craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

Our texts for today:

http://thisismadebyhand.com/shoppe/
http://thisismadebyhand.com/film/the_knife_maker
http://cutbrooklyn.com/artwork/1711581_Available.html
http://www.bestmadeco.com/collections/axes

We all like to have nice things. Some people like to make very nice things in archaic ways. I'm not going to try to claim there is a "handmade movement", but there's definitely a cultural current of people wanting to buy stuff that is verifiably good and not just the best of the available options at Target for instance. It's hard to say that an enthusiastic craftsperson making kitchen knives by hand is somehow being evil by making cool stuff in a way that is economically viable for them, or that the people who buy the results can't do what they want with their money. But when he's selling one knife for six times as much as a block of kitchen knives costs at Target then you really have to question what exactly is going on here.

He's gotta be pricing his knives based on the value of his labor creating them, plus materials and whatnot. I certainly think $40 an hour is a fair rate to pay yourself for knife-making.

On the other hand, the resulting product, a $600 knife, seems pretty much like a Veblen good. Its use value has to be very close to even the $200 equivalent from Global, if we assume for the sake of argument that both are better knives than the $25 equivalent from Victorinox or the $10 equivalent from Ikea. Anyone who buys a knife from this guy either is spending a big part of their hobby budget on a knife they think is really excellent (maybe a few people) or…they've got cash and want something fancy and Handmade In Brooklyn By A Man With A Beard for its fetish value.

Something about this whole process is probably virtuous, and something about it is just conspicuous consumerism. And it all sort of feeds into the eternal quest of enthusiasts on the internet trying to figure out what thing is best. Running polls, seeking out trustworthy tastemakers, etc.

I certainly think $40 an hour is a fair rate to pay yourself for knife-making

really

craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality [Started by whoop, up the butt it goes (silby) in November 2011, last updated 1 minute ago]
Innocuous things that make you irrationally angry (a list thread) [Started by the great aussie ballkicking vids (jjjusten) in September 2010, last updated 2 minutes ago] 10 new answers

xp considering programming contractors bill their time at $75-$100 an hour or more $40 seems fairly reserved. Plus the guy obviously has rent, fixed costs, etc.

so yeah maybe the guy could be pricing his labor at $18-$20 and selling the knives for cheaper but I don't think "how much do people deserve to get paid for their labor for doing one thing vs some other thing" is a focus here?

The "$40 an hour" thing by the way was inferred from $600 knives / 15 hours of work = $40 an hour, assuming materials costs are negligible.

Materials, tools, rent also factor into the cost of that knife, and whatever it cost him in time and materials to learn the skill in the first place, he's probably really only paying himself $20/hr.

Tied into this is also a sense of satisfaction at supporting craftsmen - I'm wearing a pair of jeans right now that cost more than $200. I can justify it (in my mind) because they're the only jeans I wear, the materials and construction are of higher quality than basic Levi's, and they're made by one guy in a loft in the bay area (Roy's Jeans). Objectively, it's an absurd amount to spend on jeans, but I appreciate the craftsmanship and that I'm supporting someone making them on his own rather than feeding $50 to a corporation that uses sweatshop (or near-sweatshop) labor.

The ability of machines to mass-produce items, which in turn cost less because of economies of scale, is not something I have a problem with. It is the steady flow of profits away from under-compensated labor toward over-compensated capital that seems to me like the essential problem to address. That and overconsumption in general.

let me use your shit and you can use mine

one one hand, yeah i think 'fetish' is a very good word to use in terms of what's happening from the consumer side here, it's inarguably luxury for the sake of luxury

Otoh, paying living wage to local craftspeople for good product isn't a bad thing, i guess. Haven't ever heard of any millionaire 'dude who makes knives in a workshop' types.

there's a real arrogance to the new breed of millenial craftsman, i.e. the kids who went to college in the '90s and '00s and then realized they liked doing manual work that was, by their standards, "below" them. To justify their own egos and intellectual pretentions they take to correspondingly hiking the prices/ramping up the cultural "worth" /finessing the language in their copy to include shit like "artisan-made" and "uniquely sourced and crafted" so that they feel their middle-class prejudices being satiated while they're doing work that would otherwise be, you know, plain old labor.

(and I don't buy for a second that the high cost of labor is due to some benevolent workers' solidarity with their underpaid brethren)

darraghmac on the mark ^

There's certainly a handmade movement. Wallpaper is fixated with it. It reflects a cultural shift in the way wealth is spent. It's considered a little vulgar or, at best, impractical to want the most stuff or the biggest stuff, people with money to throw around want something unique - something with its own instant 'heritage'.

I think there's also an element of the 'shop class as soulcraft' idea, in a strange way. People like the idea of working with their hands, creating something beautiful from raw materials - a counterpoint to people shifting numbers between Frankfurt and Zurich, making millions of intangible dollars. Even if it's the latter group with the cash to pay for it, but not the time or skill to do it themselves, an element of the romance remains.

I can't really see a moral problem with people spending £30,000 on a couture Chanel dress, tbh, given the number of people involved in making one and the number of dying crafts the company keeps alive. It's a needless luxury but it's not the worst needless luxury out there.

there's a real arrogance to the new breed of millenial craftsman, i.e. the kids who went to college in the '90s and '00s and then realized they liked doing manual work that was, by their standards, "below" them. To justify their own egos and intellectual pretentions they take to correspondingly hiking the prices/ramping up the cultural "worth" /finessing the language in their copy to include shit like "artisan-made" and "uniquely sourced and crafted" so that they feel their middle-class prejudices being satiated while they're doing work that would otherwise be, you know, plain old labor.

(and I don't buy for a second that the high cost of labor is due to some benevolent workers' solidarity with their underpaid brethren)

― turkey in the straw (x2) (remy bean), Thursday, November 3, 2011 12:43 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark

this kind of bald-faced self-serving projection is 100x more arrogant and prudish than any of the "new breed" of "millennial craftsmen" i've met or known.

http://www.thatfreebiesite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Free-Dominos-Pizza-300x257.jpg

making something yourself and selling it, as your livelihood, and trying to be good/get better at it, is such a weird proposition in today's market that some kind of authenticity branding is kind of unavoidable, no?

not talking about domino's obviously

artisan means square in that context

Matt, I don't give half a shit whether you agree with me or not, but why don't you do it without the ad hominems?

also: chunky xp

tbf your entire post is basically an ad hominem

I would categorize remy's post more as an appeal to emotion and prejudice.

first of all, you're kinda being dicks.

second of all, i'm dyspeptic after paying $14 for a shitty plate of vertically-arranged eggs crafted by an "artisanal cafe" started by trust fund brats that took out the breakfast place where i used to buy excellent burritos for $5.50 and included a side of dirty rice so this is probably feeding into it

third, eh, fuck it

occupy burritos

remy, not sure where the ad hominem is, unless it's taking a guess at why someone would write that kind of boilerplate horseshit.

xp yeah, sorry, that sucks?

occupy burritos

― Mr. Que, Thursday, 3 November 2011 20:56 (40 seconds ago) Bookmark

^^

probably the most vile part of this trend is the tacit assumption that the guys making those global knives (or any high-quality product made by a skilled craftsman) are not putting equal or greater amounts of skill, effort, and passion into the things they're making.

remy what's the new place called?

The ability of machines to mass-produce items, which in turn cost less because of economies of scale, is not something I have a problem with. It is the steady flow of profits away from under-compensated labor toward over-compensated capital that seems to me like the essential problem to address. That and overconsumption in general.

― Aimless, Thursday, 3 November 2011 19:29 (1 hour ago)

otm!

i'm writing off the cuff here, but in my experience a lot of the current iteration of 'craftsmanship culture' i.e. 'dudes who have a hobby making shit' gets elevated all out of proportion into 'artistry' that shortchanges long-time practitioners and career creators of that same ("mass-produced") items. maybe i'm thinking narrowly (though not – sorry – appealing to prejudice or bald-faced self-serving) but in the case of my uncle the snobby pro-'artisanal' attitude cost a good and devoted laborer his job.

In other words, I guess I agree with CAD.

there's a real arrogance to the new breed of millenial craftsman, i.e. the kids who went to college in the '90s and '00s and then realized they liked doing manual work that was, by their standards, "below" them. To justify their own egos and intellectual pretentions they take to correspondingly hiking the prices/ramping up the cultural "worth" /finessing the language in their copy to include shit like "artisan-made" and "uniquely sourced and crafted" so that they feel their middle-class prejudices being satiated while they're doing work that would otherwise be, you know, plain old labor.

