Comments on: Howzat?

By: hatmandu

hatmandu — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:56:56 +0000

Damn, you guessed!

No, silly, it just means ‘important family-related news’, dunnit? (hatches, matches, dispatches – and, er, the sexing of one’s foetus)

By: lisekit

lisekit — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:12:35 +0000

Well, traditionally the number 4 joke concerns matrimony, and you’re already married, so you must be announcing your forthcoming divorce?

By: hatmandu

hatmandu — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:16:50 +0000

🙂 I’m pleased to confirm this is certainly true. So far.

By: rickbot

rickbot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:03:42 +0000

It’s so going to turn out that the Wednesday news was that Hat doesn’t need to replace the carpet in his study after flooding.

By: hatmandu

hatmandu — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:32:58 +0000

Hat got to look round a huge factory

🙂 This was, of course, why I went!

By: m1nstrel

m1nstrel — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:15:44 +0000

Oddly, my first instinct on this wasn’t “Ah, the world is one step away from some horrific apocalypse” but rather “Wow. Cool. Hat got to look round a huge factory. I wish I was Hat”. I have a very bizarre (though probably entirely genetic) adoration of production lines.

Cool about your Wednesday news.

By: rickbot

rickbot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:08:31 +0000

Oh – that quite cheers me. The thought that these people will earn enough money to send their children to school, that these school children will go on to become engineers who build robots, and that these robots will mean no one has to do such mindless jobs again is surely the ambition of all developing countries?

Everything starts somewhere, and it’s better you buy a £19.99 iron in Argos and give them work to do, than don’t and leave them unemployed.

That said – you can buy a £3.99 iron in Sainsbury’s…

By: dogrando

dogrando — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:54:45 +0000

Sorry, I wasn’t clear: these were actual human people, doing jobs like: pick a tiny plastic cup off that conveyor belt, prick a whole in the bottom with this special needle, put it in that hopper, and repeat; or, pick a newly pricked tiny plastic cup off that conveyor belt, a tiny plastic tube off this one, click the two together, and put it in that hopper; or… The thing that terrified me most was contemplating just how many different people have had a tiny part in the construction of the iron I bought for £19.99 in Argos without really thinking about it.

By: rickbot

rickbot — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:09:15 +0000

I was reading about this sort of thing the other day. American factory workers complain because they think their jobs are going overseas… in actual fact, their jobs are going to robots. Indeed, manufacturing productivity is substantially increasing in both the US and China… while unemployment continues to rise in these sectors in both countries.

Robots were supposed to give us more leisure time, but it’s a shame the factory workers have no money to spend on leisure pursuits.

By: dogrando

dogrando — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:02:29 +0000

...utterly depressing. I couldn't help but think our civilisation is totally fucked. I had a similar feeling after watching Manufactured Landscapes. It opens with a panning shot through a Chinese factory where with aisles and aisles of production lines which seems to go on forever. It left me wondering if I'd ever be able to look at an iron the same way.