Monday, November 12, 2007

The Robot Menace

MM posts from Hanoi about, well, another post that was inspired by another item &...um, where was — oh, yeah about the sheer fucking nerve of anybody, anywhere, going on strike, & why are the unions so powerful, etc. One point these clowns all seem to miss: These are GUILDS, not unions. There is a difference. (Look it up yourselves, lazy bad-choice-making losers. It's your responsibility.)

The item she linked to inspired this comment:

The reason I see for the WGA being more powerful than other unions is that the WGA represents those that think for a living versus those that just show up and do an assigned task. The later [sic] can always be threatened with bringing in a robot to do their job (which should be done more often) while the WGA person can't easily be replaced. Sure the studios can try but the end product will suck. And the difference between sucking and not sucking is multiple millions of dollars so the WGA has a lot of leverage.
Posted by: BlogReader at Nov 11, 2007 11:20:20 AM
Emphasis mine. Does that nicely sum up glibertarianism? And this idiot thinks a "robot" can do anything on a set? Not bloody likely. This would appear to be the "Robot Fallacy," as opposed to the "Renaissance Faire Fallacy."Above: Typical glibertarian brings in a robot to do his job.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The idiocy of that comment is astounding. Who knew robots could be electricians and caterers and costume designers and script editors and proofreaders and acting coaches and directors and set designers and location scouts and cinematographers on and on and on...films are a highly collaborative process that involve people of vastly differing talents, requiring skills in everything from the creative to the scientific to the athletic. They demand a huge amount of effort and hard work on the part of those involved. At least the moron gave props to writers as actually contributing something as opposed to a lot of the other ignorant dolts commenting on the subject.

M. Bouffant said...

Thank you, cleverp. You always expand my items nicely. I'm just too damn lazy to list all the non-robot things that happen on set.

Anonymous said...

there is an additional irony of course, in that the r&d for the sort of robots that mcardle's commenters gtet hard-ons thinking about was almost entirely funded by the government via the pentagon system, and wouldnt have been remotely economically viable otherwise. chalk up another victory for the free market