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Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

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Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#821

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #712
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can be as politically active as they want, on their own time and on their own dime. Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.

Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace. I don't begrudge the dislike of workplace politics—again, I'd love to not talk about this. But for some groups, i.e. black Americans, it may not seem like a choice of whether they can be political. Indeed I'm a…

> "Well, in fairness, if someone's religion had reliable, study backed evidence that the world was going to face a catastrophic climate based future, I'd probably be fine with them proselytizing in the workplace."

While I agree on the need to address climate change urgently itself, I must point out that progressives would be infuriated if the same level of evidence were demanded for the scientific validity of beliefs regarding various identity groups they support. Again, a very clear double standard.

> "Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus"."

You shouldn't be. News stories like the Harvard Asian-American admissions lawsuit and California's Proposition 209 repeal and many, many others have made it amply clear that progressives are no friends of Asians either, but at a much deeper level.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#822

Post by int_19h »

jlokier wrote: post #775
SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh it's not strategically genius. The crypto community is hugely political and right-libertarian leaning. He's just signalling that he's not going against that trend. > He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.

"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days." - Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.

There's nothing about this statement that's incompatible with right libertarianism. Right libertarians themselves do believe that their ideas would improve the world over time, as do adherents of most political ideologies in general.

With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxation, and so providing the ability to circumvent both is beneficial. It's definitely a libertarian stance, although it could be either left or right libertarian by itself. But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#823

Post by bcrosby95 »

awb wrote: post #686
koheripbal wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of value in removing political activists from your company, and so it's worth paying them to leave. Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation. In a…

You could reasonably extend this to your friends and neighbors as well. Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming. I understand that dramatic actions bring attention, but I just hope that we can start focusing more on doing our own part and leading by example rath…

> Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming.

It's a nice thought, but my mother in law has original presidential campaign pins and bumper stickers from as far back as the early 60s.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#824

Post by refurb »

md_ wrote: post #161
nemo44x wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes very much so. They found the moral high ground and were able to persuade people on our shared humanity. No one “had” to do anything. People were compelled to as they were persuaded that we had immoral systems in terms of individuals civil rights. A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.

For some historical context, contemporaneously, the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular; it's exactly the kind of thing that would have been described as politics best left out of the workplace. "In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mas…

I don't see how your statement "the Civil Rights movement was highly controversial and, among white Americans, fairly unpopular" has anything to do with your reference.

You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.

Those two things are completely separate.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#825

Post by refurb »

paulgb wrote: post #223
tossAfterUsing wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we have had presidents who were willing to condemn white supremacy, we tended not to call on CEOs to. https://twitter.com/robsmithonline/status/131113297546835968...

Last night he was given the chance to unequivocally condemn the Proud Boys and instead told them to "stand back and stand by", which the group themselves has taken as a rally cry. Just like how after Charlottesville, white supremacists took his ambiguous response as a sign of approval. He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability that people can make lists like the one you posted, while everyone who…

The Proud Boys are a white supremacist organization? Headed by an Afro-Cuban?

https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/proud-boys-enrique-tarrio...

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#826

Post by tomjakubowski »

renewiltord wrote: post #492
jcims wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous I moved there from Ohio to work for a FAANG for six months. It's not nearly as bad on the ground as it might seem but you do witness spectacles with much more frequency. Racially and culturally its definitely not homogenous but there aren't any black folks to be found. Alameda county is the only one around the bay to break double digit percentages, mostl…

SF did shove black people out with urban renewal but aren't demographics mostly like this in the West since the slave trade wasn't as extensive? The real indicator for the tech industry's lack of diversity is that CA's 39% Hispanic population reflects as some minor fraction of the tech population. Some extraordinary filter is occurring somewhere that's keeping Hispanic people out. Not alleging malice, just the scale…

No. Lots of black Americans moved from former confederate / "late era slave" states to the west coast, midwest, and northeast during the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#827

Post by TedShiller »

This makes sense.

The problem with recent political activism in companies has been that it isn't fair. It has been acceptable to advocate for liberal causes (for example for affirmative action), but not for conservative ones (against affirmative action).

It might be ok if both were allowed equally. But if only one viewpoint is allowed, that's not really democracy.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#828

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

CarelessExpert wrote: post #456
kkhire wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s there to admire? This is common sense and he should have set these expectations from the start. why are people discussing politics at work?

> why are people discussing politics at work? Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political. Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends. But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice. Maybe that's fine. The…

You're absolutely right, and I'm disappointed that you've been voted down to negative. At the very least this is a well worded argument worth looking at.

Politics, as much as we all hate it, is engaged with everywhere in business.

Choosing to be apolitical is effectively a form of political engagement, usually resulting in a vote for the status quo and/or the pursuit of money eschewing engagement in difficult questions in society.

This can be argued about whether it is moral or not, or even if a company has much of a choice in the matter (There are many entrenched companies that do "immoral" political things that are near impossible not to engage with as a business), and this is not unique to coinbase, but it's not somehow withdrawing from judgement on morality when you say you are "apolitical", and you still should be judged on your politics and lack of engagement in society.

Let's not be naive here, any larger company, even the most "apolitical" company still has large influence, uses services, and makes decisions that are politically charged.

That said, it's not all one direction where all political activism within a company is great, but eschewing all politics is not doing so at all.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#829

Post by jlokier »

int_19h wrote: post #822
jlokier wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days." - Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.

There's nothing about this statement that's incompatible with right libertarianism. Right libertarians themselves do believe that their ideas would improve the world over time, as do adherents of most political ideologies in general. With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxatio…

> But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.

Perhaps so.

But this isn't about cryptocurrency adepts in general. Is there other context that shows Coinbase and/or Brian Armstrong have a problem with fiat money, and/or that they advocate for a limited money supply, or even that they advocate to reduce or avoid taxation?

Seems to me the corporation's activity is literally integrating fiat systems with cryptocurrency, including tax reporting, so it's not clear if Coinbase's longer term direction is towards cryptocurrency being its own separate system of ordinary transactions in the end, or towards it being just another option alongside and integrated with fiat for more options in ordinary life. Regardless of what cryptocurrency adepts out in the world would like it to be.

Re: Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission

#830

Post by zeckalpha »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #455
C1sc0cat wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect its only some activists that Mr Armstrong want's rid of.

I highly doubt that. Unrestrained political activism on either side has been shown to be a lose-lose situation for any large company. The only winning move is not to play (at work).

There’s more than two sides.
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