Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission(theblockcrypto.com) |
Coinbase offers exit package for employees not comfortable with its mission(theblockcrypto.com) |
ha.
Sure, 50 years ago MAYBE this would have been valid, but I'm doubtful.
Are we going to ignore that companies in Germany were profiting off of the Nazi regime? Lockheed-Martin, BAE, etc pushing us into infinite war. Oil and gas companies lying about climate change. Coinbase is taking the side of those types of companies.
Climate change has been hijacked as a political issue. Lobbyists from companies are constantly arguing in favor of more damaging and exploitive rules for society.
So, no you can't be apolitical. Armstrong is being selfish and privileged. He's signaling to employees that they need to shut up and make money. If I was working there, I'd be glad this was exposed now instead of later.
I speculate that this is a way for Coinbase to carry out its first round of layoffs.
No, it's not, at all.
> What's being discussed at the workplace isn't foreign policy
Well, I mean, it often is, but clearly that's not what you are centrally focussed on.
> it's authoritarianism vs democracy
That's still politics even when it isn't foreign policy, but it's not a mutually exclusive category with foreign policy.
> People are getting executed in the street by those supposed to serve and protect
Domestic racial and political repression is, very much, politics.
As is asking people to shut up about it.
> Asking employees to ignore an existential threat is like asking humans to not experience emotion,
No, it's asking workers to not act out on their emotion and behave as the industrial tools and consumables (“human resources”) which is their use in capitalism.
No one owes anyone anything and there are not really any rules here. Consequences and outcomes yes but no real rules.
So the people that work at Coinbase took some action (walkout) and the CEO is taking some action (blog post/policy/vision clarification/severance offers to leave). His job is to convince and use his power to get his desired outcome. But employees have a similar amount of power to change the vision and direction of the company too. They don’t often wield it well since it’s been in business owners best interest to convince workers they don’t have this power at all.
It will be interesting to see if the employees realize any of this and how they respond.
Furthermore, 6 months severance is on the lighter side for 3yrs of service in cases where the company did something remotely controversial. Setting the aside the issue of allowing politics at the workplace or not, actual implementation of the policing invites all sorts of non-standard harassment and first amendment claims. Any of the lawyers in the Bay Area who helped Uber employees negotiate severance could likely get a deal like this doubled, especially if the employee is a manager or senior-level. While 6 months of salary is nothing to scoff at, there's a time and a place for major company ideology changes and COVID is not the time to make employees worry about their employment.
Being an adversarial employee when working on an exit package certainly is FAR from necessary, but it's also not at all necessary to put people out of a job during COVID due to _culture changes_.
Now bringing these ideas to work and using that as a vehicle for change is not something I’m comfortable with, but if you as a company have a mission, you can’t expect your staff to not also have missions that might be aligned or orthogonal to the company.
It might make your company work better getting rid of politics (that disagrees with yours anyway) from the workplace by paying people. I wonder if it leads to a filtering out of potentially difficult conversations that people should have.
Anyway I’m against corporate stuff like this and I think you can cut this down quite a lot without the fluff. I wonder what the specific internal conversations were to prompt this public plea for apolitical-ness outside of the company’s political mission.
This is exacerbated by a decade+ of claiming the company is "making the world a better place by X," when really of course it's not. It's selling ads or what have you.
So, I think part of the insistence to bring politics into work is also driven by that - the employees were sold a bill of moral goods at 23, slowly realize the company doesn't actually have the PR mission it says it does because it's a profit seeking company, and employees start trying to overcorrect.
At least CB is being open about what they're about :shrug:.
Probably a matter of pick your poison.
I spent a lot of years as a traveling consultant. Every company I visited broadcast it's culture and in doing so, it's mission. It's in the way companies bring products to market, it's in the words it uses to describe itself. It's in the way it treats its employees.
The mission could be "We want to line the pockets of the founder's family." It could be "we want to build products that make people's lives better in these distinct ways." It can even be "We want to shine this turd just long enough to get acquired by our largest competitor." As employees, we buy in one way or another.
Each of those is a mission, just a very different mission from the way Coinbase is positioning their mission.
So you think wealth is based on 80% luck and your solution is to reset the family wealth every time?
So a family who isn't "lucky" can't pass on their little wealth to their children and have that compound over time? You'd prefer the children get the reset button?
You have some flawed understanding of how people can actually increase the probability to generate wealth.
They would have a leg to stand on if they were part of a worker's cooperative, because then they'd be owners. The juicy job market for tech workers may obscure this fundamental fact, but when the rubber hits the road any overpaid engineer is still considered hired help and forever "below the salt". Until workers build up a co-op sector to compete with private sector companies, they will never have a say, no matter how much they kick and scream.
So either sit your ass down and sell your soul like you already said you would, or get out there and start building. Not just for yourself, but for all of us. Because we will never have true democracy as long as most of the wealth the people generate gets sliced and diced at board meetings without even the veneer of representation.
I feel the whole argument against being apolitical is just being made in bad faith to support radicalism, political acceleration and extremism.
Why would you wan't a workplace of radicals always fighting? If you can't argue this then you can't argue against being apolitical.
Initially the king used the Wahhabi extremists as troops and it was quite a successful partnership. But eventually it went sour as the king tried to modernize the country bringing in phone lines and roads and he was attacked by his former extremist friends who were opposed to the sinful modern world. Eventually the king enlisted the aid of the British with airplanes and machine guns and the Wahhabi were subdued (with a large number being killed).
A couple of parallels and potential lessons here.
Beware of getting in bed with unreasonable and fanatical extremists. They will turn on their former benefactors fairly quickly and the danger often isn't worth the risk.
And, if you are an fanatical extremist (not passing judgement on just noting), you likely won't actually ever take power for long and will be quickly disposed of when no longer useful or you become problem which you will shortly. Cynical people will take advantage of your idealism for their own purposes but you won't see the benefits.
The people who put money above all are their own form of extremist. I guess it is normalized to the point of being a non consideration, meanwhile the planet burns.
Now if you feel like your power as a citizen has dwindled and you can't meaningfully enact change through democratic means, it makes sense to try and "weaponize" your job, especially if you work for a powerful company and you're a valuable highly skilled worker.
But in the end if you're dissatisfied with your company and you know that there's a fundamental ideological incompatibility it probably makes more sense to just quit, especially when you're a software dev and you can probably find some other job fairly easily.
I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions but for some reason I don't see that happening in the USA any time soon...
Take for example NFL management telling the players not to kneel in solidarity. That is the players' most effective (and frankly, peaceful, and not particularly disruptive) way to send a message. But if you don't agree with their message, moving to shift it to a less visible place is absolutely a political attempt to neuter it.
It's a good thing to try to be so generous with supporting an exit over values alignment. It's unfortunate, though not surprising, for Armstrong to want Coinbase to be like other for-profit financial firms -- quietly amassing wealth and influence vs. noisily in the spotlight.
Politics is not something that happens twice a year in a voting booth, or even something that happens on TV; it's how you and I engage with civic society at large, and to say that the workplace should, or even could be divorced from that seems almost silly.
Coinbase doesn't walk to talk about politics at work? That's neat, and sounds nice. But they're making that statement in a time where "not talking about politics" is something that very much works in favor of some groups and against others.
I know that we're engineers, and we want to spend our days building and shipping. I wouldn't ever fault anyone for that desire. But we have to acknowledge the fact that neutrality favors, and will always favor, one side of a debate. To protest that politics are something that "doesn't happen here" is to bury one's head in the sand.
Some other forms that I'd be happy to eliminate:
* Virtue signalling via preaching the doctrine of the party predominant at the company
* Bob from IT talking endlessly about his pet theory of Soros conspiracies
* Portraying politically grey areas as completely black-and-white and deplatforming those that disagree
After reading The Toxoplasma of Rage[1] I can't help but regard the vast majority of current politics with a great deal of cynicism.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
I was taught politics isn't polite to talk about it.... illogical (what politics are to me ...a pissing match driven by billionaires on each side fueling fires for their side and their sheep almost mindlessly following along ) views aren't a welcoming or warm human experience that fosters teamwork.
All companies should follow with this stance ..letting all know discussing politics at XYZ company is frowned upon and if troubles arise from it (other employees feeling harassed and or uncomfortable by it; report it) then XYZ company isn't the place for you!
A company deciding between "everyone work from home" or "everyone come into the office and sit in open seating" has to engage with the realities of what the virus is, which necessitates taking a stand on issues which are political.
This is doubly impossible for Coinbase since cryptocurrency is the most overtly political area of technology.
https://www.icpas.org/information/copy-desk/insight/article/...
Encouraging explicitly amoral stances from companies and retaliatory actions such as this may be appealing to some but is ultimately harmful to the company and society in general. That's a debatable assertion of course but the more we learn about white collar crime and companies which disregard the harms they do the more we find that individuals lacking empathy are core players.
None of these are perfect solutions, but any of them would be a step in the right direction. When manufacturing was the engine of economic growth in America, workers figured out how to get it to work for them. Tech is becoming the new engine now, and it's time for us (the workers) to figure out how to implement systemic changes to ensure our concerns are heard and addressed.
As to your main point, I agree. Whinging about your employer won't change anything - the systems themselves need to be changed.
It's the same idea as how modern agile companies run, small teams that work in the same environment, have more empathy/trust of one another, and are able to make compromises in order to have stability and direction within the team.
Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want.
Having multiple baskets is essential for enabling different ideas and perspectives, especially if the bad ideas were to win out. I firmly believe humans are not meant to have such large scale societal structures where communities are expected to encompass an entire nation. You care more about and think more similarly to your neighbor than you do someone three thousand miles away.
You'd think that after months of "locally led" covid responses in the US that this naive take would somehow become less popular.
Whether small-government enthusiasts like it or not, the US is highly interconnected on almost every level. There are certain things that absolutely require federal responses. Things like pollution and viruses absolutely need to be handled from a nation wide perspective. How would healthcare work as a piecemeal implementation across local lines? Its almost as if "letting localities decide" is a nice way of ensuring something will fail without forcing it outright.
Your argument is implying that the federal government is somehow ineffective, but given the federally led improvements across the last century - from roads to environmental regulations, public health and even the internet just shows that you're either ignorant of intentionally dishonest.
at the state level, Republican;
at the local level, Democrat;
and at the family and friends level, a socialist.
If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”
- Nassim Taleb, Skin in the game
This is what is breaking down I feel. And what we're seeing is just a symptom - employers want to ban workplace politics not because politics and participation is bad per se, but because it has become so dirty and vicious that allowing it can literally destroy the company. You can't efficiently work together with people you hate, and I definitely feel like hate has become the primary weapon and the primary drive of US politics. It is basically required from anybody who plays in it to hate your opponent, and to hate everybody who doesn't march in lockstep with you. If you don't, you're probably secretly in league with "them" and must be targeted for hate yourself. There's no respectful disagreement, there's no difference of opinion allowed, there's no assumption of good will and willing to work through disagreements. The slogan of the day is "burn it all down". Of course there's only two ways for the company to survive in such environment - either everybody thinks the same and wrongthinkers are expelled - thus ensuring all hate is directed outside the company - or ban the politics and keep the hate outside the place of employment. Third way would be to actually remove the hate from the equation, but it doesn't look like there are enough grownups around for this to happen.
> I guess an other possibility would be to have proper unions
I don't see how the unions - especially US unions which are completely partisan - would help anything, except making the union shop inaccessible to those who isn't willing to join union's party.
I think this will happen sooner rather than later. As the market gets flooded with more and more engineers, tech workers will continue to get more and more proletarianized. Unionization will be the natural avenue for workers to get a slice of the pie.
This is a bizarre, ahistorical sentiment. Go read about the history of labor struggle in the US. Even when everyone could vote, the organizing of workplaces and response by their employers was far more contentious and violent than anything that’s going on today.
Here in France I can't quite think of something really similar to Silicon Valley activists. When I think about worker-led revolts I think of Germinal or Mai 68, when the proletariat (and, in the case of Mai 68, the students and then the proletariat) fought for better working conditions and more rights.
I don't think that's very similar to the time of activism we're talking about here. For one thing IT workers are not exactly the lowest dregs of the proletariat, it's a very privileged position with much better working conditions that most. Beyond that the fight is not usually for the direct benefit of said workers ("higher salaries!" or "fewer hours!" or "better food at the corporate restaurant!") but more ideologically motivated. An obvious instance of this is the very polarizing firing of Brendan Eich from Mozilla (that's still making waves all these years later). Doing that didn't directly change anything material for Mozilla's employee, it was motivated by ideology. The only thing that comes close I think is videogame devs complaining about their bad working conditions, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
Conversely the 1984's UK miner strike wasn't triggered because the National Coal Board had said something homophobic. It's just not comparable, IMO.
The lack of violence is also easy to explain: violence is the weapon of those that have no other way to be heard. Developers in the silicon valley can make themselves heard without having to burn their company-provided MacBooks and taking their managers hostage at the next SCRUM Sprint planning.
I think you're close, but not quite right. I think what has happened is that ideas well outside the Overton Window have become popular with a couple small, but very vocal, groups. Their ideas aren't very popular with most people, so they can't achieve their desired outcomes democratically. They therefore try to "weaponize" their jobs in influential institutions, like Software companies, to gain influence over the rest of society.
While true that you could find "some other job" - it likely won't be a job that pays as well or has some other detestable attribute. If you have a pathological disagreement with companies collecting lots of data - you're going to have a hard time finding a company paying you $400k+/yr as an IC software dev.
If you're not wealthy (bought real estate before the big boom) or come from a family of wealth (they bought you a house) - you're going to have hard time in many cities only going with companies that you can find almost no ideological incompatibility with. And, turns out, a lot of these major cities that are very expensive also happen to have most of the job listings. God forbid you move to BFE and the few places that hire ICs stop hiring. You'll have to upheave your entire life and move - or pray you can find a suitable remote job.
Like most of us - you sacrifice your ideology because it isn't compatible with living in a capitalistic world and you've decided you're also not ready to be a martyr. You stand to lose a lot in the developed world (as you start with a lot more than those in less developed places) - martyrdom isn't worth it then. Only when you're independently wealthy can you truly make decisions based on your ideology. Making the presumption here that everyone wants a middle class to upper middle class American lifestyle (SFH, 2 cars, live in a somewhat desirable area, kids, retirement savings, etc.).
Because I have the right to provide for my children and ensure they can live their best life.
I don’t care if it’s “not fair” or if I “lucked out.” My family comes in first. Not the government, not anyone else - if I make something or earn something, it is my right to provide for my family.
> largely by being born in the right place, at the right time, with the right parents etc. etc.
Why is anyone obligated to a level playing field?
And the polarization of unions is far from a forced move. I do not think Republicans made this happen: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democratic-socialists-am...
It's more like that centralized top-down economy is much more comfortable for the union leadership than chaotic horizontal competitive economy. It's much easier to enforce certain policy by the power of the government than negotiate it privately with each employer. That makes unions a natural ally of socialists. And of course there's nothing like government subsidies and regulations - which can be exchanged for votes and donations - to hide the inefficiencies of inflexible unionized setups and deflect the competitive threats from more agile and enterprising newcomers. Again, here the unions are the natural allies of centralized regulatory state. And the effects of this are pretty obvious: https://nypost.com/2018/08/25/why-nyc-is-priciest-city-in-th... https://www.nj.com/news/2018/06/money_for_nothing_working_th...
That's not Republican party's fault.
https://ucommblog.com/section/national-politics/ronald-reaga...
(And Zerohedge is a trashbag of libertarian fanfiction and russian govt talking points - with the exception of their currency coverage - which is great stuff.)
The cleavage you’re describing between ideological and material concerns is one that was introduced as part of the neoliberal ideology of the 1970s, in which Capital intentionally carved out a narrow space for identitarian claims to better defend itself from the multi-constituency groups that were attacking it in the 1960s. But it doesn’t reflect the real history of how solidarity functioned in the period.
There is certainly a shift in white-collar workers beginning to understand themselves in terms more akin to their working class predecessors, especially as it relates to hierarchy and power dynamics in companies. But this is not too terribly surprising given that massive wealth inequality has produced an even greater degree of proletarianization, even among the highly educated workforce. Google has more contract employees than regular employees now, for example.
These are progressive ideals pushed usually by people who share other progressive ideals, but employee representation is not itself ideologically motivated.
I think that was exactly the OP's point. The kind of activism we're talking about here is low-key activism by privileged people. I can't think of any examples either - that didn't mean they didn't happen, it just means they weren't important enough to make the history books because they were settled without any violence.
> from roads
The Interstate Highway System, while technically impressive, essentially entrenched the US as a car-centric society from the top-down.
> public health
The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
> even the Internet
DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
On the flip-side, US States are larger than many nations. The State of Massachusetts has more people than Norway, and enjoys a similar HDI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.
Its been effective. It achieve the goals it set out to do. We discovered that focusing on highways and cars was ultimately not very good. But it achieved the goal it set out to do, so I don't get what your point is.
> The vast majority of our healthcare problems can be attributed to the fact that it's tied to employment, which was caused by Federal policies.
This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
> DARPA falls under "organize national defense". The EU also has EU-level agencies that work on space research (ESA). Advanced research can also be organized among the States in a CERN-like model.
Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
> Insofar as "localities" are ill-suited to governing, the States are a sufficient mechanism for top-down control.
Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
That's exactly the thing we're arguing against — a monopoly/monolith doesn't necessarily know whether the goal is the correct one. Enterprises rely on competition to arrive at the "correct" goal. The argument is to allow State actors to do the same. Discovering that something is "not very good" after experimenting on 300+ million people is worse than running those experiments and observing those failures more locally at the State level, where failures impact fewer people. GP commenter made the same argument, as follows:
"Additionally, we shouldn't be trying to put all of our eggs in one basket. Should we have single-payer healthcare nationally? No one knows if that's the most appropriate solution for all of the US, but why not let cities or communities try various localized healthcare strategies out for themselves. Each may try things differently. Some may work and some may fail. Other places can see how things worked elsewhere and either decide to improve, not implement, or take verbatim what another local government has done. You influence change by setting an example and letting others decide for themselves, not by trying to force the world to behave as a small subset of people want."
I don't know that I agree that healthcare systems should be fragmented at the city level, but there's really no reason why States shouldn't drive healthcare policy and try different approaches. Switzerland, Denmark, the UK, Singapore, and Germany all have wildly different healthcare systems — all with their own merits and demerits. There isn't a single system that is objectively "the best". States can enact the policies that the citizens want the most, and we can see for ourselves how they do.
> This is an absurd argument. What are you even trying to convey? That the Federal Government should take charge of providing healthcare? OK then.
And this is an absurd reading of that argument. The argument is that we got to where we have because the Federal government started off by 1) imposing wage ceilings that resulted in employers offering health insurance to get around those, 2) enacted a tax deduction to incentivize employers to keep doing this after the wage ceilings were lifted, and 3) instituted a mandate for employers to provide health insurance. These are all terrible policies, all advanced at the Federal level. It should then follow that we should reduce the degree to which the Federal government makes these decisions, not increase them. You don't promote a bad decision maker, you fire them.
> Medicare/Medicaid/ACA are all Federal policies and provide healthcare to millions who wouldn't get that otherwise.
Medicare subsidizes healthcare for overwhelmingly rich people (old people are the richest cohort in America, owing to a lifetime of accrued income). Does that mean we shouldn't subsidize healthcare for any old people? No, not at all — Medicare was just local optima. ACA entrenched employer-sponsored health insurance via the employer mandate. Are individual mandates bad policy? No, not at all, that's how Swiss healthcare works. But ACA was more than just that, and got us stuck in local optima.
Again, that's the entire point — when we give a monopoly sole decision-making power, it's very difficult to get ourselves out of local optima, especially when the polity is as ideologically polarized / heterogenous as ours.
> Again not sure what your point is. EU has Federal agencies too, yeah, so what?
Exactly. The argument is not that the US should have 0 Federal agencies, it's just that it should look more like the EU, writ large. One of the foundational principles of the EU is "subsidiarity" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(European_Union). I (and ostensibly, also GP) argue that the US ought to follow this model.
> Hard disagree. While States have been great for introducing and experimenting with new ideas, spreading those ideas across the country requires Federal Investment and oversight. Obamacare traces its origins to Romneycare in Mass, but it required Federal dollars to bring it to the rest of the country.
Yeah but that's just because most of that taxation goes to the Federal government. There's no reason that can't change, and for the majority of one's taxes to go to their State government. Today, I pay around ~30% of my income to the Federal government and ~10% to my State. The argument is to make that the other way around, so that you don't need Federal dollars to bring things at the State level. This is exactly how it works in Switzerland, where the top marginal rate at the Federal level is ~10%, and Cantonal rates vary between 16-30%. Switzerland isn't some "libertarian" hell hole, it's one of the most prosperous nations on the planet. Likewise, the EU's leaves taxation entirely to its Member States, and not only do they do just fine, some of their States are arguably more prosperous than the US.
The EU gave us the Greek and Irish financial crises and Brexit.
Pointing at Greece kind of makes the point: you get to isolate the failures, and Greece doesn't get to hold back Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, et al. On the flip side, EU Citizens aren't at each others' throats about everything because they are largely enfranchised at the Member State level.
You can't say either of this about the US.
> Irish financial crises
Yeah but then as of 2015, Ireland became the fastest growing economy in the EU. As of today, it is among the top 10 wealthiest countries in the world.
> and Brexit
Yes, and now the UK no longer gets to sabotage the EU.
I live in Switzerland, and the response here to the virus and most other incidents are far more federally managed than the cantonal system would imply to someone accustomed to US states, in my opinion. If forced at gunpoint to generalize, the simplest explanation I would use having lived in both countries is that in Switzerland the cantons have more independence in execution, while in the US they have more freedom in legislation.
Everyone wins when competitors try different things and find out what's efficient and what works well and what doesn't. Marijuana legalization and gay marriage started as experiments by states and localities, which could find and set the example to be adopted federally.
Everyone loses when an entrenched monopoly (here the federal government) can forcibly impose one way of doing things with no room for deviation.
I think both Marijuana and gay marriage legalization started because of a small group of like-minded people that found it acceptable and were able to spread that ideology enough so that eventually the state could vote on them. For those particular examples, competition doesn't really kick in until it's already been experimented with, but then it really speeds up the spread for sure.
Looking at the timeline of cannabis laws [1], recreational use in particular, Colorado basically tipped the ice berg. My point is that the organic spread of new and/or controversial ideas is localized before competition kicks in.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_cannabis_laws_in_t...
The libertarian "Minimize the federal government" is an extremely misguided fanatical view which is devoid of any fact-based reasoning. Federal investments have lead to transformative change in most sections of the US economy. Federal Reserve keeping the interest rates low and providing unlimited liquidity is whats keeping the stock market from tanking today. Federal investments will be key to de carbonizing the US economy and reducing income inequality (e.g. by increasing the minimum wage).
A lot of survivorship bias on here and folks who want to think everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, get rid of taxation and large government etc etc
It completely neglects marginalized people.
For the same reason that Google tells Congress 'You need to let us run free to fight those Chinese giants', the US needs federal level regulation to play on the same level as those companies, if it had the guts.
I'll offer a different take: taxation (and budgets) are just the price we pay to society for a basket of services. There's some optimum price / optimum basket. This competition allows different societies to lower their price (taxes) or lower their basket of services based on the democratic needs of that society. Some societies will value job creation more than short-run costs to the budget, and others will not. It's not surprising at all that the city that didn't have a whole lot of jobs chose the former (via the democratically elected government), and the city that already had a lot of jobs (NYC) chose the latter, also via a similarly selected government.