(and I don't buy for a second that the high cost of labor is due to some benevolent workers' solidarity with their underpaid brethren)

it goes beyond 'justifying their own egos and intellectual pretentions' - if you can sell shit for more money by marketing it differently, *that is a good idea*. this happens in basically every market for everything!

otm

how about when the product is bank accounts, iatee?

this is really easy to run into if you buy liquor these days--microdistilleries are popping up all over the place and using words like "local" "artisinal" and "craft" and they pretty much ignore some basic facts of the beverage alcohol industry (liquor branch in particular), such as 1) distilling is really hard; 2) once you can do it it's really easy to do large-scale; 3) market competition and consumer choice have resulted in an environment where 95% of midshelf and higher products are quite high-quality.

the response of microdistillers is to give something "unique" (i.e. a gin that can't be used in martinis) or to essentially just put something out there and provide no reason for drinking it beyond who/how/where it was produced (i.e. the glut of awful, pointless "white whiskies" that you can get now).

i'm writing off the cuff here, but in my experience a lot of the current iteration of 'craftsmanship culture' i.e. 'dudes who have a hobby making shit' gets elevated all out of proportion into 'artistry' that shortchanges long-time practitioners and career creators of that same ("mass-produced") items. maybe i'm thinking narrowly (though not – sorry – appealing to prejudice or bald-faced self-serving) but in the case of my uncle the snobby pro-'artisanal' attitude cost a good and devoted laborer his job.

― turkey in the straw (x2) (remy bean), Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:04 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, i can see how the appeal to "artistry" is arrogant, especially when there are so many other people who make and sell the same kind of thing in a factory and do a good job and don't loudly claim to be "artists" and probably aren't white. agreed that mass-produced <> "lovingly crafted" etc. xp

it goes beyond 'justifying their own egos and intellectual pretentions' - if you can sell shit for more money by marketing it differently, *that is a good idea*. this happens in basically every market for everything!

― iatee, Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:06 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, i mean, that's where things get complicated imo

the Global website has just this one photo of dudes grinding knives

http://www.global-knife.com/global/img/photo_04.jpg

if he had a beard maybe he would be ok to work out of brooklyn instead of japan

i guess i think there should be a distinction made b/w stuff that "appeals to artistry" in a way that is kinda slimy and stuff that is actually "artisan" by definition. and if ppl wanna pay $600 or for an actual artisan knife i guess that's their prerogative?

competition in the market for personal bank accounts is a great idea and the fact that large banks don't seem to want to offer a competitive price (free) anymore is why people are switching to alternatives. xp

overall if someone is consuming less cause they're spending more money on fewer things, I'm totally cool w/ artisan stuff. if it's just creating more needless consumption opportunities otoh, there's a good argument against it.

regardless of 'higher quality' (true sometimes, bullshit sometimes) this trend has to be looked as primarily as marketing. you know what else has marketing behind it? all the cheap crap in the world.

anyway I find this interesting but am getting on a train. surely will be 500 posts while I'm gone.

xp what is artisan by definition?

Many of the best chefs in the world use knives costing 1/2 - 1/3 as much as those in the OP, made by folks whose family/ancestors have been in the "artisinal" "knife"-making business for centuries.

Global is not very "artisinal" fwiw, it's a fairly large manufacturer.

thanks for this thread, this is a subject i've been mulling over a lot lately. *mulls*

also, making one particular thing is like 95% tedious and brutal anyway, it's not like someone making knives in their warehouse is going to know something ^those guys don't. factories improve quality control for products like that big-time. xposts

(it's only on ilx that i remember what a socialist i am, at heart)

true story:

my Uncle J spends 30 years making a niche product so successfully that it becomes ubiquitous in his corner of the [classical music] industry. Uncle J charges a very reasonable fee to make a custom, one-of-a-kind [widget], and takes on an apprentice who studies with him for six months. apprentice comes to my Uncle, and says he wants to become a partner –– AFTER SIX MONTHS –– because he's learned everything Uncle J. has to show him about making very complicated [widgets]. Uncle J. says no, not yet, and apprentice informs J. he'll be quitting if he can't make more $$$; what he feels is fair compensation. Uncle J. asks what fair compensation is, and the kid lists a price that is easily three times what Uncle J., himself, makes. Uncle J. is already paying the new kid a pretty top-shelf salary (middle five figures) roughly equal to 4/5 of J.'s own salary, in an industry that is flagging in this recession. Uncle J's apprentice quits and a few weeks later opens up a business at the other end of town where he charges many many times more than Uncle J. for the [vastly inferior, vastly less-experienced version of the highly technical widget –– now made with recycled! metal!]. Uncle J. loses all of his clients, who (are carefully seduced by the former apprentice to) feel that his product is inferior and less "ethical", because Uncle J.'s his experience and craftsmanship and desire to be reasonable are trumped by the geewhiz factor of a kid who slightly alters a half-stolen design and stamps ARTISANAL and HANDCRAFTED over a product that has always - obviously - been artisanal and handcrafted. Reducing my (inchoate) argument to a nut, I find it reedikerus that 'artisianal' and 'craftsmanship' are currently applicable to anything that, say, a 23-year-old has done for less than a few years.

I don't think I thought that Global was particularly artisanal, just their knives are more expensive than and probably better than random stamped piece of crap knives from Target. So from a purely use-value perspective ("I want an objectively good knife and will pay more for quality because this matters to me") they are competitors. xps

obv. i know this is not a generalizable anecdote, but it's illustrative of the attitude that bothers me

yeah that kid sounds like a massive tool

The customer is always right, even when the customer is a flagrant idiot.

ha i finally looked at the links in the original post and pretty much had the same reaction tbh xxp

that story has nothing to do with the word artisanal and everything to do with the apprentice being a dick

also why would the customers pay more for something? they are dicks too

In the future everything will be artisinally made by laid-off hipsters and sold out of a truck.

moral of the story: kid is better at marketing than your uncle.

also the way you tell it everybody in the story is an asshole, except your uncle

In the future China will outsource to 8-year-old children of American hipsters

ok but remy, the force of your argument here is basically not new at all, it's a jeremiad against dishonesty and greed and deliberate poor quality masquerading as something it isn't, not craftsmanship or even young people who want to be genuine artisans (for whatever reason, including silly reasons) (young people often take up careers for silly or pretentious reasons; some of them turn that round)

in what practical sense is the interloper's work poorer quality* -- when and how will the difference manifest in a way his gulled clients will notice?

*i realise you may not want to answer this question directly, to keep uncle J reasonably anonymised, but what i'm getting at is that a significant part of artisanal (true sense) added value is in quality that sustains itself over time (objects that keep their qualities for years; craftsmanship that you can return to year in year out and discover maintenance of quality)

multiple x-post bcz i fashion my posts in the tradition of my ancestors

do you have to set wooden type and letterpress your posts onto fine cotton paper, or do you whistle the letters into your modem directly?

i think there is a risk of needless over-generalization here, if we are to assume that 'handcrafted' and 'artisinal' and 'responsibly sourced materials' are completely hollow marketing terms. i mean, stop me if i become stupidly obvious here, but customers are not only buying a product but buying into a set of values expressed by the means of its manufacture, if not the quality of the product itself, but I don't necessarily think you can generalize that those values are empty or false or unworthy.

what if people en masse can no longer be relied upon to objectively judge quality and craftsmanship? i.e. the yelper effect

lol no longer?! when have they ever

etsy.com

Can't wait till I can post some recycled jokes itt via an artisinal computer running on sustainably sourced electricity

can we talk about the $116 scissors? http://www.bestmadeco.com/collections/frontpage/products/shears

My sister has insanely expensive scissors (she cuts hair)

i think it gets complicated when supposedly extrinsic use value turns into fluffier or harder-to-define symbolic value. i mean, there is "this is going to last longer and work better, and i can prove it with the numbers", but what exactly the numbers prove can get a little lost on the way somehow. and now you do get the sense that at the ass-end of this stuff, both makers and purchasers are trying to inscribe some moral dimension into what never really had a moral dimension in the first place and what are really just the same market principles by appealing to 100 years ago or whatever.

i think a big part of the problem comes down to locating good/bad in materials/products themselves, when it's the organization/structure responsible for the material/product that needs to be held accountable. it's like, the world's too big and complicated, but that looks handmade i think i'll buy it. fuck i feel better already!

My sister has insanely expensive scissors (she cuts hair)

― Do you know what the secret of comity is? (Michael White), Thursday, November 3, 2011 5:57 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well that makes sense! these are just, like, scissors for cutting paper or whatever you use scissor for

These days? Stabbing myself in the head, mostly

can we talk about the $116 scissors? http://www.bestmadeco.com/collections/frontpage/products/shears

― call all destroyer, Thursday, November 3, 2011 2:56 PM (3 minutes ago)

If you are "crafty", you can find these online with shipping from Japan for ~$60. Still $60 scissors, lol.

