This is almost a good point, but you're missing a little thing called population growth.
Let's say you have the two populations, each of 200 people. One sees an event occur every year that kills one person (0.5% of the original population size). The other instead sees an event occur every 200 years that kills 200 people (100% of the original population size).
Assuming the population that experiences the 0.5% loss every year is stable, all else equal the population that doesn't experience it will grow by 0.5% every year. By the end of the 200 years, it will have about 542 people (200 * (1.005)^200) when the other population still has 200. After the 200 year loss that kills 200 people, they will still have 342 people, which is 142 more than the other population.
I suspect the evolutionary reason has more to do with catastrophes and the lack of trade offs. Let's say you have a volcano that erupts every 200 years and kills half of everyone who lives on it. If there is no significant cost to instead building your village on the next mountain over (i.e. no added cost of losing 0.5% every year instead), the tribe that does that will be more likely to succeed than the one that keeps rebuilding on the volcano.
The problem is that evolution hasn't prepared us for when that trade off does exist. Evolution trains us to want the Third Way. (In the energy context this would be fusion, or maybe thorium.) The first tribe who makes fire will crush both the one that builds on a volcano to keep warm and the one that allows some of their people to freeze to death in winter. But until you can make fire, you have to do the math and choose the best of the available alternatives.
Th232 decays emitting alpha radiation, which makes it safe to handle with gloves, but will assure you cancer if inhaled.
How is it that you expect to be inhaling it? It's a solid. Its boiling point is over 5000 K. If the air you're breathing is somehow hot enough to hold it, I suspect you have more immediate problems than cancer.
Furthermore, the most dangerous stuff are the fission products.
More dangerous than anything they deal with on a regular basis in the chemical, medical or petroleum industries? I doubt it.
Good job trying to lie with statistics, but your numbers are all wrong. You've failed to include all of the reactors that were once in operation but have been shut down, the fact that you've failed to include them means that your measure of the average years of in operation per reactor is substantially too small (since the reactors that were shut down will have been the ones in operation the longest, which roughly squares the previous error since the two numbers are being multiplied), and then you're counting Fukushima three times even though the separate units are not statistically independent.
On top of all that, try measuring the actual damage caused by these incidents, dividing it by the number of TWh produced and comparing it to alternative power generation methods. "Those numbers are too high" is a fool's argument when the alternatives have even higher numbers.
I'm skeptical of the whole concept-- we've heard about next gen safe clean nuclear forever -- LONGER than we've been hearing about clean coal or Roswell Aliens.
1) Nuclear power was not used to generate electricity until the 1950s. The Roswell incident was in 1947. So you're wrong.
2) What makes you think the future is not already here? Chernobyl was an RBMK reactor designed in the 1950s. Fukushima had multiple units of different designs that were built in the 1960s. Newer reactors both exist and are safer. Of course, all the old reactors are still running because idiots fight all attempts to replace the with anything newer. The Russians are still operating eleven RBMKs to this day.
this substance is more chemically and radiologically toxic than Pu
Do you guys just make this stuff up as you go along? The half life of natural Thorium is 1.405×10^10 years. Radioactivity is the inverse of half life. (By contrast, the half life of Pu-239 is ~24,000 years, and the Iodine-125 they inject you with when you get an MRI has a half life of 59 days.)
You can probably predict with a high degree of accuracy exactly how many people will die of cancer from a coal plant. But nuclear plants very clearly have many unknown and unpredictable characteristics.
You're doing it wrong. First of all, you can get a pretty damn good estimate of the likelihood of a major nuclear incident by dividing the world-wide number of operating hours of all nuclear plants by the number of major incidents. It isn't predictability that's the problem, it's the scope of the damage that occurs when something does go wrong.
But that isn't even a problem either -- it just sounds a lot scarier. People are irrationally afraid of things that are very rare but when they occur are very bad. It's like movie plot terrorist threats: Hardly anybody is killed by terrorists, but we spend trillions of dollars trying to reduce the amount of terrorism with unnecessary wars and security theater.
Do the math. Something which is fifty times as bad but occurs ten thousand times less often is a Good Thing. (I mean honestly, go visit an abandoned coal mine once. Then tell me the damn Superfund sites they leave behind aren't each individually worse than Chernobyl.)
Mass media is very much biased against Unions, since unions have fought for their employees to be treated well and fairly compensated
You're resorting to conspiracy theories. I mean look at the media coverage of the Walker thing a few months ago. You had Jon Stewart on the television every night telling people that getting rid of collective bargaining for one state's public sector unions (and not even the union itself) is eliminating their "right to exist" as though they would somehow all be killed. And he's the reasonable one. Meanwhile a teacher who dared to go on television and agree with Walker was thanked for her opinion with union hate mail and efforts to take her job away.
