromides that everyone basically agrees with with specific contentious policy prescriptions on which there is little agreement.
You can't actually believe that harassing and stressing out one's coworkers over a political agenda has a positive effect, changes minds and improves the world.
I'm not sure why you think people who care about justice harass coworkers as a matter of course. It's strictly the opposite, in my (considerable) experience.
Exactly the opposite in my experience. The top competent/productive people I’ve worked with were too obsessed with their craft to even think about politics.
Brian disagrees, he opened his discussion of the benefits by saying: "it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction".
Regardless, if I recall correctly Coinbase paid people generously to leave if they disagreed! Pretty hard not to increase attrition with a policy like that.
On the other hand, I, a fairly good Engineer, would favor Coinbase over many other tech companies precisely because their CEO had the courage to say what every other CEO is thinking, that is that a company is a place where money is exchanged for labour not a venue for promoting one's political agenda, no matter how righteous that agenda might feel.
Because the CEO shares your politics and is only allowing your brand to express themselves at work you want to work there. I mean I understand the feeling but can we stop pretending that this isn’t entirely political?
What politics would those be? The last thing I want is to discuss politics at work with my CEO. I have enough meaning in my life that I do not need to look for validation of my ideology during working hours.
What 'brand of politics' is it to suggest that politics shouldn't be a major factor at work.
Also, to your OP's point ... I think it's reductionist to suggest that 'companies are an exchange for labour' - this is too much.
Almost all educated workers derive some meaning and dignity from their work beyond salary or benefits.
So 'what we work on matters'.
That said, even if we work on 'some new currency that can help the world' it may still mean that whether or not the company should fly the BLM flag is a bit of a political matter.
I very much doubt educated workers, and I assume you really mean tech workers, derive much more than money and prestige from their incredibly well paid but for the most amoral jobs. Big tech life is saturated with hypocrisy. Most workers just play along, virtue signaling like the rest, and keep cashing the RSU's hoping to one day have enough cash to be able to buy back their independence of thought.
> What 'brand of politics' is it to suggest that politics shouldn't be a major factor at work.
Let’s apply this to say the stereotypical 50s “Mad Men” office, gender gap and everything. To be political in that time and say hey women shouldnt just be secretaries and stay at home parents wouldn’t fly, it’s political. That’s what I think is meant by “a no politics rule means acceptance of status quo”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people happy with the status quo, or who think it’s fair and equitable as is.
Not that the ones being “political” are necessarily correct completely or in part right now, but there were plenty who liked the status quo just fine back then too.
This is a win win. They don’t want you and you don’t want them. There’s nothing wrong with it. It would only seem wrong to people with authoritarian desire to force everyone to align with themselves.
There's no reason on god's green earth that a reasonable person should not be able to work at Coinbase, and in reality, Coinbase probably has pretty much the same level of inclusivity at the end of the day as every other tech company. Moreover, there's no reason why Coinbase can't at least acknowledge some of the social ills flaring up, it's not 'unfair' I think to staff to do so.
Such self-selection is good, and serves the intended purpose (much like the Netflix culture deck). The folks that work at Coinbase wouldn’t want colleagues like you, and you wouldn’t want colleagues like them - so this is a clear win-win.
Considering Coinbase isn't seeing any attrition above normal for tech and isn't having issues recruiting, I think nobody really cares.
Also, if you're white and claim diversity and social justice to be "critically important" then why don't you give up your job so that a minority can take it?
Aren't you privileged?! :) I used to be 95% apolitical but now that the recent events have re-energized my old hard-libertarian stance, with a new addition of a big dose of anti-wokeness, I cannot have the same luxury as you do. If I were to shun woke companies, I'd have nowhere left to work :P
Honest question, what do you do at your presumably more enlightened workplace instead to pursue your political beliefs?
From what I've seen, these people typically just want to treat the company slack like Twitter and persecute political enemies while still cashing their paycheck and doing nothing of material value for the disadvantaged.
That's your choice, but I think the ratio is maybe 4 to 1 the opposite way, with most people somewhere in between, leaning a bit towards the Coinbase side.
I think most of us want to see people treated very fairly, but that it's not any one group's job to distort their situation so much as to hire people on the basis of race or gender or to worry about it that-that much.
The first time you hire A over B due to a very obvious ideological reason, and you come face to face with the plight of the bloke you didn't hire ... it becomes more visceral.
I think we can be pretty good citizens, and maybe even say a few words of empathetic to BIPOC etc (which I think Coinbase should have done) - but without going full woke.
I think that's what most people probably prefer.
I don't think there are really that many truly racist places in tech (most wouldn't want that of course), but I think most people also don't actually want to work in a 'fully woke' environment if they really had the choice. Definitely some. But a minority.
I don't see any political statements on that page that aren't aligned with creating an "open financial system for the world & increasing economic freedom". The point isn't to not be political, it's about not being political about stuff that isn't related to the mission.
What mission did they focus on and how did it go? All I see here is "I wrote a controversial screed and many people tolerated it and kept showing up to work." That's great and all, but what sort of new things did it unlock? How do you compare it to the world where you didn't write the screed? It all feels like a heap of bullshit to me -- if you're in the right industry, you can be the worst manager on the planet and your company can still do okay. He's just saying that his household name company in a booming industry did all right last year. We all kind of expected that, it would be nearly impossible to not make money in Coinbase's position. (Like what if nobody merged any code last year and didn't launch any features? They'd still be doing great!)
My controversial opinion is that companies like Apple and Amazon did well in spite of their leaders' quirks. AWS would have been a great business even if Jeff Bezos didn't fire people recovering from cancer. The iPhone still would have been a hit if Jobs didn't bring someone to tears over a bug in their code.
I think you can make great products AND be nice to your employees, and maybe even let them discuss how black lives matter at work.
> let them discuss how black lives matter at work.
That is not how it works. In practice, there is a bigoted, mostly fresh from college activist group that considers themselves morally superior. Some Gen-X and Boomers join for their careers.
The group looks down on everyone else, treats them with suspicion. Gen-X, who wore Greenpeace and anti war buttons and helped introduce women quotas in the workplace is lectured by brats with $250,000 salaries (which for some reason the little angels don't give away to Black people).
The whole movement is deeply hypocritical and self-serving. It is NOT merely discussion!
What you are talking about is Microsoft in the Balmer years. No focus on delivery, no focus on perfection, churning out half assed products. See where it got them? Lost out on mobile, lost out on Cloud, Playstation is still a better gaming console, etc.
Leaders inspire, letting things slide is bad for the culture of succcess.
Noisy echo chambers are uninclusive to anyone who doesn't hold that precise political viewpoint.
We both know that the program goes way beyond "black people shouldn't be indiscriminately shot", its driven by people who are addicted to social media and perpetually pushing for another rush of outrage. I'd prefer not to be around that, personally.
It seems like Brian Armstrong is the only person using social media to push for fabricated outrage. Anyone complaining about “wokeness” is talking about an issue that only exists in the minds of true bigots. It’s a boogeyman that they use to punch down. No one is forcing Armstrong to say stupid shit constantly.
I don't really use Twitter, but this is the first time I've heard of the whole thing since a year ago. If he's on there every day fighting with people, then yeah, he's an addict too. If he's just checking in after a year and saying "hey it's working out for us", more power to him.
You need to take your blinders off and get some reading glasses.
> What is the scope of our mission?
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. This is difficult and important work, and every employee at Coinbase signed up because they are excited about this mission.
The fact that you immediately jumped to calling it a "screed"—not once, but twice—despite allegedly not knowing this reveals your motives quite clearly. You are simply ideologically opposed to the message, not its form, and in favor of the imposition of a woke monoculture.
Your dishonest use of an obvious motte-and-bailey in your last sentence is just the cherry on top.
> Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
Basically sounds like “mission focused” = “do your job”
Well the mission seems inherently political (economic freedom), so coinbase is asking its employees to take a myopic mission focused approach while simultaneously finding the mission inspiring politically and not mentioning politics at work.
Ultimately employees want more than just to punch the clock and pay their mortgage, especially SF knowledge workers.
If you could tell me what point you think I should be drawing from that link, it would be lovely.
Because all I see is the first half devoted to the sort of generic PR speak that any company does about having an aligned vision, and the latter half is about what they're not doing.
Where's the big reveal? What makes being a 'mission focused' company different than just... actually not making political statements? What did the big meta-political statement add to their company?
It was clear the the GP commenter was grasping for something bigger than the actual results provided, and neither that article or your explanation of it added more depth than the Twitter thread alone did.
I don't understand why you need to attach such a large value judgement here? If the answer is "Yeah, it was mostly a PR move re-stating their existing focus" that's fine, it's not any sort of attack.
>Seems like you're incapable of grasping these basic concepts. I believe you may have to be 18 to post here. Here's a better site for underage kids that may not grasp things like company mission statements: www.reddit.com
Ahem
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
>
3/ One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Reddit is at scale a sentence like this often means they’ve established a dominant monoculture and squashed out the ‘annoyances’..
If there is one thing I've learned from a company that went woke was that the supposed diversity that it reached was merely superficial.
They hired people from all the minorities necessary and ended up with culture that was even more monolithic than before. No dissent allowed.
I am a bisexual dude, and nobody at work (sans my closest friends) know about it because it's none of their business. I did not disclose it during my interview, I don't want them to ask me about it.
This has been my observation as well. Such companies pat themselves on the back for hiring a diverse group who actually think the same _despite_ coming from different backgrounds or have different skin color.
What I take from that statement is "We have not meaningfully tackled any of the issues of discrimination in the workplace that our Black employees have continuously attempted to bring to our attention", such as the ones u/saurik linked in his comment.
Yeah, if the most positive thing you can claim is "the rest of our Black employees didn't quit" then that is really saying something. I liked how he bragged about improving on some undisclosed metrics though, as though that kind of thing isn't trivial to game or even outright lie about
It’s dismal in an environment where the base rate is far higher than 5%. What’s the rate near their HQ? What’s the rate among those with any qualifications locally?
The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employees and don't tolerate anyone who doesn't" are just...basic things you need to do in 2021. They aren't a distraction, I would say not saying them is a distraction.
In all of the discussion around the blog post from Armstrong last year and the similar discussion around Basecamp, I never once saw an example cited of these so-called distractions from being mission-focused that wasn't just affirming the basic dignity of a group of people. I don't understand why doing so should be controversial. Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support the right of Black people to not be killed randomly and of LGBTQ+ people to exist simply doesn't belong in polite, modern society. How is this controversial?
I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
Basecamp's angry worker faction was demanding the company apologize for contributing to a white supremacist, genocidal culture... because some customer service folks had a funny customer name list that included names from all backgrounds.
That had absolutely nothing to do with basic dignity for marginalized groups. It was simply a grab for power and status. One of many. We who have been watching are very familiar with the game.
The framing of it as merely about basic dignity is deeply disingenuous, but is itself familiar and another part of the game. What about the dignity of customer service workers? Is it upholding their dignity to frivolously condemn them for a mildly immature in-joke that showed no racial bias and harmed no one?
Some of us, you will find, are not so easily played for fools.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position
> At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”.
You leave out that basecamp gave 6 months of salary to each person quitting. I'd assume that most of those would have quit under those conditions even if there wasn't an incident at all. As we can see here at the Coinbase incident where they didn't give a ton of money basically nobody quit, basecamps case would probably look similar.
