but i have to wonder what powerful people actually bring to the table.

Leadership.

Most here won't want to hear it, but the average person does not want to lead. They want to be told everything will be alright.

Leading + consequences is difficult and stressful. Heck, just leading your own household is stressful, try doing it for someone else or 1000s.

i know you're joking, but it is an interesting parallel to draw. consider how roads often make walking unsafe, infeasible, or even overtly illegal. and consider the externalities of automotive culture.

can you explain how someone being incorrect about something weakens their position? i assume the position in question is that their should be more trust busting. "there have been these antitrust actions" isn't actually a counter argument to "there should be more antitrust actions", so it doesn't weaken the position, unless i'm not understanding what you mean by that.

you know what my favorite fallacy is? the fallacy fallacy, the mistaken assumption that by showing an argument is invalid you've shown its conclusion is false.

If someone says 'the level of X is 0, and the appropriate level should be higher than it currently is', and if it turns out that the current level of X is higher than the claimed 0, that does indeed raise doubts about their position.

Because the argument wasn't "there should be more" but was in fact "there have been none"?

It's pretty easy to weaken such a strong position if you can provide not just one but multiple pieces of evidence to the contrary.

The argument was they feel they are invincible in their [monopolist] position, and that argument is only made stronger by the cases you cited as none of the outcomes really moved the needle in that aspect.

also because, well, our dictatorial regime.

what numbers can you trust? i mean, you can trust whatever suits you, but *i* don't trust, really, any of the things i hear about the global bad guys, particularly iran when america is making war on them or building a case for war.

How about start with the number that the regime itself admits to; namely, thousands of protestors killed.

i really can't tell which side you're talking about

well, who decides the country's values?

Sure, relative to the universe, but it's more than those who haven't had idealism beaten out of them by the world.

no, not relative to the universe, relative to recent history. 40 years is not much in the context of history, which is the topic. your life experience is small and unimportant at the world-historical scale.

So what are you, 200?

> The NLRB has been gutted.

there was a before the nlrb and there were unions then. would you expect union organizers for a tech workers union to be assassinated? would you expect members of a tech workers union to be gunned down en masse? if no, then the political landscape has been so much worse than now, and unions have managed to form.

this is so funny for me to read. a few years ago, i would see programmers saying they can negotiate better deals for themselves than a union could. now you're saying it's already over, programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero.

i advise against being so sure of your ideas. maybe you think platform holders have all the cards--test it. if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.

Individuals can negotiate insane labors deals for themselves. Go ask the best-paid person you know how they got their pay package, it usually entails some form of schmoozing. Unions are for bringing the bottom-rung up to par, not for raising the top bar further.

> if they fight efforts to unionize, that tells a different story.

You are describing an industry that has outsourced intelligent labor to India and Pakistan for more than 25 years. The efforts to unionize would be like trying to save America's auto industry in 2004.

i'm saying test it, let's get scientific. why would you have a problem with that?

The fatalistic view that "platform holders have all the cards" and that "programming as a skill has a future valuation that's heading to zero" is a common psychological barrier in labor struggles. Oppressed or subordinate groups often suffer from a "diffuse, magical belief in the invulnerability and power of the oppressor"[0].

However, theories of political and social power argue the exact opposite: the power of any ruling class or corporation is actually quite fragile because it depends entirely on the cooperation, obedience, and skills of its subordinates. If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources, skills, and knowledge, we can severely disrupt or paralyze the systems that enrich the platform holders.

0. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire

> If highly skilled individuals like blue-collar technologists and programmers collectively withdraw our human resources

Individuals cannot convince the Subway app, Raycast or LastPass to defect from Apple or Google's platforms. Using those platforms is an executive decision, and Senior iOS/Android engineers will not voice this minority concern or risk their job to advocate for it. Similarly, Apple and Google's platform monopolies are not designed by individual engineers, but executives that will happily pay to replace you if you feel morally unjust.

The only place where this could work is indie development, since that's the scale where developers have authority to sabotage themselves. And sabotage themselves they would - it would be like Fortnite's removal from the App Store except with ~100,000 times less public outcry. You'd go bankrupt before ever inspiring change on the platform.

Nothing about the technology changed, indie developers have long warned users to not give their OEM control over what they can install. But users don't really care, businesses told them the App Store is "safer" before they ever got to see the alternative.

Well said!

Haha, well, Freire is a very difficult read, but I try to do him justice.