The problem is this: Look at some state-level Democratic politicians on opensecrets.org. See how many get paid by public sector unions. It's pretty much all of them. At the state level the unions are worse than the corporations. They've got a nice racket going: The union gives the politician money to get elected, the politician gives the union more tax dollars, which the union can launder part of back into the politician's campaign fund. The extra money comes mostly in the form of benefits and optional overtime so that if you compare base salaries to those in the private sector it always looks like public sector employees are getting ripped off, even though they aren't, so you can always rationalize giving them more tax dollars that way.
What's worse is that public sector unions have no value, since the government they're negotiating with is the one that makes the law as to whether they can have a union at all. Which means that it inherently, necessarily has all of the negotiating power no matter what. If the government thinks government employees deserve more, they get more. If not, they don't. The union has no leverage as a union. Its only leverage comes in the form of campaign contributions. Which makes it not a union, but a taxpayer-funded lobby group that advocates against the interests of taxpayers.
However, since the Democrats through this arrangement are dependent on the unions, you can't get rid of them. Because the Democrats will do everything they can to stop you, since you'll be preventing them from getting reelected by depriving them of campaign money. And since private pro-Democratic-party interests also know this, you get the media campaign against eliminating sycophantic public sector unions by Democratic-party-leaning media.
This is not a flaw of unionization or a valid argument against unions, but go ahead and argue against the regulations. I personally would support removing any laws that protect unions specifically, as many states have done with their right-to-work laws, but if and only if we also remove corporate personhood and other corporate protections.
The entire concept of a union is a violation of the antitrust laws. They have a specific exemption otherwise they wouldn't exist.
As for corporate personhood, I still have no idea what the crap the people who argue against it are talking about. Corporations don't actually exist. They're legal fiction. The idea that "Microsoft" can do anything is corporate personhood, because there is no person called Microsoft who you can go and punch in the face. When "Microsoft" ties Internet Explorer to Windows, there is actually a real human person in Redmond who writes the code tying Internet Explorer to Windows. What thing that "corporations" do would you expect eliminating "corporate personhood" would prevent? They don't do anything now, we just create the fiction that they do because it's easier to keep track of that way. I suspect that actually eliminating corporate personhood would make people very angry, because the result would be that some guy who makes $40,000/year and has a negative net worth is the one on the line when he dumps barrels of toxic waste in the river, instead of the corporation he works for that might actually have some assets to pay the victims.
If you were to add up the total number of deaths directly linked to unionization it would considerable lower than many other organizations and actions. The most obvious is the military, and few people would support a wholesale disbanding of the military.
You have changed your argument from "unionization causes less violence than stamp collecting" to "unionization causes less violence than all out war." Moreover, people are generally agreed that we should do whatever we can to avoid wars.
You also ignore that different things have different values. You need the protection of a military a lot more than you need a union, because without a military the other guy's military will come and kill you. There is no thing a union does that can compare in the slightest with not being raped and murdered by an invading army.
Seniority is a valid basis if you chose to only keep competent and productive employees.
You're ignoring the possibility I already mentioned that an employee will become less productive over time once seniority makes their need to remain marketable decline.
Sure the unions are there to protect employees from wrongful termination, but trust me, if the person deserves to be let go the unions will not protect them.
Unions will only allow someone to be let go for cause. If you haven't done anything "wrong" even if you're lazy and stupid and you could be replaced with someone else who will do twice the work in half the time for three quarters of the pay, you can't be replaced. That makes the company less efficient, which reduces the amount of money they have available to pay other employees and makes everyone poorer.
How does that make it more advantageous for them to join the union? Even if it's only the same compensation, the employee can take it without joining and get out of paying union dues.
Plus, it isn't exactly common for a company to give an employee an ultimatum to join the union or quit. Notwithstanding laws to the contrary, it's pretty difficult to be so useless that they won't at least give you half the money it's worth to them to not have another union employee.
But let us not limit a collectives capabilities to bargain. If they have the strength to negotiate a contract with a corporation that says the company can not hire non-union workers, then more power too them.
The flaw in your thinking is that unions aren't just normal organizations. They have their own laws. They get exceptions for things that would otherwise violate the antitrust laws. You aren't allowed to just refuse to negotiate with them. If your argument is that we shouldn't treat them differently than other organizations, businesses will agree with you. But then they wouldn't exist because half of today's union activities would be illegal and nobody would negotiate with them without being obligated to by law.
Harm is amoral and illegal, and also is no more a side affect of unionization than it is a side affect of any other activity.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement. Unless it is your contention that unionization has resulted in less violence than, say, entomology, you know that it's wrong. You're very casually dismissing a hundred years of violence and intimidation.