I will start a new service that will artisanally search the internet for you by hand and find you the best prices.

hand-typed searches

i went into michaels last week to buy scissors and was p stunned by how many pairs of exorbitantly priced scissors they were selling

created in my bedroom

my fav part is the description:

We have gone through at least a dozen mediocre pairs of scissors at Best Made: they lose their edge, are cumbersome to handle, or have flimsy plastic handles that wouldn't pass muster at nursery school.

i would humbly suggest the problem is not with the scissors!

one take on our annoying future

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/07/200135/the-yoga-instructor-economy/

http://www.artisanalpencilsharpening.com/

Mark,

My uncle makes a musical instrument traditionally manufactured in a fairly high number of pieces kluged together to the rough specifications of the musician. Kind of ... plug and play, mix and match. Uncle J. figured out a (very ingenious) way to manufacture the instrument bespoke, in (essentially) one large piece without the valves, fittings, and joints that are prone to failure in the ordinary process. Uncle J.'s pieces take a lot longer to make, are highly, highly customized to the playing style and needs of each musician, and require an extreme level of skill, experience and precision to manufacture successfully. The instruments are pricey once-in-a-lifetime purchases for professional players of the instrument, and each one comes with a 'forever' guarantee and unquestioning repair work from J. and his assistants. J. worked for 15 years making instruments the traditional way for [the equivalent of Suzuki] before going into business and getting a name for himself. The former apprentice's instruments appear to be crafted in the same style as my Uncle's instruments, but they're just a modified (for aesthetic effect) version of the traditional process; prone to wear, fatigue and failure. While my uncle's marketing acumen is undoubtedly less polished than his apprentice, I don't think the marketing is entirely at fault. There's a burden to be carried by the consumer as well as the producer, and it concerns the incoherent valuing of anything with artistic credibility over experience and workmanship.

For the record, I never said my argument was new. It's old-fashioned, kind of in the tradition of "slow food," and it does owe a debt to the old ways are the good ways camp. But I genuinely believe that when we're bragging about the moral superiority of – say – an artisan-made ottoman crafted from locally sourced Alpaca fibers ($500) vs. a Walmart generic footrest in synthetic green ($30), what we're doing is, in an implicit part, stating that we value the work-hours of acculturated Western white people with good educations who can Talk Our Talk more than we value the work-hours of an anonymous poor Malaysian fella stapling gunny-sacks to a pile of coils. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't pay for quality, or fairly compensate skilled workers –– just that there's a class-sorting mechanism often apparent in the (sometimes) slimy categorizing of between craftsman/artisianal/handmade product.

Despite his often biting comments in the book, Weingarten is quick to point out that he’s not so different from that which he mocks. “This isn’t some jock-bully out to take down the hipsters,” he explains. “This is coming from someone who lives in Brooklyn, plays in noise bands, goes to Film Forum and Smorgasburg, and buys artisanal ketchup from Sir Kensington.”

i need a locally-sourced, sustainable and renewable editor

this is the second time i've seen reference to whiney's artisanal ketchup buying; brb need to commit suicide

More like wbrb, eh?

"Are you a bad workman? With our hand-made artisanal tools, even you will be able to do your job adequately!" <-- am tempted to try this pitch out

xp yes I wasn't calling you out, just noting that hipsters didn't invent lying and cheating, and that words that confer value degrade pretty quickly in a commercial context -- as your uncle's former clients are presumably going to discover. "Artisanal" is already degraded: it means square pizzas! The judgment of quality is in the (sustained) use: there isn't actually a shortcut.

what we're doing is, in an implicit part, stating that we value the work-hours of acculturated Western white people with good educations who can Talk Our Talk more than we value the work-hours of an anonymous poor Malaysian fella stapling gunny-sacks to a pile of coils

sorry but this is wrong

the idea that Walmart does not Talk Our Talk is ludicrous.

i know so so so many people who brag about never having set foot in a walmart. how is that ludicrous?

i.e. people who draw distinctions between shopping at pier one and target

I'm not really sure what your uncle's story has to do with, say, the aforementioned knifemaker or artisans in general. It was a shitty thing to do, but one asshole doesn't represent anyone other than himself (and local consumers who r dumb)

The knifemaker in the OP is right in the ballpark on what custom knives (of all sorts - chef's knives or pocket or w/e) cost - he's not calling himself an artisan for no reason and underbidding traditionalists.
The guy who made my jeans isn't putting some old-timer who's been hand-making jeans for his entire life out of business.
The guy who made an absurdly nice cabinet/shrine for a Buddhist center we remodeled rightly calls himself an artisan, and his work is amazing.

Artisinal is just marketing borrowed from Latin languages where it means handmade.

i.e. people who draw distinctions between shopping at pier one and target

these are different how

they aren't -- that's my point!

lol at "the yoga instructor economy." i've been thinking about dropping away from my current "career track" (i.e. what i paid 100k for a grad degree in) to become a personal trainer. 1) i think i'd be good at it, 2) i'd actually enjoy it, 3) if i was good enough and enjoyed it enough, maybe i could make some money doing it. otoh it's crowded out there! and oh yeah, i'm a liberal arts major.

what do we think about "life coaching"?

it seems to me your primary complaint is with marketing language and the associated inability of people to make informed decisions based upon it

i think that's what a lot of this discussion is about

Once the publishing industry collapses presumably freelance editorial services will be easier to find many xps to remy

i mean if you just want to talk about truly artisanal goods that provide tangible value over mass-produced equivalents and are fairly priced there's not really a lot to talk about

Pier 1 is not as evil politically as Target

they aren't -- that's my point!

okay, but just because marketing language creates an artificial and perhaps misleading distinction when there isn't one does not in fact preclude the possibility that there ARE goods that are well-made, locally ,by appropriately-compensated workers, and that this is type of product is preferable (for a number of reasons) to the mass-produced in near slave-labor conditions and then shipped around the world crap. Your issue is not with this distinction, it's with products that make false/spurious claims based on this distinction.

xp

facepalm

Pier 1 is not as evil politically as Target

I'm not well-versed enough in the politics of either (I was referring more to their range of products and where they come from) but I'm curious what makes you say this

Appropriately-compensated?

Pier 1 doesn't make the same kinds of political contributions that Target does and Target donates primarily to Republicans

Appropriately-compensated?

y'know, a living wage

can this conversation be had by americans

I understand the desire for a living wage or even just better wages but I am wary of second-guessing those labor markets. Would it be better to entirely forego products from some place because they don't pay wages I think fair and thus potentially deprive those workers of any wage at all or reduce the very advantage that they have in the global market?

Mind you, I'm not against socially ameliorative purchasing strategies, I'm just wary that 'fair trade' too might be a form of cynical marketing.

pfft the only product that doesn't involve cynical marketing is probably something made by someone you know and given to you for free, ie a homemade gift

"artisanal" is a word that's come back into fashion recently, but it's been in english usage for centuries: it was a distinction the arts and crafts movement popularised in the 19th century, to register approval of maker-knowledge they feared was vanishing, with the mass move to cities and the growth of factories and the machine-made; they wanted to differentiate skilled handwork from the unskilled work that (many) machines fostered. It probably comes from artigiano, but another possible source is artitianus (via artitus, past participle of artire, meaning to instruct in the arts)

(second derivation being key, since it's about a skill being passed on rather than lost)

alright, but handwork has nearly always been associated with luxury in some products -- i'm thinking specifically of textiles, esp. handworked lace and embroidery -- because of the sheer amount of labor required to make them and make them well, and they are very easily distinguished from their machine-made equivalents. but that labor is also acknowledged to be tedious and even (literally) punishing.

a product made with attention to detail implies the wealth of the owner, and always has -- not just wealth, but class distinction and all the heightened discriminations that go along with it. you do not buy it because of its details, you buy them to demonstrate that you are the type of person who appreciates those details.

elmo otm

elmo otm. they're a more significant iteration of the impulse that lead a lot of us to hang band posters in our dorm rooms

it seems to me your primary complaint is with marketing language and the associated inability of people to make informed decisions based upon it

It's more an argument with willfully deceptive (and often self-deceptive) self-definition. I can go out tomorrow and hang a shingle over a blanket in Harvard Square and sell tiles I've pornographically Sharpied and call myself a wandering artist in the tradition of Basquiet. I can even believe in my art, and maybe have some real raw talent for it. Maybe I'll get rich from it. Who knows? But the fact is that I'm not a wandering artist in the same way as somebody who's spent twenty years at his trade, or in the same way I'll be in twenty years. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not an artist, or that my art is invalid or inauthentic. But if I set my prices at an ego-gratifying $500/tile, when there are tiles that are roughly as pornographic for $12, two blankets away I'm basically acting in an entitled, delusional and borderline-dishonest way. And even moreso if I induce customers to spend an extra $488 under the justification that there's some moral superiority to purchasing from me.

