Comment on amazon can afford to treat its workers with dignity
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 6 days agoAnd nothing materially changed between then and now.
I’d hate to break it to you, but that just isn’t true. Manufacturing capabilities have left the continent. People no longer have the relevant expertise to pass on through apprenticeships. We’d basically be starting from scratch, and with corporate hegemony built on cheap overseas labor to compete with.
That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be worth doing, but let’s not fool ourselves about the uphill battle that it would be, or the very real possibility that people would just keep using the cheap convenient corporations instead of supporting local fabs
its_kim_love@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
You’re absolutely right. The word I chose was poor. What I meant was the underlying rules of the material world hasn’t changed. Atoms still act the same way, and all that. It was an exceptionally weird way to make an even weirder point, but yeah.
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Alright well when you figure out the precise alloy of steel to optimize a spring for required specs, and the exact forging, quenching, and tempering processes and temperatures to use, as well as the specs for the equipment to extrude the wire and twist it into the right shape with enough precision to be commercially replicable, then we can all use your springs in all the things that we build. Now we just need someone else to build literally every other part.
The thing about a lot of modern technology, is that it’s made with other technology, which in turn requires still more technology. So when manufacturing capabilities disappear from a continent, it’s not so simple to just rebuild them. You need to rebuild the stuff that’s required to build them first.
And you also need technical knowledge, niche skill sets and tooling, and sources of often highly specific materials.
This isn’t meant to sound discouraging, but it’s best to understand the scale of the task from the outset.
its_kim_love@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
Okay
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
Sorry, rereading what I wrote, it seems unnecessarily harsh.
You’re right though, there are plenty of things that cottage industries absolutely can and should reclaim. I guess I was just thinking about highly technical fabs, like computer chips and medical equipment.
Overall though, I’m very much in support of the idea of cottage industries in general.
SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Great, you’ve outlined the work that’s needed. To quote a fave movie of mine: “‘It’s not possible’. ‘No, it’s necessary’.”
wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 5 days ago
Yeah, you’re right. We should start with the easy wins, like making soaps, baked goods, hand tools, etc.
We can work our way up to more complex fabs and maybe some day we can have a worker’s collective to manufacture semiconductors, but we shouldn’t let the immensity of the task get in the way of starting on the simpler aspects.
krisevol@lemmus.org 5 days ago
The rules absolutely have changed. Distribution networks and data transfer are completely different today than back then.