[paxys]

The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury. At the time of the industrial revolution it was common for a family to spend 15-25% of their annual income just on clothing. A single shirt from that era would cost the equivalent of £2,000 today when considering material and labor. New clothes were something you may be able to afford once a year, if at all. Like the article says, weavers were the equivalent of PhD scientists who could charge whatever they wanted for their skills (and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time). Great if you're the weaver, not so for everyone else.

So the industrial revolution wasn't a conspiracy to put down the lower classes. The lower classes were in fact the biggest benefactors of the industrial revolution.

If software can go the same way, I'd say good riddance. The profession has always kept free from gatekeepers, and that's a good thing.

[stego-tech]

> The part that is always skipped when making the clothing analogy is that for most of human history good clothes were a luxury.

Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part. Go RTFA.

> and they would cater pretty much exclusively to kings and the 0.1% of the time

Oh yeah, I totally remember reading about how people in pre-modern civilizations were almost always semi-clad or fully nude due to the expense of clothing.

Oh, wait, no I don't, because people still bought clothing and wore it regularly. They just also had economies around mending clothing, updating it, tailoring it, altering it, reusing and recycling it. Rather than building an economic system of destruction for the sake of a handful of profiteers, it was an economy of artisans who provided a staple resource at reasonable rates and quality to support themselves. Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear, people took care of it - and themselves - for longer periods of time. Techniques were used to keep articles sturdy for longer, rather than disposable machine stitches that fall apart in a washing machine.

Experts and artisans are not "gatekeepers", they are skilled craftspeople worthy of respect and deserving of compensation for their skills. To demand anyone be able to do anything of any complexity is to demand a complete elimination of anything that differentiates humans from one another, to create a homogenous mass of genetics with no incentive to grow and evolve.

Nobody is "gatekeeping" software developers, or Doctors, or plumbers, or weavers, or artists. Those all take skill, and people with a suitable level of skill can easily pass good credentials checks and tests.

[0x1ceb00da]

> Literally what OP discusses in their text, right in the first part

The article says clothing was passed down generations.

> Because clothing was often tailor-made rather than ready-to-wear

What if the father's clothes don't fit the son? Now you have to choose between feeding your cows and buying a shirt.

[AngryData]

Cloth of any decent quality is not hard to alter to fit, often clothes were made with extra material with the expectation of being altered likely multiple times to fit different people.

Also people did't really buy cow feed at the time, they were grazed on nearby fieldgrass in the summer and fed harvested hay grasses from their own fields in the winter. And it doesn't take all that much work to use a scythe to cut literal tons of grasses. With just a minimum of practice you can cut 2-3 acres of grass a day without straining yourself, provided you are fit, which any pre-modern farmer would be.

[int_19h]

The first part of the article has a lot of ahistorical nonsense in it.