Half the country voted for Trump. A small percentage of those, but still millions of people, voted for him in part because they believed he was going to save them from a satanic ruling class of pedophiles.
"A lot of people did something" is not a solid reason to respect what they did or why they did it.
The big problem with diversity in corporate settings is that it is often fake. It is not used to help marginalized people. It is used for internal power grabs and for “woke-washing” evil organizations. Like the “I’m a Latina with two moms” CIA ad.
This is a fantastically creative misrepresentation. No one demanded anyone apologize for contributing to a genocidal culture for anything. And yes I know you're referring to the pyramid. It also misses out on plenty of other content too, but that bit was fantastically creative, really.
I was slightly off in my memory, but I went back to some of the original blogs [1] and news reports [2] and there was indeed a specific employee demand that leadership acknowledge the customer list as something to be included in the pyramid of hate, as contributing to a colonial, genocidal culture. That this would require an apology was not explicitly stated, but it goes without saying, since there had already been apologies all around for the lesser offense, the general inappropriateness of the list.
In his blog post, DHH pointed out exactly where the dispute was: "It's still inappropriate for us to be laughing at individually named customers in our company Campfires, but not because there are any racist or colonial overtones to it." [emphasis mine] DHH simply didn't want the list spuriously connected to the serious moral offenses of bigotry and racism, with all the consequences that would open up.
This isn't to deny that a completely different sort of list, in a completely different context, could be validly cited as within the pyramid of hate. And it's fine to bring that up, so long as you note that what happened obviously wasn't that. But the angry employees didn't note that, because it wasn't part of their game. In fact, demanding that leadership frame the list as the sort of thing that contributes to colonialism and genocide, rather than merely being immature and inappropriate in the workplace, was a first step in setting off a moral panic where the instigators would call all the shots. Again, those of us who have been paying attention have seen many examples of this.
Other points of controversy, like the implicit demand that leadership take sides on the existence of white supremacy within the company precisely because an employee denied it was present [3], present even clearer examples of the Kafka-trapping and moral panic-mongering that was unfolding within the company.
Hansson and Fried were smart to nip it in the bud, and nip it in the bud publicly. They set a great example of how to show these people the door.
As an atheist that grew up in a religious environment, the techniques and patterns of religions are recognizable. You may not realize it, but you are introducing religion into the workplace.
A Christian posts on HN: merely saying "we as a company believe thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" or "we as a company believe you shall not steal" are just...basic things you need to do in 1952.
>you're mixing two entirely unrelated things up in bad faith.
The Leftist's Exit Fallacy: claim the response is in bad faith because you cannot reasonably respond to the core claims, and do not have any retorts to the analogies, metaphors, etc. used.
>Saying people deserve to be able to live isn't the same as introducing extremely "othering" religions.
The fact that I can't tell if you're talking about leftism or Christianity is hilarious, and telling.
>The tactics are the same, the goals are different.
That's literally what he was highlighting here...
>Comparing these is bad faith.
"I have no response to your well thought out arguments, so I'm just going to disregard them entirely because the narrative must be preserved!"
What if a bunch of white male employees ask the company to make s statement that their lives matter too? After all they are overrepresented in suicide statistics, drug addiction and homelessness.
You now this shit will make a lot of leftists lose their mind and show up at ur company offices trying to cancel you out of existence.
In a society going mad like ours, opting out of the madness like Coinbase did is the best option.
"Black lives matter" is a slogan that largely refers to a desire to solve issues related to police brutality and black people. "White lives matter", as it's commonly said and understood, is merely a contrarian pushback against that desire to fix those issues.
Obviously white lives do matter like others, but making a statement of something communicates something other than the literal meaning: it asserts that there's part of the meaning that the receiver isn't demonstrating knowledge of, and it evokes connections to things people have encountered before. If you say "white lives matter", intending it to mean something about suicide statistics, and other people interpret it as racist pushback against solving police brutality, the other people aren't doing something surprising or wrong. You would just be fruitlessly rebelling against how language actually works.
If you want to raise awareness about suicide, go ahead, but don't use a slogan that already has a meaning that will be misinterpreted in your context, and certainly don't do it competitively against people raising awareness for a different issue.
One could argue that the BLM slogan, being intentionally divisive and exclusive, is designed to provoke from day one rather than bring up constructive change. It's a heavily politicized movement. Since Biden was elected for example, the issue of BLM and police brutality is not mediatized nearly as much as before. It's not that the problem was fixed overnight, it's just that there is no use for it right now by the progressive left agenda.
It's not a honest movement. I refuse to support it even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
And given that the two of us, as reasonable people, can have a rational disagreement on this issue, why should our employer take a side? Why bring this discussion in the office? It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution. And employers don't take stand opposite of it because... it's unconstitutional.
The slogan is only divisive if you make it so. It certainly isn't "intentionally" divisive.
> Since Biden was elected for example
Looking at Google trends, there's basically no correlation between Bidens election and "Black Lives Matter". You're reaching to creating a narrative that doesn't fit the facts.
> even if I support the general idea that our police force and judicial system need reform to infuse them with more humanity and empathy.
Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
> It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side. The simple stuff is usually written in the US constitution.
The stuff you mentioned doesn't start out in the constitution (and arguably actually still aren't). It only got there due to activism by people and organizations, some of which happened in the workplace. Were they wrong to do so? Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms. That misses the point, unless your point is that the norms shouldn't change.
> Do you support any group or organization that does policeor criminal justice reform?
It's not the issue here. I am not even trying to say you are wrong about BLM. My point is it's one of those issues where 2 reasonable people can disagree. And employers shouldn't take sides.
> Concretely, you're making an argument from status quo in a conversation about how we change norms.
Strawman fallacy. My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized. Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment. If you were my co-worker I would refuse to discuss this issue unless we have a very close bond/friendship outside of work and we are comfortable discussing this kind of stuff.
We can effect change through debates, voting, protests, ...
The chart shows a large spike in June 2020. Then a sharp decline between June and the election. Like the protests. Then a slow decline after the election with small spikes in 2021.
Erm, no. If there were some sort of correlation, looking at that graph you should be able to tell me where on the graph Biden either won the election or took office (Nov 4th or Jan 21st). You can't. What you do see is a wonderful bit of exponential decay from an event that wasn't related to Biden: the death of George Floyd on May 26. That's the vertical line. And then an expected exponential decay.
If you look at https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2020-01-01%202..., for example, Election, Joe Biden, and Trump are all strongly correlated. Heck, Trump and Black Lives Matter are briefly correlated, but Election and Black Lives Matter aren't.
> Strawman fallacy.
No, you literally made an, if we want to get technical, argumentum ad antiquitatem. Pointing that out isn't a fallacy. It's what you did.
> Which in turn allow people with different ideologies to work together effectively in a safe non-toxic environment.
People who disagree with you would claim that often they do not feel the environment is safe and non-toxic. They aren't comfortable with the status quo, hence their attempts to change it. That you are unaware of the toxicity and lack of safety doesn't invalidate their experiences. In fact, its an example of the challenges they have to overcome to achieve the safety and non-toxicity you enjoy and presume.
> My only argument is that work environment shouldn't be politicized.
No, you said, and I quote:
" It's not like the issue is so obvious and simple (i.e. all people have equal rights, women should be able to go to school, ...) that it's okay employers take a side." Your opinion is that employers can clearly take a side sometimes, but only in cases where some norm (the constitution as it is today) dictates. If that's not what you intended, please clarify, but that's precisely the argument you made, and again, it wasn't a strawman for me to point that out.
All of these statements are like when people comment their condolences or congratulations on social media. Yeah, it’s just a gesture, but the gesture is appreciated. And like a condolence, I don’t think it’s weird if a company doesn’t say anything, but I would find it weird if a person was really proud of how they didn’t give condolences or congratulations.
> I would find it weird if a person was really proud of how they didn’t give condolences or congratulations
I am proud I have never written RIP Celebrity on twitter when a celebrity died or sent my congratulations to a Kardashian on the occasion of the brith of their child. When I have offered condolences or congratulations it has been exclusively in person or in a non public broadcast message.
I guess that makes me weird, but personally I find posting that sort of shit on social media decidedly odd.
> I now try to avoid using the English idiom "I just don't understand how..." to express indignation. If I genuinely don't understand how, then my model is being surprised by the facts, and I should discard it and find a better model.
I just don't understand what kind of person expects their idioms and mental models to have a literal 1:1 match. If I wanted to say exactly what I'm thinking, I wouldn't be reaching for idioms.
>I never once saw an example cited of these so-called distractions from being mission-focused that wasn't just affirming the basic dignity of a group of people.
You are free to affirm whatever you want, and have all sort of discussions about society at large when your aren't being paid for your time by someone else to do a job that has nothing to do with affirming groups of people.
>I simply cannot imagine working at a place that doesn't recognize the humanity of their workers. Utterly baffling and heartless mindset.
Its baffling to me that so many people feel entitled to espouse their social and cultural beliefs in the workplace instead of doing the job they are being paid to do. The way a workplace recognizes the humanity of their workers is by offering good wages, good hours and a generous benefits package.
You are free to work at companies where you can impose your political views on those arounds you. However people who don't want to work with you are free to go work for companies that doesn't let people like you do that, like Coinbase.
but that's thing...what is "social activism" here? I don't think having a single tweet or post from your company's account saying "happy Pride month, we love our LGBTQ+ Coinbasers" is activism really....it's just like, a nice thing to do. No one is saying Coinbase or any company should pay their employees to go make phone calls for Bernie Sanders' campaign on the clock. It seems like people are inventing some kind of strawman of "paid activism" that no one is asking for.
I don't know, more people celebrate Christmas compared to Pride month, but saying "Merry Christmas" can be seen as controversial. It's hard to imagine that "happy Pride month" is completly neutral.
> If you say “Merry Christmas” to someone who celebrates Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or nothing at all, you could make them feel marginalized: like their own beliefs aren’t valued or respected by society. And that’s not a good way to feel around the holidays.
I'm not sure if that fits "examples of people complaining about it" however, as it's more "people trying to protect the feeling of marginalized groups", which isn't the same.
> On the other hand, people don't greet me with "happy pride" during June, but they do greet me with "merry Christmas" during December, so perhaps there's a false equivalency there too.
That's fair. Pride month is not a thing where I live, so it's hard to know exactly how people experience it. I was under the impression that it was really important and lots of people talked about it, but maybe it depends on where you live, or maybe it was a warped vision of reality.
Though to go back to the original subject, if people don't greet you with "happy Pride" during June, then wishing it would be definitely not neutral.
How about we stick to "a company can do everything it wants as long as it is legal and people are free to go work at whichever company they want"? Why is that controversial? If you want to effect social change become a politician, do not try to turn your work place into a political party that has to react to every social fashion.
The problem with the argument that this is making a workplace a political party is what the fuck are you supposed to do if you’re transitioning at work? Now you’re fucking political, and all you want is for your boss to call you she/her and your health insurance to cover your hormones.
Lets say that coinbase said "We are fully political at work, we expect all of you to have conservative views!". Would that make you happier than their current apolitical stance?
> What do you do in an apolitical workplace and you’re going to engage in controversial medical intervention to align your body with your believed gender?
You just do it? In an apolitical workspace that isn't a political act, what you do in your free time is up to you. And if you change your legal name people should update how they call you. Nothing of that is political. If people make a fuzz they are dragging politics in the workspace and should be reprimanded.
> I think this is a straw man that doesn’t actually address my question.
