I'd be fine with dropping right to work laws, if we at the same time dropped the laws that required companies to negotiate with unions
While we're at it, we should drop the laws that require companies to negotiate with their vendors. They should be able to name their price and get whatever they want:)
This is special pleading on your part -- everybody acknowledges that corporations must negotiate with each other, as must individuals, but somehow for you, unions are different and their rights may be disregarded.
Wow, just wow. I would LOVE to see you say that to the Teamsters union. Next thing you know, you're ass will be wearing cement shoes and talking to fish
Stop watching TV and restrict your comments to things that happen in the real world.
The 40 hour work week can be traced back to Ford Motors, who found that by working 40 hour weeks
Uh, the 8 hour day can be traced, in American history, to labor agitation going back to the 1830s. The AFL made an 8 hour day part of its platform in 1886. The United Mine Workers won an 8 hour day through collective bargaining in 1898, and many organized skilled trades won an 8 hour day around this period. Citing Ford as the creator of the 8 hour day is like saying John Glenn invented powered flight. Ford, at best, was an 8-hour day concern troll who undertook the change to mollify trade unionists who were attempting to organize the auto industry at the time.
Who the fuck are you to tell someone else what they can and can't do.
Well, the capitalist/propertarian status quo ante is based on the idea that "you can tell someone else what they can and can't do" if you're an employer, because you own. Trade unionism is a reaction to that, it's based on the idea that a union can tell someone else what they can and can't do because it has strength in numbers, and it fights for a just cause: for a fair and equitable stake for labor. Both positions are founded in moral sentiments.
This shithead mentality is why states started with the whole right-to-work thing, effectively destroying the functionality of the union.
The "right-to-work thing" traces its roots to the fact that wage-earning is considered socially low-status in the south, to the extent that politicians could kick factory workers in the teeth and nobody would raise a finger in protest. There was also the fear at the time that African-Americans would begin to join unions, as the racist attitude that had prevailed in organized labor through the first half of the century abated, and that they would serve as a cradle for racial "agitation" and activism.
You have to see it as an adverse selection problem. LLP was paying production people about half the going rate for the same work someone paid union scale. If everyone agreed to that it wouldn't do anyone any good. I mean there's some imposition of will going on here, but it's either our will or management's, there's no middle ground here where free people make a free exchange. They'd like you to believe that, but It's a sham, it's false consciousness.
The 5 day, 40h work week was introduced by Ford in 1926 in order to increase productivity, under no pressure from unions.
Well, that's what he said, anyways, obviously he'd have a pretty good reason not to seem stampeded into it. Unions had been agitating for a five-day week for decades and he didn't invent the thing, it was common the textile industry since the aughts, mainly because a significant number of Jews were involved in needle trades and they wanted to have Saturdays off for the sabbath. (Ford was of course a terrific anti-Semite, so this probably wasn't his justification.)
The catch with all of Ford's labor innovations were that they were always understood to be a gift on his part. It had to be his idea, and his time to give. The suggestion that labor had earned it, or that it was their due, was out of the question, and he reserved the right to withdraw his liberal labor practices at a moment's notice if anything displeased him.
A lot like Disney later on, he took the organizing of his business as a personal betrayal, because he'd always seen himself not as an employer or an economic actor, but as a sort of father who, through his benevolence, had earned the right to tell people how to live their lives. This was the same guy that mandated his employees go to dances, took it upon himself to organize their social lives and wasn't afraid of firing people for looking funny or having heterodox opinions. Unions are completely antithetical to this idea -- you should be able to live however you damn please and win high wages and benefits not as some gift, but through hard bargaining.
Yes, we restrict the right to contract in certain ways. For example, you can't make a contract selling yourself into slavery
The equation of a union security agreement with slavery is ridiculous and morally revolting. On the one hand we have generations under the lash, a decrepit neo-feudal economy, institutionalized rape, and genocide; and on the other hand, we have double time on Sundays. The comparison is idiotic.
Closed shops are not required for unions to work, unions as we know them are dispensable, the real issue is the construction of laws to target certain people and groups, namely the working poor, to systematically deprive them of political representation. Right-to-work doesn't help workers– it exists to protect employers, to realize producerist ideology, to keep capital unaccountable and ascendant over all other forms of human society.
Here, wiki has an okay overview. The system used to be more like you describe, between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, but since the lat 1940s there've been no closed shops. Neither an employer nor a union can force you to join a union, at best they can make you pay an agency fee, which are dues less whatever the union spends on political action.
