why do they post this public blogpost. Companies change their hiring patterns all the time. I don't understand why they need to make a blog post about it.
Possibly because they think investors need to know about it - since they are a publicly-traded company - and want to avoid running afoul of SEC regulations. (Note: I am not a securities lawyer; this is admittedly a guess.)
I’m not a securities lawyer but I can imagine that some material information might need to be disclosed immediately. I’d love a more knowledgeable person to chime in.
> On May 16, 2022, Coinbase Global, Inc. (“Coinbase” or the “Company”) issued a blog post (the “Blog Post”) relating to its hiring plans. In connection with the Blog Post, Coinbase affirmed its expense outlook for the second quarter of 2022 and full year 2022 that the Company provided on May 10, 2022 in a letter to its shareholders announcing its financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2022. A copy of the Blog Post is furnished as Exhibit 99.1 to this Current Report on Form 8-K.
> Coinbase announces material information to its investors using filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Company’s website at www.coinbase.com and blog.coinbase.com, as well as press releases, public conference calls, public webcasts, its Twitter feed (@coinbase), its Facebook page, its LinkedIn page, its YouTube channel, and Brian Armstrong’s Twitter feed (@brian_armstrong). Therefore, Coinbase encourages investors, the media and others interested in the Company to review the information it makes public in these locations, as such information could be deemed to be material information.
> The information in Item 7.01 of this Current Report on Form 8-K, including Exhibit 99.1, is being furnished and shall not be deemed “filed” for the purposes of Section 18 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”), or otherwise subject to the liability of such section or incorporated by reference in any filing under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Exchange Act, except as shall be expressly set forth by specific reference in such a filing.
So whether or not they were required to communicate the slowdown, they did at least consider the post to be material information that needed to be communicated with investors.
If someone employed there wants to trade then they have to announce or risk insider trading. When the trade can’t wait until the usual information release then you will see sudden announcements like this.
Earnings only happen quarterly. There's lots of events that need to be communicated more urgently than that. And there's no way you could keep a lid on something like this for up to potentially 90 days. People (internally and externally) are going to notice that no one is being hired there anymore.
And it's worth pointing out that large companies are constantly posting disclosures, sometimes as frequently as daily. Here's one example (Google): https://sec.report/Ticker/GOOG
The bar for disclosure is quite low, and is not dependent on quarterly cycles.
The point is for outside investors to ensure them that money is well spent and the company is on path to success.
Common for public companies to do this.
For those depending on investor money to survive, aka the cash-flow-after-funding crowd. For others not so much, those only communicate head count reductions most of the time.
Coinbase has seen their stock price plummet by 80% in the last 6 months. For comparison, the NASDAQ is down 25% and the Russell 3000 is down 16% over that same period. In other words, Coinbase has performed much worse than most other equities.
This decline in stock price was exacerbated by the recent crash in crypto prices and a large net income loss in Coinbase's most recent quarterly results.
All of this to say, investors' confidence in Coinbase has been absolutely rattled. An announcement of a hiring slowdown/freeze or layoffs could accelerate the Coinbase sell off if it is misinterpreted as evidence of a meltdown of the business. So Coinbase is trying to get out in front of and own the message around their change in hiring patterns. "We are acting as good stewards of your investment, and no reason to panic."
This post surely addresses many stakeholder groups, but investors seem to be the primary constituency that is being reassured.
If crypto is mostly a "get rich quick" scheme and shortcut to riches plummeting prices will cool down the hype fast. There's no such thing as a money printing machine that doesn't backfire.
It's not a get rich quick scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. o
Once you can't convince new suckers to buy in the system collapses and the one left holding the bag loses everything.
The USD has intrinsic value - the US government insists on receiveing its taxes in USD, and only in USD. This alone creates trillions of dollars per year of real demand for USD. Crypto doesn't have anything like it.
I think they are trying to get the price of crypto to drop.... to be able to buy back .... I dropped Coinbase long ago, they manipulate the market too much (I.E.: You can't sell if price drastically go up, etc)
Facebook, Coinbase, all these companies publicly announcing hiring freezes. There should be plenty of other tech companies and non tech hiring, but will this soften wages?
All those crazy 500k+ offers going around over the last 6 months are already softer thanks to RSU value dropping. Some people are already getting 30% less then they thought they were getting (at least for now).
The big secret is those companies knew a sell off was imminent and that their stock was overvalued. The 500k offers were really 350k offers in disguise.
If hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash, why do you think a team of accountants at an Amazon office can? And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?
The accountants at Amazon have material non-public information that they can't act on for obvious reasons, but if they know beforehand - for instance - that sales aren't growing as fast as they used to, or that luxury purchases are trending downward, they can forecast that their own price might slump in the next few months.
> hedge funds can't reliably predict a market crash
Hedges can predict a recession is coming, just not the timing. They have been saying it for the last 12 months.
> a team of accountants at an Amazon
Amazon hires ex-bankers to work for them. They aren't a team of accountants. It's a cushy corproate job that many bankers take. It's good to do when you don't want to hustle long hours anymore.
> And if they could, why don't they exit their core business and get into trading stocks?
At the $1T+ scale, their CFOs are constantly road-tripping to find new institutional buyers. It stands to reason they’d perhaps know which way the wind was blowing based on those interactions.
Honest question: what does a public company have to gain by convincing institutional buyers to buy its stock? I can't imagine that to have any lasting effect on the stock price.
Why would they need to go woo institutional buyers? At 1T they're already probably part of S&P 500 and other standard investment indexes. All the mutual funds, ETFs, pension plans are bought into them.
Well, there are two categories of wages for tech workers: FAANGs and everyone else.
If the tech stock bloodbath continues, that certainly will impact wages on the FAANG side. People might start leaving for places that offer more cash comp, or FAANGs might increase RSUs to compensate.
It seems like a lot of the recent wage growth is at the lower-mid tiers, which make up the bulk of the industry. So, if companies that pay in the $80-120 range start cutting back on hiring, we might see a softening of wages for normal developers. I have not seen this happening...yet.
Not necessarily. The FAANG stock prices are low right now due the overall market slump (except may be FB or NFLX). They will highly likely bounce back along with the rest of the market in a while. So getting a fat count of RSUs from a FAANG company at a bargain price (usually based on price on/around starting date) may likely have a huge payoff in a few years.
I agree, but you are still betting on a lottery ticket here. Likely, a lot of companies might not recover and just slowly grow (Netflix?) and not make too much movement.
Netflix pays cash so engineer comp is fairly insulated from market fluctuations. In the past few years, that may have seemed like a negative, but right now it’s a blessing.
I've gone through several jobs over the last year (I managed to join a company that got acquired by a company I wasn't happy with).
Smaller and medium companies are offering great salaries right now. I took an offer for over $300k just on salary. I know others who are jumping ship from the big companies to smaller ones while still getting a big bump in salary. Even with this market slump there are far more open positions than there are people to fill them, which means those people can demand quite a bit.
I've avoided fintech in my career- I currently work for a company called Aptible (currently hiring, and with great revenue so we're not dependent on investment) that manages infrastructure for companies that need HIPAA compliance.
That said I interviewed for a bunch of companies, and with the exception of a small few all of the salaries were above $250k. This is for principal level roles.
Facebook and Coinbase are unique cases. Coinbase was fueled by cheap money and crypto craze. Facebook is ceding way to TikTok and due to huge investments in VR tech. Companies with profits should tighten the hatches and come out fine after 12-18 months.
Looks like pretty much all high tech company's slowing the hiring. That usually indicates that in few months it would not be surprised to see stating the blood bath in tech companies.
I think it's the opposite thinking at Microsoft: they see here an opportunity to change their reputation as "the forgotten FAANG", not even in the acronym because it doesn't pay as well as the SV companies.
The stock is good sure, but I always figured that FAANG was more about their reputation as employers than it was about their reputation as an investment.
Just hired a man, put the idea inside his head
Pulled the trigger, now his career's dead.
MAAMA! Funding had just begun,
but now my crypto has gone and blown it all away.
I'm looking for a job right now and honestly the market is red hot. Total comp is higher than I've ever seen and I'm even getting the opportunity to pick my interview style (eg: opting out of leetcode style interviews). I'm really enjoying the change.
I'm going to be looking soon, any tips that've been working for you so far? What sites were you looking on? Were you requesting interview type up front or just applying to ones that mention it, etc.?
- hired.com is good for startups; startups are often matching salary and benefits with top engineering firms and don't do geopay.
- (as usual) keyword optimize your resume and sync it with LinkedIn. A lot of managers, corporate recruiters, and third party recruiters are using LinkedIn search to find candidates. I use LinkedIn as a medium-quality queue.