It isn't a strawman, I am just explaining how politics at work wouldn't solve your problem. However an apolitical workspace actually would solve your problem since it bars conservative politics as well.
The way you picture politics as a wholly separate thing unrelated to the amount of consideration/kindness toward LGBT people or minorities is alien to me.
Twenty+ years ago, being visibly gay in a workplace was much less popular, to the point that many people made the choice between hiding that about themselves or facing a more hostile workplace. Things are very different today in many places. Did society just get overall kinder, or did it go through a political change?
In the past, asserting a visibly gay person warranted more consideration and kindness was definitely "political". Was there some point it wholly stopped being so?
That’s what I don’t understand, because my understanding is that being conservative or progressive when it comes to trans people is no middle ground. Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice. There are laws passed explicitly around their bathrooms for example.
> Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice
No, it is just a kind gesture. It is like people not telling an overweight person they are fat, it is the normal thing to do. And if you go around calling people fat then in any healthy workplace they will call you in for a talk and tell you to stop being so rude.
The problem here is that you make this about politics and not about just common decency. If it is about politics then it makes sense for conservatives to reject your wish, you wont change them from being conservatives. But if you make it about common decency instead then they almost surely comply since most people are nice. Maybe not the first time you ask but after a few times almost everyone will, because they will see themselves as assholes if they don't.
> Choosing to go with a trans persons new name and pronouns when they are early or mid transition is a political choice.
It's not, at least not for me. I think what people do with their bodies is not my business. I think that if people want to be called a certain way, I'm fine with it. All I'm asking is a bit of forgiveness in case I make a mistake, as I'm bad with names. But most of the time it will be not remembering someone's name, not using the one they would prefer me not to use. I don't consider any of this political. My grandmother doesn't like her name, so everyone calls her by her nickname. I was a bit surprised when I saw her full name when I was young, but that's about it. I don't see any difference with trans people. Sure, the stuff behind is very different, the "why" is not the same. But that's not really my business. I think accomodating people, up to a certain degree, shouldn't come with conditions about the "why".
I think people tend to forget that it's normal to accommodate to some degree people that you work with. I have two vegetarian colleagues, so if I bring some food to work, I make something that they can eat. I would try the same if someone was vegan or allergic to nuts. I don't know why they are vegetarian, and I don't need to know why to respect them and try to accommodate them. On the other hand, they've never lectured me about what I eat.
The sibling comment about being overweight is also very true. I am overweight. I've never had any comments about it in the workplace. At my last job, all of my colleagues were very physically active. Sure, sometimes I felt a bit left out, but that's on me. They never made me feel uncomfortable about my weight. I was allowed to exist as a person, and not a fat person. That personally means a lot to me.
I don't have any good answers for the bathrooms. Individual unisex bathrooms would solve that, but not all offices are equipped with that, and adding them may not be possible. You're right that here, it may be a bit harder to accommodate them, depending on who you are. On the other hand, I'm fine with unisex bathrooms, as I'm not comfortable with urinals.
I realize that it's not everyone's cup of tea, and that some people will prefer a workplace where everyone is strongly aligned with them on almost everything. That's fine too.
All of that may be just an expression of privilege/luck/something, as I realize that not all workplaces are like mine. But these places do exists. I'm trying to raise awareness about them, in hope that some people will go look for them, instead of being abused by employers and colleagues that don't deserve them.
I don't think we should optimise workplaces for the smallest possible edge cases.
If you joined a bigoted company as a queer person and transitioned then you have to change your job, the same way if you join NPR and suddenly realise after spending too much time online that you are in fact right wing.
Work is a place where people go to earn money to do stuff they want after. It's not a place to get validation.
That doesn’t answer my question of what happens if someone transitions in a workplace. How do you do that non-politically? Dismissing the edge cases of marginalized people is kind of like… of course they’re edge cases. Marginalized people are edge cases by definition.
> That doesn’t answer my question of what happens if someone transitions in a workplace. How do you do that non-politically?
It is simple, you transition, you tell people you want to go by the other name now. If people say it wrong you remind them but don't get angry. If they harass it for it there are laws against harassment, bringing up harassment isn't political. You can discuss the medical benefits with your manager or HR, but don't have to try to make a political campaign about it.
If people makes a fuzz over those things then they are political and you can report them to whoever is in charge that they are bringing politics to work and causing problems. If they truly are against politics at work they will take your side and tell those people to stop.
What do you do if your peer reports you as political because asking people to go by your new name is a political demand? I’m genuinely asking, because I’m under the impression that even asking people to respect your pronouns can be too political, or trying to use a bathroom you think matches your gender.
If you legally changed your name then it isn't an political act.
> I’m genuinely asking, because I’m under the impression that even asking people to respect your pronouns can be too political
That is just your assumption here. Why are you assuming that? It is almost as if you assume "apolitical" means "conservative". That isn't true, even if the left tries to tell you that all "apolitical" people are really closet conservatives that isn't really the case.
I’m assuming that because there are laws in several places in the country about whether or not trans people can use certain bathrooms, so I’m assuming it’s a political thing.
I think my assumptions are different than you. I’ve met people, co workers, who have told me that a trans person asking to be described as a new name is political, and forcing the co worker to call them by a new name is forcing politics in the workplace. This is my understanding of what an apolitical workplace means. Am I wrong? I’ve generally avoided workplaces that claim to be apolitical explicitly because the people I know who claim to be apolitical actually claim that they’d never respect a trans persons new name, because that’s bringing politics into the workplace.
Then your problem isn't with apolitical workplaces, but with conservative workplaces.
Also, a few people saying that trans stuff is political doesn't mean that those views are the general consensus or that apolitical workplaces works with that. I haven't seen that and almost everywhere I've been doesn't really do politics at work. Trans people are just people etc, nobody cares.
I don't know. How do you tell an apolitical workspace from a progressive workspace if the progressive workspace claims it's apolitical?
But until we see that coinbase harasses trans people who work there I'll assume they are apolitical as they say and not conservative. If you have evidence that they did harass trans people as you fear then you can bring them up and we can see that coinbase isn't really apolitical, but until then you are just creating a problem out of nothing.
Plenty of companies have policies against politics at work, but I've never heard of a real expample where that caused issues with trans people. Instead people just bring up thought examples. I don't doubt it might have ever happened, but I don't think it is nearly as common or problematic as people try to make it out to be.
I can assure you that most people would not bat an eye they were asked to use a different pronoun. The problem starts when they are 1) forced to do so b) suddenly have to "disclose" their own pronouns, and you end up on a zoom call with he/hims she/hers and one they/them.
The problem is not that some people want to stop being marginalised, the problem is that the aim is to marginalise a normal person.
If they are rude then you can bring it up with your manager about them being rude. Companies usually doesn't accept rude behaviour or bullying. If they are fine with rude behaviour and bullying then you will have problems regardless of the political stance of the company.
There is no law that makes people call other people by their given names too. Or law that makes people call priests "father". I don't understand how that can be so hard to fathom.
> There is no law that makes people call other people by their given names too.
Actually this would likely fall under some form of workplace harassment issue, and the company would have a duty to stop the harassment. ("Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs", and it's kind of hard to imagine how calling someone a name that isn't theirs isn't a form of mockery or name calling.)
> or trying to use a bathroom you think matches your gender
If you get in trouble for being in the wrong bathroom at work, you need to go find a company that isn’t full of children. Nobody has time to care where you pee
>It's baffling to me that people believe I should turn off my brain when I'm at work.
You should choose a place of employment that lets you behave as you feel you need to behave, not expect that you as the employee are the one who decides on the standards of behavior.
Then don't work for someone who you don't consider sufficiently woke! Nobody is being forced to work at Coinbase. If you don't like the idea that you are hired to do a job instead of running a social justice campaign, then don't take that job, work somewhere else! The sense of entitlement is absolutely astounding.
> The thing I hate about this line of thinking is the supposed "distractions" of being mission-focused are nearly all related simply to basic rights/dignities for marginalized groups. I don't think anyone is saying companies need to take a strong stance on every political issue, but merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter" or "we as a company welcome and accept our LGBTQ+ employees and don't tolerate anyone who doesn't" are just...basic things you need to do in 2021. They aren't a distraction, I would say not saying them is a distraction.
The context is people asking the Coinbase CEO to make a statement about BLM. You can read about it here:
This is the start of the first paragraph of that article:
> IN EARLY JUNE, a week after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, employees at Coinbase gathered, virtually, for an emotional meeting. In the previous few days, mirroring workplaces elsewhere, the company’s Slack channels had been filled with comments about the nationwide protests and demands for more support for Black employees. In the background hovered a specific question: Would Coinbase and its CEO, Brian Armstrong, make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement, as so many Silicon Valley companies had?
I think it's fair to say here that the root comment changed the goalposts from "make a public statement about Black Lives Matter and the racial justice movement" to "merely saying "we as a company believe the lives of our Black employees matter"". Which, in that case, would fit my characterisation of that comment as a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
I appreciate your intent in keeping the discussion on topic, however in that case I think I was on topic.
There is a difference between people/companies that believe that lives of black people matter and those that claim that BLACKLIVESMATTER. There is a difference between people/companies that believe that women need to have the same rights as men and those that claim to be feminists. There is a difference between people/companies that believe that gays/lesbians are normal people and those who put rainbows everywhere.
> There is a difference between people/companies that believe that lives of black people matter and those that claim that BLACKLIVESMATTER.
FWIW, in this case, that "difference" might be that Coinbase was simultaneously treating their black employees poorly--dare I say, as "second class citizens"--while actively refusing to take a few seconds to agree with something as banal/obvious as "black lives matter". The BLM statement struggle was merely a catalyst for what were already existing and somewhat long-standing racial tensions brewing inside the company that had led people to feel that, with its actions, the company did not in fact care about its black employees... context you can't just pretend didn't exist going into Brian's "let's not talk about this and everyone go back to work" post.
> The tensions at Coinbase came to a head in June, after the police killing of George Floyd. As many tech leaders publicly voiced support for Black Lives Matter protests, Black employees at Coinbase said on the Slack messaging platform that they were hurt by the silence of Mr. Armstrong and other executives about the matter. They organized a meeting where several of them told executives, often through tears, about their difficult experiences at the company, eight people who attended said.
Take careful note: this wasn't "merely" "our difficult experiences in the world", this was "our difficult experiences at the company". Seriously: too much of this comment thread seems to be hyperfocused on BLM statements--as I guess y'all really think taking a few minutes and a couple sentences to acknowledge that in solidarity somewhere is somehow a horrible distraction--while ignoring that this had started in the background of "Coinbase is mistreating its black employees so much that it had already lost 3/4s of them" (and that's before Brian's post, so a lack of strong improvement since then is telling). This is way more concrete than these abstractions.
> But according to 23 current and former Coinbase employees, five of whom spoke on the record, as well as internal documents and recordings of conversations, the start-up has long struggled with its management of Black employees.
> “It was the first time I realized what racism felt like in the modern world,” said Layllen Sawyerr, a compliance analyst who is Black. “I felt like I was being bullied every day at work.” She said she filed a discrimination complaint with Coinbase’s legal department before quitting in 2018.
If you tell people they're victims, they'll act like victims. Not acknowledging George Floyd "hurts" black employees? This is the kind of nonsense born of priviledge.
Anybody from the 3rd world reading this garbage feels sick. 20 year olds making 6 figures to build craigslist for crypto crying because their boss won't acknowledge an event.
