[deleted]
Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Billionaires are highly correlated with millionaires, which don't seem to be beyond the pale for critics of wealth inequality. Countries with billionaires rank much higher on quality of life than those without. It hurts to see Bezos and Musk in yachts but the side effect of their wealth is companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society in terms of products and employment.
Not to mention little old ladies, 50 year old ex fire fighters and retired unionized school teachers get full generous pensions because of stock market value of companies created by billionaires
Yeah, about that:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/business/bear-market-time...
> But 401(k) plans can still take a significant hit in market downturns. In 2008, for instance, as the S&P 500 dropped 37 percent, the average 401(k) account balance for those who were in their 50s fell 24 percent.
> People with retirement accounts are keeping more of their assets in stocks now, as opposed to bonds or a mix of other investments. “There has been a growing complacency of people keeping most of their nest eggs in stocks,” said Monique Morrissey, who specializes in retirement at the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. “There has been a fundamental misunderstanding — returns do not always average out.”
> “It’s not just the loss from January; it’s what happens going forward,” she said. “If you were counting on the amount that you have in your 401(k) to continually grow, well, then you may never get to what you had planned for.”
Tying retirement plans to the market only looks good when there's a continuous bull market, less so when the bottom falls out.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…
That's an arbitrary cut off and it's not just about whether they will work less hard or not. It's about effective capital allocation. If they earned their wealth through smart capital allocation, why would you want to remove capital from proven allocators and forcibly move it to the least effective allocators? TLDR. Elon makes vastly better use of capital than the government does. He turned $180M into SpaceX and Tesl…
SpaceX was funded by government contracts awarded to SpaceX. 'Ol Musky doesn't wave a magic wand for discerning capital deployment. He just gets lucky.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#134Why they need these many people for an exchange is puzzling. I’m sure there are many things to do, but shouldn’t they grow their headcount organically and slowly?
Is it an exchange or more like a lead gen company? I thought coinbase's business model was to advertise heavily to get newbie crypto investors on their platform and then to charge wildly inflated commissions compared to other exchanges. Kind of like a Rocket mortgage for crypto. Unfortunately in that business model gross revenue directly tracks the price of bitcoin.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just a run of the mill average joe, who has a rock that has been in my family for generations. Turns out some weird little cult likes my rock and wants to buy it for $1B. Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?
Why is the rock yours? How did your family attain ownership of it? If the rock means little to you, why should you have it rather than the cult that actually values it? What if the cult wants to preserve the rock but you want to destroy it even though that will cause great pain to those who care about it? Why should you have permanent ownership of a rock just because your parents had it?
You set the table to abolish the notion of property. It's hard to extrapolate what effects that would have on modern societies... it hasn't really been tried. I'm not saying it's an inherently bad idea, but the proponents of that kind of idea always seem to paint rosy visions based on extrapolations from inappropriate samples.
Maybe you can say you don't have to fully abolish property. But it remains especially hard to predict what second order behaviors any particular implementation would bring about, and what steady state would result from them.
Per your example, if the expected ruling of society would be that gp doesn't get to keep the rock because they don't "care" about it... well, maybe people in their position would suddenly find themselves caring about the rock very greatly. Not even cynically -- if the choice presented to you is "value or no value", the limbic system suddenly becomes very persuasive.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
“companies like Amazon and Tesla that have a net positive effect on society” Citation needed.
My claim is that if these companies weren't useful than they wouldn't exist. People hate Bezos but they spend their money at Amazon. Methinks they doth protest too much!
You could argue the same for the likes of Philip Morris or the Sackler families business. Just that people are very willing to buy a product doesn’t imply that it’s good. So I wouldn’t raise the fact that folks buying Amazon or Tesla products as a pointer that their products are any good perse.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#137I think if employees feel slighted by being fired, they're fooling themselves. The best mindset is that you could be gone tomorrow. It gives you clarity and purpose. It also happens to be the truth. Coinbase was also extremely generous with severance. 12 weeks plus two for every one year at the company, I think. I've had the experience of being let go without notice and without severance. Devs seem a little more griz…
People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…
> Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealth tax on assets kicks in?
In my experience from having known a couple of mega-rich CEOs, yes. Even those who are not principally driven by the money or three-commas social signaling, they still want to leverage their accumulated assets into changing the world in some way. Take that away from them and they lose motivation, yes.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
People keep pointing to Armstrong's $110M house like it's some sort of injustice. If you think billionaires should exist at all, then that's one of the least-bad injustices imaginable Ok, I'll admit it, billionaires should not exist at all, there should be a heavy wealth tax that makes it hard to become a billionaire. Will a CEO work less hard if he (and his peers) can only ever gain $100M in net worth before a wealt…
There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be reduced to that amount? Does someone earning more than you hurt you? Also… do billionaires employ people? Do you want their employees to have their jobs seized from them when the johny555 tax goes into effect?
> There are plenty of people in the world who would think that anything over $500/month is way more than enough for one person. Should your compensation be reduced to that amount?
This is rhetoric that tries to confuse two totally different scenarios in order to convince the majority to oppose something that only hurts a tiny minority. Saying "one person should not have 5 generations worth of wealth" is not the same thing as saying "people should not make a middle class salary". They aren't even similar. If there was any place on earth where $1,000,000,000 was comparable to $500/month in any way, you might have a point.
> Does someone earning more than you hurt you?
Yes. Without a doubt. Wealth is freely convertible to and from political power, so outsized wealth translates into outsized political/lawmaking power, which affects us all.
Let's make an extreme example if you don't believe me: Should sextillionaires exist? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, someone having $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 might have a negative effect on other people's lives?
> Also… do billionaires employ people?
Some do, some don't. Some non-billionaires employ people, some don't. Employment was around long before billionaires. It's not a requirement.
To me, wealth should be like the speed of light. There should be a limit, and it should be increasingly harder and harder to approach (but never achieve) that limit as you get wealthier. Not sure how you'd actually implement such a Lorentzian economic speed limit, but it seems fair to me. Make the limit high enough where at 99% of it, you can have your needs and your family's needs fully met in the most expensive neighborhood on earth, or whatever.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#139In my opinion this is what greed does to people. Doesn't matter your background. Armstrong was here on HN pointing out his vision of free exchange of currency at close to zero rates. He wanted to fight "the big guys", including credit cards mafia and PayPal mafia. What A WONDERFUL goal. What he ended up with, is obnoxious exchange rates @ Coinbase (triple what credit cards charge), hundreds of thousands of ruined liv…
"lots of suicides" - that's bold claim. In searches I've only found one related to CB. One is not "lots"
you don't know cryptocurrency took a lot of lives??
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can put a wealth tax on billionaires without putting taxes on poverty level workers ($500/month in the US). You're making bizarre nonsensical arguments here--slippery slope, strawman, etc.
The top 1% complaining about the top 0.01% while ignoring 99% of the world is a nonsensical argument?
Wow, yeah. Putting it like this makes it pretty crazy right?
You don't see your error?