Yesterday I watched Bernadette Banner visit a Loom Museum and try them out for herself. A few takeaways:

1. Looms were a serious physical workout, and could honestly be hard on one's body

2. The mechanical looms they operated were pre-electric, pre-industrial, but still incredibly complex and amazingly fast compared to previous iterations

3. The operators of looms, living in abject poverty, took these jobs so that they could eat and support their families, and incidentally became the top experts on weaving cloth during their lifetimes, which all basically collapsed when looms were automated and mechanized.

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent [-]

But also, it is important to remember that automating and mechanizing is what brought society as a whole out of abject poverty.

It would be very short-sighted to look only at the jobs lost by the few weavers, and not the wealth gained by everyone else.

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You mean the wealth gained by the ruling nobility of the time. As they said, the loom operators were worked to the bone for almost no pay.

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No, I mean the wealth you and I have right now.

All of it - the car, the iPhone, the healthcare, the indoor plumbing, the air conditioner, the closet full of clothes - is only possible because of automation.

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tadfisher 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are multiple billions of people alive, right now, who have none of those things.

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Legend2440 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, people who live in areas that are poorly industrialized (Africa, India, etc) and whose lives have not yet been blessed with automation.

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inigyou 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They are not "poorly industrialised", they are the other half of industrialisation. Think of the Rick and Morty episode where they split themselves into good halves and bad halves.

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Legend2440 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The industrialization of rich nations did not make Africa poor.

Once upon a time, everyone was poor. Then, some countries industrialized and others didn't. The ones that didn't are still poor today.

Some countries like China have recently pulled themselves out of poverty through industrialization. Someday Africa will do the same.

	▲	inigyou 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh. What are the cobalt mines for then? Why were countries called banana republics?

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wasn't aware that looms made iPhones.

	▲	card_zero 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		India does produce a lot of cloth, it's true. "the only industry in the country that has generated large-scale employment for both skilled and unskilled labour", says Wikipedia. So they're quite well industrialized for textiles specifically. I'm not sure where this leaves the argument, I'll assume it means you're both wrong.