Seniority is a valid basis, as you shouldn't be keeping people that are not affective, but performance can easily be included as well.
Seniority is not a valid basis. It's the root of the problem. People get seniority, then stop trying because they can't be let go.
Truly scarce resources are capable of getting more than they would be unionized because they are not lumped in with the not quite so scarce.
That's not it at all. You can create a union that has only in-demand members. Then they can negotiate to be paid $250,000/year instead of $100,000.
The reason that doesn't happen is that smart people realize what happens when everyone in the market is being paid more than they're worth: You create a market incentive for oversupply. Do you know what happens when a job pays $250,000/year? Everybody who is even remotely capable of learning how to do it does so, and the market is soon flooded with qualified workers. Five years later your scarcity is completely extinguished and unemployment in the field creates a ready market for scabs which destroys your union. Then you're either left without a job or with one that pays $40,000/year instead of $100,000.
The unions for unskilled labor have learned this the hard way: A union job is fat city for a few years, until the factory you're working in is due for renovation and instead of renovating it the company just closes it and builds a new one in China. (The exception is government employees unions, which become powerful lobbyists that can fend off their destruction through politics regardless of market forces.)
In other cases, the unions champion changes in the law that make non-union labor effectively illegal.
That is really the problem with unions: If employees can choose whether to join or not, they can go to the negotiation with the employer as a non-union employee and take the union package as the starting point for the negotiation, with nowhere to go but up because the employee has the alternative of joining the union. So non-union employees will always be able to negotiate better compensation than union employees, and nobody will join the union.
But if you're required to join the union then the union is in the position of a monopolist, and the entirely expected thing happens: It turns into a lazy, incompetent bureaucracy more interested in perpetuating itself than doing what it was created to do.
Think about the argument you're making for a second. If these people would be pirating apps because they have no money, how much of the money they don't have do you really expect to get by reducing piracy?
This is the whole issue with the "piracy is a problem" people. People with money pay. People without money can't pay regardless. How does the fact that the latter people find a way to get stuff for free actually cost you anything?
Yup. MS, Apple and Canonical can't stop you... from giving them a virus, from snooping their address book entries, from sucking down RAM and making their system unresponsive, from using system widgets in non-standard and confusion-inducing ways, from silently installing bloated adware that has nothing to do with your actual "application," from having broken or weird updating mechanisms, from producing objectionable content that skirts OS-level parental controls and so on.
So I guess you missed the whole Carrier IQ thing? Or not letting you change your DNS server from the carrier's, then redirecting NXDOMAIN to their search portal and probably logging every site you visit? Or the not providing older phones with new versions of the OS so that users have to get a new phone/contract to have a secure device?
The damn carriers are worse than the malware authors. And without the walled garden, at least you have the option of removing that crap. With it you've got the malware whether you make any mistakes or not.
A web browser is probably the most obvious example. But that's really missing the point: Am I not allowed to write software if I don't have the money for a web hosting contract? Or if I'm writing something that oppressive countries want to ban, which they can do trivially if all they have to do is block my web server?
Which I guess brings me back to my original concern which is that we need to be careful where this is heading..
Your first two points are variants on "monopolies are efficient." Which is a real argument made by real economists in some cases, for exactly the reasons you're pointing out: You can avoid a lot of duplication if you only have one of everything. But let me put it this way: When I entered "monopolies are efficient" into Google to see if I could find a link explaining that and explaining the trade offs (and why they're usually bad), it changed the query to "monopolies are inefficient" because... they are.
Right now you like the monopoly because it's lowering your costs, and because Apple is not currently in a position to squeeze developers very hard because they need you to fight against Android. But let developers reap that "efficiency" by not making apps for Android and see what happens. Or push Google to do what Apple does and see what the consequences of conscious parallelism are. The stronger you make this platform you like, the stronger its grip over developers like you. If you wait until they start to squeeze it'll be too late.
Which pretty much leaves you with the piracy argument, and I'm not sure I buy it. Apps are not expensive, and people don't exactly buy thousands of them each. You're talking about people who are paying $100/month for their wireless contract who can't pay a one-time $1 for an app? I don't think that's it. For those prices if it's even slightly more convenient to buy it than pirate it, people are going to pay. If people aren't buying as many apps on Android, it's more likely attributable to the other things you're talking about than piracy: Google needs to improve their app store and make it easier for people to make impulse buys etc.
I suspect we might be arguing past each other here. I would put the App Store in the same category of "things that aren't the walled garden" that you have to disambiguate. The App Store isn't the problem. The App Store is the garden. The problem is the walls.
So unless you're taking the position that refusing to allow users to use third party App Stores is the thing that developers really like, I don't think we're really disagreeing about anything here. Are you?
