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Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

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Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#601

Post by dadoge »

Johnny555 wrote: post #281
jerry1979 wrote: post #278

Earlier 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…

Does that do something to the power relationships in the world? The fact that you're even asking that is a reason we shouldn't have billionaires -- world power relationships shouldn't be based on the wealth of individual citizens. For example, what did Musk really talk about when he met with the president of Brazil? Did he represent American interests, Amazon Inc's interests, or Elon Musk's interests?

Good luck getting competing countries to agree on banning billionaires in one fowl swoop.

This is a very idealistic and impossible to ever implement take

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#602

Post by scarface74 »

tuckerpo wrote: post #36
sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I 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…

Anecdote: I had an old co-worker who was given 6 month's notice that he'd be let go from a previous job, and his manager at the time helped him look for a new gig + gave him shining reviews and references. After the 6 month period was up, they still gave him several months of severance, even after he had found a new gig. Some companies/managers actually do care about you, and it seems like Coinbase is roughly in that…

You should always be prepared for your job to be pulled out from under you. There is no major city in the US where a software engineer with experience shouldn’t be in the top quartile of income earners for their location and have a 3-6 months emergency fund.

You should always have an updated resume, career document, be interview ready and have an active network.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#603

Post by dadoge »

boc wrote: post #588
sytelus wrote: post #503

I don't understand why Coinbase is feeling such a crunch. They are just middleman in buying and selling. Their advantage is supposed to be that they make money whether crypto goes up or down. How can they screw this up?

USDC. They see something really bad on their books that's separate from their core business. Just like how Lehman Brothers was a profitable bank that got shredded by one risky trading strategy. These stablecoins have been devoured one by one, and each time they fall more people start trying to get their money out. USDC will experience a run and it might not be survivable without liquidating user account holdings, whi…

No one is expecting a run on USDC

Given that their business is just a “buy sell” platform, they are trimming around to get just that

They have lots of other features like “NFTs, lending” etc and other investments in their UX (separating out to currency vs smart contracts vs defi) I’m sure all that A/B testing to get that will be squeezed now too

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#604

Post by stevenjgarner »

Johnny555 wrote: post #45
sillysaurusx wrote: post #15

I 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…

A wealth tax implies a tax on unrealized appreciated assets, which is beyond bizarre IMHO. So you buy a house for $500k somewhere. It surges in value to $1.2 million. You therefore have an unrealized capital gain of $700k. You are NEVER going to get that money until you sell it, and when you do you are going to pay a whopping amount of capital gain tax. But a wealth tax implies you pay that capital gain tax now. Okay so let's say you do. Then a year later there is a major correction to the real estate market (hmmm ... 2008). Your $1.2 million property (on which you paid a huge amount of wealth tax) is now worth say $700k. Do you get a tax refund? You never got the income. You should never pay the tax. No different if it is a $500k property or a $1 trillion company. It is not wealth until you have it.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#605

Post by its_ethan »

wwarner wrote: post #571
its_ethan wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, if 10% of people holding 70% of wealth is unreasonable, how do you reconcile 1% of Spotify artists getting 90% of all "streams"? Basically, you're saying that the current distribution is crazy/unsustainable (and maybe it is) but the distribution is actually not totally out of whack with the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle). Just wondering where your confidence comes from that a functioning society doesn…

Actually, it's not simply the proportion, but the fact that over time the proportion of wealth held by the richest has been growing really fast. So, to use your analogy, I agree that a small number artists commanding the lion's share of attention can be fair, but if over time, an ever smaller number commanded an ever greater share, very soon every one would be listening to one artist and one song, and fair or not I d…

I think there's a valid point here, but I also think (at least anecdotally) that we are trending in the direction of more people listening to fewer songs. (Would love to see some Spotify data on that front lol)

I would argue that it's not going to collapse to 1 artist or 1 song for a similar reason that all wealth will never be in the hands of 1 person. If the rate of change (or just raw distribution) in wealth is unhealthy, that will present itself in the form of a less healthy economy.

That will likely cause a bit of a churn and redistribution to sort of self correct. There's also the fact that wealth typically doesn't survive through generations all that well. If this didn't happen, the Rockafeller's/ Vanderbilt's/ Carnagie's from the past would still have the top wealth holdings - sure they are still incredibly well off and have a huge advantage from family name, but per a Forbes list none of them are in the top 2500 wealthiest.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#606

Post by Johnny555 »

stevenjgarner wrote: post #604
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

A wealth tax implies a tax on unrealized appreciated assets, which is beyond bizarre IMHO. So you buy a house for $500k somewhere. It surges in value to $1.2 million. You therefore have an unrealized capital gain of $700k. You are NEVER going to get that money until you sell it, and when you do you are going to pay a whopping amount of capital gain tax. But a wealth tax implies you pay that capital gain tax now. Okay…

Oh, you mean like the property tax I pay on my unrealized house value?

I don't get that tax back if I end up selling my house for half what it was taxed for last year. But I can appeal the evaluation for this year.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#607

Post by Stupulous »

alx__ wrote: post #584
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

100M in net worth would motivate me, but one of the differences between me and a talented CEO is that I don't already have 100M in net worth. Gates had well over 100M when Microsoft went public in 1986, Bezos had more than a billion when Amazon went public in 1998, Musk made 150M on Ebay's Paypal acquisition in 2002. We may disagree on whether we're better off that they continued working, but I don't think they would have done so as a public service after they capped out lifetime income.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#608

Post by yellowbanana »

alx__ wrote: post #584
Johnny555 wrote: post #45

Earlier 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…

Christ on a skateboard!? All the temporarily displaced billionaires in this thread are something else. If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

This has nothing to do with motivation,

If you start a company and that company becomes succesfull you will end up rich.

> Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them.

There seems to be an illogical hate to people who have build companies that ended up being successfull.

If you are a small business ( non mega successfull company ), everyone is with you, "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy ", but then you win.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#609

Post by whimsicalism »

paisawalla wrote: post #501
whimsicalism wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as too big to fail in democratic politics and it is not a deterministic process of knowing people in "The Machine." FWIW, most wealthy people are wealthy because of inherited holdings and 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited.

There is significant income mobility in the US, which is why "the one-percent" discourse consistently fails to resonate with Americans. When 73% of Americans have spent at least a year earning a top 20% income [0], focusing on the inherited wealth of others comes off as whining. As long people feel that the pie grows, and that they can move themselves forward, these observations are at best statistical curiosities. T…

73% of Americans being in the top 20% of income earners for one year in their lives does not in any way diminish what I am saying.

The median dollar of wealth is inherited by the wealthiest top 5% of families, not earned as income - which your statistic doesn't even address.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#610

Post by whimsicalism »

smsm42 wrote: post #527
whimsicalism wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as too big to fail in democratic politics and it is not a deterministic process of knowing people in "The Machine." FWIW, most wealthy people are wealthy because of inherited holdings and 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited.

> There's no such thing as too big to fail in democratic politics Are you sure? Please tell me the top 10 names on the Epstein client list. I'll wait. > most wealthy people are wealthy because of inherited holdings and 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited. I'd like to see your sources. They probably counts by dollars, which is pointless, since one hyper-rich individual completely skews the picture - you can have…

Relying on people to honestly self report on being transferred wealth.

Counting people is not the important bit because I am concerned about the distributional equity of wealth not wealthy people.

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