>Nah, that's what the far right propaganda machine has tried to tell you.
Nah, that's what facts and being a data driven adult have told us. Apparently they line up with the far-right. Looks like reality had a right bias.
>You're told to believe that Group X is bad, and when you find that you actually believe in the core tenet of Group X, you have trouble reconciling that.
Except Group X is bad, and sharing common beliefs is immaterial. Hitler/Nazis believed smoking was bad for you and excessive drinking was a blight on society. I agree with them on that, but there's obviously no issues reconciling the fact that they were bad.
>You want black lives matter supporters who don't actually fight for change.
If they wanted that, they'd be OK with all the neurotic performative virtue signaling at work LOL!
>In short, you love the status quo, and you're scared that giving marginalised groups a better shake might take away some of what you have.
In short, you believe "you're either with us, or against us." Facts, nuance, and logically considering problems are systemic White supremacy culture in your eyes.
>you're scared that giving marginalised groups a better shake might take away some of what you have.
He supports egalitarianism which definitely helps marginalized groups along with everyone else. You're supporting institutional racism.
'Acknowledging discrimination in our industry is distracting, so to stop being distracted I'm going to focus on writing on how un-distracted we are because we're _mission focused._ I'm going to do this several times.'
I can't be the only person feeling a sense of irony, here. A big argument you see a lot is that people who raise concerns around equitable treatment only do it for clout, the ever popular 'virtue signaling' phrase. Is this not, to some extent or another, similar behavior but for a different audience?
Virtual signal* for thee but not for me? Is this something we've discussed yet?
* I've never been a fan of this term, anyway. Even if someone were 100%, consciously and purposefully 'virtue signaling', it has little baring on the validity of their argument.
What you've said makes no sense. Coinbase offered a bunch of employees the change to quit gracefully with an exit package rather than fire them. That's not virtue signaling, that's material reality.
> merely saying "we as a company [...] don't tolerate anyone who doesn't [share our political stance]" are just... basic things you need to do in 2021
> Anyone who doesn't fully and unambiguously support [our political stance] simply does not belong in polite, modern society
That's extremely divisive and intolerant. Also, it's a cheap rhetorical trick to replace [political stance] with "doesn't want black people to be indiscriminately murdered". Literally no-one is arguing that black people should be indiscriminately murdered. Some people just want to do work at their workplace instead of engaging zealots in political debates that might lead to being cancelled at book burnings. That doesn't mean they want to genocide black people. You should learn to tolerate people who have political opinions different from yours.
This is such obnoxious virtue signalling. Do you issue statements decrying the 30 people murdered in a car explosion in Djibouti on a daily basis? Who decide which new social issue you're supposed to care about?
It's distracting, propagandist and politically charged bullshit. Just because I don't support BLM doesn't mean I don't have a problem with black people randomly being killed.
It's the exact same bullshit as shoving "support our troops or else you hate freedom" down people's throats.
It's disingenuous to pretend like "black lives matter" is merely a phrase that any decent person should agree to without question. BLM is a political group with a radical left-leaning agenda that encompasses much more than just "don't kill black people randomly" as you suggest. Discussing these things in the workplace inevitably leads to the accusation that if you don't support BLM, you must not think black lives matter. It's a very cheap tactic, akin to saying that you're not a patriot if you don't support the PATRIOT act.
This is a caricature of the “mission-focused” mindset. I’ll preface this message by saying that I am brown, raised in relative poverty in the third world, and left of center on most issues. I’ll also say that I have materially contributed a substantial portion of my income helping educate poor brown kids, which most of my preachy white colleagues haven’t and won’t.
The discourse at work in SV tech is not about, “hey, let’s not hang homosexuals”, which I am sure 99.99% of employees and employers fully agree with. It’s typically more in the vein of, “hey, why did we hire person Z, who the media has proven to be a bigot”.
As an explicit example:
Antonio Garcia Martinez’s firing was, IMO, bizarre and unwarranted and a manifestation of this attitude (coming from a company that is okay with using Uyghur labor).
I actually do not want my colleagues to have a very narrow view of what’s right and wrong — or a very black and white view of the world. And surely, I don’t want to expend cycles at work having such conversations.
This sounds like "other people have it much worse in the world, suck it up or help them instead of trying to do things you think will improve things in your own life".
> we're operating in an environment of virtue signaling and fear of speaking up.
Well, which is it? Are people speaking up too much (virtue signalling), or not enough (fear of speaking up)? Perhaps the people speaking up aren't saying what you want to hear, and you imagine a hidden majority of people who agree with you that you can convince yourself you are right, through a "invisible argument of authority" towards these abstract people who you know exist but don't speak up out of fear, but surely agree with you and outnumber the other voices.
I find the usage of the term "virtue signalling" a bit disappointing. Yes, there are a subset of opportunists who are dishonestly using social platforms for their own gain - but such people are in such a minority that pretending they should dominate the conversation is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
People are trying to organize to make society better, more inclusive, right the systematic wrongs of the past, and build a better future. Dismissing the majority of these people with a dismissive term like "virtue signalling" is not only being insensitive, it's callous and belittling.
The first thing you should realize is that the "virtue signalling" happening is due to voices being oppressed and voices not being heard for too long. There are uncomfortable conversations that need to happen and these voices should be heard.
It's all good and fair that you decided those conversations should not happen in the context of your company and to make the judgement as a leader that it serves only as a distraction, but to use a callous term like "virtue signalling" in the context of these conversations shows the true character of the person conveying this message - and personally, that is not a leader I would want to follow along with any mission.
Brian Armstrong was on Tyler Cowen and Tyler asked him if bitcoin was a zero sum game, in a round about way:
COWEN: I’ve seen estimates that about 20 percent of bitcoin has been lost, or people don’t have their passwords, or it’s somehow abandoned or whatever. Let’s say that 20 percent were found. Those people would be better off, right? They’d have more wealth. Who is then worse off?
ARMSTRONG: Yes, I suppose you have dilution, and you have inflation if you’re increasing the money supply somehow like that.
COWEN: Then if we ask the general question that the social value of bitcoin — bitcoin in general — again, clearly a benefit to the people who bought at low prices. They in essence found bitcoin. But if someone else in the system is losing an equal amount, why think that the social value of bitcoin is positive?
ARMSTRONG: Who’s losing the equivalent amount in this case, just so I understand?
COWEN: I don’t know exactly who, but someone else has less purchasing power, right? Bitcoin isn’t apples. You can’t eat it for lunch.
ARMSTRONG: It’s not clear to me that bitcoin is a zero-sum game.
COWEN: But what is that? When do I get my apples, so to speak? Where do they come from?
ARMSTRONG: Well, anybody can participate of course. I think, now, about probably 10 percent of Americans and maybe 60 or 70 million people globally have crypto, at least. So it’s been growing a lot.
Brian didn't seem to understand the question and it left me a bit unimpressed.
Not a bitcoin fan, but this question of eating it for lunch or backing it with apples misunderstands that the fundamental liquidity backstop of bitcoin is risk. So long as you can take it to a casino (real or notional) and bet it, it has value. For it to go to zero, it would mean no two people could make a bet where one benefits from the result.
Even random shitcoins have a non-zero value so long as there are participants who can use it as a proxy for risk of any sort. The the value is a function of the risk the exchange represents. If we bet 20 randocoins on tomorrow's high temperature in a city, we've created potential value. The bitcoin bet is that its value is non-zero, and an infinite number of people can trade in and out of positions in that bet and create and extract value from it.
The only real downside risk is a bunch of smart contract derivatives that hoover up bitcoin, rehypothecate and leverage it and give you some higher risk platform token/scrip instead that has a much higher likelihood of being worthless when it defaults, but with some additional personal security.
Using Cowen's analogy, bitcoin isn't apples, it's the game token you use to play the game to win the apples.
Interesting! But isn't betting is a zero sum game? Betting on apples means some lose and some win, but the world is not better off as a result, because they cancel out.
You're right, I'm just thinking there is some long hedge that keeps the game going, like the transaction fees, where you get demand for transactions that are bets on blocks. The whole thing is a kind of self reinforcing stochastic uncertainty cloud (infinite improbability machine?), where the endogenous demand is never zero. Until it is because of something exogenous. Same as fiat.
Very interesting. Similar theme to a point Tyler made awhile ago, that I think he touches on even explicitly in this interview, about how if BTC gets to $100K or $200K, you have a bunch of billionaires running around that have essentially done "nothing" to earn it. Seems like it would just exacerbate inequality. Anyone can participate, as long as you're reasonably tech-savvy, and have disposable income to invest (gamble) with.
To be honest, the questions were a bit stupid and/or dishonest. It's like asking, "if gold price goes up, who's losing?" I guess anybody that didn't invest in gold, but, so what?
It's hard to find a serious economist who doesn't see major flaws with bitcoin. It's because bitcoin was designed by engineers, not economists.
Bitcoin could only have been created by engineers - it misses a few fundamental tests of currency that any practicing economist would have "fixed" during the design phase. So we are left with bitcoin, which looks silly to most experts but is basically a religion to those who only see the technical merits of the project.
If we run the experiment all the way out, we end up with a ruling class based simply on time and fervor of adoption of a random piece of tech that appeared 10 years ago.
If we run it allll the way out we have a bunch of bitcoin billionaires constantly fearing for their lives because they are essentially walking piggybanks, ripe for kidnapping and torturing their wealth away via rubber hose cryptography.
I was able to chat to Brian about this the other night. I think it’s under appreciated how brave it was to do this on the precipice of multiple fundraising / liquidity events and in the eye of the storm of cancel culture generally.
This man spends way too much time on Twitter and not enough time learning the rules and regulations of the industry the company he leads participates in.
The mission is off track. He should stop listing garbage and stick to Bitcoin.
Crap like that shiba inu token are absolute scams, like most EVM tokens. They do nothing, add nothing, and trading them on chain just enriches the miners, or off chain, the exchange. Say what you like about dogecoin, at least it’s a long standing L1 blockchain with developers and history/transactions.
They're all basically the same. All the arguments you have against anything not-bitcoin apply to bitcoin except bitcoin is older and way more power intensive. Doge is a better currency for a lot of reasons. Also its funny. List one, may as well list 'em all.
They aren’t the same. I’m not knocking dogecoin — it’s a real Nakamoto blockchain, a real working product. I’d rather folks bought BTC but hey, any software fork of Satoshi client is better than the scamfactory enabled by Eth.
Why? Presumably because you're long BTC. With all due respect, you make a lot of handwavy comments about ERC-20 scams and I agree with you, but aside from a highly speculative investment, BTC is nothing.
It failed as a currency. It failed as a unit of account. Now the narrative has shifted to "store of value" which only anyone without an understanding of what that means could say.
What does BTC do that DOGE doesn't do? Or any other scam coin? It's all speculation, you have happen to find one more acceptable (and it so happens the one you're probably invested in).
I'd argue that it has no negative feedback mechanism. More security isn't always useful. There's a reason you don't wear 25 seatbelts in a car or drive a tank to work. At some point more security is ineffective, and then eventually detrimental.
Yes, more energy is more security in this case - which of course you can obtain in alternative ways. But so is driving a tank. So is living in bubble wrap in a missile silo in the middle of an open field. We don't do those things, though, because we have negative feedback mechanisms. Bitcoin does these things (analogous versions) because it doesn't.