The pretext of the thread is that the PC is going to be replaced by specialized walled garden devices. What I'm saying is that there may be a rise of specialized devices, but there is no need for them to be walled garden devices. Moreover, the PC is not like a drill. It is already the specialized version. It's the thing you use when you want a keyboard, a big screen and better performance. The fact that you can and will continue to be able to use it to e.g. make phone calls does not make it generalized, any more than the fact that you can type a book into a smartphone makes it a generalized device.
What you need to compare with is how many were/are developing for non-walled garden mobile devices. And there are far more developing for iOS than for any of those non-walled garden mobile platforms.
I don't think that's particularly a fair comparison. The iPhone brought a lot of things to the mobile device market other than a walled garden and you can't disambiguate the effect of those things (like, say, a UI that doesn't look like an attempt to put Windows 95 on a phone).
There are lots of iPhone apps that duplicate functionality of other apps. There are plenty of apps that duplicate functionality of built in apps. There are alternate diary apps, contact apps, camera apps, map apps etc.
Apple had an overt policy of rejecting apps that duplicate the functionality of its own software. Even if they've discontinued it for now, it stands as a flaw in the walled garden so long as they can reinstitute it at will. Or reject apps that threaten their revenues based on some other pretext, given their previously expressed interest in doing so.
That situation has existed for ages on the PC, yet hardly any virus has bothered killing a PC by destroying BIOS or firmware, as there is simply nothing to gain in doing so.
I wasn't suggesting that they would brick the device. Only compromise (in order to spy on users to steal credit card numbers or passwords or whatever) it in a way that Apple couldn't undo from the cloud, so that the devices would all have to be cleaned one at a time by hand because the malware author could step into Apple's shoes to determine what you can run on the device and what you can't. (And then stop you running anything that would remove the malware but allow anything else.)
That has essentially nothing to do with a walled garden specifically, but is simply the result of central software management. If Debian uploads compromised software to their servers, every Debian user is in trouble and also every Ubuntu or Mint user or any other Debian derivate (and yes, that has already happened in the past with OpenSSH).
I'm sure you can understand why I'm attributing flaws in centralized software management to a walled garden, which is basically defined as mandatory centralized software management.
And Apple makes it worse because of the monoculture, the false sense of security and the inability to fix a problem on your own or have someone else fix it during the period of time between when Apple screws up and when they do something about it.
I don't see how that changes the point. You're saying that BSD would be fine if Linux didn't exist because it would be BSD on half the world's servers instead of Linux. Maybe, but what does that say about the necessity of market share to have a viable platform?
Also keep in mind that even a compromised AppStore server with compromised keys doesn't have to mean much, as the application would still operate only with application level privileges on the device, which would limit the harm it can do.
You're assuming both that a completely unvetted application running on the device can't find a privilege escalation vulnerability, and that the servers compromised are the ones that distribute unprivileged apps and not privileged OS components. That seems overly optimistic.
Even assuming that would be the case, so what? Shutdown the servers, revoke the keys, fix the server and bring everything up again.
Revoke the keys with what? The whole problem is you're not talking about compromising a certificate, you're talking about compromising all of the devices. You can only revoke the keys if you can push updates to the device. Once the attacker has rooted all the devices they can disable updates. They can do whatever they want. They can only allow the updates they've verified don't remove their rootkit, or allow those ones only after updating the rootkit so that it isn't removed. You're in the position of having to manually clean every device in the world, and the bad guys can find another vulnerability and make you start over by the time you get finished with half of them.
I mean it's not even really an argument, even in the case of complete and utter failure of every bit of protection a walled garden should provide, all that means that you are back to PC level security.
You're at PC level security no matter what you do. The walled garden doesn't protect you from security vulnerabilities. It doesn't eliminate remote exploits, privilege escalation, social engineering, spaghetti code or idiots. All the walled garden does is make it so that if Apple makes a mistake, it happens at global scale rather than on one device.
You're confusing specialization with control. Specialization takes root because there exist trade offs and at different times it is most beneficial to make the trade offs in different ways. Sometimes you want a thing that will fit in your pocket and run all day on batteries. Other times you want a thing that will be ten times faster and have a screen that is ten times bigger. You can't make them both in the same device because they're contradictory; you can't fit a 25" screen in your pocket, so you have specialized devices depending on which is more suited to your purpose at a given time.
That has nothing to do with control. You can lock down a PC the same as a mobile device. You can have a mobile device that is entirely under the control of the user the same as a PC. So don't rationalize corporate control over the new primary human communications method as some kind of natural evolution from generalization to specialization.
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This is almost a good point, but you're missing a little thing called population growth.