No, my argument is that the EU tries to "have it both ways" by taking away fiscal and monetary sovereignty but leaving cultural sovereignty intact. The result is that Greece, Ireland, Spain, etc were not really able to regulate their economies in any meaningful sense to prevent the kind of blow-up we saw in 2008, particularly because, when you share a currency and trade zone with a heavy exporter like Germany, their surpluses are your deficits.
The Spanish, Irish, and Greek housing bubbles were underwritten by the profits of German exporters. Greek fiscal malfeasance was overlooked because it was considered politically more important to grow the EU and the Eurozone than to let anyone at all have the authority necessary to enforce healthy fiscal and trade balances.
The United States does not actually work this way, because the federal government engages in countercyclical transfers between the states. The wealth of New York and California gets recycled, through taxes, to pay for military bases in Maine, pensions and Social Security checks in Florida and Arizona, and timber conservancies in Idaho.
Is the current wave of political tension in workplaces limited to tech/SV companies, or is this a more general thing? Have there been any significant incidents/announcement in other areas?
Good God, your firm exists to facilitate trading in speculative assets peddled by libertarian internet millionaires and that just so happen to be exceptionally useful for laundering money - enabling a whole online industry of shadow markets that were thought impossible a decade ago.
I understand that your values dictate that association with this unsavory bunch is an acceptable compromise when pitted against the grave dangers of government overreach and surveillance - I am of the same opinion. But social revolutionaries you are certainly not, just opportunists speaking the slogans of the day while lining their own pockets. So Armstrong's sincerity and lack of pretense is refreshing.
This is a fantastic sentence. One of those times when I wish I could upvote more than once.
Arguably even more puzzling are the social activists at Facebook etc. They work for a platform that has interfered with democracy, has been proven to cause or exacerbate mental health problems, tramples over privacy, and at the very least is deliberately designed to be addictive and waste a lot of people's time.
It is strange that people can (claim to) care so deeply about the welfare of certain identity groups, yet work for a company that shows contempt for humanity as a whole.
Their 'social activism' as its presented in that post includes trying to conflate BCash with Bitcoin to noobs who were unaware of the fork in order to bolster the price of a alt coin with no value or usecase just as mainstream attention (read: non-technical users) was being gained, and by extension they promoted Ver/Jihan/Bitmain's agenda and failed coup. If that dishonest behavior of their user's wasn't enough they would later report its users to the IRS and then, as released earlier this year [0] they are DIRECTLY offering Blockchain analytics to the IRS and DEA. And then ban Wikileaks account from their platform.
I regret to say that as a Community we never learned our lesson in the MANY pitfalls of allowing the growth of a cancerous central point of failure after Mt Gox, and that the path of 'least resistance' to on-board people into this tech had many (predictable) dire consequences. I've used centralized exchanges before, but it didn't feel as a enthralling as when I went to a meetup, spoke to like minded people in the Community and bought some in a p2p manner--its really a night and day experience contrast. Or simply got tipped by total strangers online for a project or an idea I wanted to explore as I had in the early days.
What were supposed to be training wheels to gradually create an ecosystem primarily driven to be a p2p currency, as was intended, became a crutch that atrophied and poisoned the general curiosity which denied it's users the rewards that often followed which made this really remarkable.
This neglect has allowed Coinbase as a single entity to now hold a large percentage of the total Bitcoin in existence, not including the large amounts that they hold custody of its user's who simply do not take possession of their funds.
To say Bitcoin can be a-political is grounded in the very ignorance that created the aforementioned consequences; it is by default the reaction to the perpetual failures of the politicizing of State-based currencies and the corruption of Central Banks. It's very Genesis Block states why it was created: as an alternative to the bailouts of 2008.
I honestly don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that Coinbase represents the very worse, and the toxic nature of what YC can bring into existence. That sounds entirely scathing, and perhaps unwarranted to those unaware of the dire nature, but this is really no different than enabling how FAANG has created a business model that has pretty much them an extension of many countries Intelligence Agencies who directly sell their user's data/information to the highest bidder. The difference being that this Trojan horse was only possible because YC funded them in the early stages.
Who's to say they won't, or haven't already, created another?
0: https://decrypt.co/31485/coinbase-license-analytics-irs-dea
I would expect a government to have proper separation from church and state, so why is it weird to want a company to separate politics and mission?
I can't see any good coming from being in a work environment where the company supports a political issue I'm strongly against, it would make co-workers and myself feel like opponents and likely make for a hostile work environment.
That is how it ought to be!!!!!! Activism and politics tends to divd people. Keep it out of work is a great thing!
There is no point to talk about anything like activism or politics.
Just do it!
Just weigh it up like that. I might have to delete the app
Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society, not just which “party” you like. The very act of being a company is very relative to the laws and regulations your country has, which are of course determined by politics.
Coinbase is specifically a company about cryptocurrency. Crypto is directly related to a how governments manage their own currency, the right to privacy, law circumvention (see Alpha Bay), and so on. How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
that's one of those "you're either with us or against us" type of deal - which is not the right way to deal with anything imho.
You _can_ be apolitical - as in, you do not let your political views affect what you do. You keep your political views private. You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job.
If someone just does their job with people no matter who they are then they are not political. Being gay is not political. Being trans is not political. Being black is not political. Saying that gays/trans/black people shouldn't exist or doesn't belong is political. Saying that everyone needs to care about gay/trans/black rights is political. A trans person and a fundamental Christian who works well together without bringing up either political stance are not political. If the fundamental Christian makes a fuzz then he is political and should be reprimanded. If the trans person digs into the Christians opinions until they find something to get angry about and then get angry they are political.
I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand.
This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X. Thermodynamics tells us that we can't ever reach absolute zero. Therefore I don't have to put the groceries away in the refrigerator.
No person or organization can be completely apolitical, but they can aim to be minimally political. And that difference is substantial. Only a maximal postmodernist would dispute that the NRA is orders of magnitude more political than the IETF.
Similarly we strive for our courts to be free of bias. However jurists are flesh and blood. They'll get hungry or sleep and that will affect their mood. Yet we'd all be horrified if a judge openly declared "Ya know what? I hate Dutch-Americans and plan to rule against them in every case regardless of the facts"
It is so sad that people increasingly have this view. Politics was never how “we engaged and collaborated in society”.
This is a Kafka trap
While you can't be apolitical, you can be measured, polite, balanced, and recognize there is an appropriate time and place for everything. You can recognize that there is only time and energy for so many things. You can also recognize that much of politics is manufactured outrage and theater. Opting out of all of the daily outrage cycle as a business or individual in favor of contemplative attention to things that truly matter to you on a 10 to 15 year scale seems like a very reasonable approach to me.
Claiming that people doing so "support the status quo" or "if you're not with us you're against us" is groupthink and coercive at best, and a mob mentality at worst.
> Politics:
> the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.
If you think it means:
> how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society
You're biting at a hook baited with identity politics. That's a curated opinion that politicians are glad you've accepted because it's choked you from imagining that apolitical positions exist.
It's absolutely possible to be apolitical. It may be hard to do so. It may be possible to claim to be "apolitical" in a way that gains political leverage. That's dishonesty and it's a different topic.
This is a fairly untenable position. Suppose there is an alien civilization somewhere with a similarly complex organization as our own society. You have no stake or opinions in the outcomes of what they do. You might even have beliefs that might give rise to politics ("I don't want earth destroyed," for instance), but in a real sense, you are apolitical with respect to that civilization. That doesn't make you in favor of the status quo, it just means that you don't know or care what's going on there.
Bringing it closer to home, you'll realize that you have similar apolitical beliefs with respect to a small town in a neighboring country, or maybe the government policy of the Central African Republic.
You might object that in these cases, a person is by construction unaware of the goings-on in distant places; however, I think the contrary argument is more absurd. The contrary argument is that as soon as someone merely knows about a political issue, she is then forced to choose, without her consent, that she is in favor of the status quo. That's not a tenable way to treat people with respect, not to mention organize society. And loads of people intentionally ignore the goings-on in politics.
So then, if people can be apolitical about certain or even most issues, certainly someone could be apolitical about all but the most mundane issues (like the governance of a family).
Further, the status quo is not a political issue; it's the condition of living in some reality. Human collective action is only one component that shapes our status quo. Many are beyond human control. So the mere existence of a status quo does not imply that anyone "chooses" it.
That I think is the error. A person can have no opinion and withdraw from politics. That is apolitical. Constructing the concept in such a way that forces them to pick a side of a line in the sand excludes the middle ground, and is also profoundly disrespectful and unfair.
I can see why a company might want to engage in a little bit of politics, particularly when it is tied to its very own existence. But that doesn't mean it should be engaging in all kinds of politics at all the times. So we are talking about "truly apolitical" vs "mostly apolitical" vs "not at all apolitical".
It seems Coinbase wants to be "mostly apolitical" here.
They most definitely will not be neutral on policy decisions that affect their business, and if you go read their blog post they said exactly that:
> If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
sure if someone says that they believe drug use should not be criminalized but also claim to be apolitical and do nothing to help make drug use legal, it follows that they are supporting the status quo of actually keeping drug use illegal.
However if that status quo is changed by the actions of others who do want drug use to be legalized and the apolitical person does nothing to try to oppose this new status quo it can be reasonably assumed that they were in fact apolitical.
Then you might say that their politics is to support the Status quo, but that is probably only in regards to the things they don't care strongly enough about to do anything about one way or another. Which is the case with most people.
Most people throughout history have been apolitical in this way - if you give them something to decide regarding an issue they have no strong opinions on they will most likely do nothing and let the status quo prevail.
Making a workplace political means excluding people who believe in the mission but don't share your views on things irrelevant to that mission. This is dumb for a couple reasons:
* you've now hamstrung the mission your organization was ostensibly about
* the people you excluded are still out there. Even if you no longer have to work with them, you do have to share a society with them. And now they're going to form their own organizations and become more polarized.
It may be a cost worth bearing in some circumstances, but generally you want to keep the number of people excluded in this manner to a minimum.
>Politics is ultimately about how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society,
An organization can be apolitical in which clients it takes, how it applies its agreements and rules, and its involvement in the campaign process.
>How can they truly be neutral on all of these issues that are directly relevant to the business they do?
They do not need to take a stance on law circumvention or the right to privacy other than to uphold the law and maximize customer value.
When you accept employment at a company, you do so on their terms -- including whether political activism on the job is permitted.
If you want to set the terms of employment, start or buy a company. Or, I guess, get laws passed that outlaw companies from having a policy you disagree with.
Whether being apolitical is itself political or not is a circular argument -- for some it is, for some it isn't. And that difference is itself a difference of political opinion of the same kind as the others.
These are issues with consumers and state not the business.
Coinbase didn't say they would be neutral about all issues, just issues that aren't related to their business. Obviously if the government wants to ban cryptocurrency, they're going to lobby against it.
Where employees seem to spend more time on social justice than building the product the company is selling.
"Don't say he's hypocritical, say rather that he's apolitical. 'Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down, that's not my department', says Wernher von Braun."
that said i think it's wrong to ascribe political motives to every move and claim that nobody can be a-political in public. Political belongs to the public sphere and not everyone wants to live in there.
The Far Left and the Far Right, and college activists everywhere, tend to agree with this statement.
Everyone else finds the idea of a forced battle, which is what you said entails, to be the beginnings of authoritarianism (or bullying if taken at an individual level).
I was surprised that other people were surprised that there's a confederate flag spray-painted on a car-sized piece of corrugated steel that's been beside the interstate (on private property) for years now that I see every time I drive between two cities.
Similarly the number of confederate flag shirts and, recently facemasks.
That's tarring with rather a broad brush. There are a lot of old school liberals on the west coast who strongly disapprove of the progressives and their behavior, including myself. The progressives' "You are either with us or against us" rhetoric is diametrically opposed to the liberal "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." philosophy.
* Companies, like the rest of the world, are now hyperconnected. We have slack and email and so on. This makes it a lot easier for similar interests to connect across a massive organization, which is a boon for special interest groups, like anime, or magic the gathering. Or politics.
* Companies muscle in on workers' identity. Workers respond to work over email/slack during their off hours. Workers pop open the laptop at home, even pre-covid. Companies try to justify this with a sense of pride, you should be PROUD to work for the great conglomerate XYZ. And guess what? If I'm proud to work for XYZ, as a worker I'm going to expect a consistent worldview that XYZ is aligned with my values. But my values are also tied up in my politics, so now I'm expecting my workplace's values to be consistent with my politics.
* The simple fact is that many companies are overwhelmingly a monoculture in terms of politics. It's easier to make your workplace political when 90% or 85% of employees are liberal anyways, as opposed to say 60%. This is largely a demographic thing, at many companies the target demographic for hiring is a strong overlap with certain political ideology (You are looking to hire a young, 25 year old computer scientist living in a big blue city who graduated from PresigiousUniversity. What politics do you think this person likely subscribes to?).
I think people too readily assume that these people are blue, but you have to remember that academia (and tech in general) tends to have strong social pressure to either be blue or hide your political beliefs. There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.
Great point. Maybe this is it?
I have been skeptical of work activism, but maybe it makes given the size of the lever (vs alternative activism options).
It was completely politically biased. I was hired when the company was neutral but over the years the extreme left narrative settled in and we tended to only hire people with the same ideologies.
Executive discussions revealed it was an intentional culture shift to attract candidates.
Is that legal?
It's wild. That was standard not long ago. Most companies, even in tech, were apolitical. Maybe there would be some watercooler chat near the election with that one coworker who was really into politics, but that was about it. People mostly didn't know or care what the politics of their coworkers were. If they did, it wasn't a big deal and would still be friendly regardless.
But now many are convinced they are warriors in a never-ending existential war. Then it's hard to understand why someone isn't a warrior.
"We're about to die! What are you doing, not fighting? You must choose a side. You're with us or against us!"
Normally this happened on a 4 year cadence[1]. Locusts would descend to rally the troops, warn of impending doom, have the battle (vote), and then go hibernate for a few years. But now it's non-stop. The war just never ends. It bleeds into everything. Those who choose to not participate in the war or don't engage in the approved way are looked at with suspicion, accused of being the enemy.
1. https://benlandautaylor.com/2018/09/22/the-four-year-locusts...
Not a RULE, but guidance that it can be divisive and that folks should concentrate on work during work hours, whilst physically at work.
One person quit as a result - and, frankly, everyone was relieved. She was a hateful person that wouldn't shut up about her politics.
I agree - it's crazy that this is controversial. We are a much stronger and more unified company as a result of this policy.
What is more wild to me is that statements like "black lives matter", "climate change is real and a problem", and "the coronavirus pandemic is real" are political. These seem like they should be commonly agreed upon facts. If those statements are political then it is much harder to be apolitical.
It depends on how extreme the politics of the society are. It only sounds like there's an obviously "right" answer to you because you're used to living your entire life in a society where politics aren't that extreme yet from your point of view. But for many other people, the line was crossed in recent years.
I live in Northern Ireland the politics of my society are very extreme when its allowed in the workplace, group A kills group B and vice versa.
Calling out the extremists and forcing them to apolitical in the work place is necessary to stop them from killing every one.
You can argue that this is a call for centrism and the status quo and it is, but it makes sense for this to be the status quo simply because extremists like to kill anyone that doesn't agree with their politics, this is true across history, country and race.
There is an obvious right answer because I have seen what happens when extremism is made the status quo.
My dad taught me not to talk about politics nor religion in a workplace. I think it's for the best.
If the reformists are winning outside the company then the status quo is in the reformists favor and thus forbidding debate is pro change. For example now, Biden is favored to win so status quo is Biden wins, so a company forbidding political debate is liberal.
For Coinbase specifically, all their US locations are in blue states, making the status quo Democrat no matter how you see it.
Edit: Anyway, your argument doesn't make sense, you aren't in favor of the status quo unless you fight to bring it back after things change or you fight to keep it from changing. Also you aren't pro the status quo just because you prevent people you pay money to waste time arguing with each other instead of doing their job.
Church and state are separate because you don't get to choose your birth citizenship. But you do get to choose where you you seek employment. As long as the company is upfront about their politics when you take the job, it's up to you to decide to work there. ie, don't take a job at a christian bookstore if you aren't christian
Outside of the monoculture, it’s actually extremely easy to be apolitical at work and people seem to get along despite extremely different personal views of each other (for example, being non-Mormon in Salt Lake City).
You cannot separate the business practices of a financial institution from politics. It simply isn't possible. To attempt to do so is a political statement in an of itself, and quite frankly, it isn't a good one.
This is just the boring old dodge that "politics I agree with is apolitical, why are you being so controversial!"
The fact that a company can emancipate itself from the political scene is nothing but a libertarian fantasy. And the fact that professional lobbyists exist show that they do influence the political life of a country.
Because this is a non sequitur? You’re making appeals to protections enshrined in law to prevent the government from limiting the freedom and rights of individuals, when almost no such protections exist in the workplace. Why do people organize in their workplace? Because there exists no bill of rights for workers to prevent equivalent abuses of corporate power and hierarchy that are ostensibly so tyrannical when done by the government.
A better question would be why America has a two-track system of rights, where one must constantly defend their violation from the government, but also completely abandon them the moment they walk into their workplace.
One argument could be that it's much easier to change jobs than to change citizenship.
- Cryptocurrencies are good and should be legal.
- Private ownership of unrestricted amounts of capital is good.
- Central banks controlling the money supply are bad.
- The ability to send and receive money across borders and avoid capital controls is, in general, good.
- The existence of corporations is good.
- Venture capital is good, as is making money for the stock exchange.
- Reporting large amounts of customer information to federal tax agencies is bad and should be fought in court.
- Spying on individuals on behalf of governments with poor human rights records is bad, and moreover, having supported this work makes you ineligible to be an employee. (This is new as of March 2019; previously, the company did not have a position here.)
Now, these are entirely reasonable positions to take (in the sense that they're well within the Overton window, at least in the US), but they're absolutely political positions! (If it helps, note that the negation of all of these is a political claim.)
I'd understand the argument if it's something like "I don't want my company to mandate that I support expanded bike lanes on Market St." or whatever, but it's very silly to pretend that a company doesn't have a mission in the world or that its mission doesn't have political aspects. If you don't agree that cryptocurrency is making a positive difference in the world, why are you even there?
(And even so, I think it would be entirely rational for the company to say, "It's okay if individual employees disagree, but as a company, expanded bike lanes on Market St. is important to our business because it's how half the company commutes to work.")
I think this 'My cause is "the" cause' has arisen as an escalation in the fight for attention. And I think it's a big element in peoples view that not taking sides is controversial - "if you're not choosing to focus all your attention on my pet cause, you don't care about X"
It can be disheartening to see friends and movements I agree with turn to aggressive rhetoric and evangelism. But the fact that it's yet another symptom of a broken (social) media environment is a nice reminder that it's not their fault so much as it is an expected result of a bad system.
Of course, it's equally sad/disheartening that our modes of societal discourse and decision-making have gotten this bad, but it's a theoretically solvable problem (eg; legislation and a good facebook competitor) and it doesn't involve me feeling bad about people I like.
It really does remind me of the "family values" religious conservatives of the past. Proving how pure and wholesome they are and competing on it by doing more and more things that aren't just living a good honest life, but are trying to infringe on the lives of others. All to show your circle of other supposedly pure friends how godly you are. So it takes a noble cause which is to live an honest and good life and perverts it into a strange contest of virtue.
After all, nobody would complain if the KKK had brought Microsoft Office licenses, any more than they'd complain if the KKK had brought food at wal-mart.
But many tech companies have realised how profitable it is to be Facebook or Github. They own the domain, their name's in the banner at the top of the page and the name of the native app, they pay all the hosting costs and make all the ad money, and they've put themselves in the situation where they can censor users.
When we in tech moved away from "we just sell the stuff, none of our business what you do with it" and made "what you do with it" the core of our businesses, we were walking into the realm of politics whether we realised it at the time or not.
Oh yes they would. Selling to the KKK would make Microsoft and Walmart KKK supporters.
We are having an (ongoing) argument in America as to who deserves what kinds of civil rights. Rights like marriage (which confers extensive legal rights), protection from being fired, fair treatment by the cops and legal system, and much more.
I'm fairly confident that there will be a civil war shortly after the election.
There's no room for trying to improve a company from the inside?
It's the norm that people in a workplace are primarily seen as cogs in the system, humans with needs and opinions as second. Any time the latter is perceived to potentially affect the former, you will be told to fall into line.
The focus is not whales, forests, ice caps, malaria.
Why is this controversial?
It isn't politically neutral technology, sure-- but it's largely orthogonal to many other political concerns. This is good too, because an alternative money isn't particularly valuable unless it's useful to a broad spectrum of people.
I could easily imagine a cryptocurrency org that didn't have a culture of leaving your politics/religion at home -- at least to the extent that they didn't directly interact with your work-- could quickly become an extremely toxic and unproductive place.
The world hashed the issue out pretty thoroughly in the postwar years. I don't know if enough has changed since to warrant revisiting it.
It's not keeping politics out of work, it is a political standpoint in and of itself.
It's kind of funny to hear DLC/Clintonian Third Wayists described as “old-school liberals”, since when they rose to dominance “liberal” in American politics meant about what “progressive” is used for now and they were very much associated with the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, with an economic policy that synced up so well with that of the Republican Party that the period between their rise and the sharp rightward jump of the Republican Party that was a response to the resulting shift of the left edge of the Overton Window became known as the “neoliberal consensus” period in economic policy.
The real old-school liberals are the progressives.
> This seems like a fallacy. X may be undesirable, but it's impossible to completely rid ourselves of X. Therefore it's pointless to even worry about reducing X.
No one said anything about it being pointless.
And, no one said undesirable. Politics isn’t good or bad. It’s just part of life. In the sense that people are inherently social and will always be discussing, civilly or not, how things should be done.
To me, if I live in a democracy, what would be undesirable is a citizen who is not, in some form or fashion, active in the body politic since a democracy depends on an active (and educated) citizenry in order to function! :).
The NRA is "more political" in the sense of their daily activities, of course, but I think you could construct a great argument that the IETF has more impact on world politics (or, let's say, the governments of the world) than the NRA. Everyone knows the NRA is taking an absolutist give-everyone-an-AR-15 stance; they work very hard on it, but at this point they're almost an anchor. Some parts of the US give easy access to guns, and they're going to do so regardless. Other parts (NYC, where I live) make it very hard to access guns, and the NRA isn't able to do much more. And the rest of the world doesn't care. Meanwhile, the IETF, in how it chooses to distribute power to network operators vs. service providers vs. end users, which protocols it facilitates standardization work on, who is in the room, what sorts of threats cryptographic protocols protect against, etc., has a lot of influence on who has power over digital communications.
I think I'd even argue that it's more important for someone at the IETF to be aware of the political implications of their work than someone at the NRA. The NRA has an obviously political mission; whether you choose to pay attention to it in how you do your job and what you prioritize or not, you're going to further that mission. (Imagine, for instance, being a gun-control advocate at the NRA and see how much impact you'll have.) The IETF's mission is more open-ended, which means you can develop protocols to facilitate government surveillance or to subvert it, depending on what you think is more important.
And the people most inclined to discuss politics in the work place tend to be the people who take it personally.
> There is likely a very large contingent of closet republicans.
Whether the minority is outspoken or not, my point is just that it's a minority.
https://www.grubblawgroup.com/employee-rights-and-informatio...
This isn't complicated. For example: People may be on both sides of climate change, but not discussing it in the workplace doesn't mean the company is for or against anything. Apply this to any other topic that has nothing to do with the business.
It specifically does:
> We won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally
The products and tools and services they sell are specifically designed to permit the circumvention of the law.
