Defending a moving castle? This just makes me Howl with anticipation!

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@TheSHEEEP: Yes, assuming low union density and general anti-union rules, just a few unionized workers cannot create the effect I described. But with high union density, particularly if it's high enough to wield the amount of power unions have historically managed in northern Europe, it does. The political power matters because you end up with things like sectoral bargaining, meaning even non-union workers get the deal the unions negotiate.

I don't think it's a valid anti-union argument to say low levels of unionization will not create all the virtuous effects you get from high levels of unionization.

Even so, if Firm X becomes a union shop, the argument is valid within that firm: You employ someone at that firm, they get to join the union whether they're from India or Turkmenistan or Antarctica.

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It'll be nice if the Linux version does well. This is a precedent that could end up being important.

(Although not necessarily--I remember being all excited many years ago when Dell first started selling a few laptops with Linux on them, which turned out not to be a sign of bigger and better things after all)

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These people are pretty versatile in their tone.

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What about the mass immigration of "qualified" coders coming from India and other places that lower wages and push natives out of the labour market. Curiously we never hear a word about that from Unions.

Well, if these immigrants from India are in the union, they have to get paid the same, so the incentive to import them disappears and the negative impacts of their presence in dragging down wages goes away. So unions don't really have to talk about that situation because the presence of unions kind of automatically eliminates it as a problem.

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Well, I must admit I'm in favour of the sun not exploding.

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I'm a little unclear about just what this does. So for instance, say I have Steam Play as the default and I cannot un-default it. Does that mean I can't play Linux native games as Linux native?

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Huh. I think of Jitsi-meet as an alternative to Zoom. In my tabletop-RPG group we're using it for 2 out of 3 campaigns, Zoom for the third (GM preferences). For the videoconferencing it's pretty decent. One nice feature Jitsi-meet has that Zoom doesn't seem to is you can easily tweak volume individually, so if someone is particularly loud compared to everyone else you can turn them down.

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Well, for simple stuff there are a bunch of little graphical programs on Linux, aren't there? GIMP is the big serious thing, if you just want to fiddle with a photo there's stuff like Cheese and so on.

It's good to see GIMP continue to move forward. Even on Windows I suspect there must be a lot of people really wanting to get out from under Adobe's horrible annoying subscription model thing for Photoshop and, well, all their other stuff. If only there was an open source Linux program to do what Acrobat does . . .

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"Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same."

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