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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

So do you believe that all the white employees just laughed about this? Did any of them corroborate the allegations?

I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that. Are coinbase employees just cut from a different cloth?

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Absolutely. Look at their CEO statements. They seem to hire very anti-establishment, anti-pc (in their view). It’s easy for a culture to then not hire people who don’t fit that mold.

> I work at a FAANG and a massive percentage of employees are rabidly anti-racist, and wouldn't stand for anything like that.

I get nervous when I make a comment about Zoom being insecure because it's Chinese around Chinese coworkers, and I can at least point to its bad track record on security and how Five Eyes members are treating Huawei.

I'm not sure I fully understand your point, but it might be worth adjusting your language a little bit to account for a quirk of our language(in that Chinese could refer to the nationality, or the government): I assume your problem with Zoom is its association with the CCP, and not just that it is merely Chinese.

Conspiracy theory time: That's not a quirk with our language, there's a deliberate lack of distinction between the country and the people. During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality. We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC, and that's because someone wants it that way. It'd be trivial for a new term to be pushed through media, but it's not being done, even though we clearly need one.

> you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality.

The demonym for the people who lived in the Soviet Union was “Soviet.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Sure, but if you had neighbors who immigrated to the US from Moscow in the late 80s, would you refer to them as "Soviet" or "Russian"?

Jews, who formed such a large part of the emigration from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s to the USA, often bristle at being called "Russian". Yes, their language is now Russian after Eastern Europe's Jews have shifted away from Yiddish, but they still don't consider themselves Russians. For example, my own mother-in-law is a member of this emigre demographic and insists on being referred to as "a Jew from the Soviet Union".

> During the Cold War, you could say "Soviet" instead of "Russian" to clearly demarcate between the nation and the nationality

That's not what that distinguished. It distinguished whether you were talking about things pertaining to the USSR and those specifically having to do with Russia; the same rough difference as between “American” and “Californian” (or, perhaps a better analogy would be “British” and “English”.)

> We don't have a modern equivalent for the PRC

Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”, which remains as the name for the absolutely dominant component.

But, again, while the Soviet/Russian distinction did exist, it did not serve the purpose you describe, and we didn't have any linguistic distinction that did.

You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

> You've got a bit to learn about Tibet, HK, Xinjiang ( a muslim region), and soon Taiwan

Or, you've got to read to the end of the sentence:

> Mostly because China didn't conquer a bunch of neighbors and create a name for the resulting state distinct from “China”

That last part matters.

You know China doesn't refer to themselves as China, right? China is Portugese in origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_China

China definitely refers to themselves as China when speaking English just like the United States refers to itself as 美利坚合众国 or just 美国 when speaking Chinese.

That's a good point: it's specifically CCP involvement, and language doesn't differentiate that well. It doesn't help that the CCP is the only game in town. It's hard not to be involved with the CCP in China.

It seems possible that a much smaller company could have a sizable number of employees who claim to be anti-racist, but fail to behave that way in practice. Particularly one with a concentration of libertarian "crypto bros" who are often at odds with employees who might be described as "rabidly anti-racist".

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