Therefore, if a machine surpasses this threshold, they will win marketshare.
how are the capital owners deciding what a consumer would choose to spend their money on?
Selling lower quality goods like the article mentions is not a problem if the customers are fine with it given the lower price of the goods. The customer is responsible for making their own decisions about whether to prioritize cost or quality. As the person you were replying to says, by their actions (purchasing the cheaper, automated cloth), you can tell that the customers to appear to vastly prefer the cheaper, poor quality cloth. Who are we to tell them their preferences are wrong?
Edit: I see your original comment. Where the heck did you get that factory owners were doing illegal worker displacement or doing false advertisement? I don’t see that claim in the article.
He has a long sections: > The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods. > > Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles.
Now. The New Yorker article simply states the factories sold worse goods cheaper. Other articles I’ve found published today on it are as vague, or say nothing at all about this specific thing.
The ebook is only sold with Adobe’s DRM, so I won’t be buying that. So I’ll have find another way to see what’s true.
[0]: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#more-6752
People don't 'prefer cheap low quality' they can't afford anything else.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... 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 a 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.