In which the pond wonders when the robots will replace the Caterists ...

The pond likes to think of time spent with the Caterists as an old reliable pleasure, as useful and as valuable as a Mardi Gras doubloon token, whatever the noble tradition behind it ...

This week the Caterists are calling on the innovative robots to do down the workers ...

No doubt the Caterists have all sorts of fancy futurist images in mind ...

But that's enough pandering to the gentleman reader.

The pond reckons that, as with all Caterist schemes, the bottom line will be the transfer of wealth from poor to rich, given that the poor can always get a job working as personal servants in gated communities, a kind of handmaiden's tale for both sexes ...

The pond imagines that the Caterists will tell a sombre tale of rogue unionists, completely unlike the nuanced way the rich use their scalpels to extract money from the poor:

And there right from the get go is a reliable pleasure - the Caterists invoking 18C like some hand-wringing cardigan wearer too weak-kneed to cope with the rough and tumble of the world.

The pond presumes that the Caterist is talking not of "fucking disgrace" - a term easily applied to the taxpayer-rorting ways of the Menzies Research Centre - but of personal threats against people going about their work.

Well if there's criminal intent involved, there are better ways than 18C to proceed, as Sydney Criminal Lawyers handily explained here ... but what's never surprising is the way the Caterists only ever concentrate on one side of the story.

The construction industry is a deeply corrupt and deeply corrupting industry, with its tentacles in both of the major parties, especially in Sydney and Melbourne. It's hard not to look at the behaviour of certain developers and builders and not resent the way they make out like bandits, with politicians as their willing pawns.

For every union official threatening to stop a concrete pour, there's some developer willing to drop a pot of money into the trough to score special treatment, and every so often a scandal erupts to show off the size of the trough.

Google up the Terror exploring the donation scandals surrounding Ray Williams; read the Fairfaxians here; keep it up and you might even be given a bond ...

Even the apparently legitimate activities involved in the building of a WestConnex is a tremendous boondoggle. 

This city-destroying build won't actually fix Sydney's transport issues, but when a project starts at $15.4 million, and quickly turns to a projected cost of c. $16.8 billion and then talk turns $29 billion, and maybe reaches $45 billion with ancillary building, you can bet there's a lot of competing snouts anxious to get into the trough, and not just for the handsome tolls facilitated by the government trying to cut off of rat runs to keep the rats paying (and don't get the pond started on the burgeoning developer opportunities provided by government in relation to the Sydney Metro line. Call it urban renewal and everything's sweet).

But there you go, the Caterists as usual have got the pond haring off into another direction, when we should be paying attention to the Caterists ...

Uh huh ...

Strange, what happened to the wool industry, as well as to the shearers? Did, as the Caterist so quaintly suggests, Chinamen and roustabouts and blackfellows become shearers? And how are the squatters going these days if they rely only on wool?

And who thinks bricks are as important as they once were in building structures, unless it's a wall across the Queensland border to keep the toads at bay in the north?

Even more alarming, what happens if the powers that be decide that the drivel written by the Caterists might just as easily be managed by a robot?

After all, the pond knows for a fact that some robots are deeper thinkers than your average Caterist ...

The pond suspects these comical illustrations of robot journalists - drawn for stories about robot journalists - were in fact drawn by robots - how else to explain the cliches and the pipe-smoking?

   

Does the Caterist have any insights into these terrifying prospects for the reptiles? 

Nope, in the Caterist dream world, he can just keep on trotting off to the Australian taxpayer for another grant ... 

Surely, the Caterist thinks,  no robot has the skills required for this sort of snout in trough boondoggle ... more than a match for any unionists doing themselves out of a job ...

But each time the pond listens to the Caterists drone on in their interminably fatuous sleep-inducing voice (surely designed to see The Drum panel replaced by robots), the pond is haunted by the thought of just how easily the Caterists could be replaced.

And then the real nightmare begins. If a Caterist is easily replicable, with the mindset boring, mechanical, predictable, monotonous and remarkably shallow, then these replicas will be easily replicated, and suddenly we'll be off with Kurt Vonnegut deep in Player Piano or perhaps some terrifying future where robotic Caterists are all around ... and then where will we all be, except maybe in a bad Alex Proyas' movie ...

And then the robotic Caterists turn really mean ...