They are no different than people who make lockpicks in that respect. Technically the company couldn't care less what you do with the lockpicks. Maybe you're a hobbyist, or a locksmith. Maybe.
Some of their employees may be okay looking the other way, but not all of them will be. Based on the way this is going down it sounds like there was some internal drama about this, and they feel like it's best to part ways with the pro-law crowd.
I want a predictable workplace where people understand we’re not perfect and sometimes make untacful remarks without meaning to hurt. I want a forgiving workplace one where minor peccadilloes aren’t picked apart by vultures looking to score points.
There are big issues we can agree on. Energy, climate, crime, justice, etc., from a big picture perspective rather than an activist perspective. Activism is tiring. People get exhausted. Long term, people just want to make a living and be left alone if they are not being negative. You can’t live in a world where activism is a way of life like Cuba. Listen to the “Commandant” brother no 1. We have to up bread production right after we recite the revolutionary manifesto one more time before we join hands in community work for the revolution”. No, let me be in peace.
Just going off this one statement, if you want a forgiving workplace, does that mean you have to own your mistakes and ask for forgiveness when you make an "untactful remark"? It sounds like seeking forgiveness will require you to do things like "think[ing] about whom I might unwittingly offend today because of something that happened yesterday that I’m unawares of today."
"Unlimited vacation days" is the biggest joke. Seriously, there's nothing stopping you from never showing up to work? In reality it's a way to make sure nobody ever takes time off if they want to have any chance of promotion.
All peaceful human interaction falls outside of that.
I don't get it. Can you please explain that to me?
This is an old libertarian argument, which when taken to its narrow logical conclusion says all taxes are fundamentally theft and immoral. The primary counter-argument is to suggest that the property or wages being taxed aren't "fully" the possessions of the taxed individual or entity. If you are receiving wages in part because of the state apparatus, then the wages weren't fully yours to begin with. Various forms of social contract theory are used to justify taxes.
The other main argument is probably more utilitarian. Your right to property only extends to the extent that it is socially valuable in comparison to other rights and responsibilities. Property is this model isn't a fundamental right, but one mechanism used in combinations with others to maximize human welfare.
Most people would agree that talking about your flight "around" the world is OK, even if it takes a side in the somehow-controversial debate on the shape of the earth.
What about talking to your coworkers idly and you mention "Oh yeah I've been keeping my kids at home cause I'm worried about coronavirus". Controversial, some people think that's fake.
Talking about how you got married last month? If you're gay, that's suddenly controversial.
Talking to your manager about how you need to take time off because a family member died, they ask what happened, turns out they were shot by the police? Suddenly very controversial...
Politics isn't some weird abstract thing, it's life and the events that are happening around us every day. If we live in a world where literally the shape of the earth is a marker of political identity -- how do you expect people to avoid mentioning topics that people might find controversial? Or do you think it's possible to draw a stark dividing line somewhere between "shape of earth" and "police reform" that can be justified in an objective way?
If someone, say, brought up their gay partner to a colleague who is very religious, I'd expect the religious colleague to treat them courteously. I wouldn't expect them to tell them that they will burn in hell for all eternity.
Maybe the line to be drawn is one of policy vs people. As a policy decision, you could be against gay marriage but on a personal level still be happy for a gay colleague that got married. Or happy that they are happy.
I'm not talking about policy decisions by a business owner, I'm talking about when people have day to day discussions with other employees.
And what happens when it's not the case? When people don't just treat people of foo group normally, and it's happening throughout the company? What should foo group do?
Ask the company to get to an apolitical state where they can just do their job? Let people in the company know that it's going on? By you definition, that's political and wrong. Or do they just bear the cost of it while others continue doing what they're doing?
> I don't see why this is concept would be so hard to understand
Because (In my opinion) you're starting with a fundamentally flawed premise that there isn't already politics in the work place. There always has been. The important difference is that the only thing that gets branded as "politics" is anything different from the status quo. If it's politics aligned with the status quo it's not seen as politics even when it it.
A similar example. I'm not taking a stand on it in any way here, but kneeling during the national anthem before a football game was considered a political act (which it is). One response was "keep politics out of football" (parallel to our discussion here). But again similar to our discussion here it was glossing over the fact that playing the national anthem before a sporting event is an extremely political action to begin with (ex. Should we play the national anthem before a game of Jeopardy?).
Saying there wasn't politics before / by default, is just turning a blind eye to the existing politics because it's the status quo.
None of these options require a company to adopt a political platform.
no that's not a political action, because the intent of the song is not to display some political message, but to display a sign of respect to the nation that has enabled the game to exist.
Is it a political action if the happy birthday song is played at McDonalds for a birthday party? It only becomes political when an action has intent behind it to display a message that furthers a political agenda.
The kneeling at a football game is political, because those people who kneel knows that their kneeling is going to be seen by millions, and thus they can leverage their visibility (due to their position as players or at least is on camera). Therefore, it's highly political - they want to send a message out there to as many people as they could that they support a particular cause (and implicitly want an outsider that also happen to be watching the game to also support). Would you declare that it's OK for the same group of people to perform a nazi salute under the same circumstances? If you're OK with that, then I would be OK with "political" actions in my football game.
The problem in this discussion here is that many are unable to separate their own political leaning with the general idea of political expression in non-political settings (such as a football game or place of business). I keep hearing that apolitical stance is not possible - but then if there are politiking that they do not like, then it's not allowed (aka, if a company "forced" their employees to engage in white-nationalist politics).
That's why I take the stance of apolitical neutrality in public places where politics isn't expected (e.g., in a place of business).
Until that trans person needs to go to the bathroom.
Voila :)
Now, to take another example - paternity leave in the United States - should there be a workplace law requiring more of it, like many other countries?
Political! :)
Or are you referring to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent Supreme Court rulings as the "extreme left"?
Or do you mean it in the Fox News sense, where any disagreement with the president is "extreme left"?
I feel like the best way to make room for people to understand that is to acknowledge your own flaws
For instance when you make an inappropriate comment, owning up to it by letting everyone know that you made an inappropriate comment and are making an effort to stop saying inappropriate things.
What happens when your area of political focus crosses tracks with another area of political focus and you're faced with a trolley problem? Do you simply steam ahead regardless of the overall impact or do you consider the overall impact?
"That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen" [1] applies to all policies, not simply those undertaken by states.
Outside the mission, it sounds like Coinbase won't factor these matters beyond the usual legal/reputation, the same as the majority of businesses.
Governments are best placed to guide prosocial behaviour.
I think governments and dedicated organisations are best placed to do this: they can better enforce compliance, and have greater visibility on all of our pressing needs.
We need to place a place on carbon, and thus share responsibility, in proportion to use.
Edit: About Europe, we almost never practice affirmative action the same way as US does. It mostly is "If two applicants has equal merit you are free to choose the disadvantaged one". See this court case for example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-47335859
In USA there are many examples of worse students being accepted thanks to affirmative action, and it is defensible in court.
I see. This is a confusion of the economic "left/right" axis with the social "progressive/regressive" axis. Mainstream media does tend to collapse those axes, along with the "authoritarian/libertarian" axis, but this is intellectual laziness that doesn't even represent american bipartisan politics faithfully. We can do better.
I think it's more like saying you can't truly be unbiased. Try as you might, it's arguably impossible to truly be unbiased when making decisions an interacting with people. Journalists try their best, by presenting "just the facts" but even that is tough as which facts you chase down and which you deem important is colored by your biases. The flavor of words you write is also thus colored. I know they go through lots of training to account for this, and the truly great journalists we know of are mostly those that achieved some measure of success here, thus earning the respect of their peers and those that they interview.
So, you can try to be apolitical, but it's perhaps one of those impossible goals, because our political views are a form of bias, and if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well.
Companies are change agents, even if it's just to get people to use their product over somebody else's. But in Coinbase's case, it's more than that. They're trying to change the way the world exchanges goods and money. That would be a big change to how we all live, and thus it touches on politics in many places. As far as Coinbase is concerned, this makes sense. Many people are finding that just "having a job to collect a paycheck" is not fulfilling enough. They want to change the world as part of their jobs too. So they find jobs that align with their views. Awesome for them.
That's the point of blinding yourself to the people you interact with, isn't it? If you pick and choose who to do business with, I agree. If you have a website where people buy things that get mailed to them, there is no biased decision making.
> if highly trained journalists still have trouble with this, everyone else will as well
Not sure about this bit. Journalists today (at least for Europe) tend to be politically active first, journalists second. They view their role as educators of the masses, not information presenter, that is, to explain to their audience, why they should believe whatever the journalist believes, not provide facts to their audience and let them decide. I don't see a lot of evidence for individual journalists and even less so companies trying to be neutral.
I understand the argument to be more that, if you don't actively fighting for whatever you believe should be the way society operates, then you're implicitly actively fighting for whatever way it currently operates. I don't agree with that at all. It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.
Then that is pretty sad. But, not surprising, and it's often the same way across the pond. Take a look at the Journalism Code of Ethics [0] and see if your news sources abide by it. This is what I hold my reporters accountable to, as much as I can.
Needless to say, I disagree that what you describe should be considered OK and normal.
> It would include that a doctor who saves a person's life without checking whether they are for or against some issue would be considered putting their weight on one side of the issue. They're not, they are doing their job and saving a life.
Agreed. But, have you thought about why the Hippocratic Oath exists in the first place? The very point of it is to force doctors to consider all lives equal and, to the best of their ability, ignore their personal beliefs and do their job. It's literally trying to prevent people from following their base instincts. Very similar to the Journalism Ethics, in a way. That said, it's not perfect; there are many studies showing that, statistically, minorities have higher rates of mortality and other adverse effects in hospitals. That's not causation, but it does point to some potential troubling behaviors.
Anyway, I digress. Not all jobs are considered equal, which should be obvious. If you only want to save the lives of your favorite political party, you should really not become a doctor. Or you will hopefully be found and reported by other doctors / law enforcement and rightly put in prison. Programmers, for better or worse, do not have the same issues.
For example, can you be a gun shop owner without being pro-gun? Some would say actions speak louder than words.
On the other hand, if you own a bakery being apolitical is a lot simpler. Avoid the Masterpiece Cakeshop case and there's as little politics as you'll find anywhere.
The entire mission of a company doesn't have to be front and center in politics but there is no such thing as being apolitical for any company interacting with the world in a meaningful way
That's a political stance. As long as you're part of society, you'll always have a political stance. That's what the other commentor was getting at.
Why would you ever want your views to not influence what you do? If not yours, whose perception would you use to inform what you do? And why would you want to keep your views private?
If you think that your views are so inappropriate or unimportant that you can't share them, that's a view in of itself and that's what people will see.
> You do not try to change anyone else's political views as part of your job
Whether you should try to actively change someone's view is a big question. It's a very different question than whether or not you should have/share your worldview. Whether you like it or not, your views are what they are because of others sharing theirs (explicitly or implicitly).
the very act of sharing your view (implying it's unsolicited) is trying to change someone else. Let me use as an obnoxious example: vegans trying to sell the idea of veganism to non-vegans.
One fairly non-controversial part of the status quo right now is our dependence on fossil fuels and co2 emissions to keep our economy running.
Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now. If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.
Beyond even this example, it's is politically naive to believe there is some "normal". The status quo today is the politics of the current dominant power (which is largely market forces). Agreeing to be "apolitical" is actively support of this system. Your view is the one that is strongly "with us or against us" in that any opinion other than the dominant political ideology is supposed to be silenced at work.
"Just do you job and don't voice contrary opinions" is a pretty radical political opinion if you ask me, so your definition of "apolitical" is only "A"-political because you are so intensely in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.
A functional definition of privilege is that politics doesn't matter that much to you. No matter how it turns out, you'll be fine, so you're able to mentally compartmentalize it and go about the rest of your business. There are many people whose lives are not like that, and it's unreasonable to expect them to treat politics as a game separate from real life.
The more privileged a group is the more they tend to be involved in politics. So a better definition is that privilege is when you have time and energy to spend on politics.
I bet the closeted gay folks in countries where that's a death sentence would MUCH rather have their coworkers compartmentalize their views.
You're even more privileged if you're so confident in your job security and the popularity of your political views that you can spend your working hours advocating them without worrying that it'll affect your ability to feed your family.
As long as some parts of politics are working to harm the people you work with, coexisting with them and exchanging pleasantries is political.
In nearly every case, the people who are claiming to encourage politics in the workplace are actually demanding allegiance - try supporting the other side and see how they feel.
They think that cryptocurrency eliminating the ability of nations to set monetary policy, or to enable people with enough means to escape from the impact of monetary policy, is a good thing. This is politics baked into the product cryptocurrency companies create, and it is part of their "mission."
Would you say that Facebook is an apolitical product since it is just its users that are affecting public behavior?
But:
1. Doing so is a political decision. 2. Your views shape your perspective and there will be actions and omissions that you take that impact politics in ways that you are unaware of.
And as the saying goes, if I'm either with you or against you, then I'm against you. It doesn't matter what your object-level goals or values are, because you have clearly stated that you care more about using those goals as a pretence to attack anyone who isn't willing to subordinate themselves to your particular movement than about actually achieving said object-level goals.
As an example: I strongly oppose oil pipelines, but a couple of years ago I had to assist with emergency network maintenance on a very large, very controversial pipeline that I do not like at all. My job required me to do what I was hired to do, and I didn't let my politics get into the way. The issue was resolved in a couple of hours, and I returned back to the projects I was working on for other customers.
But we still had a conversation at our company about what it means to support customers that we were uncomfortable with, and we ultimately decided that the views of employees should help guide how we conduct ourselves as a business. That if we noticed that our customers are doing harm, and we believe ourselves to be contributing to the harm, we should voice our concern and decide if we are operating morally and ethically.
The pipeline was whitelisted, because we don't actually help build it on native land, and we don't help drill the oil out of the Earth. We only help keep the sensors working, and those ultimately exist to keep the pipeline from failing and doing damage.
But we have preemptively decided that there are certain businesses that could use our services to contribute to harm, and so we have a process for keeping ourselves in check.
I worry about "apolitical" companies, as they have decided that they no longer care about judging the moral or ethical issues surrounding their business decisions, and have instead decided to operate entirely based on what is legal.
And it goes without saying that acting in accordance with the law is not the same as acting morally and ethically.
Outside of your job, you can be as politically active as you wish. Nobody is saying you should stop all political activism.
But if i walk into a store intending to buy something, i don't want to be blasted with any political message or be asked to sign up for a rally or donate to some cause i don't care about.
And an employee should work on the job they are being hired to do, not spend work time undertaking political activism unless explicitly allowed by their boss (for example, your company may allow you time off for charity or such activities).
If, for example, your political view is that of communism, then you will have to suffer in silence in the USA while working for shareholders/owners of property. Or quit your job if you cannot stand it. What you can't do is use your job as a resource to push that view further than you could on your own.
You are only political when you try to change the minds of others. Just existing is never political support for anything. If the communist argues that the shareholders shouldn't exist then he is political. If the company fires the communist for thinking that shareholders shouldn't exist (lets say he said that on his own time, so he wasn't political at company time) then they are political. If the company allows pro capitalist opinions but not pro communist opinions they are also political.
It's not as easy as one thinks to just steer clear of politics. Just about everything has an impact.
> Of course, employees should always feel free to advocate around issues of pay, conditions of employment, or violations of law, for instance. Hopefully the above sets some clear guidelines.
A bakery is obviously going to have an interest in politics directly related to operating a bakery and the employment laws affecting it. A bakery might reasonably avoid political stances on something unrelated, such as nuclear power, foreign conflicts, etc.
That being said, running a gun shop is definitely a political statement. I guess you could control what you sell as well, like "I only sell hunting rifles - for hunting" and refusing to sell hand guns or automatic rifles. Sorry for the example of guns, I'm swedish and have no insight in what is commonplace in US gun stores.
What do you mean "pro-gun"?
You're fundamentally trying to reduce something that's a range to a binary and you're gonna lose a lot of accuracy doing that.
There's lots of gun shops owned by fudds who support various things from the "anti gun" wish list. Just by virtue of being older the "people who own gun shops" demographic is likely less extreme on the pro-gun spectrum than the average person on the pro-gun spectrum.
Obviously this is gonna generalize pretty well to other issues. Anyone running an abortion clinic is gonna be pro-life to some extend but selling the service doesn't necessarily mean they're at the super extreme end of it.
That's a false dichotomy. There are multiple stances on guns besides "guns should be completely unregulated" and "civilians shouldn't be allowed to own guns".
Working at a gun shop is, for example, very compatible with the notion that people should be subject to buying background checks before being able to buy a gun. After all, it's the brick-and-mortar gun shops who have to abide by background checks; the more these shops dominate the market, the smaller the market will be for gun shows where such background checks aren't required.
Causes of death (U.S., approx., annually) strongly related to metabolic health which is strongly affected by diet:
Heart disease: 635k, Cancer: 598k, Stroke: 142k, Alzheimer's: 116k, Kidney disease: 50k
Causes of death related to guns:
Suicide: 21k, Homicide: 11k, Accident/Negligence: 500
You can be apolitical at work while still opposing the so called status quo with your vote. Or you can oppose the status quo in an explicitly political organization outside of your job.
And the alternative is the company's political agenda. So you are saying we must all, 8+ hours a day, support our employers political agenda, and then in the time remaining we can try to counteract that a bit.
If you think political action begins and ends at the vote then you have a lot to learn about the nature of politics in practice.
It certainly can be.
A passive stance is, by definition, not active support for anything.
Coinbase is actively working on financial infrastructure. That's what they "actively" do.
> Saying "I'll keep my views private" means I'm giving an okay to what's happening now.
No, it means that what's happening now is, while certainly important to many employees as people, not a part of or in any way related to the company's business.
Passive support for the status quo is that we all have to work and survive in this world. If you have to work for an airline to live, but hate what co2 emissions is doing for this world, you are passively supporting the currently political narrative.
Insisting that any belief that is non-status quo be silenced is active political action. You can pretend that it's passive, but that is just a cowardly way of abdicating political responsibility.
You are sitting at a bus stop and you see a man having a heart attack in front of you with nobody else around. If you call the authorities and send for an ambulance, you will save his life. If you don't, he will die.
Whether you just passively sit there and wait for the bus, or whether you take action to save the man's life, you are making a decision and that decision will have consequences.
There is no such thing as being apolitical. Not making a choice is making a choice.
Not really. I can do my job from 9 to 5 in a non-political way and then actively try to change the status quo on evenings and weekends. That doesn't align with how you are describing being apolitical at work means.
> If every individual shares the thinking at every company then it is impossible to even imagine how the most catastrophic climate change can be avoided.
Because many individuals can sincerely believe that the way to deal with climate change goes via individual or citizen advocacy groups changing cultural attitudes and then exerting pressure on the Governments to bring in the necessary regulations. Companies should not be engaged in climate change politics (or global poverty or abortion rights) if they want to avoid it.
It's really not.
It's just not giving a shit about whatever the thing is the political argument is about, instead putting time and care into other things you consider more important. eg kids, family, etc.
I also point out that "not giving a shit" and "considering more important" are synonyms for "not mattering" and "mattering", respectively.
Which is your personal opinion on the matter. What do I suggest for you? Start your own company and allow your employees to have their political views expressed as part of your ethos (or Manifesto if you can relate more to that).
I admire people that are willing to put in the time to advocate what they believe is right and just. And they are free to do that whether I agree with them or disagree with them. I just don't want to be at work where just coming in and wanting to do your job is considered insufficient and you have to be saving the world somehow. That doesn't mean that I disagree with the cause or won't contribute in my own time. I just want us working on the goal for our company. It could work both ways. Like what if an oil company gave you days off to counter protest at climate change events? If you did not attend, it would be questionable and perhaps ruin your career. So I think as a whole we support activism because it is the activism we like but it might not always be that way.
Because those people also have strong opinions, not because they are evil, but because from their point of view it is the right thing to do.
I'd say: unless you are OK with both Trump supporters, Biden supoorters, Pro-Lifers, Pro-Choice etc etc all bringing their politics to work, be careful about trying to use work for politics.
Edit: let me also add the Communist party, Jehovas Witnesses, the Catholic Church, Hinduism (a number of my colleagues wanting to learn meditation got stuck between two factions arguing loudly and angrily about some detail regarding reincarnation), the local NRA and everyone else. Unless you want to accept them doing activism on company time: don't be the one who starts it.
> in opposition to non-status quo beliefs that you disregard them completely.
Many of us disagree strongly with the status quo because we find it is way too little conservative.
Do you really want us to start using harder tactics instead of sticking to our current strategy:
- hoping the kids on the left will grow up soon. Traditionally in generation after generation they abandon the dumbest ideas after a decade or so. (And yes, this holds true for me too, I was influenced by socialism as a teenager even though I never torched anything.)
- be nice so that others will be nice to us, or at least think twice who they want to support
- stand up for others and hope others will stand up for us (and yes, despite me being deeply "conservative" that also means standing up for immigrants. I do that.)
- vote
- pray
- depending on location: make sure we are able to defend ourselves and our families if police cannot be expected to do so (we don't need to think about that here as crime rates are low and police arrive quickly if you need them)
I hear this all the time but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it is "active support" isn't it at most passive support? If you were actively supporting it, you'd be taking political actions and therefore not being apolitical?
So there's really no difference between doing nothing, and donating to FUD campaigns against climate science? They're both equally active in their support for fossil fuels, both equally "apolitical"? Or have you diluted the term "apolitical" to the point of meaninglessness, if it can describe such wildly different behavior?
Would you describe yourself as "actively supporting" Kony (or some other, similar warlord)?
This is an extreme example but imagine someone knocks on your door and says “help, the secret police are after me.”
You don’t help them, and, you don’t turn them in.
To give you an idea of the types of historical figures that used the "you're either with us or against us" most famously...
Benito Mussolini
Vladimir Lenin
George W Bush after 9/11
Recep Erdogan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_ag...
But to people who are arguing that being “neutral” is actually a political stance and usually supporting of the status quo, you try to say they’re tantamount to Mussolini.
Really? Someone disagrees with you so your go to response is to bring up Mussolini?
You're not even allowing for the idea of opposition to exist which is a radical view pretty similar to the ones held by all the people you have mentioned.
What I am saying is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
Crypto is also very capable of moving huge amounts of money from hostile foreign nations to disruptive factions anywhere in the world. Claiming libertarian alliances could be an easy cover for those kinds of activities. That whole space has been a cesspool.
Do you mind quoting the GP on where you feel like he's trying to force people to polarize and why that makes you feel that way?
edit: Could those downvoting me please make an effort to help me understand parent comment's viewpoint instead of making low effort downvotes? I really don't feel like asking for clarification on something warrants a downvote without response.
1. Political intent - acting or omitting to act because of a political view point. 2. Political outcomes - the results of actions or omissions to act which impact politics.
I guess my point is that your actions and omissions have political outcomes whether you want them to or not.
We should also agree what “politics” means. I’m not simply referring to the science of government but to the decisions around the distribution of power, resources and status in groups of people.
I think they do, and we generally expect everyone to behave that way, but we're making it very explicit for doctors and lawyers and some other professions. Of course, it's not as immediate when you're dealing with programmers, but viewing the economy not as a total war with temporary alliances between buyers and sellers but as a way to get things done with the market place being the most efficient way to do so (which, I believe, is the more appropriate way, and it's also the way we look at it from the nation state perspective which will happily disable the market place in times of war or catastrophic events), discriminating with regards to politics when selling your services is throwing sand in the machine.
It's not outlawed for many professions (but usually is once you have a monopoly in some location), but it's neither wide-spread, nor encouraged or accepted, I believe.