Compare this with the rights of a shareholder, who nominally is free to invest or not, but has no say over how his investment is used for political speech. Really what's happened over the past 70 years is rich people and the managerial class have convinced the government to slowly cripple bottom-up capital organizations, things like unions, community orgs, NGOs and social/environmental activists, tarring them as "special interests," while they walk away with all the money and spend it freely and without any limitation on political campaigns, often without the sort of consent on the part of their constituencies that they routinely accuse unions of breaching.
Nah nah, you don't understand what a right-to-work law is. It means an employer cannot require that you be a member of a labor org in order to work. Under current US labor law, there are no true closed shops, and a unions is required to offer membership to a nonmember employee once he's worked in the shop for more than 90 days.
An employee doesn't have a contract with the union that lets you work -- I'm an IA brother, and I have no contract with the IA -- the employer has a contract with the union that requires that they only hire union members, except under certain circumstances. A right-to-work law makes these provisions of union contracts unenforceable.
I've found that a lot of people in the US are profoundly ignorant of how labor unions work, and labor organization general. Everyone seems to think that employment norms just sortof emerged by magic sometime around World War II, and that unions are completely arbitrary entrenched interests that nobody wants, but some employers are just too stupid or corrupt to avoid, and the workers are all featherbedding lackeys. It just doesn't work that way; the problem is that everyone in the US seems to take their knowledge of unions from TV reports of public sector unions, with a liberal dash of things they say in On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and Blue Collar.
Taft Hartley doesn't prevent workers from organizing, it limits the ability of unions from imposing their views on workers who don't share them. Since there seem to be enough of those to make unions much less effective, they have been declining in power.
The operative parts of Taft-Hartley here would be:
1) The sanction of "Right to Work" laws and jurisdictions, which abridge the right to contract. If you own a company in a right-to-work state, the you're surrounded by a magic bubble that makes it impossible for you to ever sign a contract of adhesion with labor. Any other company can compel whatever terms they please -- cable companies have contract rights than employees.
2) The prohibition on secondary actions, sympathy strikes and boycotts.
3) The general complications arising from forming a union, the card check requirements, the arbitrarily high bar imposed on NLRB recognition of a collective bargaining unit. The NLRB's utter toothlessness in policing employer corruption and tampering in union votes would be a contributing issue to this, including intimidation, misinformation campaigns, pretense firings of organizers and activists...
By what right should unions be able to "enforce" pickets or strikes? If I'm not a member of your union, you have no business interfering in my affairs or what work I choose to do.
That's why the union has a contract with the employer, wherein the employer agrees to not hire anyone who isn't a member of the union. That's basically how it works.
Pickets and boycotts are mostly effective, because human beings have shame. It depends on the cause though; I work in the entertainment industry and in LA, everyone else does, so everyone understands what's at stake for the people on strike and people respect picket lines. Similarly, if hotel cleaning staff are protesting to make a living wage instead of $8 an hour, people will tend to be sympathetic. These kinds of strikes work. Striking public employees are a lot less successful; if the BART strike in SF had gone on for another week or two it probably would have rolled the union.
The open source world just hasnt' evolved the maturity to make a universal desktop OS **that people use**
That's really nor fair, Linux is quite mature. Google sells Linux on more shipping CPUs than just about any other OS, they just call it "Android." If Google were to decide that they wanted to seriously make a push for the desktop with Android or Chrome, they probably would. Apple makes a killing selling computers with a rebranded and modded BSD distro, after all.
The reason we don't see Linux everywhere on the desktop is strictly due to marketing -- Linux can't take over the world just be being good, large organizations have to sell it, support it, package it for hardware, and provide end-to-end application solutions. Linux is mature enough to run workstations and servers, it's just missing something on the level of an iPhoto.
Where organizations do push Linux solutions, they prosper, generally in situations where they can use Linux to undercut competition on price. However, these people never push Linux as a brand, they use it as a middleware or a framework to roll their own OS or solution, open source or otherwise. Thus, Android may be Linux, but it's is slowly becoming a Google Play Services platform that uses Linux as a boot and driver environment.
Quite the opposite of what happens when a government monopoly on things has their labor go on strike, like mail (pre-internet, when it was really needed) or public transportation of today
It's a little scary to see a commenter automatically assume that the only people who ever go on strike are government workers -- proud private sector union employee here. The Taft-Hartley Act had the effect, in the US, of slowly killing the private sector union and leaving only government employees organized, so that union formation became a privilege or a bennie, as opposed to a protected right of anyone who works.