There is a strange rash of companies putting their total comp (and base pay) under NDA. I generally let recruiters know that I think it's important to be up front about compensation from the beginning and starting the conversation from a place that makes sense with my experience.
Yes, I let recruiters know that if I have to do a leetcode interview then they go to the back of my queue (I can do them decently well; I'm just exhausted with them and don't see value). If they're project based or where they want to look at my GitHub then they go to the front. One thing that helps them meet in the middle is that I explain that I'm developing a short list of five companies and that I will knock all of those interviews out in one week and promise not to hedge offers against each other.
I'm a US citizen, honestly, my first thought was that it sounds shady and illegal. I'm not a lawyer nor do I have the time or energy to fight them on it, I just tossed it in the trash because there's a long queue ahead of them anyway.
Colorado was the first state to require salary ranges in job listings. More states have since legislated the same, and California might have a draft bill out, I believe.
Totally understand if not the right time but was keen to see if you'd be interested in discussing a fully remote Site Reliability Engineer position with one of the leading global cryptocurrency exchanges, who are driving the mainstream adoption of blockchain and crypto technologies and have grown from a small scale up to over 1500 people in the last four years?
They attract some awesome people globally and pride themselves on a no-ego team who are brilliant technically, but work together to achieve great things in a complex environment.
I'm under NDA on salaries so can't mention exact figures, but can say total comp can run into the hundreds of thousands on base, bonus and equity. The role is fully remote from anywhere in the US.
The SRE team tend to be 'dev heavy' and are using Rust and Golang currently however are open to candidates with experience in Python or Java too. You'd be introduced to Rust if needed (experience not required) and will have wider responsibility for ensuring reliability processes and the build and upkeep of container environments supporting massive volume live cryptocurrency trading platforms.
It would be great to tell you more, would this be of interest?
>"Yes, I let recruiters know that if I have to do a leetcode interview then they go to the back of my queue (I can do them decently well; I'm just exhausted with them and don't see value). If they're project based or where they want to look at my GitHub then they go to the front."
I'm curious what your views on interviews that require "take home projects." Companies have no skin in the game when they require you to use your nights and weekend hours to complete their project. As a result it's not uncommon to submit these and then be ghosted. I don't think I would agree to one now. The other issue is how many of these 4-5 hours can a person do in a month?
That is a perspective, and a valid one at that if you have kids or other obligations.
I dropped out of college, so a lot of the math this industry uses I had to learn on my own. I bought a lot of books and sweat over studying them, I had a leet code subscription too. The problem with this interview scheme is that:
1. It's timeboxed and our work is rarely, if ever, timeboxed to 30 minutes or less.
2. I've rarely, in my day to day work, implemented these algorithms by hand. I just need to know which to use and when to use it. When I do need to implement them I generally have a reference and I have a good reason for implementing it (like in Go with a lack of generics).
3. It's purely for the employers benefit. I gain no insight into the kind of work the team does, how it gets done, etc...
4. I have never in the history of my career had a more senior engineer watch me code in real time and criticize me.
Personally, I think companies need to offer a set of interviews. The typical leetcode for people who have gotten used to that, take home exercises for people that don't want to deal with leetcode, or even submitting example code that's relevant to the position.
Any of these can be abused, imo, but none are more abused than leetcode or "problem solving exercises".
imho it's the blowback of covid + the few years before.
Companies hired based on temporary trends that could mostly be explained by covid. They scaled their team accordingly, now that people start to go out again they get less users/sales/engagement they have to scale back down.
> Heading into this year, we planned to triple the size of the company.
I wonder what "slow down" means exactly in this context. Complete hiring freeze? 10-50% growth? Even if there was no market downturn, how were they even planning to integrate 3x the people within the company in such a short period of time.
Coinbase revenue increased 514.76% from 2020 to 2021. They were also profitable in 2021. Adding 3x people probably made sense, if they think that that revenue will continue to increase.
Something maybe more worrying is that you can see in the financial results of Coinbase that they invested into BTC themselves, and there is threshold where they would lose funds and likely have to liquidate BTC aggressively :/
(it's public)
When I read corporate emails and “official” messages, I always take the least charitable interpretation. So what’s the most unattractive thing that fits their definition of slowing down, that’s a hiring freeze.
This uncharitable view is the opposite when I encounter genuine human interaction where I try to view the most charitable.
But if a lawyer has read through it, then the most weaselly interpretation is probably truist.
