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1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

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Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#291

Post by philwelch »

afavour wrote: post #114
fleddr wrote: post #71

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…

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 lea…

> 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.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#292

Post by gfodor »

gwelson wrote: post #252

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+ employee…

You say you’re baffled but conclude the people you are baffled by are heartless.

You’re not baffled: you have made up your mind.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#294

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

poszlem wrote: post #283
gwelson wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#295

Post by vkou »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #16

Love that Armstrong did this at Coinbase. I want to work at work, not worry about the political opinions of my coworkers.

It must be nice to have the privilege to not need to worry about the political opinions of your coworkers.

I take it most people don't see your existence, as you are, as a political problem?

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#296

Post by cf »

emsy wrote: post #44
gorwell wrote: post #32

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 nev…

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.

I don't know what barbershops you go to, but most I have been in involve lots of spirited discussion about politics.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#297

Post by arcticbull »

randomhodler84 wrote: post #156
arcticbull wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

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.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#298

Post by maxerickson »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #96
malermeister wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not getting involved always means at least tacitly supporting the status quo. To think otherwise is just an expression of privilege. There is no being apolitical.

>"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 defau…

Just because someone doesn't agree with your priorities doesn't mean you have to pay any attention to what they think.

Like you prioritize not hearing activists talk about their priorities, and they don't care about your priorities and thus talk about theirs.

Is griping about this going to change anything? Of course not.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#299

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

dmix wrote: post #253

> 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’..

> while our diversity numbers have remained the same,

What precisely are those diversity numbers? A 5% people of color would be dismal regardless of growth.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#300

Post by rafale »

gwelson wrote: post #252

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+ employee…

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.

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