Let's say you have the two populations, each of 200 people. One sees an event occur every year that kills one person (0.5% of the original population size). The other instead sees an event occur every 200 years that kills 200 people (100% of the original population size).
Assuming the population that experiences the 0.5% loss every year is stable, all else equal the population that doesn't experience it will grow by 0.5% every year. By the end of the 200 years, it will have about 542 people (200 * (1.005)^200) when the other population still has 200. After the 200 year loss that kills 200 people, they will still have 342 people, which is 142 more than the other population.
I suspect the evolutionary reason has more to do with catastrophes and the lack of trade offs. Let's say you have a volcano that erupts every 200 years and kills half of everyone who lives on it. If there is no significant cost to instead building your village on the next mountain over (i.e. no added cost of losing 0.5% every year instead), the tribe that does that will be more likely to succeed than the one that keeps rebuilding on the volcano.
The problem is that evolution hasn't prepared us for when that trade off does exist. Evolution trains us to want the Third Way. (In the energy context this would be fusion, or maybe thorium.) The first tribe who makes fire will crush both the one that builds on a volcano to keep warm and the one that allows some of their people to freeze to death in winter. But until you can make fire, you have to do the math and choose the best of the available alternatives.
Th232 decays emitting alpha radiation, which makes it safe to handle with gloves, but will assure you cancer if inhaled.
How is it that you expect to be inhaling it? It's a solid. Its boiling point is over 5000 K. If the air you're breathing is somehow hot enough to hold it, I suspect you have more immediate problems than cancer.
Furthermore, the most dangerous stuff are the fission products.
More dangerous than anything they deal with on a regular basis in the chemical, medical or petroleum industries? I doubt it.
Good job trying to lie with statistics, but your numbers are all wrong. You've failed to include all of the reactors that were once in operation but have been shut down, the fact that you've failed to include them means that your measure of the average years of in operation per reactor is substantially too small (since the reactors that were shut down will have been the ones in operation the longest, which roughly squares the previous error since the two numbers are being multiplied), and then you're counting Fukushima three times even though the separate units are not statistically independent.
On top of all that, try measuring the actual damage caused by these incidents, dividing it by the number of TWh produced and comparing it to alternative power generation methods. "Those numbers are too high" is a fool's argument when the alternatives have even higher numbers.
I'm skeptical of the whole concept-- we've heard about next gen safe clean nuclear forever -- LONGER than we've been hearing about clean coal or Roswell Aliens.
1) Nuclear power was not used to generate electricity until the 1950s. The Roswell incident was in 1947. So you're wrong.
2) What makes you think the future is not already here? Chernobyl was an RBMK reactor designed in the 1950s. Fukushima had multiple units of different designs that were built in the 1960s. Newer reactors both exist and are safer. Of course, all the old reactors are still running because idiots fight all attempts to replace the with anything newer. The Russians are still operating eleven RBMKs to this day.
this substance is more chemically and radiologically toxic than Pu
Do you guys just make this stuff up as you go along? The half life of natural Thorium is 1.405×10^10 years. Radioactivity is the inverse of half life. (By contrast, the half life of Pu-239 is ~24,000 years, and the Iodine-125 they inject you with when you get an MRI has a half life of 59 days.)
You can probably predict with a high degree of accuracy exactly how many people will die of cancer from a coal plant. But nuclear plants very clearly have many unknown and unpredictable characteristics.
You're doing it wrong. First of all, you can get a pretty damn good estimate of the likelihood of a major nuclear incident by dividing the world-wide number of operating hours of all nuclear plants by the number of major incidents. It isn't predictability that's the problem, it's the scope of the damage that occurs when something does go wrong.
But that isn't even a problem either -- it just sounds a lot scarier. People are irrationally afraid of things that are very rare but when they occur are very bad. It's like movie plot terrorist threats: Hardly anybody is killed by terrorists, but we spend trillions of dollars trying to reduce the amount of terrorism with unnecessary wars and security theater.
Do the math. Something which is fifty times as bad but occurs ten thousand times less often is a Good Thing. (I mean honestly, go visit an abandoned coal mine once. Then tell me the damn Superfund sites they leave behind aren't each individually worse than Chernobyl.)
Mass media is very much biased against Unions, since unions have fought for their employees to be treated well and fairly compensated
You're resorting to conspiracy theories. I mean look at the media coverage of the Walker thing a few months ago. You had Jon Stewart on the television every night telling people that getting rid of collective bargaining for one state's public sector unions (and not even the union itself) is eliminating their "right to exist" as though they would somehow all be killed. And he's the reasonable one. Meanwhile a teacher who dared to go on television and agree with Walker was thanked for her opinion with union hate mail and efforts to take her job away.
