Quote:
Originally Posted by AC/HL
Quote:
Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler
Is it a case that transport of goods is just too cheap?
|
Yes, that too.
|
I'd disagree: having grown up with parents who'd been imbued with the WWII "make-do-and-mend" live-with-poverty approach, I've been only too happy to live my life rejecting this.
Cheap global transport, and the benefits of low-cost manufacturing it gives us access to, mean that for the last few decades:
Now, Ordinary People can Easily Afford Nice Things.
And surely that's something to be celebrated!! Long gone are the days when buying a colour-telly cost several months wages for a 'white-collar' clerk [and probably needed several visits from the repairman every year].
Low-cost manufacturing freed us from enduring such nonsense. As to resource-utilisation, it's the case these days that over 50% of steel/aluminium requirements are fulfilled by recycling - so lessening the need for people to sweat their lives away working in old-fashioned horribly-polluting blast-furnaces/steel-mills/aluminium-smelters.
Also, the ubiquity of cheap electronics will provide loads of goodies for future generations of 'vintage' enthusiasts: I foresee in 50 years time a couple of twentysomethings discovering Grandad's iPod-1 in a box in the attic and being utterly perplexed at how they needed something so bulky to hold a mere 500 tracks of music - and how primitive it was that back then you listened to music via earphones rather than through a cranio-audial induction implant.