My counterpoint is that it’s not possible to buy appliances which last for decades anymore, because the entire industry has changed. Consumers eventually don’t have a choice
They have much less choice because all of those businesses that cared about quality have gone out of business!
100 years ago clothes were expensive items. Which is why they were class signals - less because of fashion and more because if you were poor you needed to buy long lasting fabrics. Clothes for the poor were expensive as well as the rich.
You can buy those same quality items today but nobody will because we expect clothes to be cheap and not have to repair them.
Take flights... For all the complaints about lack of legroom etc the price of a flight 50 years ago was the same as first/business class today. And yet how few people will pay for it. They'll grumble about small seats and bad snacks but hardly anybody will fork out for the upgrade. Not because they can't actually afford it but because they believe it should be cheaper.
I think some people can afford those quality goods, the same percentage roughly as could afford it before things got cheaper. The people complaining are people who couldn’t afford those quality goods earlier and now are buying the cheaper versions they can afford. But that has shaped broader consumer preferences for cheaper goods across the board
“Works on my machine” actually isn’t a good enough response in this case, or to the comment about the video of the man being shot. LLMs are infamously easy to jailbreak and children are very good at getting around guardrails. You should at the very least be doing intense adversarial prompt testing but honestly this idea is just inherently poorly thought out. I guarantee you it’s going to expose children to harmful content
The middle path is limiting (not ending) migration while actually trying to help these counties (in particular victims of one’s past colonial ambitions) through aid, investment, and free/subsidised education for their youth.
I say this as a someone who immigrated from a dangerous country to the first world.
The only way the current plan even approaches sustainability is if the brain drain on source nations is sufficient to keep them stuck and suffering. That should make it very clear that the humanitarian impact is a side effect and not the goal.
Realistically, a white collar job market collapse will not directly lead to starvation. The world is not 1930s America ethically. Governments will intervene, not necessarily to the point of fairness, but they will restructure the economy enough to provide a baseline. The question will be how to solve the biblical level of luxury wealth inequality without civil unrest causing us all to starve.
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