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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

641–650 of 774 posts

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#641
post #123

Is "apolitical" stance a bad thing? Isn't it the default, safe? I lived in country where you had to be "political" to be in management, it didn't end up well (East Europe, Soviet Union), I always (naively?) thought that West countries were wiser. So I prefer companies to not mess with politics.

Fellow Eastern European immigrant here. It's hopeless, dude. It's USSR 2.0 being built in our lifetimes. People here didn't see where this road ends, so they've got no idea what awaits them.

Count me as well. It is horrifying how otherwise well intentioned people are busy pushing the society we were escaping to into the society we were running away from.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#642
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife is mostly liberal from a US political perspective, but happens to be opposed to abortion. I happen to disagree in nuanced ways with her on this topic. My business. According to my coworkers, who discovered this because they saw her bumper sticker when she picked me up one day, this is because she is "ignorant and doesn't know the facts" and "if she knew the facts she wouldn't think that way" and that I "need…

I'm bemused she needs a bumper sticker on this subject.

You and me both man. I HATE that she has that sticker, because it does nothing to persuade anybody, and does plenty to invite harassment. Actually got into a big argument with her one day about it after a highly aggressive, angry driver was road raging on her.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bonkers that your coworkers would actually bring this up to you lol what kind of lunatics do you work with?!

But driving around with a bumper sticker and flashing one's view is not "bringing things up"?

I don't like her bumper sticker either, and I find political bumper stickers to be annoying.

However, if I worked at an oil company, and had tons of very conservative co-workers, would you think it was ok for them to do the same thing to me if my wife pulled up and had rainbow/equality stickers on her car, or pro-choice stickers? I'm curious if you have a double standard on this topic due to prejudice against my wife's viewpoint (which my coworkers clearly have).

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bonkers that your coworkers would actually bring this up to you lol what kind of lunatics do you work with?!

But driving around with a bumper sticker and flashing one's view is not "bringing things up"?

That's his personal property he can do whatever he wants whether you agree to it or not. It's different from literally speaking to your coworker about it.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An acquaintance of mine worked for a company that stocked tampons in the men’s restroom because someone lobbied for it despite the company having no female->male trans employees. My acquaintance, who is male->female trans, was baffled.

Doesn’t that just mean providing equal facilities? If you put hand sanitizer in one bathroom, you should try to provide it in all of them.

A separation here is that these facilities are inherently unequal due to the existence of gendered signs declaring one restroom "Men" and the other "Women". In this existing framework, it doesn't make as much sense to go to the expense of stocking an item 99.99..% of users won't use.

Instead, the signs could be changed to simply state "Restroom". Sure, one might have urinals and the other a tampon dispenser, but anyone can use either and everyone could agree to be adults about it.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#646
post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a very simplistic take. The reason we’re seeing a crackdown on this is not because companies are making a political move to support the status quo. It’s because they’re trying to weed out and get rid of legitimately problematic and toxic people who abused the previous culture. For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peace…

> For instance, there was an instance not too long ago at Facebook where one engineer publicly attacked another completely peaceful coworker on Twitter because the latter declined to put a BLM statement on the landing page of an open source project they maintained. The former employee was eventually fired. These kinds of antics are deeply divisive and destructive to the workplace. It is unclear from your comment whic…

Apologies, the employee who attacked their coworker on Twitter is the one who was fired.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not, because the question of whether a government ought to be involved in some interaction is, clearly, a political question, and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions.

>and asking that question is clearly not equivalent to saying that the government ought to be involved in all interactions. Yes, actually it absolutely is. Putting everything up for grabs for state (or in modern day; the mob) control is literally totalitarianism. People who "don't understand" this are either abysmally stupid or are power mad imbeciles who are pretending not to understand for Machiavellian reasons.

I didn’t say “putting everything up for grabs for state control.”

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#648
post #463
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a bummer that Coinbase’s ploy to intentionally conflate not supporting the Black Lives Matter movement (that is, a clear implicit endorsement of the status quo) with generalized left/right-political-activism-at-work seems to have worked, at least for a lot of people who aren’t paying attention. This isn’t about office politics, or political activism at work. This is about Coinbase making an explicit vote for the…

I think this very view is likely what made the coinbase workplace so toxic and uninviting. "Black lives matter" is a statement that everyone already agrees with. "Black Lives Matter" is a political organization with political objectives, including the de-emphasis of the nuclear family, socialist economics, and explicit financial funnelling to the Democrat party. It's a moral "package deal." The idea being that if you…

> "Black lives matter" is a statement that everyone already agrees with.

The fact that you believe that is probably most of the problem.

Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#649
post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly aggressive activism of this sort started ramping up at my employer a couple of years ago. Several outspoken activists started complaining and demanding all-company meetings, which were granted by HR and company leadership. In these mandatory meetings, which were attended by hundreds of employees, all sorts of contradictory accusations were lodged by the activists. For example, in the first meeting, one o…

The fact that these activists were being unreasonable does not mean they cannot be reasoned with. I imagine transitioning is a very emotional and vulnerable thing to happen. Hence it being awkward that someone apologized for misgendering isn't unreasonable at all. Advocating that no-one should even do that would be unreasonable. But just presenting "this happened, this is how it made me feel" is a very natural thing.…

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Re: A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

#650
post #271
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors.

> This does seem to be the standard Libertarian worldview, but no matter how much you intend to ignore the world around you, it exists and you're a part of it, and you answer to your neighbors. One clever way to deeply entrench a political decision is to convince others that it's not a political decision at all. If you're successful, you've erected a barrier against your opponents by interfering with their ability to…

The opposite strategy is to talk about politics constantly, so that it's painfully obvious who's in the minority.

Which is better for a gay man in Saudi Arabia? A company where people only talk about work, or a company where everybody is expected to take a stance on homosexuality?

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