This is exactly how actions against private firms are supposed to operate. Uber drivers strike or boycott against Uber, a competitor snags available clients until Uber and the drivers reach an agreement. The fact that all Uber drivers are on the Internet makes them easier to organize, but it makes a picket harder to enforce: how do the strikers know for sure their buddy isn't taking Uber work while they're on "strike?"
The something is the panoply of chemical signals that are generated by cells, of all kinds, all over the body that promote or inhibit insulin production.
I'd add that it's really difficult to see how they'd ever completely solve this problem -- your pancreas knows how much insulin to manufacture not just because it's measuring your blood glucose (all over your body, all the time), but because insulin production is just one factor in a cascade of dozens of different hormones, all promoting or inhibiting insulin production, and each other, for many different kinds of reasons. Your natural insulin production level is the product of a ton of different physiological vectors, only some of them tangentially related to the food you ate, and even if insulin is leading or trailing glucose levels, there are related hormones that cover the gaps over seconds and minutes, or allow compensation by other systems.
Endocrine systems are some of the most finely-tuned and subtle mechanisms in biology. They're like a Tesla, where seemingly-complicated frobs like neurons are like golf carts.
My understanding from him is that the blood glucose measurement isn't especially accurate, though I can't remember why.
It's hard to make a closed-loop control because most continuous blood glucose monitors don't measure the blood, but the residual glucose in the intersitial fluid, and this lags blood glucose by several minutes, which can be a big deal, depending on the food type.
Blood sugar doesn't have a linear-time-invariant response to food input, different macronutrients can create different contours in blood sugar level over spans of time. Generally, a pump can't guess how many units to move in the bolus unless it knows specifically what you ate, it's not just a matter of dose, it's a matter of how long -- different foods require a more time-release bolus, sugars require a spike, all-at-once bolus.
No, you misunderstand. When someone copies your code, you lose access to any patches they may make. GNU effectively requires patches to be published, as a condition of redistribution. BSD and proprietary licenses do not, so GNU encourages a more free time/community-based approach that consolidates projects, because forking is almost always a waste or energy and it's almost always better to just submit your patches to a single repository.
It starts being less fun when the guy who runs the project won't accept your patches, because he doesn't consider your particular bug fixes a priority, or your features don't mesh with the maintainer's vision for how the tool should work. This is why Apple switched to LLVM, for example -- they wanted parser and static analysis tools that were made of distinct components, so they be used interactively with a closed-source GUI, and this was contrary to the overall goals of the GCC project.
It's a perfect example, it's non-modular and monolithic, requiring recompiles of the entire kernel to include support for new hardware and filesystems. This is their way of making it as hard as possible for hardware vendors to interact with a Linux kernel without publishing driver source, and preferably getting that source into Linus's tree. In Linux's case the intentional blurriness is in the Linux kernel ABI, which is overtly kept informal and unstable.
I think it was always contingent on who uses the software and who develops it. For a long time GPL-land was superior because it could collect a lot of small developers' free time, and these people were developing tools for their own use, thus they all had incentives to stay within the ecosystem and they all benefited.
In a world where large corporations are pouring hundreds of paid developers into OSS projects, using the OSS licensing not for ideological reasons but for business model reasons, the GPL paradigm has a lot of trouble competing, particularly on tools where the set of people who are users is much larger, or mostly disjoint, from the set of people who are developers.
The political stuff in GPL-land is a symptom of the ideological mission, and the perception on the part of many misguided BDFLs (by no means all of them) that they're the only game in town and they don't have to compete for coder-hours with other projects.
(I hate how "GNU's Not Unix!" is really becoming more and more true. Unix was about minimalism, and sometimes GNU seems like it's about stuffing everything possible into every tool.)
If they didn't, it'd be easier for people from the proprietary and BSD-compliant-license land (like Apple and Google) to circumvent the spirit of the GPL. As long as you have to link into their code, or copy and paste it, they control what you can do with it. If you can just invoke whatever little piece of GPL code you want with arguments, you can progressively replace their tools without adding anything back to the original GCC tools -- if you can code around a bug in GNU project without submitting a patch to that project, that's adverse to the opening of the code in the first place. GCCs middle end is intentionally blurry, and not modularized into a separate tool, to keep people from taking their own parser and bolting GCC's optimizations onto it, just as an example.
It follows that that changes to the tools, and the process of creating the tools, thus stays under the political thumb of various FSF-aligned BDFLs.
"Nobody trusts an official story and everyone believes anonymous sources."
