Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

Stamp collectors push their stamp collecting ideologies onto all the non-stamp collectors who just want to do engineering. Stamp collectors set up meetings and socially shame/outcast non stamp collectors who don't attend. Non stamp collectors get tired of this and say they are going to make a job board where they don't have to worry about stamp collectors if they take a job at a place.

The answer is that there is nothing that unites these people except not being stamp collectors. If stamp collectors didn't exist, then no one would identify as non-stamp collectors.

This is only a problem because we live in a world where political issues are strongly affiliated with political ideologies in a binary fashion - i.e. identity politics. Even so much as people interpret a company's intention to remain politically neutral and avoid making any political statements as "a lurch to the right". Why can't we think of it more as a "return to the centerground"?

I think the inclusive apolitical approach will win out in the long term. I don't believe for a second that "not saying something is a statement in and of itself", and by subscribing to this idea you're bringing forward a style of authoritarianism the world is better off without.

Given that identity politics is so rife in 2020, don't you think it's a wise move to divorce company decision making from the clutches of any specific political ideology? The people that say no are almost certainly the authoritarians.

So much of this conversation seems stuck on the binary opposites (zero politics vs 100% politics), just like the way our politics is functioning in a binary fashion today. Obviously a company cannot be truly apolitical unless it hires no one and does absolutely nothing in the world, but we can at least minimize the surface area and allow topics less relevant to company objectives to the individuals outside of the workplace.

It's a popular idea that institutions with power have a duty to wield it, which is a completely ridiculous and dangerous idea. Simply put, we shouldn't be co-opting the influence of our companies to satisfy our personal political agendas or resort to cancel-culture tactics in order to force them into speaking. In a landscape where this is regularly happening, the neutral position is better and safer for all of us and healthy political discourse.

I expect a lot companies and capital, given the COVID nudge, will accelerate moving to other locations and hiring remote, because they want to pay their employees to the their work, and not to go on moral crusades on company's time.

I don't agree. In all the places I've worked, even the most apolitical ones, someone would be viewed quite negatively if they walked into the break room and tried to break up a private political discussion.

Well, democracy is not just voting. Most of it actually happens before voting. I mean Russia has voting, Belarus has voting, USSR had voting, Iran has voting, I'm not sure whether North Korea has voting but they certainly could have. To have properly functioning democracy you need the support system that leads to responsible, informed voting and that provided feedback mechanisms between the government and the population. Which includes a vivid and robust public discussion of the topics important for people.

This is what is breaking down I feel. And what we're seeing is just a symptom - employers want to ban workplace politics not because politics and participation is bad per se, but because it has become so dirty and vicious that allowing it can literally destroy the company. You can't efficiently work together with people you hate, and I definitely feel like hate has become the primary weapon and the primary drive of US politics. It is basically required from anybody who plays in it to hate your opponent, and to hate everybody who doesn't march in lockstep with you. If you don't, you're probably secretly in league with "them" and must be targeted for hate yourself. There's no respectful disagreement, there's no difference of opinion allowed, there's no assumption of good will and willing to work through disagreements. The slogan of the day is "burn it all down". Of course there's only two ways for the company to survive in such environment - either everybody thinks the same and wrongthinkers are expelled - thus ensuring all hate is directed outside the company - or ban the politics and keep the hate outside the place of employment. Third way would be to actually remove the hate from the equation, but it doesn't look like there are enough grownups around for this to happen.

> I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions

I don't see how the unions - especially US unions which are completely partisan - would help anything, except making the union shop inaccessible to those who isn't willing to join union's party.