[I get that this is an unpopular opinion here, and I'm also sure this is why I'm always gonna be poor, but I don't think it has as much to do with marketing as the impulse behind the desire to market in a certain way.]

Artizan (manual laborer) is attested in French from the mid-16th Century, mark.

I still don't buy that completely, I think it's also about (maybe unconsciously) trying to forge connections in an anonymous economic culture, a desire to know something about who's producing your material goods. Even if you haven't met face to face, buying a print from a hipster on Etsy is more of a personal link than getting a poster from Ikea.

And even moreso if I induce customers to spend an extra $488 under the justification that there's some moral superiority to purchasing from me.

Caveat emptor and all that. There's a sucker born every minute.

Also, 'roughly as pornographic' is a felicitious turn of phrase

that was a xxp about handmade as luxury

M White OTM

thing is, this specific fashion-shift, by a sector of the educated middle-class, towards approval of (and patronage of) the hand-made, for a mix of reasons (actual politics, pseudo-politics, genuine interest and connoisseurship and knowledge, moral swank, blunt wealthy-person showing-off...) has happened several times in the last 150-odd years, ever since morris and ruskin: awareness of it falls in and out of art history -- it's obviously on a big upswing at the moment (others were the 70s, the 20s and the 1880s), but all the exact same issues swirl around

$500 vs $12 and ignoring all the ethical dimensions in favor of 'artisanal' that have been brought up is some wicked strawmanning

But if I set my prices at an ego-gratifying $500/tile,

if people are going to pay this, then it is the smart thing to charge this much. ego doesn't have much to do with it, beyond maybe feeling smug about ripping off people. which is the sort of behavior/mindset encouraged by capitalism.

xp

idk i'm just spitballing here but i'm highly skeptical of the ethical dimensions in favor of "artisanal" esp. as some kind of blanket concept

My real point, Remy, is that dude selling $500.00 porno tiles a blanket down from $12.00 ones had better have some massively compelling moral-superiority marketing and even then he's probably going to outright fail or at least end up making less money.

Artisanal, to me, is useful when it indicates something tastier or rarer or more aesthetically pleasing somehow. If you're artisinal gougeres are no better than the Taylorized bakery across the Bay and the ingredients are the same, why should I pay twice as much? Otoh, if they rock, here's my money.

you're? Sheesh...

Whenever I see something offered through Groupon, I think the company's story is: We priced it wrong the first time.

I'm noticing that a lot of businesses that aren't putting their good on sale are instead investing in telling the story behind why their products/services are priced the way they are.

Last Spring, Hermes had a bunch of their craftpeople set up at pop-up shops in a few different cities, simply doing their job at a workstation set up for public viewing -- so the tie-maker made ties, the scarf-maker dyed scarves, etc.

Today, for something kind of work-related, I ended up at a store that sells $40,000 mattresses. And you bet that those mattresses have a story about all of the details and pedigree that justify the value of the thing.

I'm sure it came via French, Michael, which you know ten million times better than me anyway -- most of the Latin element in English did. But (acc. the concise oxford, which is all I have to hand, and it doesn't do dates, or give the specific French) the deep root is as I wrote, the Italian from the late Latin, which had the sense of a skill taught or passed on...

http://www.marissamarchant.com/

How to attract people to buy without putting stuff on sale

Marchant comes from ye olde Norman for "walking artisanal merchant"

Last Spring, Hermes had a bunch of their craftpeople set up at pop-up shops in a few different cities, simply doing their job at a workstation set up for public viewing -- so the tie-maker made ties, the scarf-maker dyed scarves, etc.

lol a lot of the raw materials for this stuff still comes from china

milo, i don't disagree that other factors and motivations come into play -- i think, too, that there has been some slippage when it comes to what 'handcrafting' means in terms of marketing -- it can mean 'made with exacting attention to detail by an experienced, dedicated laborer' or it can mean 'a unique labor of love, charming imperfections & idiosyncrasies included' depending on what's being sold & by whom

Related to that, I saw an ad somewhere (some special watch issue of something like the Financial Times) from a watch-related industry group that compared and contrasted buying an authentic watch made by a craftsman versus buying a fake watch made in a sweatshop.

I guess I'm only interested in artisanal handmade stuff insofar as those qualities are usually correlated with 'quality' and 'longlasting' - pretty sure my uniqlo selvedge was made by machine but who cares they've been pretty durable. and my red wings are nice but if you told me a machine made them, well eh, they're still well made.

one take on our annoying future

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/03/07/200135/the-yoga-instructor-economy/

― goole, Thursday, November 3, 2011 6:07 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Or the annoying present of New York City!

hand-sewn ties vs. machine-sewn ties is a great example of a false distinction in 'quality' imho

elmo I asked you a question on your tie thread. btw love the tie/shirt combo you posted today

so is there an... economic(? or political?) objection to "the new craftsmanship"? so far it seems like the big objections are largely cultural in nature--i.e. abt the motives of the new craftsmen-and-women and the ppl who consume products of the new craft

It was pretty neat to watch in person.

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6209/6116352747_ae0f51fda5.jpg

"a fake watch made in a sweatshop" <-- hands don't move separately?

i think the main objection in terms of the politics of economics is that it's never going to be anything but a boutique market, so it's a red herring in respect of (for example) tackling unemployment on a significant scale

okay but there's not a economic-political objection to its existences, just to its reach

insofar as most of us probably think ppl should be able to produce, sell, and buy what they want then no

lol a lot of the raw materials for this stuff still comes from china

silk from the Orient? curse this modern age

haha. I know somebody who used to work at LV, she said pretty much all of the materials - the leather, gold zippers and clasps, chains, etc. are made in china and shipped to italy/france to be assembled.

this is gonna turn into another quiddities of the ruling class-stylee thread, isn't it?!?

insofar as most of us probably think ppl should be able to produce, sell, and buy what they want then no

― call all destroyer, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:18 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha. u sure that "most of us" do?

Dayo, that's probably part of why Hermes (competing against LV) was bringing in their folks to do this demonstration. They all work in the same place:

haha. u sure that "most of us" do?

― max, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:24 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

that seems to be an assumption most ppl itt are operating under!

the cultural objection to this stuff is, i think, some kind of instinctual reaction to its ancientness. if working this way (and buying this way) is a reaction to capitalism or industrialization, it "feels" less like a way forward than a reach back even further to aristocratic patronage of craftspeople.

so, rather than stamping out parts for something that everyone buys (to the great profit of a few), you're handmaking some object that the greatly-profited few are buying directly.

this all sounds pretty marxy i guess.

nah, you don't say

well i don't really share the objection, but that's my expert diagnosis of it *straightens bow tie*

is that bow tie hand stitched, good sir

that seems to be an assumption most ppl itt are operating under!

― call all destroyer, Thursday, November 3, 2011 7:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i dunno, ilx as a place seems kinda hostile to this kind of thing, see for example the nyt quiddities thread, or remys posts here

i know! that's why this thread it weird.

seems like remy's posts invited more disagreement than i expected

maybe people are annoyed by it because it seems like a symptom of the insane fractal inequality we're dealing with, rather than a solution to it?

i'm making big assumptions as to the buying audience for these things btw. seems like a mishmash of "ethical consumers" and "really rich people" -- i dunno what a venn diagram of these sets would look like tbh.

"in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, crochet after dinner"

http://images.unurthed.com/Vandenbroeck-geometry-circle-83.jpg

xp

http://6.freshlikedougie.net/files/2011/02/Kanye-West.jpeg

xp

[this] has happened several times in the last 150-odd years, ever since morris and ruskin: awareness of it falls in and out of art history -- it's obviously on a big upswing at the moment (others were the 70s, the 20s and the 1880s), but all the exact same issues swirl around

how the hell do we get off this appalling roundabout(*)

(*)carousel

http://thisismadebyhand.com/shoppe

That stuff could kit out Arcade Fire when they're on holiday.

I wasn't aiming for this to be another quid-ag or suburbs thread metastasis exactly.

What made me start the thread is I genuinely think it's pretty rad that Beardy the Knifemaker is doing his thing and apparently sustaining and growing his business. For him personally, it must be exciting to get to make things every day and have that be what pays for rent and food. His workshop is even perhaps accruing a benefit to the community by being a place where other folks can come learn about knives and cutting skills (cutting up vegetables is not a natural skill) and maybe a couple folks could be employed or apprenticed.