I'd interpret this as being a statement about the tendency of politicos ("everyone") to uncritically repeat salacious gossip, and to intentionally discount "official" statements, not because they're false or irrelevant, but because they're boring and lack the whiff of exclusive, "insider" provenance.
This saying is an example of artful equivocation, in the sense that it is either critical of "an official story," or critical of "everyone" for believing it, and the listener is free to accept either.
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While we're at it, we should drop the laws that require companies to negotiate with their vendors. They should be able to name their price and get whatever they want :)
This is special pleading on your part -- everybody acknowledges that corporations must negotiate with each other, as must individuals, but somehow for you, unions are different and their rights may be disregarded.
Stop watching TV and restrict your comments to things that happen in the real world.
Uh, the 8 hour day can be traced, in American history, to labor agitation going back to the 1830s. The AFL made an 8 hour day part of its platform in 1886. The United Mine Workers won an 8 hour day through collective bargaining in 1898, and many organized skilled trades won an 8 hour day around this period. Citing Ford as the creator of the 8 hour day is like saying John Glenn invented powered flight. Ford, at best, was an 8-hour day concern troll who undertook the change to mollify trade unionists who were attempting to organize the auto industry at the time.
Well, the capitalist/propertarian status quo ante is based on the idea that "you can tell someone else what they can and can't do" if you're an employer, because you own. Trade unionism is a reaction to that, it's based on the idea that a union can tell someone else what they can and can't do because it has strength in numbers, and it fights for a just cause: for a fair and equitable stake for labor. Both positions are founded in moral sentiments.
The "right-to-work thing" traces its roots to the fact that wage-earning is considered socially low-status in the south, to the extent that politicians could kick factory workers in the teeth and nobody would raise a finger in protest. There was also the fear at the time that African-Americans would begin to join unions, as the racist attitude that had prevailed in organized labor through the first half of the century abated, and that they would serve as a cradle for racial "agitation" and activism.
You have to see it as an adverse selection problem. LLP was paying production people about half the going rate for the same work someone paid union scale. If everyone agreed to that it wouldn't do anyone any good. I mean there's some imposition of will going on here, but it's either our will or management's, there's no middle ground here where free people make a free exchange. They'd like you to believe that, but It's a sham, it's false consciousness.
Well, that's what he said, anyways, obviously he'd have a pretty good reason not to seem stampeded into it. Unions had been agitating for a five-day week for decades and he didn't invent the thing, it was common the textile industry since the aughts, mainly because a significant number of Jews were involved in needle trades and they wanted to have Saturdays off for the sabbath. (Ford was of course a terrific anti-Semite, so this probably wasn't his justification.)
The catch with all of Ford's labor innovations were that they were always understood to be a gift on his part. It had to be his idea, and his time to give. The suggestion that labor had earned it, or that it was their due, was out of the question, and he reserved the right to withdraw his liberal labor practices at a moment's notice if anything displeased him.
A lot like Disney later on, he took the organizing of his business as a personal betrayal, because he'd always seen himself not as an employer or an economic actor, but as a sort of father who, through his benevolence, had earned the right to tell people how to live their lives. This was the same guy that mandated his employees go to dances, took it upon himself to organize their social lives and wasn't afraid of firing people for looking funny or having heterodox opinions. Unions are completely antithetical to this idea -- you should be able to live however you damn please and win high wages and benefits not as some gift, but through hard bargaining.
I'm not sure what your point is then... All your examples of strikes involve monopolies and service disruptions.
The equation of a union security agreement with slavery is ridiculous and morally revolting. On the one hand we have generations under the lash, a decrepit neo-feudal economy, institutionalized rape, and genocide; and on the other hand, we have double time on Sundays. The comparison is idiotic.
Closed shops are not required for unions to work, unions as we know them are dispensable, the real issue is the construction of laws to target certain people and groups, namely the working poor, to systematically deprive them of political representation. Right-to-work doesn't help workers– it exists to protect employers, to realize producerist ideology, to keep capital unaccountable and ascendant over all other forms of human society.
Here, wiki has an okay overview. The system used to be more like you describe, between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, but since the lat 1940s there've been no closed shops. Neither an employer nor a union can force you to join a union, at best they can make you pay an agency fee, which are dues less whatever the union spends on political action.
Compare this with the rights of a shareholder, who nominally is free to invest or not, but has no say over how his investment is used for political speech. Really what's happened over the past 70 years is rich people and the managerial class have convinced the government to slowly cripple bottom-up capital organizations, things like unions, community orgs, NGOs and social/environmental activists, tarring them as "special interests," while they walk away with all the money and spend it freely and without any limitation on political campaigns, often without the sort of consent on the part of their constituencies that they routinely accuse unions of breaching.