The problem is this: Look at some state-level Democratic politicians on opensecrets.org. See how many get paid by public sector unions. It's pretty much all of them. At the state level the unions are worse than the corporations. They've got a nice racket going: The union gives the politician money to get elected, the politician gives the union more tax dollars, which the union can launder part of back into the politician's campaign fund. The extra money comes mostly in the form of benefits and optional overtime so that if you compare base salaries to those in the private sector it always looks like public sector employees are getting ripped off, even though they aren't, so you can always rationalize giving them more tax dollars that way.
What's worse is that public sector unions have no value, since the government they're negotiating with is the one that makes the law as to whether they can have a union at all. Which means that it inherently, necessarily has all of the negotiating power no matter what. If the government thinks government employees deserve more, they get more. If not, they don't. The union has no leverage as a union. Its only leverage comes in the form of campaign contributions. Which makes it not a union, but a taxpayer-funded lobby group that advocates against the interests of taxpayers.
However, since the Democrats through this arrangement are dependent on the unions, you can't get rid of them. Because the Democrats will do everything they can to stop you, since you'll be preventing them from getting reelected by depriving them of campaign money. And since private pro-Democratic-party interests also know this, you get the media campaign against eliminating sycophantic public sector unions by Democratic-party-leaning media.
This is not a flaw of unionization or a valid argument against unions, but go ahead and argue against the regulations. I personally would support removing any laws that protect unions specifically, as many states have done with their right-to-work laws, but if and only if we also remove corporate personhood and other corporate protections.
The entire concept of a union is a violation of the antitrust laws. They have a specific exemption otherwise they wouldn't exist.
As for corporate personhood, I still have no idea what the crap the people who argue against it are talking about. Corporations don't actually exist. They're legal fiction. The idea that "Microsoft" can do anything is corporate personhood, because there is no person called Microsoft who you can go and punch in the face. When "Microsoft" ties Internet Explorer to Windows, there is actually a real human person in Redmond who writes the code tying Internet Explorer to Windows. What thing that "corporations" do would you expect eliminating "corporate personhood" would prevent? They don't do anything now, we just create the fiction that they do because it's easier to keep track of that way. I suspect that actually eliminating corporate personhood would make people very angry, because the result would be that some guy who makes $40,000/year and has a negative net worth is the one on the line when he dumps barrels of toxic waste in the river, instead of the corporation he works for that might actually have some assets to pay the victims.
If you were to add up the total number of deaths directly linked to unionization it would considerable lower than many other organizations and actions. The most obvious is the military, and few people would support a wholesale disbanding of the military.
You have changed your argument from "unionization causes less violence than stamp collecting" to "unionization causes less violence than all out war." Moreover, people are generally agreed that we should do whatever we can to avoid wars.
You also ignore that different things have different values. You need the protection of a military a lot more than you need a union, because without a military the other guy's military will come and kill you. There is no thing a union does that can compare in the slightest with not being raped and murdered by an invading army.
Seniority is a valid basis if you chose to only keep competent and productive employees.
You're ignoring the possibility I already mentioned that an employee will become less productive over time once seniority makes their need to remain marketable decline.
Sure the unions are there to protect employees from wrongful termination, but trust me, if the person deserves to be let go the unions will not protect them.
Unions will only allow someone to be let go for cause. If you haven't done anything "wrong" even if you're lazy and stupid and you could be replaced with someone else who will do twice the work in half the time for three quarters of the pay, you can't be replaced. That makes the company less efficient, which reduces the amount of money they have available to pay other employees and makes everyone poorer.
How does that make it more advantageous for them to join the union? Even if it's only the same compensation, the employee can take it without joining and get out of paying union dues.
Plus, it isn't exactly common for a company to give an employee an ultimatum to join the union or quit. Notwithstanding laws to the contrary, it's pretty difficult to be so useless that they won't at least give you half the money it's worth to them to not have another union employee.
But let us not limit a collectives capabilities to bargain. If they have the strength to negotiate a contract with a corporation that says the company can not hire non-union workers, then more power too them.
The flaw in your thinking is that unions aren't just normal organizations. They have their own laws. They get exceptions for things that would otherwise violate the antitrust laws. You aren't allowed to just refuse to negotiate with them. If your argument is that we shouldn't treat them differently than other organizations, businesses will agree with you. But then they wouldn't exist because half of today's union activities would be illegal and nobody would negotiate with them without being obligated to by law.
Harm is amoral and illegal, and also is no more a side affect of unionization than it is a side affect of any other activity.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement. Unless it is your contention that unionization has resulted in less violence than, say, entomology, you know that it's wrong. You're very casually dismissing a hundred years of violence and intimidation.
Seniority is a valid basis, as you shouldn't be keeping people that are not affective, but performance can easily be included as well.