Of course they are. It is good. Corporations, like functions, are sociopaths. They’re just rulesets. They aren’t real people so they can’t be anything but sociopaths, although I don’t think that’s an accurate term for a non-person. Are deer sociopaths? Or trees? Or virii? Or bags of rice?
I want the emotions to be with the people who make up corporations (and write the functions).
Except these rulesets are at the top of the food chain within our society.
As for the people who make up the corporations, they turn into sociopaths themselves as their emotion and empathy dissipate the higher they get in the pecking order.
I don’t think that’s true. Or would need to see a lot of studies. I’ve interacted with c-level execs in many industries and companies and sociopaths are pretty rare.
Also, sociopaths aren’t bad, they just extremely focus on goals. Psychopaths are bad sociopaths who harm others. If you have a sociopath surgeon or something that could actually be beneficial to society as they’d just perform tons of surgeries.
"Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons."
They have 3.7k employees, which means by the end of the year two thirds of the employees would have been there less than a year. Did anyone ever go through a similarly extreme hiring period as an employee? I can't imagine how disorienting it must be.
Binance, the company that rolled out a swastika logo on Hitler's birthday "accidentally"[0] and also juxtaposed 'gas' on top of a Star of David "accidentally" [1]?
That's a swastika symbol which is common in Asia (where binance and its founder is from). The nazi symbol is tilted, has an opposite image to it and no dots.
Gas is used for token in that context and is also a common word in crypto referring to transaction fees.
> The swastika is a completely different symbol and unrelated to the Hakenkreuz. The swastika has never been used or considered by the Nazis.
This is not true. "Hakenkreuz" is literally just a German word for swastika, etymologically a descriptive one in German instead of a Sanskrit loan word.
Contrary to popular misconception, there is no inherent difference between a swastika as used in religious imagery and a swastika as used by the Nazis. The difference is context.
Hakenkreuz is not “literally the name for a swastika”. Hakenkreuz literally translates to hooked cross. It has nothing to do with a Swastika which is a completely unrelated symbol that has been around for a long time. The swastika is also visually different (the Hakenkreuz is angled 45°, we could argue about the form itself, but on the other hand its not a very deliberate geometric structure)
Furthermore, “Swastika” has not once been mentioned or used by the Nazis. Maybe the symbolic meaning was piggybacked on by the Nazis, or they took some inspiration from it, but like you said, the difference is context and there is absolutely nil of that in common.
In fact, as far as my current knowledge goes, the in the English speaking world wide-spread mistranslation of "Hakenkreuz" to "swastika" was a deliberate mistranslation by a British Christian priest that has propagated into mainstream “knowledge”.
Also translation is not an exact science where the most literal translation like "hooked cross" wins. It's much more often about conveying the meaning to the audience (who all correctly call that symbol a swastika).
The article you linked literally says you are not correct.
> The swastika symbol, ? or ?, is an ancient religious symbol in various Eurasian cultures, now also widely recognized for its appropriation by the Nazi Party and by neo-Nazis.[1] It continues to be used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indic religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.
Even Hitler himself in his book Mein Kampf states;
> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."
Nowhere, ever, was the Swastika and its symbolic meaning mentioned as a direct inspiration for the Hakenkreuz. Instead, the Nazis attributed their own ideology to the symbol, but not even to the Swastika itself, but to its form, and furthermore that doesn't change anything about the Swastika itself.
It is not the same symbol.
If we're going to argue about the visual aspect of the symbol, please look at this image and tell me if these two symbols look like the same to you.
You're cherry-picking, poorly, from the Wikipedia article.
How does your selected sentence help your point?
> The swastika symbol, ? or ?, is an ancient religious symbol in various Eurasian cultures, now also widely recognized for its appropriation by the Nazi Party
Also you tried to pick the two visual representations that are the most different, but the first image in the article[1] has the subtitle "The swastika is a symbol with many styles and meanings and can be found in many cultures."
The second image's subtitle says "The adoption of the swastika by the Nazis and neo-Nazis is the most recognisable modern use of the symbol in the Western world."
> Hakenkreuz is not “literally the name for a swastika”. Hakenkreuz literally translates to hooked cross. It has nothing to do with a Swastika and the Swastika was not the blueprint or inspiration for the Hakenkreuz.
This is mind-boggling revisionism. The swastika was a well-known symbol even in Europe by the beginning of the 20th century, recognized as an Eastern ("Oriental") symbol, and Europeans even had a general, albeit bastardized, understanding of its meaning. In fact, you can still see examples of pre-Nazi swastika use in parts of Europe today, in older buildings and designs, although those have been getting replaced over the years. Most recently, Finland's air force dropped the swastika from their imagery. They had adopted the symbol in 1918, by which point the swastika was a popular symbol in Europe[0].