And as for why it's failed as an L1, it set out to be a digital cash. 2-3tx/sec isn't enough to support a mid-sized Costco or a flea market let alone a global currency. 1 transaction per person on earth today would take over 75 years and cost 1/3 of a trillion dollars, and 100% of the remaining block reward. It's like a soviet-era phone line - better put in your order early, I guess.
I don’t think a negative feedback cycle could exist that doesn’t introduce a huge vulnerability to a Nakamoto consensus. It is the pure externality of the metric (as opposed to chain balances or state) that makes it work in a trustless and censorship resistant way. How does one even decide a reasonable “limit” to hash rate. I want sufficient security such that when new power generation tech comes online it does not threaten the history of the chain. If we have to drive a tank to work, ok, better than getting hit by stray rifle fire on the highway.
I think the reality is no L1 can scale to digital cash for the everyone on planet to allow L1 txs. we need more layers and more innovation in transaction aggregation and transaction primitives, such as covenants.
Where we don't see eye to eye is I don't think we should unleash a grey-goo esque power virus onto the world. The obvious reason is we have one now, we're using 0.1% of all the earth's power, and generating as much e-waste as a entire country to write a few hundred bytes into a tiny database once in a while. Work that can easily be done on a single raspberry pi.
L2+ don't offer the same guarantees as a L1, and once you drop any of the guarantees the whole thing becomes basically worthless.
So using the same information as you, we arrive at different conclusions: I don't think this solution is viable, good, worthwhile or should exist. I don't think if new power technology comes online a good use is making Bitcoin guzzle it like a dog at a sprinkler. I think China has the moral high ground on this one.
We will probably be arguing as I build my dyson sphere. 0.1% is nothing. :-p
The goo scenario is inevitable, either build some kind of antigoo shield tech or be consumed. Complaining about the goo is irrelevant to the goo.
I very much disagree that was a moral high ground decision — it was an authoritarian move to crush opposition to its financial dystopia, the e-CNY, and prevent its people from escaping the all seeing eye.
Everything you say makes sense within the context of Bitcoin's proof-of-work paradigm, that there aren't any reasonable solutions to these problems within it (there's no good way to add negative feedback to lower the hashrate, there's no good way to calculate a better lower hashrate), but it misses that there are alternative paradigms like proof-of-stake that avoid the problem of too much energy use entirely. Once proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies become more popular and fully prove the technique works at large scale, I hope other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin follow along.
Sorry, Bitcoin will never be PoS. PoS doesn’t offer anything near the same security model, censorship resistance or decentralization. It is not a viable alternative for Bitcoin.
Proof-of-stake has much more ability to enact censorship resistance (https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/06/06/the-problem-of-censorsh...) than proof-of-work. PoW imposes huge entry barriers by restricting mining to those who can build and then operate expensive mining rigs, which are resources not equally available even to people with the same amount of money and may be monopolized (how many competitive mining rig manufacturers are there, and how many countries do they operate in?); PoS makes participating a much more level playing field by removing dependence on physical and monopolizable resources.
PoW does have sheer simplicity and a proven record of working on its side, but the idea that whatever upsides to PoW over PoS that exist are and will stay worth more than 0.5% of global electricity production seems extremely biased.
"More energy = More security" is a slogan now being used to scam non-technical users to buy into the crypto ecosystem, but that does not make any sense if you are willing to think about for a second. Also very convenient that this slogan started getting popular when BTC started getting bad press for energy usage.
BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.
>BTW how you reach consensus on a chain is different from how the accounts in the chain are secured. Just because all BTC nodes are burning up electricity all the time does not mean that your accounts are more/less secure.
I think you're drawing an unnecessary line here. Attacking consensus is attacking the value stored in the accounts. Attacking consensus by using your own miners to pull off a double-spend can directly take value back out of accounts. Attacking consensus by doing a perpetual 51% attack can block people from using their accounts, decreasing the real monetary value of them.
Drawing the lines so that the "security" of a cryptocurrency only refers to the security of the public-key cryptography involved in it is useless. It ignores practically all of the important design considerations and attack vectors in the system. Public-key cryptography is just one component of a cryptocurrency.
I am not a non technical user, and I know how this works.
Btw, you are not correct. The entire history of the chain and balances is protected by the hashrate. With sufficient energy you can rewrite history. This is because every block secures the blocks before it. Yeah checkpoints can be used to force a known sync point, but this vastly undermines the decentralization of the chain.
They are in on it. Listing it on the exchange automatically causes a surge in value, what wouldn't you know it, the exchange had just bought a whole lot of coins in preparation.
Right. It’s a shame that the CB mission went from decentralizing and empowering individuals with BTC to scamming and gambling on shittokens in just a few years.
You can’t convince someone of something when their enormous wealth depends on them not believing or understanding (not Coinbase or Brian Armstrong specific, general observation). People can and do perform Olympic level mental gymnastics to justify their belief systems.
> This man spends way too much time on Twitter and not enough time learning the rules and regulations of the industry the company he leads participates in.
I can't think of a more hated CEO in the Cryptospace since Jihan Wu, who also spent quite a lot of time on social media/Twitter lambasting his users and detractors. A few years later he would be ousted by the CCP from his own company and was licking his wounds from his failed attempt to hi-jack Bitcoin after having loss majority hashing power and near exclusive manufacturer of miners. (Maybe Mark Karpeles, but even then he served his time in prison and after having his life ruined by the Japanese legal system and most just feel bad for the guy.)
To be honest, Strike is going to disrupt Coinbase business model sooner than later and the valuation of Coinbase is the very definition of froth.
In all seriousness, I can't wait to see Coinbase's and Armstrong's collective demise,
> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controversial.
Yeah that made me laugh, too. Feels like the word “politics” is very effective when used to limit your employees: you have something you feel strongly about in the workplace? Fantastic! Oh, it’s “political” (and yes, I’ll be the one determining what qualifies)? Well then no bueno, sorry. We’re mission focused.
Focus on what, exactly? Bitcoin is not exactly an apolitical industry.
But even more generally: Armstrong's profile on Twitter includes his (ostensible) mission of "creating more economic freedom in the world." That's a very political mission, even by milquetoast American standards!
Focus on building a company that generates a return for investors and makes it possible to pay all of the people who work at Coinbase.
Anybody who works there and disagrees with what the company is doing can quit and go work somewhere else whenever they please.
You need to pull your head out of your belly button. The navel gazing you were taught at university is going to ruin your life and make you perpetually miserable.
Nobody disagrees about his basic financial mission! He's a CEO, and that's what CEOs (are supposed to) do.
The farce here is in claiming that Coinbase's mission is somehow "apolitical," even beyond the standard (& correct) observation that everything is political: they are explicitly a financial services company with a political message of economic freedom. They are explicitly advocates for an explicitly political form of monetary exchange.
When Armstrong says "mission focused," he really means "consistent with Coinbase's politics." And that's okay. But it's ridiculous to dress it up as some kind of apolitical position.
Certain politics are relevant for certain companies.
This idea that because everything is touched by politics, you should be free to bring every aspect of politics into any organization is ridiculous.
Coinbase should be involved in the the political discourse surrounding crypto (and other finance-related) legislation. They should not be involved in the discourse surrounding a woman's right to abortion (just an example).
If you think crypto should be banned, you probably shouldn't work at Coinbase. On the other hand, your opinion on abortion should have no bearing on whether you work there. It has nothing to do with their company mission.
> Coinbase should be involved in the the political discourse surrounding crypto (and other finance-related) legislation. They should not be involved in the discourse surrounding a woman's right to abortion (just an example).
I don't agree with this, but to be clear: you're arguing for something very different than Armstrong is. Armstrong is saying that Coinbase isn't besmirched by any politics, which is patently false -- their entire mission is explicitly political.
As for why I don't agree: political positions are not hermetic. It wasn't acceptable in 1961 for lunch counters to "not be involved" in desegregation, because "not being involved" is tantamount to support for segregation in a segregated society. But again, to be very clear: this is above and beyond the claim that Armstrong is making.
> It wasn't acceptable in 1961 for lunch counters to "not be involved" in desegregation, because "not being involved" is tantamount to support for segregation in a segregated society.
There's actually no point in time where the opinions of the actual proprietors of lunch counters mattered either way. The Jim Crow laws legally mandated segregation until the Civil Rights Act legally prohibited it. The lack of personal choice in the matter is more or less exactly what makes it political in the first place.
> There's actually no point in time where the opinions of the actual proprietors of lunch counters mattered either way. The Jim Crow laws legally mandated segregation until the Civil Rights Act legally prohibited it.
I’m sorry, but what do you think provided the political impetus for the Civil Rights Act? It was years of concerted protesting and civil disobedience, one form of which was sit-ins at lunch counters.
> But they weren't protesting the proprietors of those businesses for complying with the law.
Yes, they were. The Greensboro sit-ins began at Woolworth stores because they had explicit policies that went above and beyond those required by Jim Crow laws. They even sent a letter to Woolworth’s, not the state[1].
Edit: And, you’ll note: the Greensboro sit-ins didn’t provoke asymmetric police retaliation. What the students did wasn’t even illegal, it was merely against Woolworth’s store policies.
> Focus on building a successful profitable company.
Through what means, exactly?
We're not talking about a candy company here. This is a company that explicitly includes political messaging in both their mission and in their choice of means (i.e., cryptocurrency) towards that mission. Why the double standard?
They have chosen a specific mission. The point is to focus on said mission, not N missions. If you want to work on a different mission, work at a different company.
Deciding what your employees are and are not allowed to discuss at work feels pretty political to me!
But you’re right: Brian gets to decide what is and isn’t political, and he’s decided that he isn’t being political, so he isn’t. Which is an… interesting power to hold over your employees, hence my original post.
Because that's part of the premise of a society governed in large part by the free market. That's an idea I support, but it only makes sense if market power isn't amoral. Tech company employees wield some of the most important power in our markets.
>"a society governed in large part by the free market"
I disagree and have a much more simple explanation. Activists naturally want to involve as many people as they can in their cause/struggle. By framing everything as political, they open up opportunities to proselytize in areas traditionally not appropriate for 'politics'.
If you couple that with a cultural expectation that people must take a side, and, that simply not being a [bad thing] is not enough, you must be actively anti-[bad thing], and you've got the current climate Brian Armstrong is trying to avoid.
The status quo is not necessarily a bad thing, for instance if you have a lot of activist coworkers who want to "burn the system to the ground," then I, for one, become a huge supporter of the status quo.
One must remember that things can always get worse.
Just because there exist concrete problems in society does not mean that you, or activist coworkers get to assume that you're/they're automatically right nor that you/they have workable solutions.
Brian Armstrong has literally said he has a plan for Bitcoin to surpass the dollar as a reserve currency within the next decade [1]. That, to me, is an activist who wants to “burn the system to the ground”.
>"just another political position itself - complicity with the status quo." / "To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical."
The challenge I have with this line of thinking is that you can literally apply it to any and all issues. The number of problems in the world are effectively infinite but our ability to take a meaningful position is finite and extremely limited. The default state of being is to not have taken a position on something.
To insinuate that someone is privileged for not getting involved is a cudgel and a guilt-tripping tool being used against someone who doesn't share the same priorities as you do. It strikes me as "if you're not with us, you're against us", a sentiment that used to be loathed in the early 2000's but is now accepted and expected.
I mean yes and no. Yes there are infinite problems and there will always be worse of people who I could do things for. Guilt tripping someone into addressing all of them is unprodictive.