But what I get stuck on is still the pricing. When global manufacturing concerns drive down costs of things like quality knives, that's got some benefits, in that everyone who cooks regularly can get some decent knives. Yadda yadda industrial revolution assembly line cars vacations America. Whatever the good and bad sides of that context (other threads for that), when he sells the knives for that much into that middle class economy, then that seems to lean more in the direction of Damien Hirst selling bad paintings to Russian oligarchs than, say, the microbrewery movement, where products priced similarly to and competitive with the "corporate" are sold into the local market etc.

Of course microbreweries are probably part of this conversation on some other level…

160 posts and none of you cunts got round to dismissing this shitty venture for its use of 'shoppe' alone

/it seems to me your primary complaint is with marketing language and the associated inability of people to make informed decisions based upon it/

It's more an argument with willfully deceptive (and often self-deceptive) self-definition. I can go out tomorrow and hang a shingle over a blanket in Harvard Square and sell tiles I've pornographically Sharpied and call myself a wandering artist in the tradition of Basquiet. I can even believe in my art, and maybe have some real raw talent for it. Maybe I'll get rich from it. Who knows? But the fact is that I'm /not/ a wandering artist in the same way as somebody who's spent twenty years at his trade, or in the same way I'll be in twenty years. It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not an artist, or that my art is invalid or inauthentic. But if I set my prices at an ego-gratifying $500/tile, when there are tiles that are roughly as pornographic for $12, two blankets away I'm basically acting in an entitled, delusional and borderline-dishonest way. And even moreso if I induce customers to spend an extra $488 under the justification that there's some moral superiority to purchasing from me.
--turkey in the straw (x2) (remy bean)

you're implying that the real 'wandering artist' has some sort of authenticity that the pretend wandering artist doesn't. that itself is not a given! I mean you're attacking the authenticity trend by saying...it's not authentic enough. the only delusional people are those who think that the story behind the tile should significantly affect its value. on the macro level I think that's a weird cultural problem, on the micro level I think you're just picking on a small group of entrepreneurs for taking advantage of the exact same weird market dynamics that basically every major business attempts to take advantage of. people make irrational consumption decisions!

i'm not talking about authenticity at all. hence: It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm not an artist, or that my art is invalid or inauthentic.

i'm talking about experience.

you're just shifting words to mean the same general thing tho!

your uncle's x years of experience made buying from him better

vs

veteran authentic craftsman w/ x years of experience

'experience' is sold as authenticity by people who have it. it doesn't imply moral superiority or even better product. it usually has correlation w/ better product but not necessarily.

160 posts and none of you cunts got round to dismissing this shitty venture for its use of 'shoppe' alone

'x shoppe' vs 'purveyors of fine x' what is worse?

you're the one conflating 'experience' with 'authentic,' not me!

I am not naturally talented at painting and if I worked at it for 20 years I'd prob be better. doesn't mean that someone w/ one year of painting couldn't be much better than me.

experience is great, sure, but outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality it's only useful as a claim toward 'authenticity'.

outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality is really the nut of the argument i'm making. i could care less about authenticity; i'm too broke to even face that as a determining factor.

kirsty allsopp

grand designs, too

outside of what it adds to the product in inherent quality is really the nut of the argument i'm making. i could care less about authenticity; i'm too broke to even face that as a determining factor.

you're coming at this from the perspective that it's somehow possible for us to be rationalist machines making purchasing decisions based on nothing but inherent quality

but
a. we're not totally rationalist machines and we can't even theoretically make purchasing decisions like that
I was looking for an excuse to post this elsewhere: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/can-a-commercial-be-too-sexy-for-its-own-good-ask-axe/246863/ - that's how the target/walmart/whatever shoppers you're defending are making their purchasing decisions. it's no more or less bizarre tham people at our stereotype of a williamsburg artisanal shop or whatever.
b. there's no such thing as inherent quality a significant % of the time, lots of gray zones
c. asymmetric information always gonna exist. w/ the assumption that your uncle made better things than the other dude - do you think the people who bought from the other dude honestly knew enough about the object that they were buying an inferior quality good? do you think they were being totally rational and thought "well this is slightly worse, but the fact that it's recycled/'authentic'/whatever makes up for it"? no way, their decision making process involved varying amounts of information and emotion and the other dude was better at manipulating the information and their emotions.

it sucks! but what you're arguing for isn't socialism it's hyper-robot-capitalism.

all that said you and I are prob pretty similar consumers, I bought $10 jeans from uniqlo this week and that is exactly as much money as I want to spend on jeans. but overall this is nothing new or even particularly different about this trend. and prob overall a good thing w/ the assumption that it creates jobs and gets people to consume fewer things and more slowly. that's the bigger question for me - is this trend making people more attached to physical objects or just more conscious of their use value?

"about the object that they were buying an inferior quality good? "
=
"about the object that they knew they were buying an inferior quality good?

I think there's a funny tension for a lot of people with this stuff -- on one hand you have the idea that there's some moral bad in paying a lot of money for an object -- it seems gross, even idolatrous. On the other hand there's something morally bad about this big capitalist monster system that mass produces things while, you imagine, whipping its chinese workers and polluting the earth.

I sort of decided in the last few years that my own instinctive reaction against things just because they seem more expensive than other things in their category is false -- it actually makes better sense to pay more for the pair of jeans that, theoretically, will look good longer. Otherwise, you wind up buying more stuff, which (1) winds up being expensive anyway and (2) uses more resources.

At the same time, the trends being discussed in this thread kind of go beyond just better quality for higher price. I feel like maybe we already talked about this some in another thread, but I'm really irked by a lot of these "well-made" coats and shirts that are obviously too fashion-sensitive (and worn by too-fashion-sensitive people) to actually last more than a season. It's a classic example of worshipping the idea of something while discarding its purpose.

Also a lot of these products are just expensive beyond the added quality, so that you aren't actually making a financially savvy decision. Not that that should be the only consideration, obviously.

and assuming you're in any position to judge the quality/durability at purchase

it actually makes better sense to pay more for the pair of jeans that, theoretically, will look good longer. Otherwise, you wind up buying more stuff, which (1) winds up being expensive anyway and (2) uses more resources.

"I'm too poor to buy cheap stuff" has always been my motto

i'm too poor to buy expensive stuff, tbh

TBF my one pair of jeans is in fact Uniqlo. It actually seems pretty well made to me, idk. Sometimes you can tell, or at least you know something from prior purchases. I wear dress shirts every day to work, and I know from experience, for example, that if you wait for the big winter sale, Brooks Brothers no-iron shirts are absolutely worth the premium you pay over your standard department store shirt, because they stay fresh looking for much longer, retain their shape, etc. That's not really the kind of "craftsmanship" discussed in the thread title exactly -- I'm sure they're made in some chinese factory but just with better materials, better design, more stitching and maybe better trained workers.

darragh raises a decent point -- how can a consumer actually make an independent assessment as to a product's quality? and i don't think we can easily equate quality with durability. the infamous fancy axes are a good illustration of this. how can you tell whether those luxury tools are more or less durable or practical than their mass-produced equivalent? i don't know if you can! what i'm getting at, is that I think judging an object's 'quality' is a highly aesthetic evaluation.

TBF my one pair of jeans is in fact Uniqlo. It actually seems pretty well made to me, idk.

assembled in China of Japanese denim and Chinese sundries fwiw.

those axes will no doubt remain in excellent condition for a very long time! but just because they will rarely be put to use, not because of their inherent 'quality'

Gommorrah (the book) actually talks about how the Chinese textile industry is increasingly learning how to make things really well

sure - you can't put all that IP in the country and not expect them to copy it or reverse-engineer it!

Guys this is a great thread but I want you all to watch this for a few minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfN4_52loC4

this is really easy to run into if you buy liquor these days--microdistilleries are popping up all over the place and using words like "local" "artisinal" and "craft" and they pretty much ignore some basic facts of the beverage alcohol industry (liquor branch in particular), such as 1) distilling is really hard; 2) once you can do it it's really easy to do large-scale; 3) market competition and consumer choice have resulted in an environment where 95% of midshelf and higher products are quite high-quality.

I think the term "local" stands a bit apart from "artisinal" and "craft". The latter two terms can sometimes just be clever marketing, or a misleading implication of quality, but if we're talking about a locally distilled product made with locally-sourced ingredients, that's a bit different. Some people are happy to pay a bit more for something if they're supporting a local business. I think the increased interest in supporting small/local/craft businesses is partly due to a desire to live in a more self-sustaining, neighborhood sort of economy, where we can grow and make and buy a lot of the things we need/want without the raw ingredients, processed components, and finished products having to be shipped halfway across the world three different times.

