What? How in the world does one's scrounging together the parts for a cell phone accomplish the production of a cell phone more quickly and cheaper than mass production?
lolwut? Mass production does not automatically mean efficient
But I never made that claim, so what the heck are you on about? I never said that for any x, if x is brought about through mass production, then x is produced more efficiently than any other alternative method. I questioned the notion that
in the particular case under consideration the method of
scrounging for parts of a cell phone is equally or more efficient than mass production. I never even claimed that it was inevitable that this particular claim would always be questionable. Clearly, though, there are gains in efficiency to be made via mass production in many cases.
Redundant jobs involving mass production inevitably become obsolete.
I wouldn't necessarily disagree here, but there is a difference between this claim and the claim that the mass production of a given item becomes obsolete.
Do you miss bellhops at all?
Not at all. I don't even see what your point is though.
Will you most newspapers as they go digital?
Not at all. But so what? I never claimed that it would, e.g., be more efficient to mass produce newspapers than to simply get one's news via a digital medium. In this case we're comparing the efficiency of the production and distribution of two different items, i.e., a digitally instantiated piece of news versus a newspaper. What we're not doing here is comparing the efficiency of mass production and distribution versus some other method
for a given item, so your example is irrelevant.