Nah nah, you don't understand what a right-to-work law is. It means an employer cannot require that you be a member of a labor org in order to work. Under current US labor law, there are no true closed shops, and a unions is required to offer membership to a nonmember employee once he's worked in the shop for more than 90 days.
An employee doesn't have a contract with the union that lets you work -- I'm an IA brother, and I have no contract with the IA -- the employer has a contract with the union that requires that they only hire union members, except under certain circumstances. A right-to-work law makes these provisions of union contracts unenforceable.
I've found that a lot of people in the US are profoundly ignorant of how labor unions work, and labor organization general. Everyone seems to think that employment norms just sortof emerged by magic sometime around World War II, and that unions are completely arbitrary entrenched interests that nobody wants, but some employers are just too stupid or corrupt to avoid, and the workers are all featherbedding lackeys. It just doesn't work that way; the problem is that everyone in the US seems to take their knowledge of unions from TV reports of public sector unions, with a liberal dash of things they say in On the Waterfront, The Godfather, and Blue Collar.
You're aware that a strike doesn't have to act on a monopoly in order to be a strike, right? Most strikes don't.
A few years ago I picketed a studio that was hiring non-IATSE crews for projects paid for under a distribution agreement with NBC, a violation of NBC's contract. It was effective, it was definitely a strike, an no consumers were affected. Or do you think unions exist only to immiserate consumers?
The operative parts of Taft-Hartley here would be:
1) The sanction of "Right to Work" laws and jurisdictions, which abridge the right to contract. If you own a company in a right-to-work state, the you're surrounded by a magic bubble that makes it impossible for you to ever sign a contract of adhesion with labor. Any other company can compel whatever terms they please -- cable companies have contract rights than employees.
2) The prohibition on secondary actions, sympathy strikes and boycotts.
3) The general complications arising from forming a union, the card check requirements, the arbitrarily high bar imposed on NLRB recognition of a collective bargaining unit. The NLRB's utter toothlessness in policing employer corruption and tampering in union votes would be a contributing issue to this, including intimidation, misinformation campaigns, pretense firings of organizers and activists...
That's why the union has a contract with the employer, wherein the employer agrees to not hire anyone who isn't a member of the union. That's basically how it works.
Pickets and boycotts are mostly effective, because human beings have shame. It depends on the cause though; I work in the entertainment industry and in LA, everyone else does, so everyone understands what's at stake for the people on strike and people respect picket lines. Similarly, if hotel cleaning staff are protesting to make a living wage instead of $8 an hour, people will tend to be sympathetic. These kinds of strikes work. Striking public employees are a lot less successful; if the BART strike in SF had gone on for another week or two it probably would have rolled the union.
That's really nor fair, Linux is quite mature. Google sells Linux on more shipping CPUs than just about any other OS, they just call it "Android." If Google were to decide that they wanted to seriously make a push for the desktop with Android or Chrome, they probably would. Apple makes a killing selling computers with a rebranded and modded BSD distro, after all.
The reason we don't see Linux everywhere on the desktop is strictly due to marketing -- Linux can't take over the world just be being good, large organizations have to sell it, support it, package it for hardware, and provide end-to-end application solutions. Linux is mature enough to run workstations and servers, it's just missing something on the level of an iPhoto.
Where organizations do push Linux solutions, they prosper, generally in situations where they can use Linux to undercut competition on price. However, these people never push Linux as a brand, they use it as a middleware or a framework to roll their own OS or solution, open source or otherwise. Thus, Android may be Linux, but it's is slowly becoming a Google Play Services platform that uses Linux as a boot and driver environment.
It's a little scary to see a commenter automatically assume that the only people who ever go on strike are government workers -- proud private sector union employee here. The Taft-Hartley Act had the effect, in the US, of slowly killing the private sector union and leaving only government employees organized, so that union formation became a privilege or a bennie, as opposed to a protected right of anyone who works.
This is exactly how actions against private firms are supposed to operate. Uber drivers strike or boycott against Uber, a competitor snags available clients until Uber and the drivers reach an agreement. The fact that all Uber drivers are on the Internet makes them easier to organize, but it makes a picket harder to enforce: how do the strikers know for sure their buddy isn't taking Uber work while they're on "strike?"