And if you buy that locally distilled liquor, you're probably supporting several local businesses, not just one. There's the distiller, the farmer, the maltster, the barrelmaker, the local shops that proudly carry the local product- I could go on and on. These community businesses all depend on each other, (hopefully) treat each other well, and share in the rewards of the enterprise.

And then of course there's the idea that you're giving your money to a known entity, a person, and not some shadowy corporation using unfair business practices, and paying their employees the bare minimum, and making horrific political contributions, etc. This is of course a sweeping generalization but that's part of the mindset at play here, I think.

the local distiller could still be getting all his grain from global sources, you don't know that

Right but I was talking specifically about "a locally distilled product made with locally-sourced ingredients."

artisanal moonshine

My point was that the decision of whether to support a local distiller is not solely based on whether the midshelf mass-produced product is of equal quality.

i sold a book on canning/preserving and a how-to moonshine book to a dude last week. the revolution will be pickled.

feel like a lot of these products' 'rustic' quality is more like a 'hey mommy look what I made in arts and crafts today!' quality

this is maybe only tangentially related to this thread but i thought it was interesting--boutique brooklyn chocolatiers get a shipment of cocoa beans by sail

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303714704576385951539124310.html

Right but I was talking specifically about "a locally distilled product made with locally-sourced ingredients."

― epistantophus, Friday, November 4, 2011 8:37 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

ime "locally-sourced ingredients" is a huge issue here. there are some microdistilleries that claim to use locally-sourced grains but they only do for a fraction of their output, with the rest being the same bulk grains that everyone buys. similarly, i'd be willing to wager that a lot of these guys use the same handful of sources for malt and barrels.

from an environmental standpoint local is not necessarily better. depends on the situation but mass production + shipping stuff via enormous container ships can actually have a lower overall footprint.

but if we assume people are ~buying less stuff~ then that effect can make up for it I guess.

you have to be careful with some of these young hip dudes making axes because a lot of them went to progressive schools that stressed "process" over "product". just watch where you swing that axe is all i'm saying.

Insert Pink Floyd img joke here.

xxxxxp True, the "local" tag can be used misleadingly as well, I suppose. But, at least in my area, there's been an explosion of new, local grain farms, hop farms, and even maltsters in the past few years. I think that as we see more and more of these "support" businesses open on the small/independent/local/community scale, the local distillers, brewers, etc. will have more options for sourcing their ingredients locally without breaking the bank. Because, in the end, why start a small, local business if you're not going to support other small, local businesses in doing so? And I guess that's about all I'm going to say on the subject, because I'm getting really sick of writing the word "local". Somebody get me a thesaurus.

to make money, tbh

"regionally indigenous"

xxxxxp True, the "local" tag can be used misleadingly as well, I suppose. But, at least in my area, there's been an explosion of new, local grain farms, hop farms, and even maltsters in the past few years. I think that as we see more and more of these "support" businesses open on the small/independent/local/community scale, the local distillers, brewers, etc. will have more options for sourcing their ingredients locally without breaking the bank. Because, in the end, why start a small, local business if you're not going to support other small, local businesses in doing so? And I guess that's about all I'm going to say on the subject, because I'm getting really sick of writing the word "local". Somebody get me a thesaurus.

― epistantophus, Friday, November 4, 2011 9:20 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah i mean there is reason for cautious optimism in this space due to some of the things you point out; it's just not quite there yet imo.

if everyone that needs an axe were to buy their axe at their local artizan axemaster and that axe were the only axe they'd ever need, how long could that local axemaster earn a living before he'd run out of customers

he'd need to charge quite a high price, that axemaster, tbh

or else he'd need to diversify his product range to include other cutting & chopping tools

people used to make money by selling things and then repairing those things when they needed repairing. so maybe the axe guy could make extra axe bucks by sharpening your axe for you.

even so, realistically speaking he'd be working with a very limited demand pool

door to door knife sharpening. when are the kids gonna get on that old job.

if everyone that needs an axe were to buy their axe at their local artizan axemaster and that axe were the only axe they'd ever need, how long could that local axemaster earn a living before he'd run out of customers

That's why business for small-town artisans is so different when people can order this stuff online.

ok, so we have a blacksmith in the village, allowing for sharpening, grinding, etc. Sustainable as a local enterprise?

darning socks. my mom used to do that! she never had to buy socks. probably put a ton of sock retailers out of business near us.

scott: we still had 'tinkers' doing that and pot mending etc up to maybe two generations ago, but there's reasons the door-to-door tooling trade died out

i think we're heading into m night shyamalan's 'the village' with this.

wear jeans until they have holes. patch holes. when holes no longer patchable make into shorts. when too ripped up as shorts cut into rags and use as rags. when too raggy sew into quilt. we were like the indians and their damn beefalos.

rags-quilt is a bit of a manky progression tbh

xxp Yes, now people buy cheap things, packaged in the least recyclable materials possible, and then throw them away when they wear out. Thanks, free market!

okay maybe not a quilt. cut into strips and, uh, hook a rug or something. that's what grandma was good for.

Although the "used-rag quilt" does not sound appealing. xp haha

i still have a little pillow made out of a pair of my jeans from when i was a kid. lovely little pillow.

POT MENDING, now there's something you don't hear about. How do metal pots need mending?? Who wears a whole in the bottom of a cook pot? Maybe I'm taking this too literally?

Easy on the crazy quilts, there, you disgusting savages. Every worn out garment has some part that's still good. Things wear out where you do the work.

cf http://joyfulhomaker.com/RagCoatbook.jpg

<3 <3 Appalachia

I always wondered that too; maybe handles break off or something?

i'd go shorts-rags-call it a day

Course, once upon a time there'd a bin a local rag n bone man but now it's just hipsters traipsing around in a $100k handmade oak wagon looking for last year's abercrombie scarves to weave into neil gaiman's next graphic novel masterpiece

i still have some of my grandparents pots and pans. some of them must be 60 years old or more.

maybe pots are just better-made or modern cooking appliances are easier on the potarse or maybe we microwave everything, myriad causes imo

Well you can't "mend" cast iron, it has to be cast. So at the most, we'd be talking about...tin?

i use a cast iron pan for a lot of the cooking i do and i can't imagine that i'll ever need another one in my lifetime. i have two actually. one big and one small. same with the big stew pot that i use. it should last forever. that's, like, 60% of my cooking materials right there. pots for boiling though yeah the handle problem.

cast iron gets cast in the bin when it breaks iirc.

Yes, exactly. So what could a pot mender be mending? Steel? I don't know. Tin, for sure. In fact isn't that where the word "tinker" comes from, now that I think of it?

Copper pots were a thing once, right? Nowadays they are lined or clad to avoid copper poisoning.

Copper pots are awesome but expensive as hell.

Also I agree (to an extent) with the OP characterizing a lot of artisinal products as Veblen goods. There is definitely a degree of conspicuous consumption going on there. The more expensive, the better! In the old days, it was exotic esoteria from faraway lands. Today it's handmade, artisan goods from the local craft workshop. As much as I love to support local business, it bugs me when this stuff is outrageously overpriced and marketed toward the affluent so they can be all bohemian and rustic in front of their peers.

*esoterica

that's true but this is a pretty small phenomenon as far as veblen goods go , rich people are gonna buy something to prove that they're rich and if it's rustic pots instead of sports cars, who cares

Fewer total resources go into an axe, tbf.

elmo started to get at something earlier about the work and suffering that "fine goods" represent, like it really isn't a stretch to say that, if tying six million tiny knots to make a rug cost someone their sight, someone obscenely rich person would buy it and savor it more because of the suffering it represented. We're not far from that very dystopian scenario imo, especially since THAT'S EFFECTIVELY TRUE OF OUR ELECTRONICS ALREADY and our clothes and etc. But the suffering/lost life of the maker is devalued to the point of irrelevance.

one day robots will build the robots that build the goods that sustain us.

There's also that as products become digitized and/or mass-produced, there's both a nostalgia and a longing for putting something together by visible means. If someone understands the pleasure of developing a photograph or cooking a stew, then then may also have that appreciation as a consumer. Definitely anyone I know who cooks seriously feels that way at a restaurant where some individual has dreamed up the menu.

as someone pointed out upthread tho reaction-to-mass-production has happened fairly regularly since the industrial revolution

, this reaction-to

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

ha, laurel, I was just about to expand on that point, too -- i think you can explore the relationship between morality and labor, not just in the sense of "an honest day's work" and the sense of forthrightness & authenticity that implies, but also the idea that hard work is supposed to morally instructive or rehabilitating, and i don't think that diminishes the recognition that much labor is grueling by nature (but that I think ties back to concepts of original sin & being like Christ in our suffering)

why can't I buy a samurai sword that was folded 2000 times in the forge today, I ask you. I have $600. how come?