It's wild to claim that the Nazis were somehow completely unaware of the symbol they were using, especially because the Nazis themselves were so open about their (revisionist and ahistorical) beliefs regarding the "Aryan master race".
You're trying to draw a distinction between the word "Hakenkreuz" and "swastika", and that distinction simply does not exist. "Swastika" is the original, Sanksrit name for a symbol that was (and is) used in religious imagery, and which was later appropriated for political purposes by far-right authoritarians in Germany. Those Germans used a German descriptor for that symbol, but there is no question about where they got that symbol from, because they made zero efforts to hide it.
I am not quite sure what you’re trying to argue about. The Swastika has been around for a long time, the Hakenkreuz may or may not be inspired by it, however the Nazis not once used the term Swastika, or referred to it. The common mistranslation of Hakenkreuz to Swastika in the English speaking world is a deliberate mistranslation propagated by a British Christian priest.
1. the Swastika symbol has been around a long time, been used by many cultures and countries, is basically universally recognized
2. but when the Nazis used it, it's not Swastika, because they called it something different, so there's no way to know if they were influenced by the identical symbol that everyone already knew about
> 2) No, it might have been influenced in some way
Again, just to be clear, it's not that "it might have been influenced in some way". It's that Adolf Hitler specifically talked about his reasons for using the swastika in his manifesto.
> Neither symbolic nor visually.
As explained at length elsewhere in this thread, the two symbols are not visually distinguishable without additional context. You can easily find religious uses of a swastika which are literally visually identical to Nazi uses of a swastika.
> The Swastika has been around for a long time, the Hakenkreuz may or may not be inspired by it
Adolf Hitler literally explains his use of the symbol, and its origins, in Mein Kampf. There is no "may or may not", unless you are somehow trying to argue that Adolf Hitler is not an authoritative primary source on Nazism.
> the Nazis not once used the term Swastika
I don't know if this is true (and I'm disinclined to take this claim at face value), but even if it is, it's besides the point. The fact that the Nazis openly took a symbol from another source, admitted that they did so because of the connection to that other source, and then appropriated it for a different purpose is what's relevant, not the fact that they chose a German descriptor when talking about that symbol instead of using a loanword.
> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."
> "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."
Nowhere, in the whole book, is the Swastika and its symbolic meaning mentioned as a direct inspiration for the Hakenkreuz. Instead, the Nazis attributed their own ideology to the symbol, but not even to the Swastika itself, but to it's form, and furthermore that doesn't change anything about the Swastika itself.
Wikipedia states;
> The swastika was also understood as "the symbol of the creating, effecting life" and as "race emblem of Germanism"
You know what, I'm going to attribute huge penises to the McDonalds symbol, so any big penis is from now on Ronald McDonald.
Yes it is, the swastikas of buddhist temples are Hakenkreuze - they just have a different meaning. The Japanese call them Manji - is it also a different symbol? No, it's just a different name.
The orientation does not matter, take a look at the Zeppelintribüne of the Nürnberger Reichsparteitagsgelände - it had a gigantic Hakenkreuz on top, in a non-angled configuration.
It may very well be the same geometric structure. It is a COMPLETELY different symbol (as in, speaking about symbolic meaning)
The man himself in his book Mein Kampf wrote,
> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."
> "As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but assigning new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.
> Hakenkreuz is not “literally the name for a swastika”. Hakenkreuz literally translates to hooked cross.
But it literally is the translation for swastika. There are books from the 19th century talking about the Hakenkreuze in buddhist temples.
And yeah, you can translate it to hooked cross. But English is not the authoritative language on this topic, German is, as the Nazis did not speak english (as their native language).
(Original Nazi sources ahead)
Take a look at this edition of "Volk and Rasse": https://www.google.de/books/edition/Volk_und_Rasse/n9sZAAAAM...
On Page 465, there is a description of a "racial school" in Berlin with the name "Swastika". Because it's the same symbol. This Book was published by the Rassehauptamt of the NSDAP, directly by the Nazis.
The Hakenkreuz as a religious swastika is also being mentioned in this book: https://www.google.de/books/edition/Der_S_A_F%C3%BChrer/wdU7...
Published for the SA, also directly by the Nazis. They directly reference it as "also a swastika, like our swastika".