Seniority is not a valid basis. It's the root of the problem. People get seniority, then stop trying because they can't be let go.
Truly scarce resources are capable of getting more than they would be unionized because they are not lumped in with the not quite so scarce.
That's not it at all. You can create a union that has only in-demand members. Then they can negotiate to be paid $250,000/year instead of $100,000.
The reason that doesn't happen is that smart people realize what happens when everyone in the market is being paid more than they're worth: You create a market incentive for oversupply. Do you know what happens when a job pays $250,000/year? Everybody who is even remotely capable of learning how to do it does so, and the market is soon flooded with qualified workers. Five years later your scarcity is completely extinguished and unemployment in the field creates a ready market for scabs which destroys your union. Then you're either left without a job or with one that pays $40,000/year instead of $100,000.
The unions for unskilled labor have learned this the hard way: A union job is fat city for a few years, until the factory you're working in is due for renovation and instead of renovating it the company just closes it and builds a new one in China. (The exception is government employees unions, which become powerful lobbyists that can fend off their destruction through politics regardless of market forces.)
In other cases, the unions champion changes in the law that make non-union labor effectively illegal.
That is really the problem with unions: If employees can choose whether to join or not, they can go to the negotiation with the employer as a non-union employee and take the union package as the starting point for the negotiation, with nowhere to go but up because the employee has the alternative of joining the union. So non-union employees will always be able to negotiate better compensation than union employees, and nobody will join the union.
But if you're required to join the union then the union is in the position of a monopolist, and the entirely expected thing happens: It turns into a lazy, incompetent bureaucracy more interested in perpetuating itself than doing what it was created to do.
Apparently not.
People that think you can always throw more RAM or disc space at a problem rather than keep their code neat and clean.
I think you're confusing "think you can" with "have to."
Writing clean code takes longer. The developer generally isn't the one who decides how long he gets to spend on something.
Think about the argument you're making for a second. If these people would be pirating apps because they have no money, how much of the money they don't have do you really expect to get by reducing piracy?
This is the whole issue with the "piracy is a problem" people. People with money pay. People without money can't pay regardless. How does the fact that the latter people find a way to get stuff for free actually cost you anything?
Yup. MS, Apple and Canonical can't stop you... from giving them a virus, from snooping their address book entries, from sucking down RAM and making their system unresponsive, from using system widgets in non-standard and confusion-inducing ways, from silently installing bloated adware that has nothing to do with your actual "application," from having broken or weird updating mechanisms, from producing objectionable content that skirts OS-level parental controls and so on.
So I guess you missed the whole Carrier IQ thing? Or not letting you change your DNS server from the carrier's, then redirecting NXDOMAIN to their search portal and probably logging every site you visit? Or the not providing older phones with new versions of the OS so that users have to get a new phone/contract to have a secure device?
The damn carriers are worse than the malware authors. And without the walled garden, at least you have the option of removing that crap. With it you've got the malware whether you make any mistakes or not.
A web browser is probably the most obvious example. But that's really missing the point: Am I not allowed to write software if I don't have the money for a web hosting contract? Or if I'm writing something that oppressive countries want to ban, which they can do trivially if all they have to do is block my web server?
Which I guess brings me back to my original concern which is that we need to be careful where this is heading..
Your first two points are variants on "monopolies are efficient." Which is a real argument made by real economists in some cases, for exactly the reasons you're pointing out: You can avoid a lot of duplication if you only have one of everything. But let me put it this way: When I entered "monopolies are efficient" into Google to see if I could find a link explaining that and explaining the trade offs (and why they're usually bad), it changed the query to "monopolies are inefficient " because... they are.
Right now you like the monopoly because it's lowering your costs, and because Apple is not currently in a position to squeeze developers very hard because they need you to fight against Android. But let developers reap that "efficiency" by not making apps for Android and see what happens. Or push Google to do what Apple does and see what the consequences of conscious parallelism are. The stronger you make this platform you like, the stronger its grip over developers like you. If you wait until they start to squeeze it'll be too late.
Which pretty much leaves you with the piracy argument, and I'm not sure I buy it. Apps are not expensive, and people don't exactly buy thousands of them each. You're talking about people who are paying $100/month for their wireless contract who can't pay a one-time $1 for an app? I don't think that's it. For those prices if it's even slightly more convenient to buy it than pirate it, people are going to pay. If people aren't buying as many apps on Android, it's more likely attributable to the other things you're talking about than piracy: Google needs to improve their app store and make it easier for people to make impulse buys etc.
I suspect we might be arguing past each other here. I would put the App Store in the same category of "things that aren't the walled garden" that you have to disambiguate. The App Store isn't the problem. The App Store is the garden. The problem is the walls.