You and me, we are same-same, elmo.

2000 fold. $189

http://www.globalgear.com.au/bestsellers/shinwa-damascus-black-knight-katana-sword

So I guess the question is, if we want to buy something (like electronics, clothing, etc.) that takes hard labor to create, should we be prepared to pay the true cost of production to ensure that everyone involved in the process properly compensated for their work? The obvious answer is yes, but how could that really be accomplished without the workers still getting exploited and the company just pocketing the extra profits? Also, I think the availability of cheap (undervalued) goods is built into our entire economy- i.e., if I'm going to pay true value for all my consumed goods, I need to be paid more for my own labor by my own employer. So where does this lead? A complete restructuring of our entire economic system?

okay, fine, it's a "ninja" sword. not a samurai sword.

The handles are hardwood construction and wrapped with genuine ray skin and nylon cord.

genuine nylon cord sourced from the same nylon mines that our forebears quarried in Edo period Nippon

there are too many damn people on the earth to NOT make cheap shit. nobody can darn 6 billion pairs of socks. not even my mom!

yes scott but were those 2000 folds folded in by a mere machine or by a true bushido blacksmith versed in the lethal arts

I don't want my 2000 machine folded ninja sword to be cleaved in two by the superior hand-crafted blade of my opponent when locked in mortal combat to the death

hand-crafted blade sourced from locally grown nylon, btw

So I guess the question is, if we want to buy something (like electronics, clothing, etc.) that takes hard labor to create, should we be prepared to pay the true cost of production to ensure that everyone involved in the process properly compensated for their work? The obvious answer is yes, but how could that really be accomplished without the workers still getting exploited and the company just pocketing the extra profits? Also, I think the availability of cheap (undervalued) goods is built into our entire economy- i.e., if I'm going to pay true value for all my consumed goods, I need to be paid more for my own labor by my own employer. So where does this lead? A complete restructuring of our entire economic system?

there's no objective measure for 'properly compensated'

if things get bleaker though people will remember their dormant sewing skills. a la the great depression.

eh we got a lot more shit around these days and mass producing clothes isn't very expensive. the prob is we don't have dormant ipod-repairing skills.

you'd be surprised

all these (globalwarming?) storms bring home the fact that things are getting dangerously overloaded. before the big hurricane here the electric company called everyone in the STATE to tell them that their power might be off for as long as a week. i can't remember that happening in the past. it might have, but i don't remember it. people around here still without power from the snowpocalypse last week. lots of people buying generators this week and they never thought they would need a generator. hand-crafted locally-sourced generators is where its at in new england if you want to get in on the ground floor. the economy is gonna change in weird ways in the coming years.

Gonna start me a company that makes free-range generators out of hemp.

i mean all the back to local handicraft stuff might just be a, uh, harbinger of sorts. a collective unconscious type of thing like birds freaking out before a tornado. maybe everyone is finally getting the picture - like when their entire house is filled with water - that the center cannot hold and all that.

or it could just be boredom with local indie rock scenes.

hand perned in an authentic gyre

and, likewise, current cultural obsession with american pickers/storage wars/pawn stars is a flexing of dormant scavenging muscles. people know, even if they don't know, that finding the good stuff will be increasingly more important when the storm has left town and you don't get a visit from FEMA or the Red Cross for months.

that's a good point

yer man yeats was a fellow for the arts and crafts, d'mac -- his sister worked with morris

and, needless to say, the 400 popular shows about being dropped into the wild and eating bugs.

hand perned in an authentic gyre

W B LOL

i just got a great roycrofter book in at the store. i love their stuff. elbert hubbard's scrapbook. a memorial to the man made with loving detail.

I posted this link over on ILM but it also fits this thread I think. Basically you're paying $500 for a tape reel of music recorded directly from the studio master tapes. You'll need a decent reel-to-reel tape deck. So you'll be sepnding upwards of $1100 for one album and the tape player.

http://www.tapeproject.com/

i like how a thread about consumerism can become a thread about a survivalism

sincerely!

I keep reading the thread title to the tune of Husker Du's "Charity, Chastity, Prudence and Hope."

i would love nothing more than for my kids to learn a trade. find an apprenticeship somewhere. carpenters! the world will always need carpenters. screw college. i mean, what if they became librarians or something! *shudder*

tbh the world also needs librarians

http://hooniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Time-Enough.png

Oh the the noise board did this already. We're going to stockpile rope, cigarettes, bike parts, and weed and ride our bikes across the country to gbx's family home, or, barring that, possibly mine.

my gf's dad is a master carpenter. i feel that isn't fair, somehow. i can't be expected to impress a master carpenter ffs

Oh yeah, that sucks. Otoh, she seems to like you okay?

that hardly matters where i come from, i need two signatures on the form- paterfamilias and the bishop- then i own her iirc

I posted this link over on ILM but it also fits this thread I think. Basically you're paying $500 for a tape reel of music recorded directly from the studio master tapes. You'll need a decent reel-to-reel tape deck. So you'll be sepnding upwards of $1100 for one album and the tape player.

http://www.tapeproject.com/

― brownie, Friday, November 4, 2011 5:03 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark

M4r1ss4 M4rch4nt to thread

oh hell no you didn't

her

I wouldn't her

Shasta already went there

...the world will always need carpenters. screw college.

And they can go to Screw College to learn how.

graduates of Screw College make 20% more than graduates of Nail College

Don't tell your kid to be a carpenter, get him or her into plumbing, electrical or HVAC if you want to encourage a trade. Or auto mechanic shit.

thread title makes me hear Rancid's "Cash, Culture and Violence" in my head, ugh

HVAC will be a growth industry when we all have to move into hermetically sealed dome cities

DR: It’s like we only have a hammer and it’s really hard to put in screws. Centralized currency is really, really good for competition, it’s really, really good for big companies. Wal-Mart and Citibank can get money more cheaply; the bigger you are, the closer you are to the storehouse. And the big guys don’t want local currencies, they don’t want bottom-up value creation, work-based money, money that is worked into existence instead of borrowed into existence, because that reduces their monopoly over the means of exchange.

http://hilobrow.com/2011/11/04/douglas-rushkoff/

so much smdh in that piece

Wait wait. I just read it and I thought it was like brain explosions, b/c I have never heard of any of the concepts under discussion. Iatee, what are you saying?

if you take everything he says to be true then I could see lots of brain explosions, but like, 30% of what he says is true, most of it is sloppy history and weirdo neo-feudalist econ

Did anyone else read remy's story and initially expect that the apprentice figured out how to make it into an assembly line production and now has a factory in China? The anecdote really speaks to a fickle consumer base, or at least an undereducated one, a new good that has good marketing but unknown longevity, and a lack of understanding about what makes a good, maintainable product. Sometimes this stuff happens and there's a giant web forum full of people calling a product complete shit six months later, both killing the new business and the original since it's all migrated by the time the newcomer is found out.

Even if you haven't met face to face, buying a print from a hipster on Etsy is more of a personal link than getting a poster from Ikea.

There was a site I saw not long ago that was calling people out for selling mass-produced goods on etsy! People are pretty obviously just buying cheap shit and reselling it there, although with variable success. etsy and other sites have policies against that, but people slip through the cracks.

haha that's a good idea I want to get into that business

Well this is definitely wrong:

"Fast-forward to the 1970s. After four or five centuries of people believing it, Nixon realized that people now do believe, so the currency can be taken off the central metal and just be based on belief. That’s when they started putting “In God We Trust” on paper money, when it was taken off the gold standard."

I lol'd at the thing about women in England being taller in the middle ages. oooookay

like that's indicative of anything

xxp Like I don't understand the timeline of US history at all wrong.

he's sort of right that the dark ages are misnamed and the renaissance is over-glorified, but that's because there's more continuity between them all.

"PN: It seems like the Dark Ages were not perhaps so “dark.”

DR: Yes, I think that’s disinformation. I’m not usually a conspiracy theorist about these things, but I think the reason why we celebrate the Renaissance as a high point of western culture is really a marketing campaign. It was a way for Renaissance monarchs and nation-states, and the industrial age powers that followed, to recast the end of one of the most vibrant human civilizations we’ve had, as a dark, plague-ridden, horrible time."

or shit like this

I mean ffs all he has to do is read the wikipedia page for 'dark ages' before he says something this stupid http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

the currency can be taken off the central metal

The value of the metal also based upon belief.

