No, they never said anything about lying. That would be selling something the customer didn’t paying for.
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.
Hmm. You’re right. This article does not have that claim, I was misremembering it from a similar article written by Cory Doctorow [0]. Also written today, also written on the same book.
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.