In any case, working for an actual gun dealer is still compatible with a stance of "I support universal background checks and closing the private-seller loophole", which is still a form of gun control and a departure from the status quo.
Other people don't, and care about other things.
Claiming that people who actively put their time and effort into stopping that change ("supporting the status quo") are the same as people who prioritise other things (eg "looking after their sick sibling"), is outright dishonest. And seems both silly, and like it would generate a bunch of negative things by trying to push it.
To illustrate, lets take a dumb example...
Lets say my sister is dying of cancer, and I need to pay for her treatment, her family's housing and costs meanwhile, and whatever other expenses come up. So, I'm doing bulk hours at my job to make that work.
In that situation, someone pushing an agenda of "there needs to be more sausage rolls in the canteen" (!) can go to hell. I have more important (to me) things to care about. I don't care about their hot issue in any way.
But if they keep on trying to take up my time with it, they're not going to get a positive reaction as they're literally wasting time I could be using productively. ;)
This is roughly how the people who argue against Coinbase decision sounds.
Companies should advocate for the rights of their employees. They should demand their employees treat each other with respect. Both of those stances will often conflict with some people's politics and there's no way around it.
So you take this political stance outside of work. If enough people can be convinced that collective bargaining is a good idea, it will get enshrined into law. Employers will have to comply.
On the other hand, organising during work time (which is being paid for by your employer) is unethical - and regardless of my feelings of the idea of collective bargaining, it should not be done on someone else's dime.
I dunno where you live, but organizing at work is a protected right that workers have in the US and Canada (and other jurisdictions, but that's where I've been employed). An employer forbidding that is actually a violation of labor law.
No it most certainly doesn't. A person can hold the opinion that many people can engage in some activity responsibly, while not everyone can.
Being a gun store owner that favors regulation on the ownership of guns is not all that different from a beer brewer that favors regulation of drinking age or laws against operating vehicles while inebriated.
Ignoring morality for a moment, there's a business argument in there too. A bunch of drunk hooligans causing car accidents is bad for business. Anyone in the business of dealing in "harmful" products is aware of potential public backlash from irresponsible people and will seek to mitigate that in some form.
When the people in this thread are arguing for being apolitical, they’re arguing for companies not being involved in seeking to lobby for change in formal, legislated power structures. They’re not arguing for companies to not take a stance in cultural power imbalances, because to them, power imbalances enforced by a government and power imbalances enforced only by social norms are not the same thing, and only the former is actually covered by the term “politics”, i.e. the thing that politicians do for their job. The latter, in most countries, is usually just called social — and there’s nobody arguing that companies should avoid taking social stances.
Forming a company to do something is inherently a social stance — a stance in any culture-wars that might be shifted by the product or service the company provides. But forming a company to do something isn’t inherently a political stance. For a company to take a political stance, someone from the company would need to actually talk to a politician at some point, in their capacity as a representative of a company — i.e. to do the thing we call “lobbying.”
Tangent: associating “politics” with attention paid to cultural, non-legislated power imbalances, is really mostly a US thing. I think this might be because most other developed, democratic countries have a lot fewer such cultural, non-legislated power imbalances; for painful historically-segregationist reasons, their entire populations are mostly formed out of what in the US would be considered a single mostly-uniform voting bloc. And so politicians in most countries, can’t really base their platforms on the cultural stances of any particular bloc — there’s not enough variation in such stances that highlighting one would win you any points.
The US is unique in that it ended up as one country composed of many extremely-divergent blocs, but with there being basically no formally-recognized, legislated divisions between most such groups†. Compare to all-of-Europe or all-of-Asia (which are the most sensible comparisons, given the land areas involved): the people within those continents have long ago assorted into relatively-like-thinking groups, splitting off into their own smaller countries, historically not granting citizenship to those who are “not like them”, and so becoming each much more internally-uniform in both makeup and viewpoints. (And then, if one of those countries went on to conquer the other, the introduced power-imbalance would be a formal, political one, with real legislation — the sort of thing you do “politics” about — determining the relative power of the two sub-nations within the new merged nation.)
† The US does have one formally-recognized, legislated division, where both sides explicitly sit at a negotiating table within government: that division being the one between native/indigenous Americans and N-generations-naturalized-immigrant Americans. And guess which group in the US isn’t heavily invested in the culture war? That’s right, the native population. Because they form a politically distinct group — effectively an annexed nation, as above — whose problems are raised to the level of actual politics, rather than social debate.
No, I think that many are arguing for companies not to take a stance in cultural as well as legislative power balances. (I would argue that legislative power structures and cultural power structure are not so easily separated, as they inform each other).
Both concepts are covered by the term “politics”. The colloquial “office politics” is just such an example of that.
To sum up, I appreciate the direction you took to uncover the crux of disagreements that ate going on but I feel that your analysis is flawed because you assert that the issue is cut down a particular line (which I believe it is not) and then invalidate the opposing half through a projected misuse of the term “political” (when it is in-fact mot a misuse of the term “politial”).
To your aside: I would hesitate to say that this is a uniquely US thing. Womens rights would appear, to my relatively lay self, to still be a prevalent source of cultural and legislative power imbalance in many countries and blocs across the world.
If coinbase and its cryptocurrencies improve the means of wealth and capital exchange, that doesn't mean that cryptocurrencies are political. That makes it a tool, just as a shovel and rifle are tools. How they're used by people is what makes them potentially political.
Facebook's choice to moderate content that isn't advertiser friendly is what makes it political, not the fact that it improves communication. They're deciding what other people see. Cryptocurrencies make no such choices for users.
Coinbase has. They've done things like blacklist wallets that they believe were involved in crimes or scams.
which is not a political action. You can argue they are acting extra-judicially - which is true, but it's not a political action. If coinbase refuses to serve a customer because they are anti-whatever-political-stance-of-coinbase, then coinbase is acting politically.
Also, OP didn't actually say anything about semi-automatic rifles, at all. So it's really a nothing statement to make that distinction; I guess I took the bait, though.
For most people, the debate about "assault rifles" seems to be a misunderstanding about the language being used by the other side. For people who label semi-automatic rifles as "assault rifles", they think of hunting rifles as small capacity, bolt-action rifles. Whereas folks like you do not make that distinction.
It's so weird to see that conversation play out, and realize that neither side understands the most basic definitions of the other. It's super common in gun debates. And very, genuinely strange.
it's not symmetrical that way. the way gun control advocates use "assault rifle" is usually pretty vague. I have friends who would call a semi-automatic MP5 an "assault rifle". to a gun enthusiast, an "assault rifle" is a specific type of gun that is quite difficult to legally own as a civilian. I suspect 2A folks understand what the other side means by "assault rifle" (as well as they do themselves, at least), but choose not to give it the dignity of acknowledgement.
the inverse occurs in discussions about racism. the left uses "racism" to mean "power + prejudice", while the right understands it simply as "discrimination on the basis of race". folks on the right don't necessarily understand through context which definition is being used (if they're even aware of the "power + prejudice" definition). folks on the left absolutely understand the source of confusion, but pretend they don't to leave their interlocutors looking stupid.
in both cases, you essentially have one side mocking the other for not having done their homework. not unfair imo, but probably not the most productive way to have the discussion.
It is immediately clear even as a foreigner what racism really means and whoever tries to redefine it as a general slur deserves to be called out for it, just in the same way as they try to redefine assault rifle to mean any scary looking gun.
That said, have my vote: you seem reasonable.
That's functionally quite different from a rifle with easily swapped external magazines with high capacity.
Chambering also matters a little bit. Weapons with a military lineage tend to have smaller rounds than rifles for big game. The smaller rounds make it easier to pack large amounts of ammunition and reduce fatigue.
Of course assault rifle is a meaningless term, but that's a result of many efforts to warp the discourse and not because the weapons used for war are literally the same as a weapon that is sufficient for hunting.
Politics is more than government. It's our society, it's how we deal with each other. It's how we approach the economy, the family, the church. It's intrinsically linked to being human, or as Aristotle put it, the "philosophy of human affairs".
If your business does not actively support a reform, they are actively supporting the status quo. Which is fine, humans disagree. But to pretend it's something it's not is disingenuous or naive.
It does not even stop there. If we choose to understand what's political in this way everything that humans choose to relate to (even things that do not exist beyond human imagination) have, of course, probably some influence on political outcomes.
Rain, an escaped alligator from the local zoo, the color of a button in a web form, etc.
I think that this second idea of what's political is merely the realization that we can choose to view everything according to it's political impact. Like a pair of glasses we might wear or might want others to wear.
...to stick with my example: One might end up making a long term study on how news about escaped zoo animals affect election outcomes. That might lead to surprising results. It's just not always guaranteed to be a very productive use of time.
I think there's probably a healthy middle ground here. It's not hard to argue that there's some reasonable moral expectations regarding company decision making. Like, don't construct gas chambers. (Local example from my German home region.)
On the other side it's easy to see that insisting on questioning every minor decision will lead to almost instant gridlock.
That's why I think that both radical positions are pretty hard to defend. A better society might hide behind pragmatic decision making with some reasonable, probably even academically shallow moral questioning of ones own actions. Not in corporate apathy or zealotry.
I could just as well say “no one should ever argue anything because then people could argue about every little thing and it would be impossible to do anything at all.”
Artificially extending what's seen as political to excess is a pointless exercise that removes all meaning and usefulness from the concept.
That's bad because a shared understanding of some political sphere (which comes into existence through its boundaries) is really important for democratic discourse.
the way I look at it is the "power + privilege" definition comes from "racism" as an academic term of art, a meaning that everyone engaged in a certain kind of study/research agrees on. a comparable example from CS would be "syntax" vs "semantics". when people scold someone for arguing over semantics, they mean something more similar to the CS definition of "syntax". if you, a CS person, interpret them using the CS definition of "semantics", it would sound quite ridiculous. I often see left-leaning people (esp college educated) using certain words with their academic meanings. they're not being deliberately misleading, but they don't always do a good job of handling the confusion that ensues when addressing a broader audience.
I think the next step is then I can assail you with facts of every bad thing going on in this world and if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?
I might go a step further with your position and say that silence/speaking out are really two sides of the same coin. After all, silence and 'talk' is cheap. If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.
Absolutely, as a relatively well-off Westerner, me and my way of life absolutely are the direct and indirect cause of a lot of violence and harm around the world. I likewise creates a lot of CO2. Filling up my gas tank causes a lot of bloodshed. Doing this things is a part of the life I am used to, but absolutely yes I am passively supporting these things.
An activist against these things will likely take active steps to resist this passive support.
> if you do nothing about it, you're cowardly abdicating your political responsibility, neh?
No. My point is precisely if I tell you "we don't talk about those things, it's not polite, I want this to be an apolitical statement" that I am switching from passively supporting the status quo to actively. But by claiming that this is somehow "apolitical" that is the cowardly abdication of political responsibility. What I mean here is being responsible for your political choices.
Saying that "wow I do passively contribute to co2 emissions, I don't know what to do about it but I don't like it." is taking political responsibility. Say "don't talk about that at work!" and claiming your taking the neutral ground is abdicating that responsibility.
> If you really want to fight the status quo you ought to commit your life and the majority of your money to the causes you believe in.
This is literally the definition of activism, and I of course support it. But the source of all activism is 'talk', which is not a cheap as you make it out to be. People who 'talk' about unions at Google tend to lose jobs. People who 'talk' about questionable legal practices at their company tend to lose jobs. And 'talk' is the seed of activism.
no that's just surviving. It's not politically supporting "the status quo".
> abdicating political responsibility.
implying that everyone _has_ to have some political responsibility.
Not everyone cares enough - they believe climate change, but they also don't want to expend energy fighting it - that' snot a political stance. It sucks, but that's the majority of people.
Ultimately the people that don't care enough about a specific reform are the reason it isn't happening in the first place. I'm not trying to advocate for tribalism and polarization or promote a "mindset". I'm just stating a truth.
Isn't this the whole point of work? Exchanging your own preferences and time for money?
> in the time remaining we can try to counteract that a bit
Ideally you wouldn't be working for a company who is diametrically opposed to your own beliefs. This is why I will never work for Facebook.
In our current economic system, yes for some people; but less so for some individuals, and again even less in economies with UBI.
A founder, for instance, is often not looking to trade preferences but instead to actually make an impact on the world while sharing in the profit of that impact. This is different than just trading things away: you are collaborating actively. Of course, that’s currently mostly available for small groups such as founders and small-business owners.
And you may note that… all of this has political ramifications :) Small business owners are heavily impacted by political regulation; the ability of workers to organize and take a joint ownership over their work is governed by laws too.
None of this exists in a vacuum. We are who we are because of who we all are, and we do what we do because of what we all do. That’s political. Some people just want others to be passive.
You can work at a company and advocate for changing things and it can be as comparatively small as ensuring on-call rotations are fair to ensuring the company voices support for and takes actions in line with supporting Black Lives Matter. These are all political in the spirit described up thread as saying that politics is the figuring out and deciding of these issues as a group.
that's not a political stance - that's negotiating your working conditions. It's private and individual, and only affect you (and your colleagues). It doesn't affect society at large whether you have on-call or how sick days are counted _at_ your place of employement.
But to use your position as an employee to push for universal sick leave, or for BLM, which affects society at large, not just yourself, is a political stance.
I would love if people who are privacy advocates could get facebook salaries working for the EFF.
It looks like what you are advocating here is that not only should you silence non-status quo opinions, but your income should strongly correlated with your alignment with dominant political powers.
No one is forcing climate change activists to work for oil companies. As a corollary it would be absurd for a climate change activist to argue that oil companies must employ them to allow their companies to be destroyed from the inside out.
I’m simply saying your employer does not pay you to advance any agenda other than their own and that using your employer’s time to advance a political agenda irrelevant to theirs is theft, for lack of a better term.
or, compare how much you like a higher salary, vs a company that agrees with your political views. And choose appropriately.
What's not appropriate is to choose the company with the highest salary, but whose owner's political views differ from your own, and then try to change that to something more suitable to your own. Or use such a position as leverage to push your own political views to a wider audience than you could on your own.
"I don’t think companies can succeed trying to do everything. Creating an open financial system for the world is already a hugely ambitious mission, and we could easily spend the next decade or two trying to move the needle on global economic freedom."
What exactly do you disagree with about their statement? What are you proposing that Coinbase do differently? Should they collectively vote to align the company with a political party?
It's a business not an activist group.
You just believe that 'politics' is outside the scope of the company. Other's believe that it is not.
I believe this is a strawman. The issue at hand is political issues that are explicitly irrelevant to the mission of the company.
Issues that are relevant to the company should be discussed and potentially acted upon, if that furthers the agenda of the company (and not just some irrelevant political agenda that you might be passionate about).
Very well put and I’m terrifyingly surprised at how many people are arguing for the opposite. That is literal subversion.
Why is that inappropriate exactly? If my boss’ opinion is “unions shouldn’t exist because I think I’m entitled to treat people however I want/play them off each other/depress wages” why am I not allowed to rebel against that and organize with my coworkers? In fact, the right to do this very thing is enshrined in law.
Some moral entrepreneur might argue: Politics should govern the bedroom for [reasons]! ... and others might object: No; the bedroom is a private sphere where politics has no say for [reasons].
... and over time there should emerge a shared understanding of which aspects of life are political grounds and which are taboo.
The bedroom case is mostly decided today. One side won (mostly LGBTQ&Friends) and now we see the bedroom as something that should be free from politics. ..like I think that the vast majority of people in the western world now sees sodomy laws as bad fit for modern democracies.
But there are other issues that are more contemporary: The idea that speech is violence, for example, is prime moral entrepreneurship. Western societies regulate violence in a certain way and this equivalence would suggest to treat both equivalent, one way or the other.
... and it's far from decided how speech will be treated in the future and we all have many open arguments on the matter.
It's a healthy thing for societies to continuously re explore their specific boundaries of politics.
I have difficulties seeing the "everything is political"-trope as anything but the proposal to be reckless regarding the process of a shared understanding of the boundaries of politics.
To rephrase: through political action (such as activism, lobbying and campaigning), societies should continuously reevaluate what topics are within the political sphere.
If how we decide what is or is not "acceptably" political is itself a political process, how can you honestly say certain things aren't political.
Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms. Just because one side, and the side you presumably agree with, appears to have won the argument for now, doesn't mean that things are finished.
There are lots of things that I think should be outside of the realm of politics: basic human rights, white supremacy, a woman's right to choose. And yet.
So we return to the original question: how come those topics are "political", but in your opinion "bedrooms" aren't? (And would someone in the UK agree with you? They probably would, despite laws that affect them).
Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
And when you start into this meta-discussion of how do we make something political? The answer is pretty straightforward: you find people who are that there's an issue and you make noise about it.
When lots of people see a problem and make noise about it that problem becomes political. Disagreements, on a societal scale, are politics. So "this shouldn't be political" isn't much more than "I don't think the status quo is worth spending resources on". And, well, the people who think there's a problem will disagree on that. And thus: politics.
Yeah there are things that I wish we didn't disagree about, but I also am willing to stand by my convictions and say I disagree, instead of hiding behind "this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint because this isn't acceptable politics". If you're fine with the way things are, say that.
At first I was like “ugh” - not a big fan of that kind of language change, but then I was like, well, if it does matter to some people, what is my investment in this particular term anyway?
I could see how it gets trickier as a company policy, as opposed to something chosen collectively by the group.
Nonetheless, with everything going on in the world right now - and I say this as an advocate of free speech and of freedom of expression in art - this seems like such a small thing to stress about.
Tbh if this is your big fear then I’d say maybe read more news?
Being excoriated for an honest slip Of the tongue or absent mindedness is a different story though and there are definitely people that do that.
In some ways I think the conversation to be had around changing how we use certain language is equally or more valuable than the change itself :).
Also what about Maternity leave? Paternity leave? Are those not political?
How is negotiating working conditions not related to "how we engage and collaborate with each other as a society"? It's inherently (little p) political even if the engagement is at a company similar to how politics on your local HOA is still politics.
edit: typo
No. That's an "it depends" thing. If the "political issue" in question is something team or working condition related then it's not necessarily private and individual affecting only you.
Some people will care about that and want to potentially co-ordinate. Other people won't consider it important, and/or have other priorities.
You must be aware of the existence of unions. You're mentioning US-political concerns, so you're almost certainly familiar with the notion that the mere existence of unions is highly political. Whether or not you are a union member, union activities effect US workplaces.
Ignoring their existence in this discussion is itself a political position.
You must have missed March and April when sick days at “essential work” (such as grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, and more) was in fact a matter of national conversation: sick people going to work spread disease. The number of sick days was also of debate: most low wage jobs don’t offer more than 1 sick day a month or two. Not so good when someone needs two weeks off.
This kind of short sightedness and inherent support of the status quo as “it’s fine, I see no problem here” is exactly what the other commenter(s) are talking about.
That's the whole issue, and you're just affirming the consequent by saying this. Structural equality is unavoidably the concern of every person and group in a society.
Inspiring but simply false
Lest we forget, there are many people who support the structural inequality.
Naming something as political can be used to shutdown conversation that can and should be happening in a company.
Let's get concrete with this:
Do you feel like a soft drink maker has an obligation to disengage with countries that have set up systemic discrimination and regularly violate human rights conventions?
It really doesn't seem within the mission of providing the world with sugary carbonated water.
It's hard to imagine cutting ties with a country due to disagreement with how they treat their population as non-political.
And yet 34 years ago this happened:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-09-18-mn-11241-...
But wait you say: it's just a prudent business decision because the economics were against them and it was a "PR" win.
It doesn't matter. It's political.
This is an inherently political statement:
“Our decision to complete the process of disinvestment is a statement of our opposition to apartheid and of our support for the economic aspirations of black South Africans.” -Donald R. Keough
https://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1982/07/coke.h...
EDIT: why did you assume it was a decision made solely by leadership and that employees or other stakeholders did not have a publicly held opinion?
IMHO the tricky bit is that, there is both an honest and genuine way to express concern around using "precisely the right language", so to speak, and, a malicious, not-an-honest-partner-in-the-conversation, gum-up-the-works way.
And also, I guess a "this-is-all-unpleasant-and-I-just-don't-want-to-think-about-it-or-think-about-the-historical-context-for-why-we-are-talking-about-this-in-the-first-place-I-have-enough-on-my-plate-as-it-is" kind of way.
Of course there is also virtue signaling or what have you; that's a thing. Human foolishness has no bias.
Obviously HN is not the right place for discussing specifics, but, IMHO, that's maybe the only way to have a real conversation around this stuff. Which takes trust and a shared safe space.
Which can be hard to come by these days.
That said, IMHO my patience decreases a bit, sadly, every day when I read the news. There's a context to all this, after all. And a very real history.
Was my assumption wrong? Did the leadership of that company not make that decision?
No that's not what I've said. I talked about discourse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse
This difference is important since the discourse is in itself not framed by any material boundaries. This difference also answers your question on whether political action deciding on the scope of politics might be incoherent.
> Claiming that bedrooms "aren't" [political] is naive. There are still absolutely exist people who have and are and will continue to try and control what people can do in their bedrooms.
A shared understanding of what is political does not require every single person to agree on the scope of politics. In the end it's all about relative stability, not unanimity or majority or something like that.
> Just because one side ... won the argument ... doesn't mean that things are finished.
There I agree. I don't think the concept of "finished" exists in any human context.
> Who decided that bedrooms were off limits but uteruses weren't? How? Why? Can I change that? Those are all political questions.
This question on who specifically might make a specific decision seems to be a reoccurring theme in our dialogue. In modern societies that's usually a multitude of interlinked processes. Very rarely there's an isolationable agent/action relation relationship. ...and that's, of course, a good thing.
> ... this isn't even a discussion, you're not allowed to bring up this complaint ...
Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
I have no strong feelings on any of the many crossroads in debating social science epistemology or democratic theory in general.
> Who forbade you anything, by the way? I don't get why this conversation should be so confrontational or accusatory.
You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. Presumably this means one can't discuss them. Maybe you don't intend to enforce this beyond the force of your moral condemnation, but you're still saying "you're a bad person if you bring up this topic because it's not part of the political discourse and we're only discussing political stuff".
In our previous conversation I'd argue that politics as power relations or as a specific set of societal institutions might be the most productive definitions just because both are compatible with our main argument.
Nobody said they can't discuss something. It's a good example though:
You might believe that someone who argues that something does not belong in the sphere of politics does not want to or is unable to discuss something at all primarily because you already very strongly believe that politics necessary includes everything.
If you were to step back from that premise for a second you would see that there might be other human endeavors, think science, philosophy, math .. and that those are discussed by people completely without any connection to politics (..or as you would probably argue: they're willfully ignorant of the political dimension of their actions and might even be motivated by subversive, ultraconservative intentions.)
I just of course can't make you realize that this is only one very specific worldview out of many. ..which might have its place and usefulness but probably wasn't meant to act inhibiting on its enthusiasts.
Some do believe that every action needs to be reflected according to its compliance with some religious dogma. For them, ignoring the religious dimension in any action is very suspicious, because they are able to see a religious component in any action. Surely others must appear as stupid or willfully ignorant to them.
They're driven by a specific set of religious premises and that's completely okay. We just wouldn't want them to be literally unable to understand that there are other worldviews out there with their own premises.
A strong conviction is born through the understanding of its opposing ideas.
> You've said that certain topics are not acceptable. [...] you're still saying "you're a bad person
Oh dear goodness, where? Would you mind to quote me on that?
Because I don't think any of this is true.
Also false. Many fair minded people simply don’t have time to concern themselves with politics.
Not to mention that in many cases political actors who justify their actions on the premise of “structural inequality” end up reducing fairness.
