> I would see this as the same as a factory worker stopping the machine he operates.

A factory machine that requires active involvement by a worker to be useful would have no impact if it were turned off, so even if a company wanted to bring legal action forward because a machine was turned off what would it be over?

> Shutting down a machine is not the same as destroying it.

Whereas the function of the machines here are quite useful even if there isn't a person in the place, at least so long as they continue to run not having staff to maintain them. The service would be damaged and would need to be repaired when people come back.

There is plenty of legal precedence for interruption of service being considered damage. Again, incidental interruption would no doubt side to the unions, but if done with malicious intent I can't see it standing.

> By "collapse", I meant a lot of stuff would stop functioning, most temporarily so.

Temporarily being as long as the employer can stave off hunger. Meaning that you need to be able to stave off hunger even longer if you want to hold the power.

> Currency has no "essential" value.

But it has value.

> The value of the currency is defined by what you can buy with it

Yup. Which is true of everything. Your value of car is defined by what you can buy with it. The value of your house defined by what you can buy with it. If you sell plastic trinkets, the value of those plastic trinkets are defined what you can buy with them.

If your car is traded for 10 chickens, your car's value is considered equal to 10 chickens. If 10 chickens is traded for 5 hours of labour, then your car is considered to have the same value as 10 chickens and 5 hours of labour. If 5 hours of labour is traded for 50 US dollars then 50 US dollars is considered to have the same value as 5 hours of labour, 10 chickens, a your car.

Now let's say that a study found that chicken has magical healing properties and, with greater desire to have chickens, the value of chicken doubled. Now you need either two of your cars to buy 10 chickens or accept that your single car can now only buy five chickens. Likewise, you now need 100 US dollars to buy 10 chickens. This scenario saw chicken inflation, but not currency inflation. The value of the currency remained the same.

It's all the same. Currency is just another thing that gets traded. The only thing unique about currency is that we normally like to talk about value relative to the value of currency. The question: "What's a dollar worth?" is then met with "A dollar!", but that doesn't actually answer the question. So, we use inflation to answer the question instead.

CPI takes a basket of goods and looks to extract uniform price movement across the basket to try and determine what is the currency component. If, say, the price of everything went up by 10% at the same time, you can reasonably conclude that it is the currency that declined in value and not that the value of everything else went up by the same amount at the same time. The latter is statistically unlikely and you can safely say that inflation is 10%. If the price of only one item in the basket went up by 10%, with no change to the rest, it is likely that there was no inflation. The real world isn't nearly as clean and tidy as a HN comment can be, but we try our best.

> This may or may not be true

Which is why we seek counterexamples to find cases where it hasn't been true. Even if technically possible, if it has never happened before, it is not worth presenting as something that likely to happen as has been done earlier in this conversation.

> Anyway, my prediction is that we're likely to have more labor market conflicts in 2023 in many places

It is certainly possible. All signs point to labour becoming stronger, and as indicated earlier, labour is more likely to stand up when they are strong – being in a better position to weather the storm that comes with pushing back. The wildcard is government, which throughout much of the world are working hard to crush labour's growing strength – a number of central banks have made it quite clear that they won't sleep until unemployment is high. If that is successful, labour could lose power before they stand up.