On the other hand, the fact that I can choose which struggles I engage with, and am able to avoid ones I don't want to involve myself in is absolutely a privilege. Someone who may need an abortion may not be able to avoid caring about that issue. Someone less economically secure may not be able to avoid worrying about unemployment or healthcare policy. There's countless similar examples.
You can absolutely acknowledge that you don't have the spoons/time/interest to deeply invest yourself in every social cause or issue. But you should also recognize that there are tons of people who also don't have the spoons/time/interest either, but have to anyway because the issue affects them and they can't afford to ignore it either.
Silence means just that, silence. It could mean anything: I don't know. I don't care. I might care but don't have time to look into it. I care but it's not in my top 10 issues.
I doubt quoting MLK will change your mind, but considering what the Black community in America went through for 100’s of years; it’s worth consideration…
>Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
>Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
>The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.
>The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
>The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
>We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
>Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.
>Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
>The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”
>In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
>He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.
>History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
>Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Change my mind about what? I was merely explaining how you can't draw strong conclusions based on silence.
But I do love MLK quotes:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Maybe I don’t have the privilege of time/resources/position to get involved. I have to keep my head down and GSD, not looking to rock the boat, endanger my position, or forgo income by spending time on such issues.
Take one step back. The interaction might not be political in itself but the desire to be able to engage in it might be. As others said, buying a lawn mower isn't political. Demanding that the product you are buying is safe and that economic transactions are done with USD or Bitcoin is definitively political.
If I take a dump I have to ensure to dispose it properly, because the fecal disposal is tightly regulated by many states, therefore taking a dump is a political issue.
> How about this: Every economic interaction (which includes employment) is political.
“Economics” and “politics” are just different lenses for viewing interactions relating to the distribution of power (equivalently, control of scarce resources.) They are the same thing; economic interactions are political and vice versa; economic power is political power and vice versa, etc.
This is also why capitalism (enabling the private accumulation of economic power) and democracy (involved the egalitarian distribution of political power), despite both initially being advanced by the same moves away from the particular structure of the monarchic/feudal concentration of both, are fundamentally in tension and ultimately incompatible.
I agree, a lot of free market arguments just boil down to maintaining an imagined status quo. What I take issue with is that the real status quo is an unspoken rule that everyone understands but nobody ever talks about. Most of it boils down to appeal to nature in the form of "the strong rule over the weak" and actual freedom for all people is basically irrelevant.
When I go for a walk with a friend, is that political? When I play a puzzle game on my computer? When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? When I cook dinner?
I suggest that there is much activity in life that is not political.
I think it's pretty clear that when people say "everything is political" the "everything" is scoped specifically to scenarios where there is a decision to make and people disagree on how to make that decision.
When someone says something like "meat is political" I don't think they mean that the physical substance on the dinner plate has this property, but rather that there are decisions to make that directly involve meat which people disagree about, and that politics is the (or at least one of the) processes by which decisions get made by groups of people when individuals in the group disagree.
It's not at all clear to me. What's the point in saying "everything is X" if you implicitly mean "everything is X except all the things that obviously aren't X"?
If we all agreed on what was not political then no one would need to argue that "everything is political" in the first place, so if you want to have any interesting discussion at all then you need to actually say something about where the boundary is between political and non-political. Because it's that boundary that's contentious and might actually lead to some insight when discussed freely.
The statement "meat is political" is a different case, because it is specific. It doesn't rely on an implicit clause that hides the actual concept of interest.
It’s just how people talk. They’re not making a universal quantification in first-order logic. If you ask someone what kind of food they want for dinner and they say “I like everything” you don’t conclude that they like genocide.
This is a non-argument because "status quo" can be construed as anything and everything. It boils down to "you're either with us or against us."
"If you don't actively support my pet cause on women's rights to own hand guns in California, it means you support the status quo. You support women being murdered and victimized without any recourse because you want to disarm them when they need guns the most! Supporting the status quo on gun rights is supporting women victimization!"
Do you by complicity [1] mean the critical social justice concept that all white (or people that believe in classical liberal culture) people are complicit in the maintenance and harms of systemic racism (stopping a perfect equity utopia) and white supremacy (continuation of individualistic western liberalism, instead of collectivist group-based critical social justice)?
Edit: changed terminology from "classical white" to "classical liberal" culture. It diverges from critical social justice dogma by doing this, making my attempt at communicating with a Critical Social Justice adherent less in their language, but is hopefully clearer.
I'm not as concerned about identity politics as I am about class issues.
Bitcoin is an ancap political project designed to make exploitation of the working class, independent of skin color, easier.
Identity politics themselves are a neoliberal ploy to distract from the real struggle at hand.
Also, what even is "white culture" other than a racist dogwhistle? Whats the common denominator between Russian, Portuguese, Hungarian and English (all white) cultures?
Exactly. A great thing about cash is that dissenters can use it anonymously in a way that no institution can legislate unmasking the transactors. Crypto should gain that capability
To expand upon your point about the greater political moment: these revolutions have never been good for the working class, because those with little power in order to gain a powerful voice need to organize into powerful interest groups using voting (with little cheating) plus free speech plus a way to overthrow a corrupt regime. These groups of people may strongly disagree on other issues, but unite on work. Notice how all of these are under attack by critical social justice activists.
Identity politics is just a tool to divide the people into unchosen cuts that are too small to affect change or fight back against a corrupt elite.
In the US a minority of people comprising both sides of the “horseshoe” are uniting together to push towards a China like system. No communist (Soviet Russia), fascistic (hitler Germany), communist fascist merge (China) has ever had the means for the working class fight for themselves. In all of these systems the political elite have much greater access to wealth than any other group of people, and the working class paid the cost and lived a basic living style.
> A great thing about cash is that dissenters can use it anonymously in a way that no institution can legislate unmasking the transactors. Crypto should gain that capability.
Replace "dissenters" with "capitalist robber barons" and "great" with "problematic" and I'm with you.
>these revolutions have never been good for the working class
Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US TO THIS DAY. From 1953 to 1962 their literacy rate went from 56% to 96%, one of the highest in the world.
Yugoslavia had the best passport in the world and Yugoslavs were the only people who could travel freely in both Cold War blocks.
You're just parroting propaganda.
The main problem is capitalist overlords trying to establish neo-feudalism (Erik Prince and his private army come to mind). The only institution that's strong enough to fight that trend is the state, and taking power over money away from it seals our neo-feudalist fate. Our only chance is to take control of the state before it gets to that, be that through peaceful democratic means like Salvador Allende or through a more direct struggle like Castro or Josip Broz Tito.
Thank you for being honest and straightforward about your communist sympathies. So many that agree with critical social justice play word games to obfuscate their radical position as a classic liberal position.
I agree that instead of the transition from a tyranny of the proletarian communist leaders, those with gnostic knowledge of communism, to communist utopia communist revolutions have a tendency to fall into feudalism. I disagree with your assertion about Cuba, your example, where the political elite and Castros family has much more access to food&resources than the people.
However, considering that communism remove all checks and balances on state power transitioning into feudalism ruled by a political elite seems like its natural outcome. I therefore disagree with your assertion that the communist process to achieve utopia could ever result in a different outcome. “Trotskyites face the wall first”, those were the communal ideologues and opportunists took over
Instead of looking back I think we should look forward and learn how to harness technology with a healthy fear in order to not “burn” ourselves again, and try something different
I'm trying to avoid any association with "classic liberals", cryptofascists by another name.
I think Yugoslavia is the better example fwiw - a society where there was high living standards and high degrees of freedom, arguably higher than in the West. They had greater economic freedom as all companies were worker-run coops with leadership elected by the workers competing in the marketplace; compare that to the autocracy of the modern capitalist workplace! They also had the freedom to travel both the Communist and the Capitalist blocks, but that's not as relevant today anymore.
I agree with your comment about having to look forward though. I think the ideal scenario would be fully automated space luxury communism - e.g. Star Trek, but baby steps ;) We'll have to make sure to avoid falling to deep into capitalism and its systemic descent into corporatism, then fascism though as has happened every time that system has been tried.
Yeah, I agree with you that the group must be balanced more with the group to be a human system. However, I believe communism relies on a fictitious concept in the state to be a proxy for the group and the fiction when unchecked turns tyrannical. The US system was designed with competing hierarchies that would check each other in order to “stop the group from consuming the individual” through state tyranny, although that’s largely broken down. Turns out the state don’t like boundaries, equivalently to how marvel evolved Superman from a fast running strong man to being a flying laser eyes G-d.
I know people that lived in communist Yugoslavia. It was little better than Cuba and Soviet Russia, and a small elite lived well like feudal lords. Everyone else was dead poor with basic living standards at best.
> Space luxury communists.
If we gain a healthy fear of tech and acknowledge the dual nature of humans, both evil and good, new solutions will open up like when humans stopped burning down stuff with fire by containing it and applying it with a healthy fear.
I think whatever we would have next would be best centered by the individual in the natural and human local community, with a very small central state, in order to not overwhelm the local community and the individual with the centralized tyranny communism has tended towards.
Some people argue that a centralized communist AI world economic forum style will make communist non-tyrannical. I think that is unrealistic because a centralized AI deciding stuff, like the Fabian society dreamed up (see HG Wells “things to come”), will also be tyrannical as it’s still made and maintained by people. A Stalin, Pol Pot or Mao will eventually control it.
Btw, Marcuse that formulated the woke movement thought a communist system could only fund basic living standards. He also thought that for sustainability the state needed eugenics control over reproduction. Only a commmunist fascist merge like China has supported luxury, but that system is indistinguishable from feudalism. Wokism in practice seems like a China like system achieved through communist means
Because I was communicating with someone I believe is a critical social justice (CSJ) adherent I was trying to use the language from that faith. However, I changed it as it may overall be confusing.
What I meant was classical liberal culture, which by CSJ adherents is termed as white culture by perpetrating whiteness. Whiteness is not about color, although its assumed all white people by default are this, but is about you adhering to liberal western culture instead of CSJ dogma.
> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race
No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)
>> USA has this strange notion where they group people by skin color and call that race
>No, we don’t. (There's two races where one of the common, not-generally-offensive names for each refers to a color, but people identified and identifying with each of those races have a wide range of skin colors, overlapping with those of most other races in both cases.)
Correct, most people do not believe that skin color define them or their neighbor. The notion also generally does not make much sense, as Americans are incredibly racially mixed.
However, a very aggressive and powerful minority that believe in critical social justice are enforcing racial stereotypes.
To say you are defined by race is a bit like saying you are defined by nose size. It is an arbitrary trait amongst many.
>> and assume same skin color has same culture.
>No, we generally don’t.
That is the Coinbase CEOs experience. People generally falsify preferences in public in order to not offend any Critical Social Justice activist that may ruin their life for saying the wrong thing.
However, generally Americans are friendly and welcoming people that just want to live a good simple family life next to good neighbors of any creed.
Because mercenary motivation is in and of itself a choice. If everyone was motivated by money alone there wouldn’t be non-profits. There is clearly a market for occupations with different incentives.
Absolutely! You spend the majority of your awake time at work. Some people optimize for money, others optimize for status, happiness or any other objective humans can have.
I think the thing that really upsets people is that the company changed course. People who go to work at a HFT firm are probably all motivated by compensation - and would expect that, because it’s baked into the company culture and business model.
People choose to work somewhere based the reward it offers. If that changes, without their consent, it breaks an unwritten contract.
