Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#961

Post by Aarostotle » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 4:26 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #903

Aarostotle wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that b…

> We live in the most equal time in human history. [...] Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.

It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, meaning that taking these dollars will have a compounding negative effect on future productivity.) Look at history. Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Why would they keep taking on so much responsibility? To raise your standard of living? Why should they care about you?

Any of those guys are capable of becoming a surf bum, living on $30k a year, but instead, they build massive companies that deliver incredible value to the rest of us — they get their money because we pay them for that value. Would you rather incentivize Elon Musk to keep working on Tesla or would you prefer him to retire?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#962

Post by wskinner » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 4:37 PM UTC

ralph84 wrote: post #900

wskinner wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“These stablecoins” lumps together some very different implementations of “thing that is always worth $1”. USDC: fully collateralized by cash or cash equivalents held in US banks - basically a money market fund Terra: partially collateralized by crypto assets + algorithmic magic Tether: like USDC but not held in US banks, and the actual collateral may be partial or of lower quality Dai: overcollaterelized by crypto a…

> basically a money market fund When money market funds were all about to break the buck in 2008 the Treasury department stepped in with a $50 billion insurance program and the Fed started buying commercial paper to prop them up. Will they do the same for USDC?

I don't know, and you should include that in your personal risk model. "basically a money market fund" is certainly not intended to suggest a certain level of safety. It is a comment on the structure of the asset.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#963

Post by yunohn » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

googlryas wrote: post #542

owisd wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a straw man, I believe a better idiom would be 'the tail wagging the dog', i.e. you're using an extreme edge case to argue against the big picture proposal. A real tax would include the small picture details: payment plans, equity swaps, valuation tribunals, etc to cover the oddball cases. But none of that would matter, you would sell it and net the $500M.

Even with payment plants ,equity swaps, valuation tribunals, it would still be the case that someone with more money than me can force me to sell anything I own to them, by placing a value higher than I can pay on it?

I find it odd that you think that amidst this world of legal tomfoolery and loopholes - a wealth tax could not be conceived that doesn’t force artificial valuations and liquidations.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#964

Post by FabHK » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:09 PM UTC

Aarostotle wrote: post #321

FabHK wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am fairly sure inequality is more extreme than that (top 10% hold 70%) at the moment, and it was less bad in the second half of the 20th century. The top US marginal income tax rate was 90% in the 1960s, and 70% in the 1970s, and it did not seem to discourage GDP growth or innovation. https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...

We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago. Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that b…

While I don't agree with your conclusions, part of your arguments are correct:

> Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

From the paper below:

"This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income"

https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/technology-and-dev...

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#965

Post by smsm42 » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

guelo wrote: post #713

smsm42 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am indoctrinated by the reality I am observing daily. And before you are tempted to tell me "oh, it's because $not_my_favorite_political_party prevents $my_favorite_political party from achieving its true potential as the paragon of democracy" - this happens regardless of your tribal squabbles.

$not_my_favorite_political_party_1 wants to destroy government besides police and military. $not_my_favorite_political_party_2 wants to increase welfare spending. Neither party is focused on good government. Mostly that is because voter dissatisfaction with government is channeled into the two competing ideological camps so that obvious, practical improvements never happen.

There's no party that has anybody elected to Congress (or to a state Congress afaik either, though there I may be missing one or two persons) that wants to even reduce substantially, let alone destroy, government. TBH, let's not be cute and drop "substantially". No major party wants to reduce the government at all. Didn't for a long while. The only disagreement is about how fast the government will be growing and who gets the benefits of the wealth transfers that would follow from that and who gets to control these trillions and get the goodies that come from controlling trillions of other people's money. There are disagreements on other subjects, but on the subject of Big Government the consensus is clear and present. No agency ever gets reduced power (or, the horror, disbanded!) whatever party is in power, the worst could happen is that one party's functionary would temporarily disrupt the implementation of other party's schemes.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#966

Post by FabHK » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

Aarostotle wrote: post #961

FabHK wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We live in the most equal time in human history. [...] Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units. Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.

It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it. Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, mean…

> It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

So you are advocating 0% taxes?

That argument (of type Econ 101/Ayn Rand) is misguided, because the world is not as envisaged by Econ 101 (or Ayn Rand, who famously enjoyed Social Security and Medicare).

Counter arguments:

1. Society has made available the gift of the limited liability company, to encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship.

