Maybe donate it to poor countries?
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
When I used to work for the biggest ecommerce in europe, we had various stages for clothes. The last stage was selling the clothes by kilo to companies.
https://www.udet.org/post/the-hidden-cost-of-generosity-how-...
Isn't that another version of the Broken Window Fallacy? Destroying things to create jobs re-creating them is a net loss.
1. The elites grab the crates and hoard them, leveraging their existing power to make sure they enrich themselves and extend their power. They sell the items, but at a lower price than the Earthly-produced items, which is easy since they have 100% margin.
2. Whether or not #1 happens, it becomes impractical to make any of these goods for a living, so people stop. Eventually, the factories are dismantled or simply crumble.
Now Earth is dependent on the aliens to keep sending the crates. If the aliens ever get wiped out, or just elect a populist who doesn't like to give aid to inferior planets, then we won't have any cars, or clothes, or computers.
(And yeah, I get it - no one "really" wants to work on a "soul-crushing" assembly/production-line... People want to make art (or games) or write novels... (both areas of creative work which are ALSO being targeted by AI)... but people definitely want to "eat" and have shelter and our whole system is built on having to pay for those priviledges...)
Around 1800, 95% of people worked on the farm. Today it is 2%. People do different things now.
I'm talking about how our usage of the "Crate Goods" makes us incredibly vulnerable to a disruption in Crate delivery.
Maybe it's better to let them decide what they want to buy.
local development simply does not happen if outside products are allowed to dominate.
if we were talking about a part, say less than half of the market, that would be fine, but the import of cheap clothing is so massive that there is no more room for a local market.
Protectionism has value when applied to strategic industries, like chip making, that you cannot afford to have cut off.
Making local garments is not a strategic industry.
P.S. Every businessman believes in the free market for everyone except his own business, which the government should protect from competition. The same for unions.
providing an income for everyone is important. keeping everyone satisfied is too. not to mention not loosing your cultural identity. and if the clothing industry is able to provide jobs by keeping cheap low quality products out of the country, why would that be bad? clothing is not the biggest expense people have, so making clothing a bit more expensive is not going to hurt that much.
If you want to compare this to broken windows, the controversy is: the developed countries produce so much glass that we don't know what to do with it. When we have extra and irregular pieces of glass, we can either melt the extra panes down, or we can just ship boatloads of "free glass" to Africa every week (likely result: Their glass factories will eventually shut down). Doing the former is simply not the same as breaking windows to make work for glaziers as in the analogy you're referencing.
They'll find another way to destroy them.
2018 article reports that Burberry destroyed £28 millions worth of clothes to keep their brand "exclusive": https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44885983
The most desperate povert I've ever seen was in India. You know what people were using to make tents to live in? Clothes.
Poor people have been making clothes for thousands of years without any help from heavy industry, and it's incredibly cheap to produce long-lasting cotton clothing.
Clothing isn't really a perpetual need the way you frame it. A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
However, countries don’t wear clothes. People do. People sometimes have shortages of clothing in many places.
For example, here in the United States people sometimes experience poverty and may sometimes experience a lack of suitable clothing. This happens at the same time that there are also people in the US throwing away clothing that they do not use. This is because those people are different people in different immediate locations.
The reasons that people lack clothing is not because there is not enough clothing in existence. It is because the clothing is not distributed universally to every person who needs it.
If I have seen this with my own two eyes in the US, then I am sure it happens in other places.
> A single garment can last decades if it's synthetic or allowed to fully dry between uses.
So? A person with the ass ripped out of their jeans or a hole in their shoe doesn’t give a fuck whether other clothes last 10 years.