17 ms·

It tells a lot about our society that the only way to apply capital is to build a slop machine that will make us redundant.

• thrance 8mo ago
  Nothing new here, that's basically what the luddites complained about: the machines that replaced them output worse quality garments and sent them all to the streets. It only benefitted the owners. Capital will always seek to rid itself of its dependence on labor, until it eventually succeeds...
  • delichon 8mo ago
    > It only benefitted the owners. And the buyers. As a ballpark estimate, it would take around 50 hours of human labor to produce a shirt by hand, fabric plus sewing, versus about an hour of human labor by industrial machines. That lowers the cost greatly, which most consumers demonstrably value over custom tailoring.
    • thrance 8mo ago
      At the time, the quality of machine-made clothes was noticeably worse than human-made. It's debatable wether the "consumers" (the term certainly wasn't used at the time) won in the end. Terry Pratchett's "Boots theory" feels relevant here: > Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
      • delichon 8mo ago
        > It's debatable whether the "consumers" won in the end. If "in the end" is now, it's pretty clear that automation has made clothing both better and cheaper. And paying $10 now for shoes of less than 1/5th value of $50 shoes much later, or not at all, can be entirely rational. Most of us make that kind of compromise frequently.
        • thrance 8mo ago
          Is it really better if it's made by slaves in the Global South, from a mix of plastics and crops grown in an unsustainable way, then shipped across the globe, and made to last about seven washing cycles before being disposed? Debatable, as I said.
          • SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
            I just don't think that this is an accurate description of modern clothing. Cotton is not typically grown in unsustainable ways, and cheap 100% cotton clothing that will last for years is widely available at a variety of retailers. But a lot of people don't want that. They want comfortable stretchy clothing, accepting or not realizing the inherent tradeoff with durability. Or they want thinner, lighter styles at the very edge of what a 50/50 polyester blend can hold together.
        • JohnFen 8mo ago
          > automation has made clothing both better and cheaper. Cheaper, yes. Better, most definitely not. We have traded quality for price.
      • stoneforger 8mo ago
        It's a cult, these people really just want to believe everything is better because of unhinged capitalism, not despite it.
        • delichon 8mo ago
          I just bought a new shirt on eBay for $22, including shipping. If that shirt had taken 50x as much labor to produce, what would it have cost? Is it unhinged capitalism to prefer the cheap shirt?
• smartguyalert 8mo ago
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