Example is myself. I am a child of poor immigrants. I am neither white nor wealthy. I do not care about involving myself in your politics, I spend my time focused on working and being productive for the sake of supporting my family. Frankly your politics destroyed my country.
This is a political stance. You have involved yourself in politics. There's really no way out.
I don't know if the severance package is good or not, but it seems generous and it gives employees who aren't aligned with the company an easy way out.
Aside from the combative toxic environment they generate, they are also often the source of disgruntled rogue employees that will generally behave improperly, misrepresent coworkers, leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation.
In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
They're just poison. In the best case scenario, they are just a huge distraction - and in the worst they will cost you 10x their salary in legal drama.
It’s tempting to think of this in terms of Democrats vs Republicans or right vs left, but that’s not really the domain of the most problematic employees. The most problematic employees are the ones who have given up on the notion of reasonable debate or disagreement and instead have become convinced that the other side is committing acts so terrible that fighting them at every juncture is the only acceptable thing to do. Strangely enough, the “other side” isn’t just far-right or fad-left people, it becomes centrists, or people who don’t vote, or people who don’t want to engage in politics at work.
When you’ve reached the point where a small handful of employees are fomenting outrage at their company for not putting a BLM statement on the company Twitter account, for example, the situation has arrived at a “with us or against us” false dichotomy.
Generally, the only way to win with politics at the office is to not play. However, when one side decides that not playing is equivalent to being evil, everyone is forced to play. When everyone is forced to play by a handful of disgruntled employees, everyone loses.
Paying to remove these people from a company makes a lot of sense. If you don’t do something to remove them, the people who are sick of being dragged into political debates at work will slowly diffuse out of the company. The hyper-political employees are a loud minority, but the people who just want to do their jobs and remain professional are very much more common. Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
There was one manager in particular who really tried to do the right thing in supporting this employee. The manager convinced the marketing folks to make a pro-BLM post on LinkedIn, but then this employee got upset that it had not gone far enough and was too weakly worded. A good friend of the employee and former coworker at this company actually called out the company in the comments of the post on LinkedIn for not taking a stronger stand. The manager also convinced the executives to have the company donate money, and this kicked off a broader giving back initiative where they wanted everyone to vote on causes that the company could support in various ways. This caused even more backlash, because it had now lost site of the BLM focus and become a broader thing.
By the end, the company was just cluelessly walking on eggshells with no idea how to not make things worse in their attempts at support. The employee was extremely frustrated, struggled to regain any level of respect for the company and stopped really performing in their job and ended up leaving a couple months later. I still very much believe nobody was in the wrong here, nobody involved was a bad person or even an insensitive person. It just proved to be very difficult to navigate this situation, there were too many ways for it to go wrong and the company didn't handle everything absolutely perfectly and so they just made things worse.
Anyway, in the end I'm very convinced that everyone, including the activist employee, would have been much happier under the model as stated by Coinbase. And even if this person left or had never joined this company to begin with because of that policy, the result would have been very similar in the end, but without the weeks of frustration and stress and lost productivity all around.
This. And like another commenter pointed out, it's not unique to one side or the other. Anyone who defines their entire existence in this left/right dichotomy is suffering from media-induced mental illness.
Your company should be 100% political activists, but (at least during work hours) they should be focused on advancing the mission of your organization.
Even within activist groups you have the exact same problem that Joe is talking about, e.g. at some point in the 90s Adbusters went from lobbying against advertising to just generally supporting any leftist cause. And that's why every highway (except in Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine) is still lined with billboards 25+ years later. The only way for an organization to accomplish its mission is to actually focus on solving the specific problem they're trying to solve, not to get distracted by trying to fix every random problem that exists in the world.
Growing up, politics was private outside of the family dinner table. Any dedication to an injustice or a good cause was done through donating or volunteering. No yard signs, no shouting, no blaming.
I understand that dramatic actions bring attention, but I just hope that we can start focusing more on doing our own part and leading by example rather than preaching and focusing on how much others are doing. This goes for everyone on the modern political spectrum.
> leak documents, raise alarms about operations they don't understand, and generally draw the company into litigation
and it was actually a case of misguided political activism rather than legitimate whistleblowing? I suppose maybe in slaughterhouses or animal testing laboratories, but definitely not with tech.
> In a highly sensitive market like crypto, you don't want to gain unnecessary regulatory attention, and activists like this will be the first to testify against the company with their biased interpretation of internal operations.
It is very difficult to not read this as "sometimes crypto companies need to break the law to make that cheddar, and you really don't want any of these radical 'companies should obey the law' activists getting in your way."
I would like to see more mission focused companies.
They can help the societies they are in with some unilateral initiatives like Netflix did with helping capitalize banks in certain communities, without discussing it or changing the focus.
I fully support what Coinbase is doing. It seems very fair to all sides.
You just have to read what the activism says. It says everything is racist, sexist, etc and that in every situation you must try and identify not if things were problematic but how they were. And then “do better”, etc. so it’s impossible for these people to separate their beliefs from their jobs.
It’s far beyond politics and more a religion than anything. It would be as if a very Christian employee made it their goal to point out everything that isn’t within Christian morality and protesting the company to comply with the word of god.
Probably because the work these companies do is frequently political.
Let's be clear: What Coinbase is saying is, we the founders, who set the company's mission, and are doing so with a clear political view (rooted in libertarianism and so forth), are allowed to use the company to further our political ends.
But the staff? Sorry, you have no voice.
Maybe that's fine. The clear message to staff is: you are either onboard with our mission, or you can leave.
But let's not pretend companies and workplaces are apolitical. That's, at best, deeply naive.
Frankly, I wonder how much of what we're seeing now is due to the destruction of unionized labour, which were organizations explicitly designed to channel the political views of employees into collective action. Absent those structures, a) you get this bizarre perception that the workplace is apolitical (it's not), and b) staff no longer have a path whereby their views and values can be channeled and expressed.
Which other Silicon Valley company is doing this?
[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/21/why-amazon-pays-employees-50...
The extended window for exercising options is something I haven’t encountered before. I’d be curious to hear if others have seen it offered elsewhere.
I wonder if the real goal here is just reduce headcount.
On the other hand, it's a good move because it keeps things neutral. These annoyed employees should just take it and leave.
So now you've created/agitated a population of disgruntled employees; this will tend to cause problems. Paying a generous severance is enough to lift most of these employees over the "activation threshold" and is (in my opinion) the correct good-faith way of managing the situation; it's saying "no hard feelings if you don't agree with this direction, and we respect/value your contributions thus far."
Regardless of whether you agree with the object-level mission statement, I think that, having made the decision, this is a good example of strong leadership; it's important that everybody is bought in to the company mission, and you need to proactively filter out folks that aren't. But at the same time, you need to do so with respect; it's not necessarily a black mark for someone to no longer be a fit for the company or role, as both company and individual can change over time.
This is the same sort of idea as when you part ways with an exec after a strategy shift (e.g. pivot from B2C to B2B; replace your consumer-facing head of sales with a B2B veteran). It's not necessarily the case that they aren't doing a job, just that they aren't a fit for the role as it now stands.
Selecting for groupthink^W mission is pretty important in the business of cryptocurrencies. Reduces chances of anyone having a different moral stance that would push them to become a whistleblower. It might even be a way to prevent employees unionizing. Any disagreement about policies is political, free speech is political, so this is perfect to pre-emptively censor every criticism.
"coinbase engineers walked off [in June] because brian wouldn't say "Black Lives Matter," he posted it so they'd get back to work, now he's having an executive "YOU AREN'T THE BOSS OF ME!" meltdown* about it" and "this looks a whole lot like the play certain advisors tell CEO's to run when they need to extend their runway. whether or not they backfill the people who leave will tell the tale. guess it's time to watch linkedin."
https://mobile.twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1304490208...
"There are many unbanked and underbanked people in the world who have no ability to get a loan to buy a home, or start a business, so this kind of technology has enormous potential to improve the world over time, even if it is still early days."
"I greatly admire Apple as a company, and think they build amazing products, but their restrictions on the app store, in particular around cryptocurrency, are not defensible in my view, and they are holding back progress in the world."
The way that Coinbase puts pressure on Apple is the same as what Coinbase's politically-active employees are doing.
It got relatively little discussion because it set off the flamewar detector (http://hnrankings.info/24610267/). Normally we'd turn that off in such a case, but we missed that one.
Also: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click:
how often does it get triggered?
Is comment pagination still necessary?
But at the level of severance discussed in the post (4 (or 6) months, 7-year exercise window), it feels like most employees who know they could soft-land into another position would be silly not to take this offer. Some people may still enjoy working at Coinbase, but do they enjoy it enough to reject an effective 30-50% bonus?
Especially for employees who were there less than 2 years, and may not necessarily stay for 2 years, this looks like a unique opportunity to lock in that 7 year exercise window.
I've seen offers like this before, and it led to a much-higher-than-expected number of employees choosing to leave.
Not having to deal with activism at work sounds like a nice perk!
Never discussed politics at any of the companies I’ve worked for, we were always too busy with...work!
If you want to stay focused on building a company and not on debating the subjective merits of sociopolitical systems, this is a winning move.
At the highest level, a company is a group of people who get together to 1) set an impactful goal, and then 2) work very hard to achieve it. The first part — the setting of the goal — is the political act. Disagreements at this level are good, and broadly healthy.
But the second part — the achieving of the goal — is purely a practical act. Here, your guiding principle is to take those actions, and only those actions, which you believe will give you the highest chance of achieving your goal.
Politicizing a company contradicts this principle: to the extent that you make the act of achievement more political, you are also making it less practical. To the extent that you allocate more budget, focus, and optimization power to X, you are also taking it away from Y.
If you make the act of achievement less practical, someone else may beat you to your goal. Your company will be less impactful than it could have been, and may even die as a result.
What Brian is saying here is: we set our goal in 2012 when we started Coinbase. We are now engaged in the practical act of achieving it. If you have a goal that's different from the one we set, no problem. Here is some money: you may use it, if you choose, to find an organization whose goals you support.
This may be a sign that it’s become increasingly hard to organize or take part in such activism outside of work. What happened?
One of the longstanding contradictions of Silicon Valley ethos is that we will simultaneously talk about "mission" and "impact"—and, implicitly, the social impact of our work—while applauding management efforts to stamp out employee activism as a principled stance.
At the same time, as American politics in particular become increasingly polarized, many of us may be forced to decide between being professionals—and the apoliticism that implies—and being engaged citizens.
Edit: Reading some other posts here, I'm struck by some other trends at play:
- The shifting of—or, more pointedly, fragmentation of the "Overton Window" of acceptable behavior.
- The longstanding tendency in tech companies to have porous boundaries between "work" and "social" spheres.
- The above-mentioned rhetoric in tech companies to promote an idea of "mission" that goes beyond mere profit.
Along with increasing political polarization and (worse) delegitimization, these are all trends that make it harder to keep politics out of the workplace, and harder to balance "activism" with "professional" conduct.
I don't think Coinbase's approach will prove to be a lasting one.
The problem with recent political activism in companies has been that it isn't fair. It has been acceptable to advocate for liberal causes (for example for affirmative action), but not for conservative ones (against affirmative action).
It might be ok if both were allowed equally. But if only one viewpoint is allowed, that's not really democracy.
If you spout liberal ideas at a conservative company, you will find disagreement. If you spout conservative ideas at a liberal company (most of SF tech), you will find yourself out of a job.
This election is a bit different than normal. I've never seen a sitting president that would not commit to the peaceful transfer of power. You really think that coinbase would be where it is if we had that for the last 50 year? You think silicon valley would be silicon valley?
I don't.
No, the only thing companies are obligated to do is what they want to do (usually profit), within the boundaries of the law.
There’s no obligation to support the environment in which you flourished. A particularly ruthless company might actively work against that environment to prevent competitors. And it’d be fine - use the law to define what a company can or cannot do instead of depending on personal (company) responsibility.
My current presence on a career site mentions my long-time involvement in societal implications of technology. In my case, the relevance to work is that I'm drawn to some companies and roles, knowingly avoid some others, and some of my technical and product work is informed by, say, some understanding of security&privacy -- but it's not that one day I'll spontaneously become woke on some issue, and organize a march of employees to a media event where we denounce our employer and burn the founders in effigy.
Given some news incidents in the last couple years, I'm wondering whether a job candidate looking like possibly an "activist" is going to become a standard factor for hair-trigger filtering by HR.
Will there be new hiring rituals in which the people who read the interview prep books know the right shibboleth to convey that they're "totally non-political"?
Yeah, it's an exchange, trade w/o mainstream adoption will likely go on for a while, and there are a lot of caveats I'm not mentioning.
A mainstream Coinbase with mainstream cryptocurrencies, which will include Bitcoin (assuming a multi-currency future, not just BTC dominance), implies some serious changes to bedrock financial and geopolitical practices currently in place.
In the same way that wearing a mass-produced cotton shirt vs. a homespun one in 1890 implies the industrial revolution which implies Manchester mill-towns which implies...., so does a successful Coinbase if it reaches the end goals of its mission.
It's interesting that in exchange for not taking a stance on one set of issues, their very aggressive stance in another extremely societally profound area is getting overlooked. Like literally, interesting. Probably a nature of how Coinbase vs. other crypto cos chose to market itself.
It's not overlooked, it's explicit in the call to focus on the mission of the company and not unrelated politics.
It's never in regards the big overarching social issues like racial politics though. It's the advertising companies you work with, the casinos and bookmakers (which is the only time I've made a moral stand at work), or people losing jobs that are replaced by automation.
The longer I work, the less I put up with dehumanizing actions from the top. You only live for so long. Why be told to your face that you're just a resource.
And I have no problem with this, when I decided to work for a company that relationship is you provide them your services for pay. If you like the company and feel you are treated well, stay. If you don't like it there, leave, it's that simple.
Lots of successful companies who've found current fit and are chugging along.
I think the inclusive apolitical approach will win out in the long term. I don't believe for a second that "not saying something is a statement in and of itself", and by subscribing to this idea you're bringing forward a style of authoritarianism the world is better off without.
Given that identity politics is so rife in 2020, don't you think it's a wise move to divorce company decision making from the clutches of any specific political ideology? The people that say no are almost certainly the authoritarians.
So much of this conversation seems stuck on the binary opposites (zero politics vs 100% politics), just like the way our politics is functioning in a binary fashion today. Obviously a company cannot be truly apolitical unless it hires no one and does absolutely nothing in the world, but we can at least minimize the surface area and allow topics less relevant to company objectives to the individuals outside of the workplace.
It's a popular idea that institutions with power have a duty to wield it, which is a completely ridiculous and dangerous idea. Simply put, we shouldn't be co-opting the influence of our companies to satisfy our personal political agendas or resort to cancel-culture tactics in order to force them into speaking. In a landscape where this is regularly happening, the neutral position is better and safer for all of us and healthy political discourse.
But he also wants to influence politics and laws to benefit his company. Coinbase pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobbyists and lobbying companies around the world to advocate for their position (this is all public information).
He seems to believe that you can separate “political decisions that benefit Coinbase” and “political decisions that are irrelevant to Coinbase”, but you can’t. They’re all interconnected. It’s naive to pretend otherwise.
I believe that corporations are not governed or regulated to support activism writ large, but there has to be room for dissent (even if it ends in separation). How else do you arrive at a shared definition of “economic freedom”?
Is the next step amorality?
Agreed. I wonder if they will take some word smithing to the mission statement. Even with the clarification and interpretation presented in the blog post, "economic freedom" encompasses a lot of "other politics". It is a helluva juggling act to want a diverse, thriving team, and a singular shared definition of economic freedom across that team.
More practically, I wonder how it will be debated. Who within the organization has confidence to debate where the line is drawn beyond what the CEO has shared? Is it the board?
If the first step is "apoliticism or we'll help you find the door" then isn't a potential next step "amorality or we'll help you..."?
Again not arguing that any CEO should nurture activism (though I personally might like it), but healthy dissent is important for solving hard problems, and not every hard problem is purely logical.
If my company's mission is to create an open financial system for the world, how can we possibly do that without holding space for the multitude of values, beliefs, and political opinions across the world about financial systems?
Seems one way would be to take an amoral stance on the multitudes and stick to a tightly held definition of what an open financial system means.
Visa, paypal, stripe .. etc
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
>We focus minimally on causes not directly related to the mission
>Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...
In theory, I am all for it. I do not use hashtags on twitter, or openly support any ideologies.
However, as a light brown dude whose parents immigrated here to Canada, my existence itself is a political statement (in support of legal immigration) that is bound to offend people.
I try, to the extent that is possible, to not say political statements on twitter, but I am only human. And for many humans, existing itself is a political statement.
I sometimes feel like a platypus. There are plenty of taxonomist that want me dead. There are plenty of well intentioned people that will protest for me to keep my rights to exist while never getting close to me.
And all I wanna do is keep platypusing every day. It's just hard to do that in deeply divisive times, I guess.
Fortunately, most of them are quick to pick up on the reality that they’ve been misled, but a small minority try to turn the workplace into an extension of a Twitter flame war at every opportunity.
Unless those in your country who are opposed to immigration literally want you dead, this is a pretty hyperbolic statement.
If what Brian Armstrong is saying here was considered the norm, this article wouldn't even be on the front page.
The role of an employee is to deliver value to the employer during their working hours. The role of the employer is to provide an income to the employee. It’s insane to think that the role of the employer should be to further the political objectives of the employees. By that rationale, having any interaction with any party who’s politics are different from yours in any way is conformism.
Coinbase is full of shit. Cryptocurrencies are a political statement themselves. The policy is just an excuse to eject employees with any moral compass, and signal that Coinbase won't out people with abhorrent anti-social views. It's not a surprise that it comes from a business that is borderline illegal, and adjacent to scams, extortions, and money laundering. They've found a way to treat employees as obedient dumb cogs, and have them feel smart about it.
Erica's theory that this is a way of trimming payroll while eliminating personnel Brian sees as problematic seems to fit all the facts about the pressures Brian and Coinbase are feeling right now.
While I'm not sure this will turn out to be a bad thing for the world, it's a lot clearer why now & why Coinbase with this in mind.
1. The literal meaning of the term or its original definition.
2. The core ideas proposed by the group or by whoever defined the term.
3. The real actions of people who feel identified by a group or people who use the term.
Many times we have misunderstandings because we are thinking about different layers. Also, these differences in meaning are often astutely used to manipulate and tergiverse things.
Examples of terms with different effective meanings depending on the layer: blm, antifa, alt-right, feminism, neoliberalism, capitalism, communism.
Funnily enough, I interviewed at Coinbase not that long ago, and almost joined the company. I am glad that I did not, this would have made me quit. One of the things that one of the interviewers mentioned was the openness and transparency of the execs. I wonder if these draconian measures will make these employees think twice about working at such an institution.
Coinbase’s mission is to create an open financial system for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to bring economic freedom to people all over the world.
This is squarely in line in trying to push Apple to be more amenable on this issue.Yes, because he is the CEO of HIS company, with an app on IOS. Not just an employee and he never asked his staff to agree with his position and tweet about it. At coinbase right now, some people want HIM to talk about "Black Live Matters". It's like employees in IT in US don't understand the concept of subordination and think that a company is a college campus... or maybe the problem is that too many companies thought they should be like college campuses, and not a business.
"In my day" -- it was just poor form to bring up that kind of stuff at work. If you did so at all, you usually tried to avoid being "that person". You don't get to choose each person you work with, so it pays if everyone puts in a bit of extra effort to not give anyone else a hard time.
I think some of these work politics issues--in particular around the bay area-- is partially a product of extremely homogeneous work forces (at least politically), partially poor work-life balance cultures (no life outside work), partially social networking (massively increasing the visibility of your co-workers out of work activities), and <???>-- I don't feel I really have a complete understanding of what is going on.
Maybe a factor is a breakdown in our wider culture's ability to see people who disagree as being people who are still good people with reasonable points but just have different understandings or priorities (or even just to patronize them as stupid or uninformed). But instead perhaps there is a trend to rapidly decide people we disagree with are irredeemably evil just based on a soundbitized version of some insanely complicated political trade-off (or maybe even just by association)... But I'm not really sure how much that breakdown is actually happening compared to the appearance of it happening in the reporting funhouse mirror ("Reasonable people do a reasonable thing" said no headline ever).
Some of it might also be due to a transition from products to services-- people seem a lot more willing to view product sales as anonymous and totally transactional, while they seem to view a service as something more akin to a marriage.
A big downside of reactions like coinbases' might be that in what I would consider the traditional regime there was still an opportunity for employees to bring a little bit of their politics to work-- so long as they were professional and not obnoxious about it, or in places where there were genuine interactions with work ("How about lets not buy the toner cartages made from clubbed baby seals?") ... but if you can't count on people to control themselves and you're forced to set bright line policies then there is probably a lot less room for people to be reasonable.
A cognitive limitation that it's hard to see the bubble we are in.
Being smart at the things in our bubble makes us over-confident about things we really don't have deep nuanced experience about.
We don't know what we don't know, but we think we do .. until we gain enough experience to appreciate life's complexity and our own limitations.
It's my personal view that so much of the current political vitriol is because as a society, we've run out of things to worry about. We've reached critical mass of people solving Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and therefore, we are dwelving in to other arenas where we are feeling neglected.
Same, and that's the conundrum.
"Activist" employees put others on the spot by querying coworkers' political views and expecting discussion. And for those who have had their head in the sand for the past few years, things like "being a Joe Rogan fan" are now considered unacceptable politics.
For one who has had their head in the sand and is only vaguely familiar with Joe Rogan; why?
I think that's one side effect of having these gargantuan, hugely profitable tech companies. They can essentially have a huge portion of their workforce be unproductive if the essential "money machine" at each company (e.g. AdWords at Google) is running smoothly.
Other, smaller companies can't afford to have as much fat in their workforce, so their workers need to be actually focused on, you know, work, and if they're not, their lack of productivity is much more visible.
You only want to work on a feature for a social media platform? No politics there, right?
I'm curious to see if Spotify management might copy this.
Especially when the company in question makes significant political donations[1].
[1] https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/?...
Also the company is not claiming to be apolitical. They are saying they don't want employees individually engaging in politics while acting on behalf of the company.
I'm sure coinbase has plenty of political objectives. On some level business is politics. Especially a crypto company, which makes it even more important not to have your employees politically organizing in a way that could appear represents your companies politics with out any executive oversight.
> He's totally neutered the ability of employees to take strong political stances
He absolutely has not. I'm sure they will continue to take hard right-libertarian stances that are common in the cryptocurrency world.
- Brian Armstrong, 2 weeks ago
Seems to me that's not at all a hard right-libertarian stance.
Also I have never in my lifetime of working with many libertarian programmers heard anyone aggressively push their libertarian views in a way aimed at changing a companies internal politics. Also never heard a conservative or even really a traditional Democrat do this.
This is almost strictly a leftist thing.
And I agree focus on their goal is a great, abstract guiding principle for a company. But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world? Brian believes social activism has "the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division." That might be true, but in many cases, I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy changes and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.
> But the better question is does a socially active company have a more positive impact on the world?
Your total impact tends to be greatest when all your effort is concentrated on a small surface area. An organization that optimizes for two things almost always has less total impact than it would if it optimized for either one alone. To maximize impact, you'd be better served starting a company that's 100% focused on solving the problem you wanted to solve in the first place.
> I doubt the cost of employee annoyance and loss of focus is more than the benefit of enacting minor policy and fund diversion that could positively impact millions.
Generally if you want to impact millions in a real and lasting way, it will cost you more than some minor annoyances and fund diversions — even at a company as big and successful as Coinbase. The tradeoffs here are real, and I strongly suspect Brian is speaking empirically when he talks about destruction of value.
