Live data from Hacker News

1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

twitter.com

611–620 of 699 posts

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#611
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Diversity" can be so confusing and misunderstood. The example I gave, extreme diversity, is not the standard in my country, this tech hub is the exception. I've also worked in teams consisting of only white men. The inconvenient reality is that I couldn't detect a meaningful difference in the quality or quantity of output in either team. As said, I did enjoy the increased diversity from a personal perspective, so th…

Just wondering, what country are you in? Do you think this is something unusual about your particular tech hub?

Netherlands. No, not unusual at all, just adult people cooperating and doing their job.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you by complicity [1] mean the critical social justice concept that all white (or people that believe in classical liberal culture) people are complicit in the maintenance and harms of systemic racism (stopping a perfect equity utopia) and white supremacy (continuation of individualistic western liberalism, instead of collectivist group-based critical social justice)? [1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-complicity/…

I'm not as concerned about identity politics as I am about class issues. Bitcoin is an ancap political project designed to make exploitation of the working class, independent of skin color, easier. Identity politics themselves are a neoliberal ploy to distract from the real struggle at hand. Also, what even is "white culture" other than a racist dogwhistle? Whats the common denominator between Russian, Portuguese, Hu…

Exactly. A great thing about cash is that dissenters can use it anonymously in a way that no institution can legislate unmasking the transactors. Crypto should gain that capability

To expand upon your point about the greater political moment: these revolutions have never been good for the working class, because those with little power in order to gain a powerful voice need to organize into powerful interest groups using voting (with little cheating) plus free speech plus a way to overthrow a corrupt regime. These groups of people may strongly disagree on other issues, but unite on work. Notice how all of these are under attack by critical social justice activists.

Identity politics is just a tool to divide the people into unchosen cuts that are too small to affect change or fight back against a corrupt elite.

In the US a minority of people comprising both sides of the “horseshoe” are uniting together to push towards a China like system. No communist (Soviet Russia), fascistic (hitler Germany), communist fascist merge (China) has ever had the means for the working class fight for themselves. In all of these systems the political elite have much greater access to wealth than any other group of people, and the working class paid the cost and lived a basic living style.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism, and it indoctrinates students with the belief that everything everywhere is politics, always. This mentality has infected "liberal" intellectualism outside the academy, to the point where it is, essentially, the "culture" of much of the Left in the U.S.

Define what you believe Marxism to be. It isn’t a buzz word for anything to the left of Reagan. And everything is politics. A political system could decide to outlaw computers and the internet. How would your SaaS business survive then?

I define Marxism broadly as the initial poisoning of the left-leaning mind with the concept of the ubiquitous class struggle. It has mutated into a belief system under which there is always an oppressing class and an oppressed class. It can be the landed gentry (oppressors) vs. the commoners (oppressed), capital (oppressors) vs. labor (oppressed), racial majority (oppressors) vs. racial minority (oppressed). But at its core, it is unable to view the current state of the world, or any subdivision thereof, in terms other than oppressed and oppressor, whether any reasonable person would agree or not. And, as can be seen with all Marxists (operating under there many self-ascribed labels), the only cure is revolution and purification. Of course, for those of us with a passing grasp of recent history, its quite clear that both of those will lead to mass violence and death. See also, the Bolshevik Revolution and its ensuing horrors, Mao's revolutions and their ensuing horrors, the Cuban revolution and its continued mass oppression, the French Revolution and all of its violent insanity, etc. etc.

> And everything is politics

And thus we arrive at Postmodernism. Postmodernism introduces the belief that everything is relative and everything is a construct. There is no base reality, no ground truth–or if there is, we can dismiss it as irrelevant given the all powerful constructs and systems of human life. Thus one can make arguments like, "Everything is always politics" and use such asinine premises as the basis of injecting noxious politics into every facet of our lives. Once again contravening the majority of people's lived experiences and desires.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#614
post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the neighborhood of 1 percent of all energy consumption, for literally nothing, is a colossal waste. Try to think of it in tons of coal. You proud of that?