> But it literally is the translation for swastika.
No, it is not. Even Hakenkreuz, in German, does not translate to Swastika.
Hakenkreuz is, as typical for German, made up of two distinct words - Haken, hook, and Kreuz, cross.
It is very likely that "Hakenkreuz" had simply at some point developed upon seeing a Swastika and trying to visually describe it in German, which would make it a pointer/reference. A lot of German words have exactly this mechanism of origin.
Now, I'm not trying to argue with you that a Hakenkreuz simply used to be a reference/pointer to a Swastika, BUT it was only until the original reference was appropriated and perverted by the Nazi regime, making the resulting output most definitely a new and distinct symbol with a new, distinct symbolic meaning.
I fail to see where you disagree with me, on the ethmological part. Yeah, Hakenkreuz describes the swastika, a "Kreuz" mit "Haken" on the ends, but then... it still is just the German word for swastika, no? Like "Hakaristi" is in suomi / finnish. "Eisenbahn" still is just the word for railroad and not for "iron track", even though it's technically correct :D
"This tempel has a big, golden swastika" could be translated as:
"Dieser Tempel hat ein großes goldenes Hakenkreuz" or
"Dieser Tempel hat eine große goldene Swastika", neither of them is wrong, even today.
> Contrary to popular misconception, there is no inherent difference between a swastika as used in religious imagery and a swastika as used by the Nazis.
This is just plain wrong, I'm not sure what the counterfactual is here. The Nazi symbol is rotated by 45 degrees, the other one isn't. Context doesn't matter one bit, they're two distinct sigils. You could make the argument that the swastika heavily influenced the creation of Hakenkreuz, but they are two distinct symbols.
You're right, and it's easily provable by looking at old literature. The word "Hakenkreuz" is ancient and was used in the 19th century[1], decades before the national-socialism.
I have a hard time understanding why so many people want them to be two different symbols. The symbol is not the problem, but the meaning it conveys, right? The context matters, see the difference between Germany and Finland - both used the Hakenkreuz, but they are not the same, as the context is different, isn't it?
Context is everything. The German Army still uses a version of the Iron Cross, but the context is different - using the same symbol on a flag from the German Empire has a vastly different meaning.
Edit @Mo3: I searched for the original text in Mein Kampf in German, he wrote:
"Ich selbst hatte unterdes nach unzähligen Versuchen eine endgültige Form niedergelegt; eine Fahne aus rotem Grundtuch mit einer weißen Scheibe und in deren Mitte ein schwarzes Hakenkreuz"
As established[1], the word Hakenkreuz was already used at that point to describe the swastika, including in the original religious meaning. So he wrote "a black swastika". Translating it as "hooked cross" is IMO like translating "kindergarten" to "child garden", technically correct, but weird.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but assigning new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.
Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1 or the neck of a german officer in WW2?
I'm not sure whether or not there is a definition of symbol. If you define a symbol as a character or icon paired with a certain meaning, then you're right. But that would imply that e.g. the weird S[2] everyone draw at school was a different symbol every time. Would you agree with that?
> The symbol is not the problem, but the meaning it conveys, right?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you take a symbol, rip out its symbolic meaning, replace the symbolic meaning with a completely new symbolic meaning, in my opinion you end up with a new symbol that may share some visual aspects, but has nothing to do with the other symbol in terms of what a symbol actually is - conveying symbolic meaning. It's still going to be a new symbol in a different context.
Especially so if the symbols visual representation is a very basic geometric structure, and the new symbols visual representation is mostly shown in a slightly altered way, and used in an overarching structure.
Even if the symbols are visually similar, if the conveyed symbolic meaning is vastly different, these are two different symbols and calling a Hakenkreuz a Swastika is more likely incorrect than correct.
> Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1?
Possibly. I'm not an expert on symbols or sigils, but rationality would say that it is only the same visual representation but not the same symbol.
Hitler in Mein Kampf states;
> "I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black hooked cross in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the hooked cross."
He also stated;
> As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red, we see the social idea of the movement; in white, the nationalistic idea; in the hooked cross, the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work."
Even the way Hitler himself is referring to the "hooked cross" conveys pretty clearly that a Hakenkreuz as a symbol is not interchangeable with the Swastika. The Swastika or the symbolic meaning behind it may have been a slight inspiration, that's all there is.