1) There exists a zero-point of politicization for this widget company;
2) In this scenario that zero-point corresponds to the decision, "do not bake climate mitigation into company's DNA"; and
3) That decision is one necessary component of the policy that maximizes the company's chance of hitting its goal.
I'm not saying anything prescriptive at all — just highlighting that tradeoffs that are being made, whether or not one is intentional in making them.
Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form.
It's smart to do what one can to get rid of these types of employees basically because they are only trouble, they add nothing with their activism in the workplace.
Now what you do on your own time on the other hand is totally up to you.
Or protests against other employees because <reasons>.
I'm the bloke who got my boss to hire the Polish girl who cleaned our offices after I realized she had a relevant degree.
The Indian girl I worked with at the helpdesk at the start of my career approached me at a wedding for common friends and said thanks for how much I had helped and encouraged her to pick up the local language.
I'm often the bloke people talk to about this or that because I listen and neither judge nor leak (unless clearly agreed).
I'm the bloke who was happy to be let go so that another guy with less experience could keep his as the bottom fell out of the market. (Also I really didn't like that job, but it made me genuinely happy that he could stay there as he had small kids and needed a job for different reasons. Also: I got a 40% increase in my base salary when I got a new job : )
It goes without saying I strongly believe all people have the same worth.
But at Google I would not feel safe at all, because I have studied enough biology and psychology to know that men and women are different and I refuse to pretend otherwise if confronted although I am wise enough not to bring the topic up.
Whether or not you agree, you can objectively see how this would jeopardize a presumably 10-figure deal for Spotify.
> Imagine having employees who refuses to do work because 'they feel they shouldn't'. Or organizes walkouts, protests and are actively lobbying for changes in company policy to reflect their own personal values. Or protests against certain customers of the company, because they are evil in some perceived way or form. It's smart to do what one can to get rid of these types of employees basically because they are only trouble, they add nothing with their activism in the workplace.
I think the world would have been collectively grateful if engineers at IBM and Dehomag would have refused to do some work because they felt they shouldn't [1].
Remember, politics is out there in the world. If a large enough number of people at your company are being affected by it, there's likely something wrong that's much greater than your company. History can teach us some lessons about this.
---------------------------
> Of course, employees should always feel free to advocate around issues of pay, conditions of employment, or violations of law, for instance.
Now, if he really is trying to diminsh the possibility of that happening, I don't know.
I doubt Coinbase thinks employees advocating around pay/conditions are desirable for the company.
So generous of him, he could have run it like a drug cartel.
So, pass on that.
Can you elaborate?
I'm partial to Aaron Levie's take on this[1]:
> An alternative take on the importance of companies taking a stand on critical social issues that impact our employees and communities: when there's a vacuum of leadership from the government in dealing with these topics, businesses often need to lead more than ever.
When we have had presidents who were willing to condemn white supremacy, we tended not to call on CEOs to.
1. https://mobile.twitter.com/levie/status/1311007294033854464
The country is tearing itself apart right now because we really do have two camps with opposite beliefs that each feel they are fighting for the survival of the nation itself. Read what the other side says about themselves, and not just what your side says about them.
https://twitter.com/robsmithonline/status/131113297546835968...
I might be over-simplifying but the vast majority of people most affected by political decisions no longer have the incomes and free time to partake in such activism.
For example if you cared about something like workers' unions (let's assume the relatively well-run, non-corrupt version), the people in the best place to perform the activism do not feel they need the unions because they have the spare income and time (ex. tech workers at TechCompanyX). Those who would be most helped by the activism (ex. workers in TechCompanyX's factories/warehouses/wherever) have grueling work schedules and lower pay.
It will be interesting to see where this takes the culture of Coinbase.
The cynic in me feels like it's a casual way for engineers to feel better about themselves.
It's no wonder to me that this "bring your whole self to work" nonsense sprung up at ad-tech companies like Google.
And by the way - the political stuff never is about anything that Google does. I haven't seen any tax law, anti-trust, or privacy protests at Google.
Essentially that means that for the company, it ends up being a win-win situation. They satisfy their employees' urges to perform activism and they get brownie points from the public for promoting a "noble" sounding cause with minimal effort, all the while not having to rock the boat by having to defend their opinion because it's defacto assumed to be good and justified. E.g. have a look at the whole Goya Foods incident to find out what happens if a company happens to support a non activist-approved point of view.
Proffeshional without stones to stand up to authority/management is what gave us Chernobyl and Challanger disasters, Boeing 737, massive famine in China, and, debatably, 2008.
I think Sabine Hossenfelder said it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGVIJSW0Y3k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
All three had known issues (in the case of Chernobyl, for decades), but averting disaster gave people, specifically the engineers, confidence to continue.
OTOH, if the trend continues towards employees and/or management demanding more political positioning from their companies... some sort of "on board or out" dynamic is inevitable. Maybe "on board or shut up," in reality.
No position, including neutrality, will be comfortable for everyone and no company wants political factioning in their ranks.
Ultimately though, I think employee opinions are less operative than some of these reports would have us think.
Yeah if there wasn't the pesky world around all the engineering and we could all just stare at our stock options while we sit in our gentrified neighbourhoods and pretend the world doesn't exist.
You can ignore politics but politics doesn't ignore you. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil is an unworthy attitude for a democratic citizen. The etymology for the word 'idiot' comes from 'idios', meaning 'one's own', in ancient Greece signifying a person who is only concerned with their private interest, rather than living an active life and participating in civic affairs. To be an idiot was to be withdrawn, isolated and selfish, to not participate in the public, political life of the state.
Given how much people nowadays love to invoke the Greeks and our ancient Western traditions, maybe it's time to remind everyone of the meaning of that word again.
http://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/305parkeridiocy...
You cannot ignore your dreams, your health, your family, social ills, the air quality, politics and a myriad of other things in the world around you. But if you focus on all of those all the time you will achieve nothing. Imagine a great inventor, scientist, engineer or artist working on his next idea. Do you really want to make him jump and go demonstrate for/against your list of hot button topics?
The issue with "activist" employees isn't so much that they want to bring politics to work (which I can see arguments for and against). It's that the new "activist" employees insist everyone's politics be the same, else you become a target.
I think "no politics" offices will crush it in the future, if by nothing more than being able to focus on the product.
You are not going to innovate or create anything if you're fighting all day, every day. Constantly distracted. The purpose of a company is to bring people together to CREATE something of value. To solve problems. Hopefully to improve lives on some vector. And you do that most effectively by rowing in the same direction, focused.
People spending their day on Twitter or Slack or in the office halls arguing about the war is not productive. It's mostly just destructive. They're certainly not inventing anything, or curing a disease, or improving energy efficiency, or creating tools, or educating, or entertaining, or inspiring, or anything else additive.
"Being apolitical is a political stance"
"If you don't take a stand you're part of the problem"
Gosh, this is tiresome.
You can also still take action - by leaving. That's exactly what this policy is encouraging with a generous exit package. Why is that not acceptable? Why does the corporation have to follow what you decide?
For example, AGI will be built either by accident or intentionally by sociopaths at Google, etc. All decisions at a certain scale are inevitably political, and choosing to ignore the politics in those contexts is in itself a political position.
Much of the discussion here today is confused by the intermingling of so many concepts under the singular term "politics".
Except this has nothing to do with that. It has do with a group of people that insist that everyone get behind their pet cause and use their job to promote whatever activist belief they have - and negatively affect everyone else who may not agree with them.
I'd stand behind anyone who wants to protest their companies business model - like the executive at Amazon who protested the treatment of a union organizer (which was racist and absolutely disgusting). I'm not going to get behind the culture of activism which has nothing to do with civil disobedience.
For a deeper dive on this, look at Arendt's "Report on the Banality of Evil."
I'd say most harm was done by humans who did not just do their job, but thought they knew how everyone else has to do their job, live their lives etc, by political activists.
You might think of activism only as what those do that you're politically aligned with. What are those on the opposite side who work just as hard to bring about their ideas of society?
What serves the public better, a utility company that "just does its job", or a utility company that snoops around people's garbage, identifies dissenters and then stops supplying water to them (because otherwise you'd be aiding the enemy)?
Ironically, the people preaching activism in the workplace would be livid if a religious believer proselytized their faith at the workplace, despite the believer having as strong a belief in their ideas as the activists do in theirs. Quite the double standard.
It's one thing for an employee to be activist within the company about new (or even existing) features/products/etc, because that is part of the company's mission and business ops and its the kind of feedback a company should get before it introduces a potentially controversial product/feature to the market, or about problematic products/features that should be retired. Otherwise you end up with companies like Palantir, or unethical business models based on loot boxes and youth gambling.
It's another thing for an employee to take external politics that aren't directly or indirectly related to the company's business, and try to make the company and other employees take a stand on those political issues. Generally, the only time this is appropriate is if, for example, those political issues directly affect a large segment of the customer base and taking a position is also a deliberate act of marketing. (See, e.g., Patagonia, Nike and even Hobby Lobby, but contrast with Chikfila.) Otherwise, you just end up alienating a large portion of your employees and customers to the overall detriment of the business.
It's not an attack if people just don't want to be around you.
Besides, engineering problems and the solutions to those problems bring enough variety of opinion that you would think people would be able to fulfill whatever need this new religion of politics brings. Engineering is challenging and rewarding on several different levels.
Very few people have the time and money to fund tech and engineering purely to influence elections. Most money coming in to tech is going to be from customers and investors, the latter being in interest of making money off of the business getting more customers.
Companies like Cambridge Analytica are a very very minute minority compared to the swaths of B2B, consumer tech, etc.
We all bear responsibility to what happens to this world, and we, collectively, are building systems that affect how people think and view the world, and hence how they act. We are part of this shared universe, and now more than ever, we are the ones creating it.
That's of course coming from a point of view where Democracy is the only moral political system, and the understanding that democracy dies if not defended daily by being political. First very slowly, then very quickly. There are obviously other points of view, and dictatorships have their supporters.
Perhaps this doesn't apply to your area of engineering, but I do feel that it does affect a substantial chunk of the HN audience.
How and what data you choose to collect about internet visitors is no longer a purely technical analysis, it now has broader implications that potentially involve political actors. You don't know who might have access to that data in the future or what they might do with it.
We as engineers are the final implementer of these decisions. Should we really abdicate the ethical responsibilities tied to these decisions so easily?
1) Large
2) Has a culture that embraces optimism, reject cynicism, and has "Change the World!" type mission statements
3) Have overly-strict culture fit parameters.
Political activists share a lot in common with founders: They are stubbornly optimistic (Why fight for social change if you think it's pointless or impossible?), they want to change the world, and they have interests in building movements/organizations. If your hiring process is designed to weed out candidates cynical enough to know your organizations mission statement is bullshit and recognize you're just here to make money not change the world - or pessimistic enough to think they'll never be part of positive change - don't be surprised if you find yourself with a team full of activists... just saying.
I suspect the Bay Area is extremely nondiverse and homogeneous, and folks there aren’t actually used to having to work with and get along with people who strongly disagree with them on politics. In that kind of monoculture, it’s easy to think that politics can and should be part of work life. In a much more diverse workforce, though, it rarely works well.
If Coinbase is going to be remote-first, as they recently announced, the company’s employees are certainly going to encounter a level of diversity they haven’t been exposed to in the Bay Area. This could be preparation for that.
I moved there from Ohio to work for a FAANG for six months. It's not nearly as bad on the ground as it might seem but you do witness spectacles with much more frequency.
Racially and culturally its definitely not homogenous but there aren't any black folks to be found. Alameda county is the only one around the bay to break double digit percentages, mostly because of Oakland. SF at ~6% is on par with Colorado Springs and Portland lol. The rest (Santa Clara, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Napa, Marin, etc etc) are on the order of 1-2% black, and based on my short experience living and working there I imagine a good chunk of those are immigrants.
I had no idea and when I first noticed it I got extremely creeped out. Not because I'm some diversity champ, it's just that everybody else is there and you realize there's clearly some kind of filter at work.
Yes it's fair to say that about Bay Area tech companies. The geographic region that is the Bay Area however features extraordinarily diverse demographics: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/10/14/three-bay-area-cities...
This is extremely ironic given the hiring practices of Bay Area companies.
A lot of companies are going to get some serious culture shock if they increase their remote hiring.
In that sense, it's terribly unfair to forbid employees to bring up politics at work. After all, their bosses are doing it: and not only that, their bosses are using their employees' productivity to empower those political views.
For example, the company refuses to take a stance on:
- Brexit (even though it will negatively impact them)
- Elections or any vote (even though again, this impacts them)
But for example actively campaigns on:
- Agricultural issues (It's in the food industry)
The company VERY strongly supports LGBT rights and minority rights, and will raise money for charities, but typically this does not transfer into support of individual political policies or parties.
The view is effectively that the company has lots of customers, and we shouldn't alienate them if they have opposing views, and that taking a strong political stance outside our industry can look like we are not respecting opposing viewpoints that our customers or competitors may have.
Without a lot of double speak, there is no such thing as a 'universally tolerant' corporate policy because different legal, social, and religious moral frameworks are mutually incompatible. In the US people just prefer to pretend that post-Protestant Woo-ism is universally friendly to everyone.
Both likely affect the company significantly, both are (unfortunately) political issues, both (unfortunately) alienate people.
It seems the only distinction here is that Brexit is a closer call in the UK. Is there another way of looking at it?
I agree that it's hard and maybe impossible to make a hard line that separates the two, but wouldn't you agree that some political decisions are way more specific to Coinbase than others? Specifically the CEO sets out a pretty clear distinction: "If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here"
That seems fair to me, lobbying for crypto and maybe even internet privacy laws wouldn't seem outside the mission to better his company but publicly declaring support for one candidate or another would. Likewise getting involved in a non-crypto centric mission like BLM would be quite far outside its mandate.
Companies do what works better for them, which means: - Earn money - Retain employees
Political discussions will definitely make some employees feel uncomfortable or unwelcome (unless you have an entirely homogeneous company). This is deeply unfortunate and troubling (I blame education and the media for people incapacity to have a discussions without feeling triggered) but it's today polarised reality. Preventing or discouraging polarising discussions on the private properties of the company sounds like a sensible choice.
Political moves from the company will definitely have some trade-offs but have less of an impact on employees. This is not zero (I remember some Google or Amazon employees leaving over their company's political choices) but it's far less common.
And so for better or worse we're actually in some socialist capitalist system. Blaming capitalism for problems that are often rooted in bad government is often just wrong.
Assume good faith https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A conservative guy who generated headlines because of being discriminated against because he voted for the GOP?
Also some sort of whistleblower who got fired for speaking out against anti-union activity (but may have been a personal / non-union issue)?
I think most business owners would say this is not at all sensible. If someone is a troublemaker you don't normally pay them to leave. You fire them. Brian is being very generous here, almost inexplicably so except for the fact that they're based in the Bay Area. Most CEOs would tackle it in two phases:
1. Tell people they may not attempt to bring social activism into the work place.
2. Fire anyone who keeps doing it.
Payments wouldn't enter the picture!
By using the carrot instead of the stick, you protect yourself somewhat from these disgruntled employees tanking your public image.
There are reasons that might work badly, though. Without the org continuing to generate political pressure, public awareness, or money, the originally-achieved goal state could backslide. But ... change is inevitable. Perhaps at that point you try and get the org back together,; if you can, you can, otherwise you accept the world has moved on.
Easier said than done.
Maybe I'm reading too much in to this.
Besides, I'd expect the "true believers" to find some way to outright brag to future interviewers they parted ways with Coinbase over moral / ethical objections.
Easy money. Not much to read about politics in the decision of getting paid for nothing.
Perhaps it's not really that important, and there's not even much point debating it for the organisation .. people at work could instead get on with the work they are doing and offering value to society through the outcome of their work. Of course they could do various activism in other ways, without inflicting it excessively on their colleagues just because they are earning a living across the hallway from them ..
> without inflicting it excessively on their colleagues
This is the tricky part. In a transition from the old normal to the new normal, I believe it's important to recognize who may have always been excessively afflicted but didn't have the platform. Or conversely, who may have never felt excessively afflicted and had full discretion over their professional platform.
It's the eternal theme of monoculture vs. multiculturalism. The Coinbase CEO is acknowledging both sides of the coin, and maintaining focus on one side (pun intended). I don't think that's right or wrong. It is what it is.
There is more than enough willing talent to keep the line he has drawn in the sand, but will people look back years from now and question the veracity of the original mission despite evident success (e.g. Facebook making the world more open and connected)?
It's a nice thought, but my mother in law has original presidential campaign pins and bumper stickers from as far back as the early 60s.
One obvious example being the use of "all lives matter" and "blue lives matter" to reinforce the false interpretation of "black lives matter" as meaning "only black lives matter," when the phrase more correctly means "black lives matter as well."
Or the way that "fake news" has been re-appropriated to refer to bias within mainstream media, rather than literally fabricated stories and memes posing as news on social media and the web.
Or ask a feminist and a redpiller to agree on what "toxic masculinity" actually means.
> Cultural diversity means that a group contains people of different races, religions, ages, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, socioeconomic statuses, nationalities, and more.
Their agreements or disagreements on political viewpoints are not what makes a pool of employees culturally diverse.
> 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
Huh? https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18114285/google-employee...
I'm not from the US, so thanks for pointing that out.
> For what it's worth, Coinbase must "allow" those discussions by law in the US.
I feel most companies think that this isn't desirable. However, as long as the complaints, and the complainers, are treated fairly, that's fine by me.
All labor is "activism" performed in service of a specific outcome, because every action is inherently ideological. Only tools are morally neutral -- not the actions performed with them.
What you spend your time doing, introduces an influence that drives nature and society in one direction over another. If you make tools for microlending, you are contributing to the economic activity of disconnected portions of the world population. If you make tools for surveilling undocumented immigrants, you are contributing to the apparatus which continues to strip and violate the human rights of large groups of people.
Different degrees of separation warrant different levels of attribution. But no one is completely inculpable.
English isn't my native language but doesn't this make it sound like you only spend "a day or two" researching? Or are these two sentences unrelated?
> Bringing politics to the office(thanks Google!)
How bad is it really? Have you ever been told something like "I won't review your PR because you don't vote for the same person I do"?
As I noted elsewhere in this thread, I think it's more ambiguous these days, not less.
As a few concrete examples:
* Say I refuse to buy Chinese-made goods because I oppose the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. What do I do if my employer considers doing business in China? Should I not mention this, because it's "political"?
* What if it's 1933, and my employer is IBM, and the customer is Nazi Germany?
* Say I oppose H1B visas because they take jobs away from American citizens, and my employer considers expanding the H1B workforce. Should I speak out against it, or hold my tongue because my motives are "political"?* Say I believe in equal rights for gay couples, and my employer is considering expanding health coverage to same-sex partners. Should I speak out in favor of it?
In each of these examples, it seems to me there's a spectrum of options, ranging from:
A. No constraints on in-office behavior; I speak out about anything.
B. In the office, I am purely a shareholder-profit-maximizing robot.
I don't think either of those extremes is very satisfying—I expect many of us would say it is noble to oppose selling adding machines to Nazi Germany, but that we'd have many more questions when it comes to some of the other examples.
Unfortunately, I think that means that there's no simple answer here. "No politics in the workplace" can result in ghastly, amoral outcomes (selling adding machines to the Nazis).
But "every culture war, all the time" is a great way to be a dick.
I think my personal code here is, "try not to be a dick." Past that point, I don't think there are easy answers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_Uni...
Their sacrifice wasn’t any less important or necessary to the expansion of the democracy in the United States. In fact, it was this “bringing politics to the work” that provided the means for workers having real representation for them in government in the first place.
The original quote is diplomacy is war by other means. And it had very specific connotations to explicitly adversarial political relationships. Politics is much larger than diplomacy, and indeed as Aristotle concluded there is nothing in a society that is not politics.
They wouldn't be; that's the point. If there was no problem there would be no reason to define oneself as anti-problem.
The answer is that there is nothing that unites these people except not being stamp collectors. If stamp collectors didn't exist, then no one would identify as non-stamp collectors.
Basically the companies only look at skin color and what’s between your legs. As long as you have an American middle class/upper class upbringing or at the minimum had your education in certain American universities. So culturally they are pretty much identical.
From this point of view a white, black and asian American middleclass teenagers that have had identical education are wildly different and bring diverse viewpoints. Whereas a French, Italian and a Polish person would be non diverse. Even though the latter group has massively different cultural background compared to the first group.
everyone might look different, but they 100% think the same way.
You can't say "We won’t: Debate causes or political candidates internally" (quoting Armstrong) but simultaneously say that anyone who attempts to enforce that would be viewed negatively. That would imply that Armstrong would view himself negatively for enforcing his own rule.
My personal opinion is that they don’t like him because his platform is massive and threatens other traditional means of informing people about what to think on certain topics.
> liberals care far more about proper culture signaling than they do about the much harder and more consequential work of actual politics.
I'd argue this is more about the political climate in the US (and many other places) than about liberals specifically. Arguably for "true liberals" this shouldn't be a consideration at all but might be for conservatives.
Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees once they reach a certain depth vs. upvotes.
> Reddit does it right by auto-folding comment trees
That doesn't address the "faux replies to top comment" problem unless you auto-fold at depth 1 (i.e. collapse away all replies to every top-level comment) – which feels like too much auto-folding to me.
It is a deterrence to posting a direct reply to the top comment, since there is a higher chance that the reply gets folded, unless it is high quality.
I like this idea that comments have to earn their keep, in a weighted ratio to how visible a space they are trying to claim.
You can disagree with how it's implemented, but it's not subjective.
dang does a way better job of addressing moderation issues as they're happening than anything you'll see on Reddit (besides perhaps tiny, niche subreddits.) And at least he's not surreptitiously changing people's comments. (https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13739026/reddit-ceo-stev...)
There are lots of other moderation features -- e.g. shadow bans and automatic vote penalties -- that are completely opaque but turn HN into a strong echo chamber.
I also disagree with your point about Reddit. At least on Reddit you can easily track what was removed (there are entire subreddits dedicated to tracking what's been removed by moderators) and many subreddits provide explanations of why content was removed.
Every time I click "vouch" I wonder if a counter is being incremented on my account, or if a record of things I've vouched is being kept for moderator perusal. A chilling effect which certainly exists outside of HN, of course.
How is that a relevant comparison? Reddit is orders of magnitude larger (looks to be around 100 times more active users) and allows users to create public and private subreddits that can easily become echo chambers.
HN moderation is not even in the same ballpark as what Reddit deals with.
To be clear I'm not defending Reddit or even saying they do a good job; I'm just saying the comparison is not fair or useful.
But then she starts to over-speculate about Armstrong's emotions without any basis and tries to frame him as an unstable person. All of this simply because Armstrong posted about his company's mission.
How would she feel if talking about her company's mission resulted in execs from other companies tweeting about her "having a meltdown", simply because she has a different political perspective?
Unprofessional, ideological, dogmatic, crazy-lady
https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1307109690917224449
https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1306403761603051521
https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1306280514035179521
https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1303264312354512896
And on, and on, and on. She tweets so much it's kind of sad. Practically none of her tweets have anything to do with actual engineering. It's all identity politics and other leftist nonsense.
There is. I've lost vouching privileges after the mods disagreed with my decisions. They don't tell you, either, you'll just notice one day that it no longer seems to work.
Those strongly emotional actions are a whole different thing and it's dishonest to use mild language to describe those behaviours as 'bringing it up' and more accurate to call it something such a 'arguing about politics instead of working'.
