Re point 1, I'm afraid I also think of infamous union regulations which have kept workers at the same useless jobs for years, wasting the company's money and the workers' time (and their souls) for the sake of keeping them employed. What we want is not to keep make-up artists and technicians busy at jobs that are no longer necessary, but to find new ways of keeping these people, as individuals, with a decent income and occupied doing useful (and, one hopes, interesting) work.

Re point 2, there's also a God of the Anti-Gaps, the one who says that some desirable innovation is 20 years off, and a decade later it's still 20 years off. And so on.