The something is the panoply of chemical signals that are generated by cells, of all kinds, all over the body that promote or inhibit insulin production.
I'd add that it's really difficult to see how they'd ever completely solve this problem -- your pancreas knows how much insulin to manufacture not just because it's measuring your blood glucose (all over your body, all the time), but because insulin production is just one factor in a cascade of dozens of different hormones, all promoting or inhibiting insulin production, and each other, for many different kinds of reasons. Your natural insulin production level is the product of a ton of different physiological vectors, only some of them tangentially related to the food you ate, and even if insulin is leading or trailing glucose levels, there are related hormones that cover the gaps over seconds and minutes, or allow compensation by other systems.
Endocrine systems are some of the most finely-tuned and subtle mechanisms in biology. They're like a Tesla, where seemingly-complicated frobs like neurons are like golf carts.
It's hard to make a closed-loop control because most continuous blood glucose monitors don't measure the blood, but the residual glucose in the intersitial fluid, and this lags blood glucose by several minutes, which can be a big deal, depending on the food type.
Blood sugar doesn't have a linear-time-invariant response to food input, different macronutrients can create different contours in blood sugar level over spans of time. Generally, a pump can't guess how many units to move in the bolus unless it knows specifically what you ate, it's not just a matter of dose, it's a matter of how long -- different foods require a more time-release bolus, sugars require a spike, all-at-once bolus.
No, you misunderstand. When someone copies your code, you lose access to any patches they may make. GNU effectively requires patches to be published, as a condition of redistribution. BSD and proprietary licenses do not, so GNU encourages a more free time/community-based approach that consolidates projects, because forking is almost always a waste or energy and it's almost always better to just submit your patches to a single repository.
It starts being less fun when the guy who runs the project won't accept your patches, because he doesn't consider your particular bug fixes a priority, or your features don't mesh with the maintainer's vision for how the tool should work. This is why Apple switched to LLVM, for example -- they wanted parser and static analysis tools that were made of distinct components, so they be used interactively with a closed-source GUI, and this was contrary to the overall goals of the GCC project.
It's a perfect example, it's non-modular and monolithic, requiring recompiles of the entire kernel to include support for new hardware and filesystems. This is their way of making it as hard as possible for hardware vendors to interact with a Linux kernel without publishing driver source, and preferably getting that source into Linus's tree. In Linux's case the intentional blurriness is in the Linux kernel ABI, which is overtly kept informal and unstable.
I think it was always contingent on who uses the software and who develops it. For a long time GPL-land was superior because it could collect a lot of small developers' free time, and these people were developing tools for their own use, thus they all had incentives to stay within the ecosystem and they all benefited.
In a world where large corporations are pouring hundreds of paid developers into OSS projects, using the OSS licensing not for ideological reasons but for business model reasons, the GPL paradigm has a lot of trouble competing, particularly on tools where the set of people who are users is much larger, or mostly disjoint, from the set of people who are developers.
The political stuff in GPL-land is a symptom of the ideological mission, and the perception on the part of many misguided BDFLs (by no means all of them) that they're the only game in town and they don't have to compete for coder-hours with other projects.
I dunno, I do develop software, what's the matter with my account?
Correction: I imagine most of the people invoking clang these days are using dispatch.h to do what OpenMP does.
I imagine most of the people invoking clang these days are using to do what OpenMP does.
If they didn't, it'd be easier for people from the proprietary and BSD-compliant-license land (like Apple and Google) to circumvent the spirit of the GPL. As long as you have to link into their code, or copy and paste it, they control what you can do with it. If you can just invoke whatever little piece of GPL code you want with arguments, you can progressively replace their tools without adding anything back to the original GCC tools -- if you can code around a bug in GNU project without submitting a patch to that project, that's adverse to the opening of the code in the first place. GCCs middle end is intentionally blurry, and not modularized into a separate tool, to keep people from taking their own parser and bolting GCC's optimizations onto it, just as an example.
It follows that that changes to the tools, and the process of creating the tools, thus stays under the political thumb of various FSF-aligned BDFLs.
Actually the 9 million number applies to just the 5S and 5C, according to Apple's press release.
I'd interpret this as being a statement about the tendency of politicos ("everyone") to uncritically repeat salacious gossip, and to intentionally discount "official" statements, not because they're false or irrelevant, but because they're boring and lack the whiff of exclusive, "insider" provenance.
This saying is an example of artful equivocation, in the sense that it is either critical of "an official story," or critical of "everyone" for believing it, and the listener is free to accept either.
"Shall I phone you or nudge you?"