"literally nothing" is your opinion.

It's a fact at the macro level. Individual speculators may profit but there's no benefit to the species. They don't even work as currencies because the transaction costs are so high.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”. I’ve got a timeline put together on it https://schneems.com/2021/05/12/the-room-where-it-happens-ho... the post also goes into detail about Rails governance internals from my experiences as a contributor over the last decade.

> At least a third of the company quit. That is not something that happens over something “deeply disingenuous”. You leave out that basecamp gave 6 months of salary to each person quitting. I'd assume that most of those would have quit under those conditions even if there wasn't an incident at all. As we can see here at the Coinbase incident where they didn't give a ton of money basically nobody quit, basecamps case…

Your original characterization of the issue is dismissive and deeply disingenuous.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#616
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because liberal arts higher education has been completely usurped by Postmodernism and Marxism, and it indoctrinates students with the belief that everything everywhere is politics, always. This mentality has infected "liberal" intellectualism outside the academy, to the point where it is, essentially, the "culture" of much of the Left in the U.S.

"Usurped" as in : never ever there was this much progress in history and linguistic since the postmodern invested the fields, and now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before. For some reasons it was taken a bridge too far (imo, but i can be wrong, i'm not really interested in the field) in sociology, but still, never read anything better th…

Postmodernism: "Everything is a construct. Everything is relative. There is no base reality or ground truth."

Marxism: "Everything is class struggle. There is always, everywhere and in everything an oppressor and an oppressed. The only cure is revolution and ideological purification."

While the two may have been at odds at their inception, they now work together, initially in academia, but now, increasingly, everywhere in the U.S.

> now that postmodernism is present in the archeology field, we have done discoveries that were not even envisionned before

Citation needed.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear that when people say "everything is political" the "everything" is scoped specifically to scenarios where there is a decision to make and people disagree on how to make that decision. When someone says something like "meat is political" I don't think they mean that the physical substance on the dinner plate has this property, but rather that there are decisions to make that directly involve…

It's not at all clear to me. What's the point in saying "everything is X" if you implicitly mean "everything is X except all the things that obviously aren't X"? If we all agreed on what was not political then no one would need to argue that "everything is political" in the first place, so if you want to have any interesting discussion at all then you need to actually say something about where the boundary is between…

It’s just how people talk. They’re not making a universal quantification in first-order logic. If you ask someone what kind of food they want for dinner and they say “I like everything” you don’t conclude that they like genocide.

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an atheist that grew up in a religious environment, the techniques and patterns of religions are recognizable. You may not realize it, but you are introducing religion into the workplace. A Christian posts on HN: merely saying "we as a company believe thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" or "we as a company believe you shall not steal" are just...basic things you need to do in 1952.

As someone who grew up in Iran, you're mixing two entirely unrelated things up in bad faith. Saying people deserve to be able to live isn't the same as introducing extremely "othering" religions. The tactics are the same, the goals are different. Comparing these is bad faith.

[deleted]

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#619
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's tons of other cryto startups. Where in your analysis do you talk about how these other crypto startups have (1) easier onboarding/KYC than COIN, (2) access to more coins to trade (3) better tooling (4) better fees (5) etc. etc. ?

Except that the upside is capped by the new Coinbase vesting policy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808455

And that has nothing to do with the fact that Coinbase as a single entity is vastly more valuable than .

Re: 1 Year of Coinbase as a mission focused company

#620
post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many words until this: > Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world. Basically sounds like “mission focused” = “do your job”

Yes do what you are hired for. How does this not compute in the minds of many is baffling to me.

Well the mission seems inherently political (economic freedom), so coinbase is asking its employees to take a myopic mission focused approach while simultaneously finding the mission inspiring politically and not mentioning politics at work.

Ultimately employees want more than just to punch the clock and pay their mortgage, especially SF knowledge workers.

Post reply on HN