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A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company

blog.coinbase.com

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

#741

Post by juniper_strong »

jariel wrote: post #436
yokaze wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it the other way around. (Almost) everything is political. The mission of the company is not disjoint from the society it is embedded in. Things have become divisive by being able to ignore and blend out the opposing views. By not talking and listening to one another. This is just one more step in that direction. Funnily enough, I think it has been extrapolated by Neal Stephenson in Diamond Age. We will end up…

" (Almost) everything is political. " Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ... It's 99% not political. Google search is bare…

> Google search is barely political

Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women.

That is political.

Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down.

If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which would be a non-political decision, but whoever decided on how that should be implemented was making a political decision.

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

#742

Post by ardy42 »

winston_smith wrote: post #691
ardy42 wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? You're talking about something completely different. What I'm talking about is basically falsely depoliticizing a political decision,…

The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are. Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its oppos…

> The objection you and others are making to TFA is that you can't choose to be apolitical, because everything is political. Your contribution is to propose that people might claim things are apolitical to prevent people from realizing the truth about how political they actually are.

You're still not really getting what I was saying. Directly claiming something is apolitical won't actually create the state I was talking about. To do that you actually have to get a bunch of influential people to talk about some political idea like it was obviously some kind of natural or social law or something.

Not everything is political, but many people are ignorant of the political nature of many things.

> Your appeal to newspeak is pretty pointless, as it applies only inasmuch as it does to anyone who might claim that something is its opposite, for example the slogans "the personal is political" and "silence is violence".

You're thinking about the slogans like "freedom is slavery," which weren't Newspeak and would have been unexpressible in it.

> But you haven't really contributed anything to the conversation. You're just saying "ah, but what if they're /lying/! To /trick us/!"

I'm not sure I'm contributing the the conversion that you want to have, which makes it a little baffling why you're engaging with me and not one of "the others" who seem to be who you really want to engage with.

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

#743

Post by webmaven »

shruubi wrote: post #421

"Does Coinbase just stand for making a profit? No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work." My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.

> "Does Coinbase just stand for making a profit?

> No, we stand for accomplishing the mission and for creating a great place to work."

> My god, you're a business, you're entire existence is predicated on making a profit, don't delude yourself into thinking you're chasing some higher purpose, if that was truly the case then you'd be offering your services at a loss or giving away your product for free.

Hey now, there are other options besides "solely driven by profits" and "non-profit solely focused on the mission"

For one thing, it is a fiction that public for-profit companies have a fiduciary duty to be monomaniacal profit seeking entities that must do everything legal to achieve that end, and anything illegal where the profit exceeds the risk-adjusted cost of getting caught is at least on the table.

Second, there are plenty of structures for encoding specific missions into a company's charter that are binding. I'm kind of curious to see if Coinbase will follow through on the rhetoric and do something such as becoming a b-corp.

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

#744

Post by jkaplowitz »

vmception wrote: post #399
jkaplowitz wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time I was on COBRA, under 3 years ago, I paid close to $700/month, and I was the only person included in my coverage. Health insurance premiums have very likely gone up since then, and family sizes above 1 (such as even I have now) would cost meaningfully more than that. Smaller companies than that employer might also have higher total premium cost per employee, if they aim for good coverage.

Kaiser Permanente's Norcal and Socal plans this year have monthly premiums that are half of that, including dental.

This was NYC and was high quality and inclusive coverage.

Kaiser Permanente is from what I've heard an unusually good deal without anything comparable in NYC or most of the rest of the US, though not without their own weaknesses in areas like mental health coverage and dispute resolution.

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

#745

Post by jariel »

juniper_strong wrote: post #741
jariel wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" (Almost) everything is political. " Serving coffee is not political. Planning the network installation is not political. Code reviews, cleaning your office, optimizing the VM, getting a bandwidth deal, negotiating the SaaS pricing, choosing ingredients for the new dish, figuring out how many loads of gravel are needed for the landfill, picking a guy to fix the fence ... It's 99% not political. Google search is bare…

> Google search is barely political Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women. That is political. Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down. If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which wo…

Yes, it's political but in the grand scheme of searches, it's almost irrelevant.