I went to work for an HFT largely for non-compensation reasons. I had friends I liked working there and the technical challenges were extremely interesting. I learned a ton that has been really helpful sense in my career outside of HFT. Most of the engineers I worked with had similar motivations. I actually think my time in Silicon Valley startups has had me interacting with people more interested in compensation than any of my time in trading.
(None of this matters to the larger discussion but wanted to offer you a perspective of someone who has actually made the choice you are using as an example)
It is impossible to remove politics from your work. If you try to ignore everything except the mission of making money at work, that ALSO is a political choice…
> It is impossible to remove politics from your work.
It absolutely is and this statement is either not informed enough or is being argued in bad faith. Unless your job is involved in direct politics or government you can keep the politics out and focus on the work.
I do not need my peers or coworkers bringing in politics to the workspace. Politics is a disease that seems to be seeping in everywhere because a vocal minority thinks every moment needs political involvement.
Give me any job, and I am certain I can think of a way politics is inextricably involved.
If you are a website and you host user comments, and the government requests information about a commenter. Do you give it to them right away, or do you fight it? What if the country is a known violator of human rights? What if the request is to try to track down a pedophile? What if it is to track down a journalist?
Either decision is political. If you comply, that is a political decision. If you decline, that is a political decision. If you fight it in court, that is a political decision.
What about deciding what to do with user data. Do you sell it to the highest bidder? Do you protect privacy? Do you sell it, but only to certain people? Do you use it internally? Do you store it at all? How much effort do you put into securing your users data? Is that decision purely financial, or do you believe you have a responsibility to protect your users data even if it costs you more than you would lose in a breach?
Genuinely asking because I never got this: how do you remove politics from your work if your work provides healthcare? Like what if you or your dependents want birth control or need an abortion or get a blood transfusion that happens to be from a black person or take hormone replacement therapy or take AIDS drugs or get a vaccine or whatever is the political medical controversy do jour?
Because managers and directors feel that it is. They generally feel that it's an appropriate place for pushing their politics. (And complain loudly when employees do the same.)
Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism, and it indoctrinates students with the belief that everything everywhere is politics, always. This mentality has infected "liberal" intellectualism outside the academy, to the point where it is, essentially, the "culture" of much of the Left in the U.S.
Have you considered that people have reached those beliefs after observing and reflecting on how they perceive the world to work? Why are you so sure it’s “indoctrination” when people come to a conclusion that doesn’t comport with your worldview?
"Usurped" as in : never ever there was this much progress in history and linguistic since the postmodern invested the fields, and now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before. For some reasons it was taken a bridge too far (imo, but i can be wrong, i'm not really interested in the field) in sociology, but still, never read anything better than Bourdieu.
Also, Postmodernism in philosophy and sociology is built against Marxism (and Freudism), so i don't really understand the association here.
Postmodernism: "Everything is a construct. Everything is relative. There is no base reality or ground truth."
Marxism: "Everything is class struggle. There is always, everywhere and in everything an oppressor and an oppressed. The only cure is revolution and ideological purification."
While the two may have been at odds at their inception, they now work together, initially in academia, but now, increasingly, everywhere in the U.S.
> now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before
I define Marxism broadly as the initial poisoning of the left-leaning mind with the concept of the ubiquitous class struggle. It has mutated into a belief system under which there is always an oppressing class and an oppressed class. It can be the landed gentry (oppressors) vs. the commoners (oppressed), capital (oppressors) vs. labor (oppressed), racial majority (oppressors) vs. racial minority (oppressed). But at its core, it is unable to view the current state of the world, or any subdivision thereof, in terms other than oppressed and oppressor, whether any reasonable person would agree or not. And, as can be seen with all Marxists (operating under there many self-ascribed labels), the only cure is revolution and purification. Of course, for those of us with a passing grasp of recent history, its quite clear that both of those will lead to mass violence and death. See also, the Bolshevik Revolution and its ensuing horrors, Mao's revolutions and their ensuing horrors, the Cuban revolution and its continued mass oppression, the French Revolution and all of its violent insanity, etc. etc.
> And everything is politics
And thus we arrive at Postmodernism. Postmodernism introduces the belief that everything is relative and everything is a construct. There is no base reality, no ground truth–or if there is, we can dismiss it as irrelevant given the all powerful constructs and systems of human life. Thus one can make arguments like, "Everything is always politics" and use such asinine premises as the basis of injecting noxious politics into every facet of our lives. Once again contravening the majority of people's lived experiences and desires.
> Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism
Having actually gone through an undergraduate philosophy program in the United States: Marx is a blip. He's barely taught in analytical programs, which are (overwhelmingly) the dominant discipline in American colleges. Postmodernism isn't even mentioned. I spent more time reading Nozick and other politically right-of-center philosophers than I did reading anything resembling left philosophy.
It's not that anyone thinks it is appropriate - they know it is inappropriate. It's more that they don't care, and are willing to do whatever it takes to leverage the power of institutions (such as companies, universities, and government agencies) to fulfill their personal political and ideological goals. This is a well-known strategy for activism, particularly on the left, and even has a name - "long march through the institutions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...). Some call it "entryism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism). As we've seen in American tech companies, once a foothold is gained, these motivated activists immediately start to loudly push for the aggressive exclusion of opposing views, and cancellation of all who belong to a different political group. Signaling consequences for opposition leads to self-censorship from others, which in turn helps further cement the perceived institutional consensus around the activists' platform. This strategy is ultimately effective, both because institutional takeover can build silently and become visible suddenly, and because company leaders are often too timid in exercising their power to shut down or fire such disruptive employees.
> As we've seen in American tech companies, once a foothold is gained, these motivated activists immediately start loudly push for the aggressive exclusion of opposing views, and cancellation of all who belong to a different political group.
Reminds me of a cryptocurrency exchange with an activist CEO who forbids dissenting political views in the workplace. Can’t remember his name.
I'm going to take a wild guess and say if you work at Coinbase—voluntarily—you're extremely well paid. You're the farthest thing from a victim. Just because you can't raise your fist and scream at your coworkers doesn't mean you're oppressed.
This is the kind of parallel argumentation that tech workers (and their managers) make against unionization ("you're too well paid to need a union").
It misses the point -- they don't need to be "oppressed" to be justified in talking about politics at work, the same way they don't need to be underpaid to be justified in unionizing. Each is a perfectly sufficient end in itself.
Capital vs. Labor is an attitude that can be completely divorced from the unit economics of how much people are paid. Capital is the owner class that calls the shots, Labor is the people who do the work.
"Shut up and do the work, or GTFO" is a statement that only Capital can make, and it's a statement that can only be directed at Labor.
When the topic being quelled is a conversation about fairness within the ranks of Labor, and between Capital and Labor, the picture is crystal clear: "Capital says no, and you (Labor) will comply."
Just because you're part of what is called "Labor aristocracy" in Marxist discourse doesn't mean you can't recognize the exploitation inherent to the system.
You don't need to be on the losing side of an unjust system to recognize the system as unjust.
I'm not allowed to reply to you directly but responding to your response to "so quit," okay, go live on a commune then. Live your values and demonstrate to the world why your way of life is better.
You're paid to do a job. Politics is for your personal time. We need to work on getting more personal time for people so people can focus on those passions instead of further blending work and personal life.
Sustained political effort - in spite of the established rules. Every one of those people risked their jobs and in many cases their health and life fighting for those rights against laws and established order. People today want their cake and to eat it to. They want the people who made an economic exchange for their labor also let them do things that work directly against their "the purchaser's" interests. How about people organize mass strikes? Scared of losing their jobs? Too busy? Not enough time? The OG labor movement had all of that and dealt with violent opposition to boot. Maybe things aren't that bad and it's a minority whining? I don't know but something isn't adding up to me.
How about people decide to take action -- regardless of the consequences to themselves instead of worrying about maintaining the scraps they're fed in the process? Why is today so much different than yesterday that people don't want to risk their standing and their lives for their principals and expect it just to happen, to be given? All the whining is just theatre as far as I'm concerned until people start actually making the hard decisions and doing something at risk to themselves for what they believe.
Why do people seem so hypocritical compared to the people during those decades you mention?
The owners of Coinbase made a stand for what they believe in, I support that. Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.
Edit: And you know I'm not sorry but I just don't feel bad for office workers bitching about their jobs. I feel bad for the front line workers, in the stores in the warehouses in logistics and shipping. They actually have real gripes to contend with being physically worn down everyday yet we lump the person sitting in their office chair reading reddit for 8 hours with these people actually killing themselves to get you a package a couple hours sooner.
Note: This isn't aimed at you directly but very much what I feel is the superficialness of many movements today.
I think most people would agree that, by virtually all material standards, workers are better treated than they were a century ago. I think most people would also agree (again in material terms) that office workers have fairly easy jobs. But I think that fundamentally misses the point: good (read: easy living) isn't the same as just, and plenty of people have legitimate reasons for wanting their workplaces to be more just.
> Maybe the otherside of the table needs to take that collective action they talk so much about instead of talking.
I don't disagree. But to be clear: collective action, broadly interpreted, is mostly illegal in the United States. You can actually be thrown in jail for it and, unlike the CEOs, you probably don't have the money to tie the courts up. The US's labor movement spent decades fighting for recognition, and it's still paltry compared to the rest of the world (and is steadily being eroded). Most workers, including office workers, have strong social and economic disincentives against anything more than talk (at-will employment, absent social services, &c).
The difference between traditional union organizing and the social justice crusaders here is that the unions were fighting management to improve the material well being of the workers. They wanted more sick leave, higher wages, etc.
The present-day crusaders are attacking their fellow employees (who disagree with them) as well as customers (trying to get customers who disagree with them dropped). They are most certainly not fighting management. Management gets involved in those cases where it tries to stop one of the crusading employees from harassing another employee or customer, at which point there are demonstrations to try to get the enemy coworker or employee dropped.
That is why this is not at all like the unionization efforts of the past.
> The present-day crusaders are attacking their fellow employees (who disagree with them) as well as customers (trying to get customers who disagree with them dropped). They are most certainly not fighting management.
"Crusaders" already belies where you stand on this, but to be clear: historical labor movements absolutely included hostility against coworkers. The coworker who didn't join you on the picket line was called a scab.
Besides, US labor law places broad restrictions on the ability of labor organizations to call for boycotts (i.e., retaliating against customers). If you take your time to read about this history of workers' rights in the US, you'll find deeper parallels to the current day than you're probably currently inclined to believe.
Edit: Here's a link[1] to a summary of the confusing rat's nest that is NLRA's rules for boycotting.
In the same light, I'm also not paid to believe in some ludicrous "mission". That's something for my personal time in GTA. Unless I have genuine equity, in which I stand to gain from the company's overall success. In that case though, I should also have some level of say in what I can talk about at work.
Work time ceases to be work time when your hours on the job take up more than a quarter of the time in a calendar day, and that's probably the maximum upper limit, in honesty. As societies we have structured our adult lives around a window from 9 to 5 in which we are supposed to work and also interface with every other adult that works.
That’s actually an insightful comment. Of course if you do sports, eat and socialize at work so that the company can keep you there for 12 hours people have no other possible outlet for their political activism.
> We need to work on getting more personal time for people
You mean controls on working hours? Four day weeks? There are those who’d say that was extremely political (and they’d be right; the two day weekend was largely invented by the labour movement, surely the epitome of politics at work, back in the day).