Viewed in that light is it unfair to forbid employees to regularly argue about politics instead of working?
that's because the bosses (an owner of the company) is paying for it. Presumably, doing so reduces the amount of money the company can make (since employee time is diverted away to an unproductive, but political action).
The employee, however, do not have this right, because if they are doing so not under the instruction of the owner of company, they are taking away their productivity that they've sold to the company (for their wage/salary).
Here are quotes from my feed:
"The path to an IPO is to purge Black and Brown people from Coinbase ... this is very unbecoming of a federal contractor"
"Over a dozen diverse crypto industry leaders [are] calling it out as racist."
"Sweden took 60 years to admit its neutrality policy was racist. How long will it take Coinbase to do the same? Being neutral is a position in support of the status quo - it always has been."
"Coinbase's CEO's recent statement of neutrality is unacceptable and complicit."
An out of context comment unfortunately adding to the gradient of the same context: "IBM's first computer sold to Hitler. Ford converted cars to tanks sold to Hitler. Why???"
The people posting are all identifying as black, in San Francisco Bay Area, and using their platform in support of black communities.
What's going on is that there is more context than Brian Armstrong's post, there is the context of what actually occurred within Coinbase amongst Coinbase's employees, something I have an incomplete picture of. And I think all of us miss that.
I like Brian Armstrong's post - in isolation. People with more context don't like it, and are galvanizing support against this very quickly. That's too bad. I hope Coinbase gets their IPO.
Do normal people actually believe stuff like this???
Extremists abound on the internet.
In other words, exactly the toxic group of people that this is trying to remove from the company.
It should be clear that this isn't "just" trying to be mission focused, that was very eloquently written and timely, but it is failing because it is a reaction to internal issues which wasn't clear to the rest of us. And as such it has stirred a hornets nest that also no longer wants to keep things inside the company.
Many of the people it has stirred are also people that have been fighting for more inclusivity and also identify as part of underrepresented groups. People that feel like their voice isn't loud enough because they are so few inside the companies. This doesn't represent everyone in underrepresented groups, only that there is a significant overlap in the goals of inclusivity and people that want the company to be more welcoming by speaking out against inherently political nationalism, which the company doesn't want to do.
I'm not offering any solution only observation.
In my experience, there has never been a shortage of people with practically no information communicating very strong opinions online?
As a Swede, I... don't even know what they might be misinterpreting here!
I have no idea why you should apologize for that.
This is undeniably true.
Absolutely. Everyone involved with the movement put aside their differences to focus on the same goal.
It would not have been as successful if everyone showing up for a rally was expected / coerced into supporting other political issues.
A universal appeal to shared humanity is an approach that works. Shaming people into a type of morality will only invite pushback.
This just doesn't strike me as reasonable. The employee was in the wrong. Clearly. Just because the thing you support is a moral and good thing to support doesn't mean you get to foist your activism upon everyone else around you. I care about endangered species conservation - but if I did what this person did and held the organization hostage to my demands I'd be looked at sideways, and rightfully so.
It's not that there's no place for activism in the workplace, it's just that the line should be drawn at the point where it starts harming the organization as a whole.
I honestly do not understand why people socialize at work. Can someone who holds a contrary viewpoint shed some light on why this is so common place in corporate environments? My guess is that it has to do with various kinds of personalities.
I also just happen to share similar interests/perspectives with my boss, and we trust each other a lot. I count him as a friend instead of just a coworker.
I only talk politics obliquely, and tend towards analysis and hearing what people have to say. I try to come off as friendly and tolerant of other perspectives, and my conservative coworkers tend to return the favor.
They released a statement. Kind of a milquetoast, bland statement, but still unambiguously supportive of BLM.
But not supportive enough for some employees, particularly those of color. Lots of complaints, and a lot of non-racial issues started boiling up to the fore as well. They've since amended and re-released the statement to be stronger, and included statements for battered women, Native Americans, and a full-on separate statement for at-risk immigrants.
It's utterly paralyzed the organization -- and is totally unrelated to their primary mission -- and will likely lead to at least one lawsuit. It sounds like a manager or two may be a rebuke or termination as well.
I ultimately agree with the parent and OP -- create a safety valve or squash the discussion, because there is no way to function as an org if you're 10 minutes from screaming at, or stabbing, or suing your coworkers
When you ask a question like that, what you're really asking is, "why don't workplaces have the outcomes I expect along racial lines when it comes to hiring, compensation, promotion, and more?" And implicitly, "why can't workplaces be forced (or force themselves) toward meeting the outcomes I expect?"
Those are different questions, but they're encoded in yours. And they don't really apply to the topic at hand.
not 'all of us'
But if the football player interrupts the game and starts running around with a BLM flag in the middle of a play, that's inappropriate. Or if my manager decides to use the first 5 minutes of every standup to have a group discussion about libertarian ethics.
There's no bright line between which speech is appropriate and which in inappropriate and it's all subjective; and I would certainly oppose any sort of legislation that impinges on the expression of free speech in this area. Society can negotiate these rules in the course of social etiquette, not in the court of law.
But c'mon, when we're at work we're here to get shit done, just let us focus on that. If a group of coworkers wants to organize around common political goals, do it amongst yourselves. Go ahead and use a conference room and work laptops even, if it's after hours and not disrupting business.
I don't begrudge the dislike of workplace politics—again, I'd love to not talk about this. But for some groups, i.e. black Americans, it may not seem like a choice of whether they can be political. Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus". Remember, it's within living memory that the US government rounded up Asian Americans and put them into internment camps.
While I agree on the need to address climate change urgently itself, I must point out that progressives would be infuriated if the same level of evidence were demanded for the scientific validity of beliefs regarding various identity groups they support. Again, a very clear double standard.
> "Indeed I'm a little surprised more Asians in tech aren't concerned at the president's rhetoric about the "China virus"."
You shouldn't be. News stories like the Harvard Asian-American admissions lawsuit and California's Proposition 209 repeal and many, many others have made it amply clear that progressives are no friends of Asians either, but at a much deeper level.
"Spotify shares dropped 8.8% Wednesday (Sep. 2) morning, shaving as much as $4.81 billion of its value, following a report Joe Rogan's back catalog debuted on the platform Tuesday without episodes by right-wing personalities"
"In 1964, in a poll taken nine months after the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, 74 percent of Americans said such mass demonstrations were more likely to harm than to help the movement for racial equality. In 1965, after marchers in Selma, Alabama, were beaten by state troopers, less than half of Americans said they supported the marchers."
(Taken from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/10/the-nex...)
Compare this to today's thoughtless and abrasive slogans or the writings of today's favored thought leaders on this and how divisive now only are the ideas but the tactics being used to coerce people into compliance.
So yeah, people at the time may have had a distaste for some of the tactics but the messaging was very popular. The riots that took place later on in the decade were a disaster and led to a new, mainstream form of conservatism led by Nixon.
You could still support the Civil Rights movement, but believe that mass demonstrations harm it.
Those two things are completely separate.
The objection isn't to the presence of the immigrants per se, but rather the consequences of continuing the flow of people on the labor market and on cultural cohesion.
Yeah, it's all about the future thing there. Give me a break.
That's not future immigration, that's past immigration fraudulently misrepresented as future immigration on paper.
x.yyyzzz BITCOIN SOLD VIA COINBASE - PURCHASER UNKNOWN
and are followed subsequently by transactions with an (apparent) natural person as contributor with memo fields like x.yyyzzz Bitcoins, Contributions Previously Disclosed
So it looks like those PACs reported contributions twice, once naming the actual contributor, and once naming Coinbase. I'm not sure why they'd do that - perhaps to head off FEC questions about deposits from Coinbase?Regardless, those don't seem to be contributions directly from Coinbase, but rather artifacts of campaign finance reporting.
On an aside, there are some transactions that jump out e.g. line B of [1] where the PAC appears to have netted $5665 for 7.49 BTC in the closing days of 2017(!).
Looking further, it seems like their reporting occasionally exchanged BTC for ETH, and the contribution reported makes sense for latter. Still, for a moment it was fun to imagine that someone got a screaming deal on a heap of BTC the day after Christmas 2017
[1]: https://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/fecimg/?201801319091289865
Sure, that's the trade-off.
In a vacuum we all want to "make the world a better place". Does cancelling academics who appear on Joe Rogan's podcast "make the world a better place"? Does having a coworker cancelled or fired because of a stupid joke "make the world a better place"? I don't know; I don't think so.
On the other hand, I think there should be internal political discussion regarding policy at a place like Facebook.
What are the politics relevant to your job? It's not easy to answer.
Politics, as much as we all hate it, is engaged with everywhere in business.
Choosing to be apolitical is effectively a form of political engagement, usually resulting in a vote for the status quo and/or the pursuit of money eschewing engagement in difficult questions in society.
This can be argued about whether it is moral or not, or even if a company has much of a choice in the matter (There are many entrenched companies that do "immoral" political things that are near impossible not to engage with as a business), and this is not unique to coinbase, but it's not somehow withdrawing from judgement on morality when you say you are "apolitical", and you still should be judged on your politics and lack of engagement in society.
Let's not be naive here, any larger company, even the most "apolitical" company still has large influence, uses services, and makes decisions that are politically charged.
That said, it's not all one direction where all political activism within a company is great, but eschewing all politics is not doing so at all.
I think this brings clarity to the work relationship, as "the power to direct the political mission of the company" had been previously an unstated, unnegotiated axis of the terms of employment. People are now learning that this need to be crystal clear upfront.
What do the investors think? They are free to usurp the founders if they feel that Coinbase is not paying proper homage to social justice.
Investors invest in companies based on their perception of the value of a company, and that perception is of course coloured by political views.
Heck, we have an entire financial movement called Socially Responsible Investing, something which is nakedly political and a clear acknowledgement that politics cannot be, and has never been, divorced from business.
I find it infinitely more strange to think that workplaces can be apolitical at all. Choosing to work for Palantir or Coinbase or The Gates Foundation or Amazon is (in part) a political decision. It may not be a conscious or intentional political decision, but it's a political decision nonetheless.
How could anyone think otherwise?
One hundred percent this. There is a reason Coinbase is one of the few companies to take a stance like this.
The company's foundational value is literally based on the notion of state-free finance. They have no incentive to do anything to allow their company to be steered into engaging with conventional politics. In fact, they benefit from taking strong stances that maintain the status quo if the status quo furthers their own mission.
So, yeah, Coinbase is indeed very mission oriented.
Not taking a position is, by default, choosing to uphold the status quo. When the status quo is unjust, it's choosing to uphold injustice.
That's fine, just own up to it. Hiding behind "I'm apolitical" when you're a loyal foot soldier for the current system isn't a good look.
This argument can't be taken as honest or sincere, because with absolute surety I can guarantee that horrific injustices took place today that you have absolutely no concern about at all.
When somebody presents this argument, they are not honestly advocating for justice. What they are actually saying is that "by not adopting _my_ political views, you are acting out evil". Part of any person's political world view is how they choose the issues that they consider to be important, knowing that they only have the span of their short life, and the means of their limited resources to address the problems in the world. You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
And all of that is before you account for the fact describing something as an injustice in the first place is quintessentially an opinion. This sort of thing reminds me a lot of the psychology of warfare, where soldiers are systemically taught to view the enemy as animals who lack humanity. It has a terribly toxic influence on society. Your ideas no longer need to compete on their merits, because the people who disagree with them are the enemy, and the enemy is less than human.
> You have no right to demand that somebody make the same decisions in this respect as you do. It is absurd, it is hostile to the notion of free democracy, and it is a standard that no living person could ever meet.
Well said. It's sad that activists are anti-liberty in this way. It undermines their campaigns.
I had a professor in college tell an entire class the first day - "nobody really cares about you except your family and maybe some friends". You could see the shock to a lot of the students who had been coddled and told how awesome they were their whole life. Once you accept that concept, you can learn to be more effective in communication and not expect things from others.
Most of these activists have no tact.
Neil deGrasse Tyson says in his MasterClass that his father taught him that it's not enough to be right. You must be effective.
The world would be a much better place if everyone followed that.
Unless you mean a critique of the notion of justice in general, that seems to be a bit reductive. Accusations of "injustice" in most societies typically don't stand on their own; they're accompanied by evidence, which is debated, and an ethical stance, which is also sometimes debated. But injustice isn't some Hitlerian discussion-ender; it's an idea and a value set, always selectively applied, just like "fairness", "equality", "utilitarianism", or whatever. It's not like invoking the devil in church.
I'm not GP. I've no clue whether they were being honest in their statements or not, or how they'd choose to back them up, but: at what point is an accusation of injustice not an "opinion", or a "toxic influence on society"? When one person believes it? Ten? Some percentage of society? Some magistrate? When you agree with it? There's no general answer to that question, so saying "they said it was unjust, that means that they're dehumanizing my position and making me into the enemy!" is somewhat silly.
We live in a deeply interconnected world. Most actions, even studied inaction/uninvolvedness, have repercussions on lots of other people--complex repercussions that have to do with privilege and affluence and race and gender and all those other hot-button issues that people get up in arms about. We call that "political".
Now, nobody's making you be an activist (someone who puts a ton of time towards advancing one of those causes). Nobody's making you care. You're free to do whatever you want. But choosing not to care doesn't make the repercussions of your choices any less political.
It weirds me out when people get prickly in response to that pointing out that basic reality, because it sounds very much like "I don't want to acknowledge that my actions have wide reaching consequences."
What you should/shouldn't do about that reality is a separate question: opinions range from "don't tell anyone what to do" to "sell all your belongings in service to $cause right now". But accepting that basically everything we do in an interdependent society is not just tangentially but fundamentally political (yes, even refraining from discussing political topics at work) isn't a super contentious or extreme claim.
(Speaking of which, what have you done to fight the status quo? Why not more? Why have you not consumed all of your time/money/attention on it? What level is necessary to be considered not-complicit in the status quo?)
The protest is about trying someone else to do something.
In a country where your employer controls your access to healthcare and retirement, as well as indirectly controls your access to these things for the rest of your life via references (future employers will shy away from hiring a lone person who refused to do as they were told and was fired for that reason), I would say this is not easy at all.
IMO, modern companies in America are turning into a sort of benevolent government; and that's why you have all these protests. Cut employers out of things fundamental to life like healthcare and retirement, and turn it into a true monetary exchange. Then you will have far fewer of these protests; and people might feel more comfortable quitting en masse instead.
I’d love to work at a place like this. It looks like a “get down to business, cut the bullshit” place. And I’d quite like to chat with coworkers and make friends regardless of our political viewpoints. It’d be interesting.
The latter is the more visible one and being targeted by this, and in my opinion rightly so, because that behavior (attacking others) is toxic and helps nobody.
If you think its "leftist nonsense", then that's just your opinion.
She is entitled to tweet whatever she wants to from her personal twitter account. Do you think its reasonable for her to follow your idea of how a Director of Engineering should tweet?
Maybe we should roll back anti-discrimination laws in the workplace too? I'm sure CEOs find that to be a hassle…
Perhaps every company can offer severance packages to workers who don't want their rights taken away? Don't like the 40 hours work week? Here's a severance package. The rest of you are now required to work 60 hours. Etc. etc. etc.
This kind of behavior is a textbook example of how rights in practice are eroded.
To downvoters: in the past, the LGBT community was asked to "hide" their identity at work, literally, by pretending to be cis at work. This isn't any different.
Imagine offering a severance package to all LGBT individuals today. If that would horrify you, think again about what Coinbase is doing (and why).
"We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent."
"Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote. We have a pay for performance culture, which means that your rewards and promotions are linked to your overall contribution to the mission and company goals.
Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc."
"Of course, there are exceptions here around internal employment matters, whistleblowing, etc. And we want all employees to feel safe disagreeing on the work itself. Candor and debate are core to a healthy team, where it is safe to disagree. We consider these to be related to our mission."
c.f. North Korea, a communist totalitarian state that calls itself the "Democratic People's Republic". Their words say X, their actions say Y.
This isn't hard: you shall know them by their fruits.
> Definition of draconian
> 1 law : of, relating to, or characteristic of Draco or the severe code of laws held to have been framed by him > 2 : cruel also : severe
The real indicator for the tech industry's lack of diversity is that CA's 39% Hispanic population reflects as some minor fraction of the tech population.
Some extraordinary filter is occurring somewhere that's keeping Hispanic people out. Not alleging malice, just the scale is so huge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
1900 0.70%
1910 0.90%
1920 1.10%
1930 1.40%
1940 1.80%
1950 4.40%
1960 5.60%
1970 7.00%
1980 7.70%
and then you can fill in the rest with Census / ACS data
1990 7.40%
2000 6.40%
2010 6.20%
So, overall, it looks like it's about right. Black people were mostly in America through the slave trade and spread to areas adjacent to the South. The West saw very little increase.
Anyway, thank you for sharing that. It was enlightening. I do have to leave this discussion, though. I promised not to participate in non-tech here.
However lobbying for for laws such as for/against gay marriage or religious rights is unrelated to their business. Then the company is used to exert some individuals political influence instead of just being a business.
Of course politicians are sometimes corrupt and get favors from the companies and then go to do whatever the companies lobbyist tells them to, that is what people usually mean when they mention "lobbying". But lobbying itself isn't inherently a malicious or political act, in its purest form it just conveys information so politicians can make better decisions.
I believe this is a result of the fact that Americans have turned away from organized religion in recent years (note: I'm not religious myself). There seems to be something deep inside of most people that requires a shared spiritual experience. Wokism has emerged to fill that need.
>Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power. Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't really believe, they will.
>At this point we've established, at least to my satisfaction, that
>(a) there is such a thing as Universalism;
>(b) Universalism is an educationally-transmitted tradition that works just like any theistic religion, and is best understood as a descendant of Christianity;
>Universalism, again, is a mystery cult of power. Its supreme being is the State. And all of the Universalist mysteries - humanity, democracy, equality, and so on - cluster around the philosophy of collective action. Christianity has been a state religion since Constantine, of course, but it always also included magical and metaphysical mysteries, which the advance of science has rendered superfluous at best, embarrassing at worst. So Universalism, unlike its ancestors, is not concerned with the Trinity or transubstantiation or predestination.
> One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
It's also weird how he's aware of the oversimplification involved in classifying birds and bats in the same category, and then he immediately goes off and says the equivalent of "both a birds and planes have wings and a tail, therefore planes are a subset of birds". While that statement can be true from a certain point of view for certain uses ("can this thing fly?"), in the end it's just a bad analogy and bad reasoning.
Which is all not to say that the point I think you're driving at from your selection in that article can't be correct. I would agree that post-religion, people will pick up causes to fight for and act in ways that are reminiscent of fundamentalist religions, but that doesn't mean the fundamental truth is that they're all variations of religion. The fundamental truth is some people just enjoy picking up causes that let them justify bad behavior. This used to include religion a lot more in the past, and now that humanity is moving beyond it, we're discovering new ways to justify the same old behavior that we've always had.
On some of the troop carriers going to Vietnam, soldiers starting fighting each other along racial lines; in response, the US military started a major initiative to promote racial tolerance in their training of soldiers and in their personnel policies. Similarly, according to my theory, the leaders of the other major institutions of the US realize that the performance of their institution depends on the different races getting along or at least not openly fighting each other, so they will exhibit a weaker tendency to push against a radical belief system that prioritizes racial tolerance than their counterparts in more homogenous countries will.
Also, starting with the Puritans of England, the western Europeans that chose to emigrate to the US were on average more religious than those who chose to remain in western Europe.
The atmosphere during the Brexit debate is/was absolutely fierce. The remain side has fundamentally a cosmopolitan-utopian worldview and the brexit side a nationalistic one (radically so compared to the orthodoxy in London and metro areas).
In other parts of Europe they're experiencing a severe decadence in culture and media because of the creeping monoculture of wokeism. They're having existential debates about their very national ideas, people don't want to have families anymore, nobody wants to defend their country and so they outsource this work to the US, while Russia and especially Asian powers have nothing of this whatsoever. Eastern Europe is caught in-between because they don't believe any of this but they don't have the size or clout to stand up to the soft economic power of Western Europe and the real power blocs elsewhere.
Out of the so-called West, the USA strikes me as by far the least decadent, and I'm not American. This feels to me like end-of-civilisation times as described for ancient empires. America pushing back presents some hope.
The cynical side of me sees it as America being transformed into an economic zone instead of a country. This is just what a religion looks like when you're binding people together in one large brutalistic finance zone.
My understanding is that we have had secular societies before, eg. the Soviet Union, China, which explicitly try to reduce practicing religion. Did this same kind of "new semi-religion appears to fill the void" event occur in those societies? Is it the particular "holy sacrements" that the west has adopted that is unique? Or are we unique in even having something arise the "fills the religious void"?
They were very secular and extremely violent and even evil (making shows out of drowning believers etc).
As much as the Catholic Church has something to answer for with the witch processes around here etc, they are small guys compared to the secular/atheists of the French Revolution.
Same goes to some degree for USSR and to a large degree for Khmer Rouge.
Eventually as the new converts temper their zeal as it hits against reality, but if it's a wave it can make a society do crazy things.
I would argue it's a Reformed Protestant thing. Reformed Protestantism is the religious scaffolding of American culture.
The fact is that every person in the world gets to choose for themselves which issues they consider to be most important to them. They each get to choose which issues they devote their time/attention/money/skills/resources/etc to.
When you account for the total number of all injustices that take place everyday, any person will only ever be able to concern themselves with a minuscule portion of them. By not concerning yourself with a particular injustice, you are in not automatically supporting it. A failure to intervene does not make you responsible for the actions of every other person on the planet.
Somebody who says this is not saying “why are you not concerned about every injustice on the planet”, they’re saying “if your concerns don’t align with mine then you’re a bad person”. Unless they consider themselves a champion of injustice, any person who repeats this is necessarily a hypocrite.
Unfortunately, I cannot discuss this further.
Sorry, I was insufficiently explicit. "Indians who have lived in America for ten years" are past immigrants. They have already immigrated. A effort to "curtail[] future immigration" that allows deporting them to be part of it is fraudulently misrepresenting that past immigration as part of the "future immigration" which it purports to curtail.
The issuance of genuinely new visas (ie to people who have not yet immigrated) is a separate issue from renewing visas of people who have already immigrated, regardless of whether those are, on paper, both lumped into the single catagory of "[']temporary['] visas".
> Unfortunately, I cannot discuss this further.
Fair enough; good luck on whatever came up.
If anything, "this kind of technology" means the opposite of exclusivity, namely that Coinbase is part of a larger system than themselves, made of multiple corporations and other entities, and the people themselves, using this kind of technology, which it is claimed together help the underserved.
Or are you trying to argue that this for-profit corporation, or all for-profit corporations, should not be aiming to help underserved people?
With cryptocurrencies specifically, the premise is that most poor people are poor because of government over-regulation (which is also deemed responsible for monopolies) and over-taxation, and so providing the ability to circumvent both is beneficial. It's definitely a libertarian stance, although it could be either left or right libertarian by itself. But given that most cryptocurrency adepts also have a problem with fiat money, and generally try to implement an intrinsically limited money supply, it ends up aligning more with right libertarian economic prescriptions.
Perhaps so.
But this isn't about cryptocurrency adepts in general. Is there other context that shows Coinbase and/or Brian Armstrong have a problem with fiat money, and/or that they advocate for a limited money supply, or even that they advocate to reduce or avoid taxation?
Seems to me the corporation's activity is literally integrating fiat systems with cryptocurrency, including tax reporting, so it's not clear if Coinbase's longer term direction is towards cryptocurrency being its own separate system of ordinary transactions in the end, or towards it being just another option alongside and integrated with fiat for more options in ordinary life. Regardless of what cryptocurrency adepts out in the world would like it to be.
