671–680 of 699 posts
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction." BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
They lost almost half of their engineering team. Product development has almost stalled. I dunno, man.
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What if a bunch of white male employees ask the company to make s statement that their lives matter too? After all they are overrepresented in suicide statistics, drug addiction and homelessness. You now this shit will make a lot of leftists lose their mind and show up at ur company offices trying to cancel you out of existence. In a society going mad like ours, opting out of the madness like Coinbase did is the best…
"Black lives matter" is a slogan that largely refers to a desire to solve issues related to police brutality and black people. "White lives matter", as it's commonly said and understood, is merely a contrarian pushback against that desire to fix those issues. Obviously white lives do matter like others, but making a statement of something communicates something other than the literal meaning: it asserts that there's…
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction." BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
They lost almost half of their engineering team. Product development has almost stalled. I dunno, man.
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction." BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
They lost almost half of their engineering team. Product development has almost stalled. I dunno, man.
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction." BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
They lost almost half of their engineering team. Product development has almost stalled. I dunno, man.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if a bunch of white male employees ask the company to make s statement that their lives matter too? After all they are overrepresented in suicide statistics, drug addiction and homelessness. You now this shit will make a lot of leftists lose their mind and show up at ur company offices trying to cancel you out of existence. In a society going mad like ours, opting out of the madness like Coinbase did is the best…
"Black lives matter" is a slogan that largely refers to a desire to solve issues related to police brutality and black people. "White lives matter", as it's commonly said and understood, is merely a contrarian pushback against that desire to fix those issues. Obviously white lives do matter like others, but making a statement of something communicates something other than the literal meaning: it asserts that there's…
"We have a much more aligned company now, where we can focus on getting work done toward our mission. And it has allowed us to hire some of the best talent from organizations where employees are fed up with politics, infighting, and distraction." BIG takeaway. The people on your team attract similar kinds of people to your team. Good for Coinbase. Lots of good lessons here.
They lost almost half of their engineering team. Product development has almost stalled. I dunno, man.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/10/08/5-of-coinbase-e...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Replace "dissenters" with "capitalist robber barons" and "great" with "problematic" and I'm with you. >these revolutions have never been good for the working class Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the US TO THIS DAY. From 1953 to 1962 thei…
Thank you for being honest and straightforward about your communist sympathies. So many that agree with critical social justice play word games to obfuscate their radical position as a classic liberal position. I agree that instead of the transition from a tyranny of the proletarian communist leaders, those with gnostic knowledge of communism, to communist utopia communist revolutions have a tendency to fall into feu…
I think Yugoslavia is the better example fwiw - a society where there was high living standards and high degrees of freedom, arguably higher than in the West. They had greater economic freedom as all companies were worker-run coops with leadership elected by the workers competing in the marketplace; compare that to the autocracy of the modern capitalist workplace! They also had the freedom to travel both the Communist and the Capitalist blocks, but that's not as relevant today anymore.
I agree with your comment about having to look forward though. I think the ideal scenario would be fully automated space luxury communism - e.g. Star Trek, but baby steps ;) We'll have to make sure to avoid falling to deep into capitalism and its systemic descent into corporatism, then fascism though as has happened every time that system has been tried.
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Barbers famously talk about politics while cutting your hair. This is like a quintessential part of barber shop culture. Barbers that don't talk about partisan politics normally talk about some parapolitical thing, like cultural gripes, or sports, or other things that have a pretty similar valence. I've had my hair cut in like 5 different countries by dozens of different barbers who speak different languages, come fr…
Dunno what barbers you go to, I've been to a lot across many states and talking partisan politics has never been a common theme among them. I can't remember the last haircut that did involve political talking, it seems mostly avoided. Maybe it's more common outside the US?
Sometimes it was partisan politics. Trump came up pretty often, for better or worse, during those years -- I had a milestone birthday the day Trump was elected, so I remember a haircut maybe a couple of days before where that was a natural springboard.
Sometimes it was cultural politics. #MeToo came up a lot; a surprising amount of young male barbers want to talk about how they pick up chicks, which I've always found a little weird because I'm old and I'm married and I am really surprised they judge I'd be receptive to that kind of thing. One talked to me about how he saw a sex worker. Maybe that's not something you'd code as political. I remember someone mentioning the Aziz Ansari kurfuffle. Again, it's all politics baby.
My work overlaps with politics, and anyone who asked me about my work typically volunteered some kind of politics in response. If I told you I ran a polling outfit, what do you think your followup questions might be?
But what I'm saying is that partisan politics isn't the same thing as politics, which is one of the fundamental dimensions of the Coinbase story, and so it's pretty relevant. A woman who cut my hair in Los Angeles was telling me about her travel experience. Non-political. I talked about my travel experience. I wasn't from the states either, so I talked about where I was from. Wait, my hairdress is from a country that was affected by the Trump travel ban, and her parents were no longer able to visit her here, and her status -- though documented -- was such that she couldn't easily get back to see them and get back in the country. She wasn't going on an unhinged partisan rant about Republicans, she was just talking about a basic para-political topic in a pretty unobjectionable way. And that kind of thing happens very often.