You are still free to speak up about anything relating to work responsibilities. However, if your goal was to do activism to institutionalize and enforce critical social justice (CSJ) dogma into the company you are correct that is not allowed.
Coinbase certainly made itself more viewpoint inclusive by making it impossible to act within the company as a CSJ procelyte is required to do. An CSJ procelyte is expected to try to institutionalize the faith by enforcing the Diversity (hiring activists of all identities - a black conservative is not diverse), inclusion (censorship of people resisting CSJ DEI initiatives), and Equity (redistribution of outcomes based upon identities and adherence to CSJ) agenda.
I work at a company that has heavily institutionalized CSJ, and CSJ procelytization is quite distracting from our core mission and is actively creating a non-inclusive culture to other viewpoints&faiths. Almost every day I get emails about this faith, there are almost daily meetings (services) about it, almost every company-wide meeting spends time preaching about it, every facet of the buerocracy enforce CSJ dogma, and we are demoralizing the workforce by hiring as well as promoting based upon DEI principles instead of trying to achieve meritocracy.
You wouldn't go to a PETA meeting and complain that there's no meat.
In that same vein, if you join Coinbase, you should know what you're getting into, maybe it's political, but it's a kind of political that you knew beforehand. The problem comes when you try to shoehorn a different set of political beliefs onto something that didn't have them in the first place.
It's pretty easy to dunk on people when you divorce their words from the surrounding context.
This statement was within the context of advising organizational leaders who are trying to "keep the peace" (and thus, inadvertently enabling distraction and morale rot) instead of creating clarity and focusing the mission.
That's exactly what the parent commenter is saying: that this principle apparently holds true unless it's in the context of certain things that Coinbase doesn't want its employees talking about.
You missed the point, he doesn't want employees to bring political activism (I seem to remember BLM was the trigger), controversial company politics is well accepted
So in fairness I haven't followed this in the news very closely, but after initially feeling negative about this decision I've started to come around to it.
US politics has become extremely draining, divisive, and aggressive - particularly in high partisan-lean areas. It's flat out exhausting talking with people about politics, even those who I agree with, and it just gets worse every year. Polling has shown people sort themselves by political ideology first and everything else in life second. I see fewer and fewer options available, but to just run from it. I don't see it getting better any time soon.
The company I previously worked for spent an enormous amount of time (and money) facilitating discussions appeasing these divides and focusing on social justice, etc. Not only is there no hope for any given company to realistically solve for societal-wide problems or find an approach that satisfies everyone in this manner, but it's painfully obvious they don't truly care about these topics either. Having people come "talk" about racism or putting on inclusion workshops doesn't result in real action. Things like "diversity" are mangled and manufactured into company metrics where data is awkwardly bucketed by "ethnicity". Are we expected to believe HR departments who group half of the world together as "Asian" as taking diversity seriously? I've come away from every company I've worked for with the cynical impression that that their "social justice" efforts are simply to minimize inner anger, strife, and liability. And for leaders, if you commit to being a "politically engaged" workplace it means everything you do is twice as vulnerable. You are walking on eggshells even if you aren't instigating any sort of animosity - what if you weren't paying attention to the news and didn't speak up about a particular political event? What if you didn't say enough? What if you were misinterpreted? I can understand why Coinbase doesn't want to go there anymore - they can achieve the same goal if nobody says anything at all.
I'm not arguing nefarious forces don't exist or aren't important. I care deeply about many of the commonly-discussed social issues that we're dealing with today. I've personally witnessed blatant racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination first-hand at work. But those things can be solved for at a company level - trying to treat our general political environment is well beyond anything any corporation can manage nor should we expect it to be their responsibility. Companies should focus on refining things that are in their control, like practicing transparent & fair hiring, enforcing anti-discrimination policies, and ensuring equal-opportunity internally. But I think you can fairly draw the line there.
it's so ironic to me that he prides himself over the "no politics" policy, yet calls his company "mission-focused". the mission is cryptocurrency, which is very political.
It's not ironic. It's literally the point of why he's calling it "mission-focused" and not "apolitical." If the almost all members of the NAACP happened to be pro-crypto, do you it's reasonable for it's members to pressure its leadership to spread the adoption of crypto?
you missed my point. i'm arguing that coinbase is in the business of pushing their own politics, via cryptocurrency, which is very much a political thing at this point. yet, their workers can't discuss other politics. it's very ironic and hypocritical.
and yes, i think the members of NAACP would be pushing crypto if that's what they felt was a priority for their cause. i don't understand your logic?
edit: i believe that being apolitical is just as a political stance as being political.
two things:
1. the NAACP is political activist organization, not a charity.
2. i'm not sure this is sound logic. if the NAACP sees something as advancing black people, then why can't they advocate for that?
> it's so ironic to me that he prides himself over the "no politics" policy, yet calls his company "mission-focused". the mission is cryptocurrency, which is very political.
"Political" is a meaningless buzzword at that point.
What you really mean is "partisan". Should Coinbase just be an extension of the democratic party? No according to its CEO, but that's what a lot of people here wants it to be.
Is any technology inherently political, or do we make it political when we pick political fights over it? Did 7-Eleven become a political company when Bloomberg went and banned Big Gulps?
no, i'm not suggesting that technology is inherently political. the ideal of decentralization by way of crypto is a fight for power, which is the essence of "political".
politics extends past the democrat vs republican system. "political" means power, whether it's a minority group fighting for power so they can have some basic human rights, or it's some crypto bros fighting for decentralization so they can have power.
> One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics.
My understanding is that they started off really bad, right? They had 3/4s of their black employees resign before that post and were at 3%. I guess they could have gotten worse, but being proud to be where you were when this whole thing started is a bit awkward.
> One by one, they left. Some quit. Others were fired. All were Black. The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.
Numbers aside, this thread is really difficult to take seriously due to the (hypocritical) inclusion of this tweet, which seems to undermine the rest of his thesis (that speaking up for things you believe in is a distracting waste of time that is bad for business).
> The biggest lesson I took away from the whole ordeal is that if you believe something is the right path, it's worth speaking up about it, even if it's controversial.
And also like, did anyone actually disagree that being a profit-driven company can be profitable? The tl;dr of this entire thread to me is "putting profits above people and morals was every bit as profitable as I thought it would be: thus, I'm vindicated".
I would expect to see the same thing from Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Copyright, etc.... we also see this same argument from companies like Apple and Facebook: "we are making tons of money, and so our actions are not only useful, they were justified".
> While the media reports were mostly negative, and it even spawned some retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces, the reaction both from employees and people I spoke to in private was overwhelmingly positive.
Finally, the issue I have here is that the vast majority (again: we are talking 97%) of Coinbase employees are not black, which calls into question this entire metric: an "overwhelmingly positive" reaction from the overwhelming majority is... underwhemling.
> the reaction both from employees and people I spoke to in private was overwhelmingly positive.
Overwhelming positive reaction from subordinates (whose paychecks he signs), and peers who are also tech/finance bros. Sounds like a statistical universe to me!
The amount of frothing vitriol in this thread makes it clear that Armstrong made the correct choice. Public discourse in the Bay Area has become completely toxic.
Not only that, but you can see why places like Twitter need 4 years to change a font. It looks like tech in general is undermined by highly unprofessional people and this whole thread is a testament to that.
> The amount of frothing vitriol in this thread makes it clear that Armstrong made the correct choice. Public discourse in the Bay Area has become completely toxic.
He was correct, so was Shopify, so was Basecamp and all these businesses that told their employees to leave their partisan politics and social justice concerns at the door.
I'm not sure what HN has turned into but the litany of disingenuous comments from people claiming a tech company has the duty to mend society the way they believe is the best makes me believe that a lot of people here don't understand what running a business is about and It is not being a PAC.
I'm also amused with the people claiming that all these companies "are bleeding talent". No, a lot of us here just want to write programs or manage teams or products, nothing more. Certainly not be involved in any social justice activity.
I would absolutely love to work at Coinbase given these work conditions.
> I'm also amused about the the people claiming that all these companies "are bleeding talent". No, a lot of us here just want to write programs or manage teams or products, nothing more. Certainly not be involved in any social justice activity.
It's not even only about politics. I like being able to go to a place, work, chat a bit about superficial things with my collegues and go back home. I don't need to expose my whole self and soul when I go to work, and in fact I prefer not to. Some people are not like me, and feel the opposite. Great! I just want places to exist for both of us.
or not tied to BLM; just a bunch of white teenagers running around trying to set starbucks on fire and getting into fights with the police to start a revolution. which is even worse because it shows the lack of sense-making on both sides.
Even when they set that construction site on fire, the stark difference between the front of the march which went peacefully by and the trail of destruction from the end of the march; it's no wonder the people at the front were confused when the police confronted them. unless they were staring at their phones the entire time, they'd have no idea what the "pacific youth liberation front" was doing behind them.
Unless you went actively searching for both sides, the passive social media and MSM would just show you whatever half of the story aligned with your political views; any conversation was just 2 sides completely talking past each other because they only saw their echo-chamber and refused to acknowledge the other side's echo-chamber.
The best/dumbest example was video of a (dismounted) cop who rolled his bike over some guy's head. And then the time-lapse video of that guy spending 15+ mins following the cops around and laying down in front of them; only getting his head rolled over on the 5th time. The immaturity of all parties in that video is just mind-boggling to me.
This nation is extremely divided. I don't think you can run any organization that is political effectively.
Even completely political organizations will have to control political discussions at workplace. US Government is moving into that direction and we are seeing a far less political Senate and Congress that is rarely focussed in any discussion as a joint entity. The two teams in legislative bodies rarely 'talk' to each other on political topics. Most discussions are now procedural and political debate in almost all public forums is completely dead.
In the perfect world people would just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and went on their merry way if they didn't agree with Coinbase. The reason why there is so much vitriol in the comments here is that to some people there is nothing more scary than a prospect of companies realising that doing social activism can be really TERRIBLE to their bottom line and it IS POSSIBLE to have a nice, friendly, healthy company without going full woke.
The woke biggest fear is that people realize that only about 5-10% are woke so you can ignore them without much consequences no matter how much of a fuzz they make on twitter.
They try to make a fuzz here at HN as well but just like the real world they aren't the majority here either.
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Glad to see leaders showing a spine and taking a stand against the institutional takeover (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu...) we've seen elsewhere from activists, particularly at tech giants like Google or Facebook or Amazon. I often see vague claims that "everything" is political, but it is pretty easy to use one's common sense and separate out what is political and what isn't. Bringing politics to work makes it hostile towards large cohorts of employees and customers, and distracts from the mission, which is to provide utility to customers in a viewpoint- and politically-neutral manner. Other companies need to revert to that neutral way of operating again, and get rid of employees who spend more time on personal advocacy than doing their job.
"One of the biggest concerns around our stance was that it would impact our diversity numbers. Since my post, we've grown our headcount about 110%, while our diversity numbers have remained the same, or even improved on some metrics."
What that means in terms of black employees precisely, idk. But isn't it kinda racist to assume black people are a monolith with universally shared opinions? I can assure you that's not the case.
"Mission focused company" is just such a funny euphemism for "I don't want my serfs getting distracted from making money for me by more important things"
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction."
BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
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The commentary that I find frustrating is about the "retaliatory and intellectually dishonest hit pieces." The press does suck in many ways, but when you're own a massive chunk of a $65B company you should expect some negative press and be prepared. It makes him sound like he isn't open to dissent which is an incredibly privileged stance.