Meanwhile LGBT rights are pretty much universally agreed, and I don’t think that “LGBT support” is generally classed as a political view so much as an expected cultural norm (i.e. not showing support would elicit a severe backlash within the customer base).
Generally supporting established lgbt rights with no specific link to policy is different - it’s overwhelmingly supported and not even generally classed as a political view anymore (along with “is evil bad?”).
He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability that people can make lists like the one you posted, while everyone who is following along sees exactly what is happening.
Nobody takes that position because they’re concerned that you’re not considering the injustices some random far away people, that neither of you know about, are currently experiencing. People only take that position when they want to bully/guilt/coerce/intimidate others into caring about the same issues as they do.
If taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to supporting it, then the history of humanity has been comprised entirely of absolutely despicable people. Because for every injustice that you have taken a stand against, there is an essentially unlimited number of additional injustices that you have fully supported by virtue of never even knowing they occurred.
The reality is that actions have political consequences. You interpreted that as a requirement to track every possible consequence of your actions. That's a deeply false dichotomy, and is commonly used by people to avoid having to confront discomfort from the more immediate political consequences of their actions: "you're saying I have to worry about everything that might possibly happen as a result of what I do?!".
Nobody's insisting on that. That's a cop-out that allows people to say they're "apolitical" when what they really mean is "apathetic to the political consequences of their actions". Which is fine, sure, but, per the original comment, it's a bad look to not acknowledge that there are consequences when what you mean is that you are not interested in them.
What the "everything is political" folks (and the social justice folks, and the BLM folks, and unions, and environmentalists, and missionaries to a lesser extent, etc.) are saying is that you should care about a given set of specific consequences of your actions.
Whether you choose to agree to learn/care about some of those specific consequences, or none of them, is up to you. Whether you choose to associate morality with action/inaction (i.e. the difference between "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to actively supporting it" and "taking no action against an injustice is equivalent to allowing it/passively supporting it") is up to you.
Like, there are plenty of things I don't give a shit about. Maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. But I don't for a minute pretend that the fact that I don't care about those things means my actions don't affect them in potentially extremely influential ways. Denying that is Bugblatter Beast of Traal[1] logic.
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/24779-a-towel-the-hitchhike...
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/proud-boys-enrique-tarrio...
Let's be honest here: if Trump had "unequivocally" said "I condemn White Supremacy", what would have happened, practically? Do you think for a second that the media would have suddenly "let him off the hook"? Problem solved? No more white supremacy talk?
There is footage of him disavowing the KKK, and David Duke, going back 20 years, believe it or not. Has it made a difference?
The fact that question was even asked demonstrates just how far the US political system has fallen. Kind of embarrassing. The fact that Trump doesn't simply repeat the condemnation -- for whatever that's worth -- is sad and polarizing. But let's not pretend it changes anyone's opinion on anything.
>He doesn't condemn, he validates with just enough deniability
Much like many Democrats did with regards to the looting and burning of cities.
In fact, the media tends not to report on the added emphasis on the “stand by”, which served to minimize the “stand back”.
If the way the comment was received is incorrect, then it is up to Trump to correct it. Obviously, he will not be doing so.
You can draw your own conclusions.
And the Proud Boys' leader looks pretty black for a white supremacist.
If you say a group should be condemned but then proceed to justify their actions it’s barely a slap on the wrist, and coming from the president the lack of a strong response is actually a form of encouragement.
> Policy decisions: If there is a bill introduced around crypto, we may engage here, but we normally wouldn’t engage in policy decisions around healthcare or education for example.
Are there other "political consequences" around crypto that you'd have Coinbase engage in?
People realise that rather than the local town hall, the large internet platforms, their workplace, and their social media feed have become the public space of ideas. That's why the free speech debate focuses so much on internet platforms, and why 'it's privately owned' has long lost meaning to anyone in the debate.
Keeping politics 'out of the workplace', at least in our environment today, is basically to say to keep politics out, period. It's not the apolitical position, it is the 'idiotic' position because it intents to keep politics out of the one place that actually matters the most in this day and age.
When I work for a company, I provide my labor in exchange for payment. I am then free to use my money to support an activist organization or a cause. So are all other employees.
Corporate activism, on the other hand, is inherently degenerate. It means your employer withholds resources from improving the business or paying higher salaries. They instead apply those resources to some causes of their choosing. Any employee who doesn't agree with the cause is effectively coerced into supporting it unless they quit. So is every customer. The goods and services become inherently tangled with an ideology of some sort.
Why should a model where everyone is free to pursue their personal activism be replaced with a model where people are coerced to pursue activism "approved" by corporate execs?
It's also a straw man to talk about corporate execs leading the activism, the post was talking about the workers themselves.
It is for this exact reason that many people object to politics being overtly brought into the workplace against people's will.
If someone wants to discuss politics (or religion or sexuality or anything else that makes us all human) with you, have at it. If they don't want to, you need to stop.
No means no here as well. The fact that they can't leave imposes a higher burden on consent, not a lower one, IMO.
Unless it's part of your job description.
But no one likes to face what it means to sell their time to another person.
That's probably true, but they would be wrong. The fact that some people would say incorrect things is not a strong argument.
Just because something doesn't contradict your idea of a hard right-libertarian, doesn't mean that it is a hard right-libertarian view.
You may read it as "identifying an underserved market", but you have start from seeing the underserved as being a market to think that way.
Another reading is to think there are people currently deprived of basic rights to low levels of personal property and interactions that most folk already have and enjoy, and the corporation says it exists to make those rights available to more people in a more egalitarian fashion than the currently broken system permits. That would make it left-libertarian, albeit the market-oriented variety.
It was important to me that that caveat was applied to
> The mainstream "anti-immigration" position is about curtailing future immigration, rather than removing current immigrants.
So that it is clear that removing current immigrants resident in the US under dual-intent visas is part of the mainstream position.
Please do not mind read. You are not very good at it.
Temporary work visas exist to help cover shortages of labor in a host country, which will naturally vary over time. If someone is in the US on a temporary visa, then that implies that they should only be in the US on that visa for a relatively short time, and that at the end of that time they should either be granted a more permanent status or they should return home.
To continue to extend such visas indefinitely, such that visa holder builds a life in the US, all the while still legally in the position that they could be forced to return at any time is cruel and unjust. If that is happening to a large (or small) number of Indians presently in the US, I think it would be entirely reasonable to grant special consideration for them - as part of an overall immigration reform that would avoid situations in the future.
I believe mainstream immigration restrictions actually do not share your view on dual intent visas. Not many people support the position you have on Indian/Chinese who are present in America for a long time on their dual-intent visas.
Consider my comments as being edited to not reference you but reference mainstream anti-immigration positions - none of which currently state any GC reforms that permit existing Indian/Chinese backlogs to be grandfathered in.
Why the binary presentation, though?
You can make the world better by doing a single thing well and respecting your customers (and their all-kinds-diversity) while doing it. Even if you're not directly contributing to BigIssue by doing it, the people who are presumably need to be able to count on a reliable supply chain that gives them the tools/services/resources they need.
Unless your work has serious atypical externalities, just doing what you're doing doesn't itself make things worse -- it make fail to do the absolute maximum it could possibly to to make one specific thing better, but if that's your focus you should be working on that thing directly. In a reasonable organization there should be a lot of opportunity to put your thumb on a scale towards continually improving all sorts of things-- without inviting disruption and discord --by threading the needle and nudging all the free choices in the right direction and respecting that other reasonable people can have different priorities.
There are an neigh uncountable number of travesties and injustices in the world and finite time and resources to fight for them... but as a society we can't stand strong to face any of the big issues if the water taps aren't flowing, the power isn't on, the communications lines aren't communicating, the spread-sheets aren't spreading, the trash (literal and figurative) isn't getting collected, and whatnot. We have to prioritize, triage, and focus on what we can accomplish.
And someone-- many many someones, in fact-- has to be the shoulders we stand on as our tallest reach for the stars.
Besides, if advocacy was really what people were sold on in large numbers how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits? :) I think that asks me to believe that there were many people who's next alternative to a google role was taking a $40k/yr 501c3 job and google was foolish enough to offer that person a mid-six-figure compensation package.
Most of the big tech companies are all encompassing enough that they all have serious externalities.
- Amazon and Microsoft face protests that they enable ICE
- FB faces protests that they enable Trump to promote hate speech
- Google faced protests over a possible Pentagon contract
> how can we explain the literal order of magnitude compensation differences for rank and file engineering staff at tech companies and tech roles in non-profits
Keep in mind that a decent percentage of employees of big tech companies are non-eng. The comp is still better than outside, but not the order of magnitude you see for eng.
In general, are you surprised that people want to have their cake and eat it too? :P There is a group for whom changing a specific issue is their top priority and they'll accept below-market comp to work at a nonprofit. There's a much larger group, especially among younger generations, who want both top of market comp and to feel like they're changing the world, and the tech companies promised they could have it all.
A number of people in big tech are facing the decision of: should I keep working at a company whose values I may no longer agree with? Or should I quit (possibly taking a cut in pay, perks, scope, caliber of eng, etc), since I may not find a big tech company whose values I completely agree with? I haven't seen a trend towards leaving yet, but the fact that the stock of big tech has been going through the roof has made it sting even harder to leave now, so I'll be curious when the market run ends how this ends up.
Sweden apologized recently about their neutrality was not that neutral. They maintained favorable trade conditions with Berlin as well as granted land access for military incursions.
Despite this, Sweden still did an impressive job of allowing in many refugees from persecution. Its diplomatic representatives were instrumental in assisting the persecuted throughout Europe during the whole war. Anyone interested should look up, for example: Raul Wallenberg and Count Folke Bernadotte.
Sweden had nothing to apologize for during the war, and especially given the much more evident racism of other states like the U.S, which explicitly forbade many refugee jews from entering U.S soil during the Nazi persecutions and expulsions of the 1930's before the war. The writing was on the wall in dripping red letters, but Roosevelt simply disregarded it to please certain voters. At one point in 1942, when presented by Polish resistence agent Jan Karski with a whole eye witness narrative of the massive German extermination program against the jews in Poland, his first question to the Home Army solider was about the Nazi treatment of horses and cattlein the occupied territory!
I also have no opinion on that direct quote which is in quotes. Go find and ask that other person, on LinkedIn, why they wrote it in the context they did.
One in four of Australia’s 22 million people were born overseas; 46 per cent have at least one parent who was born overseas; and nearly 20 per cent of Australians speak a language other than English at home[1]
I think the key differentiator, is Australia, Canada and Britain have parliamentary democracies.
[1] https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/education/face-facts-cul...
But on the street they were just generic white christian Aussies who were out to slam a few beers and grab a chick parm. Not generic Anglo, but still very white and very western.
Unless said leaders have an interest in curtailing the institution's function or scope, in which case causing the institution to perform worse, or even fail in their mission entirely may be their intent.
For example, they might subscribe to an ideology that questions the legitimacy of the institution, or they may have previously been a leader in an industry the institution is supposed to regulate.
Uh no, he's saying "white supremacists" and "proud boys" are two different groups.
Anyways in case you are right it probably makes GPs point even stronger: when established religions are chased away quasi-religions - and often extremely dangerous ones - take their place.
LGBT rights are human rights. Brexit absolutely has a human rights component to it.
That strikes me as a level of nuance that is frankly unlikely.
I don't think these landmark legal events occurred because people demonstrated so much what the man and his supporters were saying. I believe people miss the forest for the trees and think if they just get a group of people together they're somehow right or will get their way. But it's about what you have to say and how you say it that matters. Peacefully organizing is a great vehicle for that but you still need the goods.
The violence that happened in the later 1960's set so much of it back IMO.
Yet your conclusion is far too final: it's not a "myth" that people didn't support these changes; some people did and some didn't, as with anything. At one point in the end of 1964, a majority of people oppose the protests that led to these changes.
And in fact, the 24th Amendment faced substantial opposition from southern states; I'm not able to find contemporaneous opinion polls (and I'd be interested if you have any), but it's far from the case that it was without controversy!
I strongly disagree with your last line, however—not because violence is acceptable or productive, necessarily, but because your interpretation exculpates reactionaries who regrouped and pushed back against such changes, which I think is a highly relevant lesson for the Trump era:
Race is such a good predictor of a vote for Trump. The simplest explanation for Trump's rise is that he is a counterreaction to the election of the first Black President.
So too with the success of a cynical Southern Strategy following on the heels of the Civil Rights Era.
However, opinion polls _do_ show a _correlation_ between support for _BLM_ and coverage of demonstrations: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/support-for-black-lives....
Look at Apple they were very proud to tell us about their pride themed watch face and emoji, yet some developer within Apple had to write the if statement to disable these graphics if the device is in Russia [1]. By choosing to take a stance on these issues but not willing to take the monetary loss you're causing someone in your organisation to write that if statement which could even be interpreted as an active act of oppression to LGBT+ people.
If your company truly holds these values then there shouldn't be even a question about giving up that revenue for the greater good. Until that moment then its just performative, taking advantage of those communities for the sake of advertising and headlines.
If money is more important which we know it is because you wrote the if statement, well maybe leave politics at the door then.
[1] : https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17803638/apple-watch-prid...
However, globocorps do not do that. They are woke where the educated elite are aggressively secular and the laws support it, and they are profit focused and 'business-first' where it isn't. The US educated elite is under a mistaken impression that its secularism is 'tolerant' or 'universal' when it is actually rather parochial, particular, and incompatible with most of the largest global faith groups. The US outlook is also incompatible with Chinese political culture, and China will control the largest and most significant economic power bloc over the next 30 years -- no one else will be close, including the rapidly declining US.
Point being there is no such thing as a universally 'tolerant' moral system -- no matter what stance you profess to take on a given issue of this type, it will be discriminatory against very large groups of people (billions of them).
An apolitical company can still clearly say "slavery is bad" even though it does happen in some places in the world.
Specifically: I'm disputing the theological claim "Being a practicing L, G, B, or T or pro any of them is against sharia, the Catechism, and against the rules of many major Protestant sects like Mormons." That's not really a settled question.
> They sanction funds for sex reassignment surgery in order to fit all of their citizens
> into the category of either male or female without any grey area for those who are homosexual
> or transgender.
So support the T specifically for the purposes of denying the L, G and B. Grandparent looks at least 3/4 correct to me...
>Iran is one of a handful of countries where homosexual acts are punishable by death. Clerics do, however accept the idea that a person may be trapped in a body of the wrong sex. So homosexuals can be pushed into having gender reassignment surgery - and to avoid it many flee the country.
It’s about adopting values which tend to unite your customers rather than divide them, and in the U.K. at least LGBT rights is one of those issues. A stance of no-support on these issues would elicit a severe backlash from customers in the U.K. but meanwhile they aren’t campaigning for changes to the law in these areas, or supporting particular political parties because of it (as reasonable people could disagree on that because of how democracies work, and doing this will alienate specific customer groups).
And I may be mistaken on where the mainstream anti-immigration position is, though I do think that many/most people who are in favor of reducing immigration would also be amenable to some sort of a deal if it were on the table.
https://www.amazon.com/Kindly-Inquisitors-Attacks-Free-Thoug...
Meanwhile in the US the 90s boom was kicking off and the US was exploding into global hegemony. Why protest and fight the man when communism was collapsing and there was more to gain from getting on board the winning team.
In other words, the trend dropped off externally and internally there were a lot of reasons to assume that history was in fact ending and to jump on board with MURICA and FREEDOM.
The UK presents us with a good example what happens when you spread enough fear, nationalism and protectionism. From here it seems like "end-of-civilisation times" for a once great nation that has lost its power and importance and is failing to find a new way for itself, while it tries to clinge on the status quo that is running through his hands. I think the (probable) hard Brexit will tell us quite quickly who's right on all of this.
The rest of Western Europe seems to understand that the times are changing and our cultures are getting more diverse and that this will lead to conflicts which have to be solved.
Eastern Europe, joining the EU with a strong background from its UDSSR times, wars and whatnot else, has problems adapting to "the Western Europe way". You see this especially with Poland or Hungary which have strong nationalistic, traditionalistic tendencies with "strong leader persons" at their top. But I think they'll also fail once people from the newer generations are getting more and more in charge.
edit: And the US... Well... The jokes are writing themselves.
The EU gamble is going nowhere and this is a crisis that will affect us all, regardless of Brexit. It is what it is. Europe is decrepit and best case scenario is managed decadence into a third rate bloc. Russia and EE are screwed too, of course, but not because of self-doubt. Asia and the US will shoot ahead. But that's not really a prediction, it's been happening for a while.
Russia's fertility rate is pretty much on par with rest of Europe if not lower.
Same goes for Eastern Europe. Not to mention many Eastern European countries are no strangers to overtly left wing leadership.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...
Also he was pushed really hard and seemed willing to denounce violent far right, not just in sweeping terms.
Also: Contrast this to Biden (who could easily be my favorite except for his candidate for vice president) who AFAIK refuse to denounce ANTIFA at all.
I dislike Trump and I am scared by how many seems to be close to worshipping him as a family values guy despite his two broken marriages and other problems.
That said, I think he will easily win again this year. Why?
- underdog sympathy: media tackles him harder and it seems easy to see as an unbiased observer (Again: not a native speaker, but at least I don't want either of them, although in Bidens case that is more because of his choice of vice president candidate.)
- BLM is out everyday to remind people to vote for a law-and-order president
- the Left still underestimating the discontent in the working class
- Trump simultaneously bringing home troops and strengthening the armed forces so people won't lose their lives or their jobs (for now).
- His support for law enforcement (unlike HN-ers many people seems to support the police)
- He is actually wildly successful in certain areas. He has actually managed to get more peace in the Middle East than a number of other presidents, including Obama who got the Nobel peace price.
That said: I don't like him.
I'd rather have any decent engineer or business(wo)man or teacher who knows a bit about politics, can keep their mouth shut at times etc.
It was not.
Relevant portion of the transcript:
WALLACE: “Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups…”
TRUMP: “Sure…”
WALLACE: “And to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha, and as we’ve seen in Portland”
TRUMP: “Sure, I’m prepared to do it, but I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing not from the right-wing. I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace…”
WALLACE: “Then do it, sir.”
BIDEN: “Do it, say it.”
TRUMP: “What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”
WALLACE: “White supremacists and right-wing militias”
BIDEN: “Proud Boys”
Trump: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.”
[...]
Trump: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.
Trump parroted the language in the request by Chris Wallace and the named individuals from Biden. It was a gotcha request.
And that's to say that you can and you should.
If the different political sides had more balance, I think it'd make sense to permit a modest bit in the workplace.
But today the left is so sure of its position to the point where they think they are in the black & white moral right _and_ they are increasingly dominant and loud in our cultural institutions and many corporate institutions that it is substantially interfering with basic ability to think.
Sadly for many people the answer to this is an unequivocal yes.
Much of technology is agnostic to politics, and enables much evil and good alike. This does not, in my mind, serve as justification for technology creators to intertwine politics with the creation of said technology.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-plugs-gap-in-anti-mone...
> Enable belonging for everyone: We work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.
Then, just a few short paragraphs later, they list things that they focus minimally on, because they are "not directly related to the mission." One of those things is this:
> Broader societal issues: We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.
It doesn't get more blatantly contradictory than that.
Perhaps you and the OP would be quite happy, say, writing code for a lab that makes novel fentanyl analogues for the express purpose of including them in black-market knockoff heroin powder, which in turn leads to a number of deaths (accurately cutting in your microgram-potent meds is hard, and sometimes your downstream supply chain makes a hit that's got too high a fentanyl analogue/cut material ratio, go figure!), or an industrial system that captures unsuspecting babies to then drown them, strip their flesh, and harvest their valuable bones (not really that realistic in our normal reality, but per http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25967.0 it works great in Dwarf Fortress! or it did, anyway, until that got patched out because of said bone harvester), or hell, let's just Godwin on it and say you'd be perfectly happy writing automation tooling to make Treblinka 10% more efficient.
The respondent, whom you so readily chastise, has a quite valid point that we can't separate our engineering work from "politics" (ethics, really, but there does seem to be a side in this debate that prefers to say "politics", since that evokes more the admittedly annoying horse race electoraliasm and doublespeak-driven world of actual politics and takes away from the thrust of the issue, which is ethics, which happen to often overlap with politics but are very much their own thing) ever. That's an important thing to recognize, especially in an industry that has persistent issues with laying ethics aside in pursuit of "great inventions" (let's be pragmatic, it's mostly in pursuit of profit, with some good inventions as an occasional byproduct).
What I think the respondent may be getting at is that there is a significant population in the industry that probably does have some lines they won't cross, but is privileged and willing to cross a great many lines that won't affect them personally. You perhaps think that's a laudable stance, and you can hold that opinion if you wish, but you should do so with the recognition that there are a number of people that will see that less as a commitment to honorable professional detachment and more as a willingness to trod over the rights and wellbeing of the less fortunate so long as it doesn't injure you immediately. I'd argue that it's important thing to at least consider in an industry that often speaks of changing the world for the better--perhaps that was more it drinking the consultant kool-aid about what millenials value in their work and deciding it needed to work that into messaging, if not action, but hey, if it wants to say that, it ought to put its money where its mouth is.
A lot of engineering work is inherently political. For instance, an engineer designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz and by doing his engineering work he supported the politics of the holocaust since his work and those politics are inseparable. In most cases, the connection is not so obvious and clear cut, but it's still there.
So did Wernher von Braun. I've intentionally selected the most extreme example that came to mind readily to illustrate the point: designing rockets for the Nazis to be built by slaves and used to carry bombs to kill civilians has moral and political implications. It's reasonable to judge von Braun for knowingly participating in atrocities even if his only interest was in rocket science. It's not possible to separate the engineering from the politics.
Cryptocurrency has political consequences, though they're not as obvious as those of ballistic missiles. For a company to work on cryptocurrency trading and pretend to be apolitical is disingenuous because if the company is successful, its actions will have a political impact. I'm inclined to think that anyone engaging in acts with political consequences should be proactive about what those consequences will be. Most technological change comes with the potential for political consequences.
Of course, there's engineering work that's less political. Making incremental improvements to the efficiency of widely-used infrastructure is usually fairly neutral; it's good for everyone, but doesn't really change the balance of power.
Yes I do and countless of scientists and artists do exactly that, which is why a lot of them ended up being subject to McCarthyism paranoia at one point or the other. Brilliant scientists, more than anyone else maybe, need to engage the political world to understand what influence what they built has on it. Technologists being painfully unaware of the political ramifications of their work, if anything, got us to where we are right now.
It's no coincidence that the politically detached scientist is the archetypical citizen of autocratic countries. The technologist who does not care for politics is today, the most sought after person in China.
No, he didn't. And while he does have trouble focussing long enough to string together a full coherent sentence, he's not so incompetent with words and shirt phrases to not understand the difference with, or to a inadvertently swap, the terms with very different meaning “stand back”, and particularly “stand by” when intending to repeat “stand down”.
“stand down” means to demobilize.
“stand back” means to pause, usually for planning or emotional reflection.
“stand by” means to be ready for action or orders.
Bob doesn't want to be accosted by Richard from accounting because he doesn't do enough to advocate for anti-money laundering political causes or senatorial candidates. Bob just wants to show up and do his job.
Is there a way to have employees say e.g. "the company needs to endorse suchandsuch political slogan" or "the company needs to oppose suchandsuch candidate" without yelling? I don't think so.
People can care about an issue without taking a stand or even discussing the issue.
This "with us or against us" attitude is precisely what makes it difficult to get along with activists.
The only reason it is "a problem" is that it doesn't conform to the long term goals of the activists. The company needs to have goals that are separate from those of the activists in order to survive.