I searched for the original text in Mein Kampf in German, he wrote:
"Ich selbst hatte unterdes nach unzähligen Versuchen eine endgültige Form niedergelegt; eine Fahne aus rotem Grundtuch mit einer weißen Scheibe und in deren Mitte ein schwarzes Hakenkreuz"
As established[1], the word Hakenkreuz was already used at that point to describe the swastika, including in the original religious meaning. So he wrote "a black swastika". Translating it as "hooked cross" is IMO like translating "kindergarten" to "child garden", technically correct, but weird.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but assigning new symbolic meaning to a symbol results in a new, unrelated symbol.
Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1 or the neck of a german officer in WW2?
I'm not sure whether or not there is a definition of symbol. If you define a symbol as a character or icon paired with a certain meaning, then you're right. But that would imply that e.g. the weird S[2] everyone draw at school was a different symbol every time. Would you agree with that?
> But that would imply that e.g. the weird S[2] everyone draw at school was a different symbol every time.
I'm not sure, this symbol is not known in Germany or at least has not been when I went to school there, but if the general context, meaning or reference of all of these S symbols is the same, and no matter the exact visual representation the intent behind it was the same, then yes. It's probably the same symbol, but again I'm not an expert on symbols.
> Does it? The German Bundeswehr still uses the Iron Cross. It's the same symbol, it has the same name, the same origin. But doesn't the meaning differ, whether you see it on a German tank now or on a tank of the Imperial Army in WW1 or the neck of a german officer in WW2?
Yes, the intent behind displaying the symbol is different. I believe it could be regarded as a new iteration of this symbol.
Ok, fair enough, then we just have different definitons of symbols, and there apparently is no hard definition. :D
> I'm not sure, this symbol is not known in Germany or at least has not been when I went to school there
Interesting, it was when I went to school! Maybe it's not as universal as the internet thinks it is. But the meaning surely was different, in my class it was used by the class clown as a personal symbol of approval :D
> I have a hard time understanding why so many people want them to be two different symbols.
Neo-Nazis have spent years spreading misinformation about this, because (ironically) conflating the two allows them to use Nazi imagery more openly and with a greater degree of plausible deniability[0]. Unfortunately, that means that the vast majority of people who don't know any better[1] end up falling for the propaganda, because it sounds believable.
[0] You'll see a low-effort verison of this on places like Twitter or other Internet forums, where people will write U+5350 in their display name or signature, and when called out on it, will immediately claim that "it's religious and you can tell by the direction it's pointing" (which is wrong). Of course, actual Neo-Nazis will openly use that exact character (U+5350) as a Nazi symbol with no concern for the direction or orientation - because, again, it's not about distinguishing the two; it's about creating plausible deniability through confusion.
[1] eg, people who are not Hindu (and therefore would be familiar with its religous use) or Neo-Nazis (and therefore would be familiar with its Nazi use)
I've edited the comment as to not include the reference to my nationality, because this reference was originally meant in the way of "I dont see anything wrong with this either", referring to the original twitter links, but I see how this could be taken in a very different context.
Obviously nationality does not relate to knowledge or expertise in symbols in any way, and that association is a little bit far fetched to be quite honest with you.
I'm not sure why you would project this specific intent into my comment, as I was originally replying to something completely off the topic of symbols and the Swastika or Hakenkreuz.
Increasingly more people see the world through a very limited set of prisms. Lots of people online tend to see everything through racism/sexism/whateverism and will make connections where there are none. It's an easy way to discredit the people you're talking with by inferring meaning.
Critic Zelensky on a specific topic: you're pro Putin
Critic a woman politician: you're sexist
Use a company that used the word "gas", you're obviously antisemitic
Once it's out there on twitter &co nobody will even attempt to verify the facts (in this case the two obvious explanations you provided) and will just parrot the thing ad infinitum
I view it as a failure of education. Education should produce well-rounded people who are happy, tolerant, and calm. Yet the US, for whatever reasons, has been producing these kind of angry, impulsive, and less tolerant students. Ironically, they are also the bunch who are easily subject to hoaxes and can't tell information from opinion.
Some of it is also just the difficulty of differentiating between an intentionally sneaky bit of whatever-ism and an accident. A finance institution using a star of david is borderline enough that any savvy marketing person wouldn't have let that go out. The use of "gas" on top of it is just silly.
There's certainly some amount of what you're pointing out, but given how much of modern politics and communication is done in dog whistles, with people making this level of borderline content and then going "how dare you think I'm intending anything by this accident" when they make an "accident" weekly, it's becoming more important to at least be suspicious of "innocent mistakes" by people who should know better.