2. Society has made available streets, canalisation, schools, defence, police, fire fighters, certain forms of insurance, etc., for a simple reason: market failures. Those goods would be provided in insufficient (suboptimal) number by the free market due to: strong positive externalities, non-excludability, adverse selection, and many other reasons.

For those (and many other reasons) government does have the right to taxation. The question then is the optimal level.

> Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Yeah, the poor Northern Europeans, starving to death... Somewhat higher income, capital gains, estate, and maybe even wealth taxes won't result in mass starvation.

> they get their money because we pay them for that value.

Again, a neat Econ 101 idea that fails to take into account reality. "salary = marginal product" is only true under entirely idealised assumptions of perfect competition [1], in particular no economies of scale and no network effects. That is most definitely not the case for today's tech companies, which quite obviously have monopolistic tendencies, thus extraction of monopoly profit (rent) which accrues, guess to whom, the boss.

And, for what it's worth, if Elon becomes a surf bum, or twitters full time, we'll still get great electric vehicles, maybe a tad later.

[1] Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#967

Post by popcalc » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

Geee wrote: post #50

joshmarinacci wrote: post #40

Coinbase had over 5k employees?!!! WTF. What were they all doing?

Probably customer service. They have about 100 million customers, so 1 employee per 20000 customers.

I'd wager 40-50 million of those are accounts opened under false/stolen identities.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#968

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:50 PM UTC

themacguffinman wrote: post #730

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I don't believe that most people are really aiming to be multi-billionaires, I think most of the effort comes from people trying to reach financial independence at various levels of cost of living.

A wealth tax doesn't just affect multi-billionaires, it guts all accumulations of wealth. If anything, billionaires are most able to shrug off a wealth tax. Your average Financial Independence strategy (pursue a high income to accumulate a sizeable warchest of assets quickly, then passively live off the illiquid assets slowly) is severely gutted by a substantial wealth tax that aggressively drains saved assets.

Do you feel like a wealth tax starting at the 50,000,001th dollar of 2% until you get to a billion is "gutting all accumulations of wealth" or would harm the average financial independence strategy?

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#969

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 5:51 PM UTC

yardstick wrote: post #870

Johnny555 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take Denmark for example that taxes software engineers 50 percent of their salary (it's not unique to SWEs it's just because nearly all SWEs will make enough to fall into this bracket). I'm thoroughly examining other lower tax bracket countries to move to because why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement? Denmark consistently ranks in the top 5 of countrie…

> Are you really suggesting you want to leave Denmark to go somewhere with lower tax rates, then when you need social healthcare, you'll move back to Denmark and take advantage of the healthcare system that you didn't pay for? Isn’t that the point of their healthcare/retirement system? It’s socialist, not user pays. That it covers everyone irrespective of their tax contributions. Otherwise it would exclude the unempl…

Isn’t that the point of their healthcare/retirement system

I don't think "Encourage people to move out of the country during the working years and move back to the country when they are old and need expensive healthcare coverage" is the point.

It may be the result of their system, but it's not the point. But if it became a problem, they could require that you buy back into the system after an extended absence out of the country.

Re: Coinbase lays off around 1,100 employees

#970

Post by coryfklein » Wed, Jun 15, 2022, 6:08 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #649

Johnny555 wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the same? If my house is worth $1M in 2022, I pay tax on that $1M of value. If it goes down in value to $500K in 2023 (and is reassessed), I'd pay tax on $500K value in 2023. If I own $1B of AMZN in 2022, I'd pay wealth tax on my $1B holdings in 2022, if the market tanks and AMZN is worth $50M in 2023, then I'd pay the wealth tax on $50M in 2023. Just as with property taxes, a wealth tax is generally annua…

It feels weird I’d have to pay anyone just for owning something. Besides, how would you price private companies? Are those just going to be free?

To be honest, we're dealing with this in the context of a really weird situation; that is the curious case of the existence of the billionaire! How strange is it indeed, that in a democracy there can arise individuals with access to such ridiculously outsized and concentrated power (relative to their individual contribution)?

When the equivalent power of millions of people can become concentrated into a single person, you get all sorts of weird consequences! Most of them not good for the public as a whole, and often with a corrupting influence on liberal democracy. It is indeed fitting then, that a solution targeted at this very rare and specific problem would look a little weird; even though it's extremely similar to the existing property tax that every home owner pays.