99.99% of searches are just searches, and that's it.

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

#746

Post by juniper_strong »

jariel wrote: post #745
juniper_strong wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search is barely political Search for "american mathematician" on Google and the first six images that come back with the search results are of black mathematicians, 3 of them women. That is political. Nothing wrong with female or black mathematicians, the more the better, but that's not how it went down. If I worked at Google and they asked me to code that, I would have said, "Sure, I can do that", which wo…

Yes, it's political but in the grand scheme of searches, it's almost irrelevant. 99.99% of searches are just searches, and that's it.

Who gets to decide what is a political search and what isn't?

And why do they get to decide that?

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

#747

Post by webmaven »

ponker wrote: post #696
webmaven wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3) I’m not being an asshole to you because you’re a black trans woman, I’m being an asshole to you because I am an asshole and my white male friends say “oh Xxx is such as asshole.” So don’t take it personally I thought this deserved to be broken out to a separate reply. I actually used to be in that camp. In my case I used to say some extremely heteronormative patriarchal objectifying bullshit ironically (typical…

No idea what you’re talking about. Someone comes to me with a dumb idea. I tell them it’s a dumb idea and am not nice about it. If they are a minority group they could feel that I am acting this way to them because I’m a x-ist. But it’s actually because I’m an asshole.

I'll spell it out a bit more.

Since, as a member of a minority group, they probably get more negative feedback than average, and since probably most of that negative feedback is due to x-ism, why shouldn't they assume you're an x-ist?

And that's completely leaving aside whether there exists any sort of stereotype that members of group x aren't as smart or capable as non-x folks that you may be playing into.

It's really on your shoulders to indicate or demonstrate that you're just an asshole and not an x-ist asshole. Because, as far as the various x-folk are concerned, isn't it simpler to assume that a non-x is being an asshole to them because of x-ism? Odds are that they're right.

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

#748

Post by shureluck »

christophilus wrote: post #427
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #10

For reference, the severance package was 4 months of salary for employees with =3 years of tenure at Coinbase. The severance also included 6 months of health insurance. (Source: https://www.coindesk.com/coinbase-severance-apolitical-missi... ) What percentage of employees at Coinbase are actively interviewing for other jobs at any given time? 5%? If someone has one foot out the door already, taking a bonus equivalent…

I think you underestimate how many people are fed up with overly politicized workplaces. I’ve quit a couple of jobs due to it. I’d definitely stay somewhere where I can just work without having to listen to unrelated BS constantly, even if it meant passing on a sweet severance package.

Ditto. This is a big reason why I left Spotify and refuse to work at Google or Facebook right now. Spotify has been turning a new leaf lately though.

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

#749

Post by beaner »

sneak wrote: post #690
beaned wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. Have you ever tried to find one person who actually, literally believes that the lives of black people do not matter? You'll certainly find 11-year olds in Call of Duty who will say it for shits and giggles to control you; you won't find anybody who actually believes it.

I personally know dozens of people who don't care at all about black lives one way or the other. I've seen hundreds more that I don't know personally demonstrate that belief publicly, many of them police officers. The disparities in policing, application of police violence, and prosecution are well-documented. This is why the movement exists. It's a real problem, whether you personally have experienced it or not, whe…

The statistics are well known, and they do not support your conclusion.

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

#750

Post by webmaven »

ponker wrote: post #737
webmaven wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whose perspective is largely 1) OK 2) please pay for your own costs related to your choices In your example, the black trans woman has no choice about being black and no choice about their cisgender. Technically, they have a choice about whether they transition, but the alternative is living with the emotional pain of extreme gender dysphoria. Would you deny someone medical care for a physically painful but not lif…

You’ve pretty much done what almost never happens on the Internet: genuinely changed my view.

Thank you very much for saying that. I'm glad to have been of service.

Making arguments in good faith sometimes feels like pointlessly shouting into the void.

Obligatory xkcd: https:// xkcd.com/386/

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