Presumably you got a haircut during COVID. Did you talk about COVID? Isn't COVID (para-)political? Do you live in a city? Did you get a haircut that summer? Were there boarded up businesses because of the protests/riots connected to George Floyd? Did you talk about that?
Did you talk about sports? Most of the barber shops I'm in display ESPN. The worst was a place where I got my haircut in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and jesus christ, the "Go Big Blue!" is insufferable. Is sports para-political? Yes, in two ways -- as we're seeing with the NBA and vaccines and as we saw in 2016 with the kneeling and anthem protests and as we saw with LeBron's bizarre China apologism, and as we saw with the WWE doing stuff in Saudi Arabia, and as we saw with Blizzard and Hong Kong, and as we're seeing with the NCAA student pay dispute (had this particular conversation three or four times, in Ann Arbor, in Los Angeles, in Ontario Canada...) it turns out that sports overlap with politics a lot.
But let's say you avoid all of that discussion, and you just discuss teams. What I'm trying to say is that the kind of torturous, almost religious, tribalism that people hate when it comes to talking politics casts a shadow over a lot of other stuff. I hate talking to sports people who are nuts about a particular team and perform all the chest-beating bullshit surrounding it. It's not partisan politics, but it's the same kind of "why are you getting on with this shit?" implied by it. That's what the word valence means and why I used it.
I got a haircut in Kilkenny, Ireland recently. Fun little town. It's got a castle. It's got Cartoon Saloon animation studio. Since I wasn't getting my beard shaved, I wore a mask, so did the woman cutting my hair. Once she figured out I wasn't from Kilkenny (believe me, with my accent, it's pretty easy to tell I'm not Irish) she asked what I was doing in town. Just some tourism. She asked about how I found the barber shop, I off-handedly said "Well, I'm just a walk-in" -- side note, Irish people don't use review websites so it's impossible to find anything here -- and mentioned I saw a few other barbers but they were unmasked with customers and I'd rather not take a gamble. It was a pretty short exchange. I wasn't trying to bring up politics. Her question wasn't political. But I think you could agree, it has a distinctly political tinge, and it invited further conversation that could be more or less political depending on comfort level.
I am agnostic about Coinbase's decision to ban politics. Seems reasonable enough, and seems reasonable enough for workers to leave or stay on that basis. I think the kind of advocacy model of you demand what you want and I demand what I want and we see how it shakes out is actually a very good way to structure society. But I think a lot of their position relies on an extremely crude and unsophisticated view of politics: what it means is "We don't want to hear about the woke SJW representation intersectionality critical race theory BLM bullshit". So you end up with a workplace that absolutely tolerates discussing politics, just not a certain kind of boat-rocking politics that makes people mad.
That leads to the analogy that barbers cutting your hair aren't political, when really what is meant is that they are political, but they tend to be a little more subtle about navigating it, and because the relationship is transactional, mostly there's no ongoing stress about having to continue to work with them.
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Thank you for being honest and straightforward about your communist sympathies. So many that agree with critical social justice play word games to obfuscate their radical position as a classic liberal position. I agree that instead of the transition from a tyranny of the proletarian communist leaders, those with gnostic knowledge of communism, to communist utopia communist revolutions have a tendency to fall into feu…
I'm trying to avoid any association with "classic liberals", cryptofascists by another name. I think Yugoslavia is the better example fwiw - a society where there was high living standards and high degrees of freedom, arguably higher than in the West. They had greater economic freedom as all companies were worker-run coops with leadership elected by the workers competing in the marketplace; compare that to the autocr…
I know people that lived in communist Yugoslavia. It was little better than Cuba and Soviet Russia, and a small elite lived well like feudal lords. Everyone else was dead poor with basic living standards at best.
> Space luxury communists.
If we gain a healthy fear of tech and acknowledge the dual nature of humans, both evil and good, new solutions will open up like when humans stopped burning down stuff with fire by containing it and applying it with a healthy fear.
I think whatever we would have next would be best centered by the individual in the natural and human local community, with a very small central state, in order to not overwhelm the local community and the individual with the centralized tyranny communism has tended towards.
Some people argue that a centralized communist AI world economic forum style will make communist non-tyrannical. I think that is unrealistic because a centralized AI deciding stuff, like the Fabian society dreamed up (see HG Wells “things to come”), will also be tyrannical as it’s still made and maintained by people. A Stalin, Pol Pot or Mao will eventually control it.
Btw, Marcuse that formulated the woke movement thought a communist system could only fund basic living standards. He also thought that for sustainability the state needed eugenics control over reproduction. Only a commmunist fascist merge like China has supported luxury, but that system is indistinguishable from feudalism. Wokism in practice seems like a China like system achieved through communist means