Post #2693096

“Like, the new textile mills may have been massively disruptive to people who had previously been skilled labor, but at least the efficiency gains meant that you could make a lot more cloth a lot faster. The affected workers bore the cost, but anyone could reap (some of) the benefits.” Though with the textile mill thing, the quality of the cloth is much worse; I have a few historical reenactment friends who have been unable to find linen of the quality that even poor, working class people would have used (and Bernadette Banner has a recent YouTube video on the topic that my friends found validating and cathartic to see). I’m not disagreeing with your point or anything — this is a bit of a tangent. I guess the point that I’m making is that textile mills did make everything worse, in terms of the availability of quality cloth, but this problem wasn’t noticed for a long time because the mills also made cloth cheaper for the average person. Whereas AI doesn’t even give us a benefit like this (which is why my comment is mostly irrelevant to your point and is just some bonus info because I’m a nerd)