Coinbase had over 5k employees?!!! WTF. What were they all doing?
About 10% as much as employees at FTX, apparently
Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#562I 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…
These billionaires don’t have a billion dollars in cash. They have a huge chunk of a company shares that are currently valued at >1 billion.
So what you’re proposing is just that a company’s shares are taken away from the founders/execs as the company grows. It’s not just that you’re taking wealth away from them, but you’re fundamentally forcing them to sell off control of the company.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
You statement makes it sound like they aren't currently doing those things already. Can you point to some data that shows they aren't donating to charities and aren't diversified? I can understand if someone like Bezos is highly invested in the company he founded but overtime he will be like Gates and hold a small portion of his portfolio in Amazon and the rest broke up across many companies and charities.
Then I guess a wealth tax is not needed, billionaires are already giving away all of their money or starting new companies through direct investments, so they're no longer billionaires.
If you have a billion dollars and you invest all of it, you're still a billionaire (unless your investments tank). No billionaire keeps all of his money in cash.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of wealth is parked in shares of companies. I'm not sure to what extent that is actually productive...?
I'm confused by this statement. If I buy shares from a company, that company has more money to spend on growth/bonuses/whatever. If I buy shares from another person, that person has money to do things with. I don't see how there is even a thing such as "parked in shares of a company"; it doesn't park there, it is immediately available for investing in other things. Now, the money could sit in the bank, sure. But even…
Yes, so many people seem to think that billionaires are some living version of Scrooge McDuck, and their wealth is vaults full of gold coins under their houses, and they swim around in the coins before breakfast every morning.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either the rock gets sold and the income is realized and the taxes are paid then, or the rock ends up being worthless and the loan margin called for possession of the rock and the remaining value is taxed as income. Either way the taxes get paid in the end. Tax deference is not tax avoidance.
So taking the avoidance vs deference analogy. If I borrow money for car, house, boat, plane tickets, but never have to pay it back where does that leave my obligations?
You do have to pay back eventually though. Why are you assuming the loan never comes due or is margin-called?
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does tha…
> What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? This is a really good question. I believe the answer is that the USA will be better able to outcompete those countries that do have them. History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members. It leads to cynism and corruption and breaks down cooperation. It forces a society t…
> believe the answer is that the USA will be better able to outcompete those countries that do have them
Based on what? The US already outcompetes these other countries in business success and average citizen income. What countries don’t have billionaires that are competitive?
> History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members.
History has literally never shown this. This is the first time we’ve had massive inequality while still having a solid middle class. The jury is still out on whether the instability of the past was just because of excessive poverty and no upward mobility or because wealthy people were there.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#567Earlier 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…
I'm not settled on this yet. I'm from the USA, and one thing that concerns me is the geopolitics of billionaires. What happens when USA taxes billionaires out of existence? Russia and China still have billionaires. Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? Is there such a thing as "our" billionaires? The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does tha…
The most productive decades in the US correspond with its highest relative tax rates, between the fifties and the eighties. Thomas Piketty:
"if you look at the long-run evolution, we’ve seen less concentration of wealth. So the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution today would have 60 percent in Europe, 70 percent in the U.S., as compared to 90 percent before World War I in Europe. This did not destroy the economy. If anything, this decline in the share of total wealth going to top 10 percent and the corresponding increase in the share going to the next 40 percent has contributed to a much faster economic growth in the 20th century than in previous centuries.
"I think partly because it allowed more people to participate, to the economy. And also partly because it came also with the rise of education. And this was the true source of productivity in the long run, rather than the enormous level of inequality that we had before World War I. This theoretical discourse that more inequality, more concentration of wealth is always better for economic growth was made, of course, throughout history by people who had large concentration of wealth, certainly in Europe before World War I.
"And this is a discourse that, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tried to tell Americans, basically tried to tell them, look we’ve gone too far with the New Deal, with Roosevelt, in terms of progressive taxation or wealth redistribution. We are going to cut top tax rate by two, where they’re going to go down to 28 percent or 30 percent, as compared to the 80 percent, 90 percent top tax rate under Roosevelt. So the promise that was made by Reagan during the 1980s was that cutting top tax rate might lead to more inequality, but will also lead to so much more innovation, more economic growth. And the incomes of average Americans are going to grow much faster than they used to grow.
"Except that this is not what we’ve seen at all. So if you look at the three decades after Reagan, 1990 to 2020, the growth rate of national income per capita in the U.S. was only 1.1 — 1.2 percent as compared to 2 percent, 2.5 percent in the period of 1950 to 1980, or 1950 to 1990, which itself was not particularly exceptional. It was the same — 1910 to 1950, it was about 2 —2.5 percent. 1870 to 1910, around 2 percent. So in fact, the post-Reagan period, 1990-2020 has been particularly bad in terms of growth rate of national income per capita, which at the end of the day is the best economic measure we have of the increase in productivity and this should reflect innovation, et cetera."
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
To pay the wealth tax you would need to reduce your ownership in the company to pay the tax until eventually you are just another minor shareholder with a leadership position (for now at least). And eventually is not long (under Warren's proposal it would be ~5 years before jeff bezos was no longer a controlling shareholder). So the question really becomes, will the outcomes for the company be as good when no one lea…
Is wealth tax paid on unrealized gains? If not, these billionaires would only pay the wealth tax when they liquidate their position in the company they founded. Until then, it's just paper wealth and not taxed.
Proposed wealth taxes have been on unrealized gains.
Without doing that it’s pointless, billionaires even today never realize gains and just rotate through loans backed by their shares.
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
c) European.
According to this[0], the absolute most generous package is the Netherlands, which offers 1/3 of your monthly salary for each year of employment. To receive 14 weeks of salary, you'd need to work at a company for 10 years. Coinbase was founded in 2012. Other "European" countries have much worse severance packages. So what Coinbase offered seems to be better than even the best country in Europe. 0. https://www.claimsa…
Long notice periods typically soften the blow in Germany. After the first six months (where both sides can call it quits with two weeks notice and without cause) the notice period is four weeks to the 15th or last day of the month (and firing people without cause is no longer possible). There are some circumstances when that notice period is not relevant (if the employee is caught stealing, for example), but those don’t matter here.
From 2-5 years it’s one month (to the last day of the month), from 5-8 years it’s two months, eventually maxing out at seven months after twenty years. That’s the notice period for the employer. It can and often is asymmetric but can never be shorter for the employer than for the employee.
However, these are the legal minimums. Many employers will have longer notice periods in their contracts which apply to both sides. Something like three months or so isn’t uncommon.
Severance pay can even lead to problems with the mandatory unemployment insurance (which in most cases will pay you 60 – without kids – or 67 percent – with kids – of your last net earnings for a year) that can reduce the payout from that insurance (and then it becomes a game of calculating severance vs unemployment insurance, which can be annoying).
Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a contrived example that you've twisted yourself in knots to try and justify. There isn't a person on this planet that wouldn't sell an heirloom for $1 Billion unless the heirloom was actually worth ballpark $1 Billion. The people that wouldn't sell it for a $1 Billion are the people that would give it a way for free, ie: those that have little value for money.
No it's really not. It's an illustrative example of how a wealth tax would (fail to) work. The issue at the core is that items only have value while they are exchanged. Fiat is the only thing with the characteristic of persistent value. So trying to tax standing wealth is fraught because wealth doesn't actually exist in that form.
Then simply don't tax fixed assets. Sure, sure, then people will simply avoid taxes by converting cash and other assets into properties that are not directly taxable, but that's just how these cat-and-mouse games go.