A company with this much money and international reach is crazy to do a major branding move and then be shocked that people misinterpret it. It's unfortunate that people assume the worst, but at this point, personally and in business PR, you have to understand that people will assume the worst, so to release something like these anyways is either an intentional choice or negligence.
> That's a swastika symbol which is common in Asia (where binance and its founder is from). The nazi symbol is tilted and has an opposite image to it.
I'll probably get hammered for saying this, but: no, that's not true.
There are many variations of the swastika, and it's not as simple as "look which way it's facing" or "see if it's tilted". That's a common meme often repeated on the Internet, but it's not true and it's trivially falsifiable, because it's quite easy to see religious uses of the swastika with various different orientations and directions. It's also not hard to find examples of Nazi imagery - both from the 20th century and contemporary - which uses an untilted swastika. Context is what differentiates them, not the direction or angle.
> I'm surprised by the connections made.
As someone who works in incident response, I'm more surprised by their statement, because it really falls short on every level, even if we take it at face value.
I'm more surprised that nobody on the team managed to notice the obvious Star of David in that image. Even without the text, it's an astoundingly bad look for a company in the financial space to use that imagery, and if their claim is that nobody involved in the design spotted the issue, that's itself quite concerning and raises even more questions.
I'm also surprised that an account that currently has 8 million followers is trying to blame this on an intern. Intern projects don't just happen to get publicly presented like that on a whim. Even for small companies, but especially for ones verified Twitter accounts and which are trying to be taken seriously, brand presence is very actively managed and a lot of effort goes into every post.
"Blaming the intern" is a tactic that people used a decade ago, but you see it much less these days because it stopped being plausible. And if we're expected to believe it here, then that just raises more questions about how they managed to provide an intern with unfettered access like this to announce a product with (apparently) zero oversight at any point.
I'm here pretty often and have never heard that word. For other like me (from a quick search):
Chirality is simply a geometric property which dictates that the mirror transformation of an object is a non-identity operation, i.e. the object and its mirror image are non-superimposable by any translation or rotation.
Stop misrepresenting things. Many users have corrected you, so I won't do the same. But, attitudes like these are really tiring...please, don't seek outrage in everything.
There are many valid things to criticize Binance for, e.g., enabling reckless crypto gambling and money laundering.
The cost of operating a US company in a highly regulated environment. Binance US, the closest comparable, "only" does 10% of the volume of Coinbase, or 20% if you take into account that half the Coinbase users are not from the US.
It's also amazing jus how much damage regulators can do, who may occupy a priveleged seat of corruption that is neither beholden to the customer nor the provider of the goods. Often (most) time the regulator is not even sitting in an elected position, with only the loosest accountability to the voter.
Hours ago you called the court of the land "corrupt hyper-partisan" and now you believe there's no evidence of corruption in the vastness of the regulatory agencies?
Some regulars are corrupt. Some are not. Some government officials are corrupt. Some are not. Some business people are corrupt. Some are not.
Any position of power has the potential to fall to corruption, if proper checks and balances aren't put in place to prevent it. GP simply seems to believe that regulators are insufficiently held accountable to avoid corruption from taking root.
Are you sure you yourself don't believe something without evidence ("regulators are not corrupt") because it's part of your political ideology?
A great deal, possibly even most, people can be corrupted if placed in a position that enables it. Any regulatory mechanism implemented has to bear in mind that the underlying problem is that _people_ are corrupt. Putting people in a position where there is no check (such as voting, or customers choosing whether to buy) on that corruption makes everything more dangerous.
My position all along has been that businesses are greedy, oft corrupt, enterprise. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that individuals in the revolving door between industry and regulator are still corruptible people -- whether they are in the role of regulator or business director. These revolving door individuals didn't suddenly become corrupt when entering business or become pure when entering regulatory agencies.
So obviously the answer is no regulation, and to let Ponzi schemes and rug-pull scams be a de-facto tax on those who fall for the marketing, with the beneficiaries being the perpetrators.
This is happening in tech companies across the board. From my network I understand many companies have either stopped hiring or have strongly reduced hiring.
I am wondering if some of these inquiries are from slightly shady recruitment agencies. I know people have still been approached for the positions my company has pulled.
The rut mostly seems to affect the tech sector. There are plenty of sectors that are fine.
I would go far to say as the majority of recruiter inquiries I've received in my life have been for pulled positions, used as bait to start engagement with the recruiter.
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