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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

#431

Post by kdkmfmfkf »

tootie wrote: post #62

This seems like a gross abuse of the phrase "mission focused" to mean "operating for profit with total blinders on to the wider world". With a very appropriate photo of the 90s Bulls being a group of self-serving egomaniacs who put winning above everything else. My current employer (a non-profit) uses the term "mission focused" to mean "we are serving the public good even when it isn't profitable and acknowledging ou…

Oh come on, you know as well as anyone that what he means is that he doesn't feel the need to divide his staff racially and promote resentment through wasting corporate time and money on consultants holding seminars on the faux-intellectual critical theories of race that have grown out of the grievance studies departments in universities.

Stop gaslighting people. Not every company needs to shove the hideous and racist critical theories of race and gender down its employees throats.

Some of us prefer rewarding individual merit, and the principles of equality and fairness to mandated racial diversity and ideological homogeneity

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#432

Post by kdkmfmfkf »

sneak wrote: post #404
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.

Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. He didn't simply ban politics at work, however: he just refused to acknowledge the Black Lives Matter movement. Prior to that Coinbase had Black History Month events they conducted; now they don't.

[dead]

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#433

Post by asabjorn »

sneak wrote: post #428
asabjorn wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. Are you arguing that for instance working for a machine tooling company such as MAG is an inherently political act? If so, how? What about working on a farm. How is that political? What about working as a contractor for building homes. How is that political? > The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. I know many…

> but what we are referring to here is radical activism for a social revolution. It's not radical any longer, and it's nowhere near a revolution that is being asked for. This is a straw man. Millions are in the streets for basic human rights. This isn't a fringe position ("radical") and it's not an unreasonable demand ("revolution").

> It's not radical any longer, and it's nowhere near a revolution that is being asked for.

How is the DEI agenda not radial? What has turned it from radical to non-radical?

For context what I mean by DEI is: Diversity (hiring activists of all identities - a black conservative is not diverse), inclusion (censorship of people resisting CSJ DEI initiatives), and Equity (redistribution of outcomes based upon identities and adherence to CSJ) agenda.

> This is a straw man.

How is it a straw man to argue that trying to change how every aspect of a society is organized is radical? How is it not radical to change it from a liberal individualistic republic into a collectivist identity-based society run on critical social justice? Seems pretty obviously radical to me.

If you are arguing that it is not as radical yet as the October revolution, you are correct. However, that is just a matter of revolutionary stage and degree of radicality.

> Millions are in the streets for basic human rights. This isn't a fringe position ("radical") and it's not an unreasonable demand ("revolution").

The ones fighting for human rights against critical social justice activists measures are a vastly larger number of people. These are in the school board meetings fighting against critical social justice, in the streets and political venues fighting vaccine mandates, etc etc

It is not human rights to force something into somebody elses body, indoctrinate kids into critical social justice, locking down a country and world for over 1.5 years, printing vast amounts of money to pay for your political measures forcing someone else to pay for it through massive inflation and taxes. These are means of population control and cultural revolution.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#434

Post by skybrian »

BoorishBears wrote: post #288
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…

This is backwards, and the crux of why it's backwards lies here: > Or they're not rowing at all and just yelling at each other on Slack all day. I have never seen an office where you will not be fired for turning politics (or anything really) into a flamewar. Period. And that's because companies past a certain size know they always have multiple "5%ers" rowing in the wrong direction. If it's not politics it will be p…

A specialized forum where some subjects can simply be ruled off-topic will be easier to moderate than a forum where you can talk about anything. That’s not to say there are no controversies left, but it’s easier.

Agreeing on a mission is a form of specialization. In the case of Coinbase there are likely plenty of debates about cryptocurrencies, and that’s controversy enough.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#435

Post by motohagiography »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #225
motohagiography wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a bitcoin fan, but this question of eating it for lunch or backing it with apples misunderstands that the fundamental liquidity backstop of bitcoin is risk. So long as you can take it to a casino (real or notional) and bet it, it has value. For it to go to zero, it would mean no two people could make a bet where one benefits from the result. Even random shitcoins have a non-zero value so long as there are partici…

Interesting! But isn't betting is a zero sum game? Betting on apples means some lose and some win, but the world is not better off as a result, because they cancel out. Or that is my understanding.

You're right, I'm just thinking there is some long hedge that keeps the game going, like the transaction fees, where you get demand for transactions that are bets on blocks. The whole thing is a kind of self reinforcing stochastic uncertainty cloud (infinite improbability machine?), where the endogenous demand is never zero. Until it is because of something exogenous. Same as fiat.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#436

Post by [deleted] »

babyshake wrote: post #396
civilized wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basecamp's angry worker faction was demanding the company apologize for contributing to a white supremacist, genocidal culture... because some customer service folks had a funny customer name list that included names from all backgrounds. That had absolutely nothing to do with basic dignity for marginalized groups. It was simply a grab for power and status. One of many. We who have been watching are very familiar wit…

If you work in customer service, just don't make fun of your customers. It makes it harder to do your job well.

[deleted]

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#437

Post by zarkov99 »

ctur wrote: post #56

I wrote this in an email turning down a chance explore opportunities at Coinbase. > To me, diversity and social justice are critically important. I have the luxury of being selective in where I put my time and energy and it is important those values align with my career. I appreciate aspects of being "mission focused" but I think that there is a gulf between my personal values and Coinbase's values such that I would…

On the other hand, I, a fairly good Engineer, would favor Coinbase over many other tech companies precisely because their CEO had the courage to say what every other CEO is thinking, that is that a company is a place where money is exchanged for labour not a venue for promoting one's political agenda, no matter how righteous that agenda might feel.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#438

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #428
asabjorn wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work, including who you work for, is an inherently political act. Are you arguing that for instance working for a machine tooling company such as MAG is an inherently political act? If so, how? What about working on a farm. How is that political? What about working as a contractor for building homes. How is that political? > The set of coworkers you have is a result of their and your political opinions. I know many…

> but what we are referring to here is radical activism for a social revolution. It's not radical any longer, and it's nowhere near a revolution that is being asked for. This is a straw man. Millions are in the streets for basic human rights. This isn't a fringe position ("radical") and it's not an unreasonable demand ("revolution").

[deleted]

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#439

Post by jhhh »

tootie wrote: post #62

This seems like a gross abuse of the phrase "mission focused" to mean "operating for profit with total blinders on to the wider world". With a very appropriate photo of the 90s Bulls being a group of self-serving egomaniacs who put winning above everything else. My current employer (a non-profit) uses the term "mission focused" to mean "we are serving the public good even when it isn't profitable and acknowledging ou…

This kind of post only works if you get to judge their mission statement as insincere. Could you, without looking it up right now, identify what Coinbase's mission statement is? What specific actions do you think they've taken that you read as being misaligned with their stated mission and caused you to only believe they care about profit?

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#440

Post by AgentME »

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…

Everything you say makes sense within the context of Bitcoin's proof-of-work paradigm, that there aren't any reasonable solutions to these problems within it (there's no good way to add negative feedback to lower the hashrate, there's no good way to calculate a better lower hashrate), but it misses that there are alternative paradigms like proof-of-stake that avoid the problem of too much energy use entirely. Once proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies become more popular and fully prove the technique works at large scale, I hope other cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin follow along.
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