So unless you're taking the position that refusing to allow users to use third party App Stores is the thing that developers really like, I don't think we're really disagreeing about anything here. Are you?
The pretext of the thread is that the PC is going to be replaced by specialized walled garden devices. What I'm saying is that there may be a rise of specialized devices, but there is no need for them to be walled garden devices. Moreover, the PC is not like a drill. It is already the specialized version. It's the thing you use when you want a keyboard, a big screen and better performance. The fact that you can and will continue to be able to use it to e.g. make phone calls does not make it generalized, any more than the fact that you can type a book into a smartphone makes it a generalized device.
What you need to compare with is how many were/are developing for non-walled garden mobile devices. And there are far more developing for iOS than for any of those non-walled garden mobile platforms.
I don't think that's particularly a fair comparison. The iPhone brought a lot of things to the mobile device market other than a walled garden and you can't disambiguate the effect of those things (like, say, a UI that doesn't look like an attempt to put Windows 95 on a phone).
There are lots of iPhone apps that duplicate functionality of other apps. There are plenty of apps that duplicate functionality of built in apps. There are alternate diary apps, contact apps, camera apps, map apps etc.
Apple had an overt policy of rejecting apps that duplicate the functionality of its own software. Even if they've discontinued it for now, it stands as a flaw in the walled garden so long as they can reinstitute it at will. Or reject apps that threaten their revenues based on some other pretext, given their previously expressed interest in doing so.
That situation has existed for ages on the PC, yet hardly any virus has bothered killing a PC by destroying BIOS or firmware, as there is simply nothing to gain in doing so.
I wasn't suggesting that they would brick the device. Only compromise (in order to spy on users to steal credit card numbers or passwords or whatever) it in a way that Apple couldn't undo from the cloud, so that the devices would all have to be cleaned one at a time by hand because the malware author could step into Apple's shoes to determine what you can run on the device and what you can't. (And then stop you running anything that would remove the malware but allow anything else.)
That has essentially nothing to do with a walled garden specifically, but is simply the result of central software management. If Debian uploads compromised software to their servers, every Debian user is in trouble and also every Ubuntu or Mint user or any other Debian derivate (and yes, that has already happened in the past with OpenSSH).
I'm sure you can understand why I'm attributing flaws in centralized software management to a walled garden, which is basically defined as mandatory centralized software management.
And Apple makes it worse because of the monoculture, the false sense of security and the inability to fix a problem on your own or have someone else fix it during the period of time between when Apple screws up and when they do something about it.
I don't see how that changes the point. You're saying that BSD would be fine if Linux didn't exist because it would be BSD on half the world's servers instead of Linux. Maybe, but what does that say about the necessity of market share to have a viable platform?
Also keep in mind that even a compromised AppStore server with compromised keys doesn't have to mean much, as the application would still operate only with application level privileges on the device, which would limit the harm it can do.
You're assuming both that a completely unvetted application running on the device can't find a privilege escalation vulnerability, and that the servers compromised are the ones that distribute unprivileged apps and not privileged OS components. That seems overly optimistic.
Even assuming that would be the case, so what? Shutdown the servers, revoke the keys, fix the server and bring everything up again.
Revoke the keys with what? The whole problem is you're not talking about compromising a certificate, you're talking about compromising all of the devices. You can only revoke the keys if you can push updates to the device. Once the attacker has rooted all the devices they can disable updates. They can do whatever they want. They can only allow the updates they've verified don't remove their rootkit, or allow those ones only after updating the rootkit so that it isn't removed. You're in the position of having to manually clean every device in the world, and the bad guys can find another vulnerability and make you start over by the time you get finished with half of them.
I mean it's not even really an argument, even in the case of complete and utter failure of every bit of protection a walled garden should provide, all that means that you are back to PC level security.
You're at PC level security no matter what you do. The walled garden doesn't protect you from security vulnerabilities. It doesn't eliminate remote exploits, privilege escalation, social engineering, spaghetti code or idiots. All the walled garden does is make it so that if Apple makes a mistake, it happens at global scale rather than on one device.
You're confusing specialization with control. Specialization takes root because there exist trade offs and at different times it is most beneficial to make the trade offs in different ways. Sometimes you want a thing that will fit in your pocket and run all day on batteries. Other times you want a thing that will be ten times faster and have a screen that is ten times bigger. You can't make them both in the same device because they're contradictory; you can't fit a 25" screen in your pocket, so you have specialized devices depending on which is more suited to your purpose at a given time.
That has nothing to do with control. You can lock down a PC the same as a mobile device. You can have a mobile device that is entirely under the control of the user the same as a PC. So don't rationalize corporate control over the new primary human communications method as some kind of natural evolution from generalization to specialization.