the purpose of unions is similar to that of lawyers: to advance the interests of their clients.

If automation is resolving the problems of employer-employee relations then automation is making unions irrelevant, much in the same way that if robot counseling were to make marriages more successful they would be making divorce lawyers irrelevant.

The purpose of unions is not to "protect jobs" but to advance the interests of their clients: one such interest is the preservation of the jobs, but also the handling of grievances (I was a party to a unionization effort that revolved almost exclusively to providing some system of handling grievances as part of a contract).

Automation is making unions irrelevant indirectly by eliminating both the injured and under-represented workers but also by eliminating incompetent and arbitrary managers.

It is bad management that makes unions useful, in the same way that bad faith parties to contracts make lawyers useful. If management was reasonable, fair and respectful then unions would find themselves without clients.

Aggressive anti-union efforts mostly revolving around fear, intimidation, illegal firing for unionizing, forced company meetings in which employers "hint" about what will happen if they opt to unionize are the some of the barriers to unionizing. Laws favor anti-union efforts and there is only weak enforcement of the existing laws in any event.

IT suffers from bad management just like all industries. The value of IT employees and the relative ease of workers to change companies perhaps makes it hard to unionize from a strict wages perspective, but from a grievances perspective it is just as useful.

So then is the NYTimes an enemy of state? Or, being Americans, they are allowed to do what "foreigners" cannot do?

can we accept the brink argument - it's a year away?

If these people can predict prices a year in advance - for anything - they'd be fairly rich investors, no?

I'd say "1 year away" is just long enough to make people listen to the argument but not so soon as to be easily disproven. Much like the "oh, about 15 minutes" estimate you get when asking how long the next table will be open at your favorite restaurant.

How about looking back 1 year for all the "one year hence" forecasters? Where are they now?

How about those of us who vote 'G'?

how about "market research" - find people who:

1)Have switched to Linux but switched back - and find out why and fix those reasons
2)Have not considered Linux and what keeps them from doing so
3)Have switched to Linux but also use Windows (games and applications come to mind)

I think the move to live filesystem distros off of USB/optical media helped removed a major roadblock for transitioning.

Assuming the "economic man" model of human behavior that we are guided by rational cost benefit analysis (something which I doubt, but let's pretend) a driving force in these mixed economic times would certainly be cost. However many people savvy enough to use Linux simply pirate their version of Windows. Many people struggle to use their Win/Mac machines and perhaps the support experience seems daunting.

Assuming, at a minimum, people could be migrated to switch based solely on economic reasons how can they be made to switch and not switch back?

Gamers are a curious market and if they're willing to spend $400 on a graphics card and $40+ on a game (or $120/year on monthly subscriptions) it seems likely they're going to spend money on the OS. So maybe gamers are out.

Pre-installation is the mechanism by which many things are maneuvered into the hands of the buyer and getting Linux pre-installed is fairly hard (I've never seen it in person retail and on-line retailers are few and oddly expensive). Maybe it's as simple as getting people to get it preinstalled and assuming they have some windows background, or catching them at the time they're about to upgrade and spend money on commercial products when free ones would do as well or better.

It says on the nice graph:

"A competing hypothesis places the point of origin in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine and Russia, north of the Black Sea."

If politicians can be sold to the highest bidder and, as you claim, it's a union "master" then the problem is corruption, not unions.

If cities go bankrupt because they mis-manage their funds and cannot pay for services they contracted for - via a union or in any method - then the problem is fiscal mismanagement not unions.

I've worked for several companies that had leases they could not afford or could not use - one in an acquisition (the acquired company was essentially liquidated, developers absorbed or laid off but the leased space was an empty floor) and the other in a company downsize where a floor that could fit 100 housed barely half that. Neither was done with unions and was done freely by the companies themselves. Does that mean we should reject corporate management (or political leadership) because they cannot forsee an economic downturn or allow their tax base to erode or things like prop 13 pass which change the way property taxes are evaluated? But certainly it's not the fault of those who contract goods and services with them, or is it?

As for firing bad teachers you might want to look at the conditions under which they are managed. Firing people is expensive, incentive systems around good performance raise quality. If management demoraizes and mis-manages their workforce allowing them to fire people to cover for their incompetence simply leaves bad management in place. Teachers do a blistering hard job and having the whip of termination let loose in the hands of management is no substitution for good management.

they aren't /designed/ to do that, but might do so anyway - the post implied it was a foregone conclusion and your example simply states it as a possibility. I'll say that it is corporate interests - not unionized worker interests - that are dominant 99% of the time. And if a union were to strike - successfully - against some automation it would be a matter of time before corporate interests would get politicians to re-craft laws, they'd move to another state (or off shore) or whatever.

I worked a non-union job that was automated away and no union struck for me, and it would not have made much difference if they did.

in the IT world much of what we do is essentially managing systems that would have employed dozens if not hundreds (or thousands) and now can be done by a few or none. Much of what I do now can be automated and frankly it's so deadly dull I'd be happy to see it go (if only those pesky business interests could come into play now).

you failed to mention if this Longshore strike was successful, merely that it happened. I'd say that's on par with Republican anti-gay marriage laws - purely symbolic and destined for defeat.

Unions can and do protest anything they like, but their primary goal is collective bargaining and worker representation, not dictating how a business operates (it may protest as a form of free speech, just as any person may do so, and, uh, more power to them, right?) unless it's directly vis-a-vis worker treatment just as you might hire a lawyer to represent your personal interests.

If your contract says you are guaranteed a job for year and they fire you after a month and say "oh yeah, we replaced you with 5 perl scripts" you might protest with your union-of-one - a laywer who represents your /personal/ bargaining interests. That's not "being against automation" that's representing your contractural rights.

If I was in a coma since the 1950s it's because unions are gone, and this was accelerated during the Reagan years and the middle class demolishing policies of Republicans under the banner of subsidizing the rich disguised as being "pro business". Wake me up when the unions are back m'kay?

with license plate recognition, driving the speed limit, this might be a huge windfall for cash-strapped states that have to rely on expensive CHP officers.

unions aren't designed to protect peoples jobs from automation but to represent collective bargaining issues and represent workers in the face of often arbitrary and hostile (and incompetent) management.

the forces that prevent government change for something (or force it upon us) are the corporations that benefit most from them. I'm guessing a well known search engine had something to do with the ability to get a law passed that benefits.... them?

and when lawsuits arise around self-driving cars a well known search engine will hire a high powered PR firm to astro-turf a lobby of "citizens for self-driving robot car rights" and we'll here politicians railing about how small businesses will fail if they have to pay minimum wage to a human driver and the right to own and (autonomously) operate a self-driving car is the American Way.

Politicians have been destroying the power of unions for decades and never really wanted them in the first place. And that's almost certainly because politicians are the dogs and the corporations are the masters who pull their chains (running dogs of capitalism no less!).

but I don't think many taxi drivers would.

self-driving firetrucks with fire-detecting robots?

self-driving delivery with a robo-caller to let you know your pizza/laundry/package is waiting?

the 'failure' of the linux desktop is basically applications. libreoffice and linux gaming initiatives are the way to win that battle. making a prettier desktop is not.

or at least were trained to:

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

so why not?

and no explanation in terms of self-awareness was used to explain it:

Citation:
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/212/4495/695.short

Full:
http://drrobertepstein.com/downloads/Epstein-Self_Awareness_in_the_Pigeon-Science-1981.pdf

So now robots can do what pigeons can do. Self-awareness is a hypothetical construct http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Skinner/Theories/ which may not be very useful.