The concept of a Dark Age originated with the Italian scholar Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature.

awful Renaissance monarch Petrarch, what an asshole

i dig that guy sometimes. i really just wanted to quote that quote. cuz that is something that can be really true. communities that become more self-sufficient or whatever are probably better off in the long run. course it helps if you live somewhere with lots of resources and smart people, but, uh, you know...

The value of the metal also based upon belief.

yeah currency is a social contract, the weird implication that there is some sort of ACTUAL VALUE independent of people's implicit agreement that x = y is odd

well the quote is bunk too. centralized currency is good for all of us, it's a big reason why our economy is a bazillion times bigger than in the periods he's romanticizing.

There's a great This American Life (I think, or maybe it was a Fresh Air interview with an author?) about the history of money, and one of the examples given is a primative society which used GIANT IMMOBILE STATUES as currency, one of which was at the bottom of an ocean.

which is why we can afford computers, toilets, whatever.

citibank and walmart aren't pro 'centralized currency' cause of some conspiracy theory against 'value creation', they're pro 'centralized currency' cause that's a basic aspect of a modern economy

also see: every other country on the planet.

xp to myself

hurting 2, this (planet money) must be what you're thinking of:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/15/131934618/the-island-of-stone-money

LIXY IS THAT YOU

its not so much the centralized currency part. its the need for alternatives. local alternatives on a human scale and not on a big bank/walmart scale. because their scale has no end. they believe in infinite growth. no end to how big they can be. and most people don't have those same needs. people feel like there is only one way of doing something. and there should be at least, like, two ways.

i never actually participated in the local currency thing here in town. i don't even know if they still do it. nobody has ever asked me about it in 2&half years of having a store in town. i'm all for trade though. i accept baked goods as payment.

but there are two ways: my way and the highway

actually, that reminds me that i should put a sign in the window that states that i accept pie as payment. i did put it in a newspaper ad once and i only got one pie :(

that's because you didn't specify pies

hi laurel :)

DR: It’s like we only have a hammer and it’s really hard to put in screws. Centralized currency is really, really good for competition, it’s really, really good for big companies. Wal-Mart and Citibank can get money more cheaply; the bigger you are, the closer you are to the storehouse. And the big guys don’t want local currencies, they don’t want bottom-up value creation, work-based money, money that is worked into existence instead of borrowed into existence, because that reduces their monopoly over the means of exchange.

it's not a centralized currency part, the whole quote relates to it! DR: It’s like we only have a hammer and it’s really hard to put in screws. Centralized currency is really, really good for competition, it’s really, really good for big companies. Wal-Mart and Citibank can get money more cheaply; the bigger you are, the closer you are to the storehouse. And the big guys don’t want local currencies, they don’t want bottom-up value creation, work-based money, money that is worked into existence instead of borrowed into existence, because that reduces their monopoly over the means of exchange.

it's not a centralized currency part, the whole quote relates to it! small businesses like yours also benefit from the ability to buy and sell w/ a single currency. those 'local currency' things aren't really what this guy is talking about - those are just dollars that you can't use outside of town unless you switch them into regular dollars. it's just a stronger way of enforcing 'buy local' but not a currency w/ fluctuating value.

walmart and citibank are bad for totally different reasons that this dude doesn't understand because he hasn't watched the right ted talk yet I guess. suggesting local currencies as a way to fight walmart is like suggesting we shut down all the ports in america to fight walmart.

and maybe you thought he meant those 'buy local' currency things like the thing in your town. those are pretty innocuous, but that's not at all what he's suggesting, he's suggesting we get rid of the american dollar and have a million local banks produce their own money each w/ its own value.

see, i was just gonna suggest that we shut down all the ports in america to fight walmart, but you beat me to it.

regretsy is the website that calls shenanigans on the etsy culture. Anytime a complaint is brought against cheap-o resellers (not handmade) on etsy, they have some policy of "not being mean" to each other and ignore or ban the complainer. They are a business, they side against whoever brings in the revenue.

i don't honestly know what the currency answer is. i just know that something has to change. and i don't know how it will happen. but people have to try something. things look bleak! despite the hugest economy in forever angle.

i hear the women were taller during the dark ages. let's start with that. how do the dutch do it?

so mad i missed this thread all day

im not

wearing wooden shoes in windmills

xp they lowered the ground to below sea-level

they are so sneaky. no wonder they are known as "the sneaky dutch".

so unclear as to how we got onto the topic of the height of medieval dutch peasant women

…question answered before I asked it?

that sounds like a gross sex thing (xp to scott)

babe, tonight we're gonna do the sneaky dutch. get out the pipe cleaners.

hoos what artisanal handmade local social networks u like

it takes two lips

xp

it's gonna be gouda

it only took them a hundred years to be giants! what are they hiding???? radioactive hashish?

"Statistically, the tallest people in the world, as measured by country are the Dutch. The average height for all adults for the Netherlands is 6 feet 1 inch (1.85 m). This great leap in height is a huge change for Holland, where about 100 years ago, 25% of men who attempted to join the army were rejected as being too short, less than 62 inches (1.57 m) tall."

Central currency isn't just good for "big corporations," it's good for anyone who might want to do things like, say, relocate or even travel to another place, buy things that aren't made in one's hometown, etc. It's really not possible to produce most of what modern americans have decided they need to live "locally," which is all the more reason that "locally made" becomes such a novelty/luxury marketing concept.

BTW, reminds me of milk I bought recently -- had this nicely designed label and a tag on a string (tags on strings are wholesome) that said "Local Milk" in a very pleasant and endearing font. I bought it a couple times without thinking (price was reasonable enough anyway), and then one day read the print -- it said that the milk was guaranteed to have been produced within 200 miles of the point of sale. Then it occurred to me -- most milk we buy is probably already produced within 200 miles. New York is a dairy state and it doesn't really make sense to truck milk halfway across the country, and 200 miles isn't even that local anyway -- that could be like northern mass or something.

It's really not possible to produce most of what modern americans have decided they need to live "locally,"

disagree w/this and will defend l8r tonight

handmade computer

silicon lovingly smelted from the sand of american beaches

i think u mean hand~crafted~

tbh I don't even understand how that could be a point up for argument but I eagerly await your defense hoos

i was kidding abt silicon if that wasn't clear

lol

I being this up a lot but it's not even nec environmentally friendly to consume the same shit just ~local~

it is environmentally friendly to just consume less shit tho

bring

is that just based on that food article about locally sourced meat?

well food is where it comes up for discussion most often (esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad) but it's gonna be generally true w/ lots of things. 100,000 local axe-makers aren't necessarily better for the world than one big axe factory in china. not buying axes is!

tbf axes are surely one of the things people only buy when actually needed

Not necessarily
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/garden/01peter.html?_r=2&src=twr&pagewanted=all

(esp annoying w/ the 'urban agriculture' fad)

not so sure about urban agriculture - I think the thing with locally sourced meat is that protein sources like animals are going to consume a lot of resources and emit a lot of greenhouse gases, such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale, and that the savings in fuel and transport didn't necessarily outweigh the initial carbon emissions.

but locally grown vegetables ought to have a lower carbon footprint than produce shipped from south america, because the growing of vegetables doesn't really produce that big of a carbon footprint!

where's an axe murderer when you need one amirite

xp

such that big factory meat farms are gonna have a lower overall footprint than a local pig farm simply because of autonomies of scale

um this is not how this works

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

patrick bateman totally owns one of those axes

lol

I guarantee you a chicken factory processing 1,000 chickens puts out more GHG than a thousand people with a chicken in their backyard.

1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory

okay, sorry shakey, I was misremembering the article. but here's the article that says that it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es702969f

Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

the point is more that it doesn't matter if you're buying backyard chicken or outside chicken, the transportation costs is still gonna be a small % of the total GHG emissions of raising that chicken

*high fives self for working 'outside chicken' into a serious discussion*

it's not whether you're buying locally sourced meat that's doing any good for the environment, it's not eating meat in the first place.

there's no disputing that. there are a shit ton of variables involved in determining when locally sourced meat consumption is going to result in less GHG emissions than factory farmed meat, I would stay away from drawing any definitive conclusions.

here's the money quote, shakey

It is clear that even with the unrealistic assumption of zero food-miles, only relatively small shifts in the average household diet could achieve GHG reductions similar to that of localization. For instance, only 21−24% reduction in red meat consumption, shifted to chicken, fish, or an average vegetarian diet lacking dairy, would achieve the same reduction as total localization. Large reductions are more difficult in shifting away from only dairy products (at least on a calorie basis) but making some shifts in both red meat and dairy, on the order of 13−15% of expenditure or 11−19% of calories, would achieve the same GHG reduction as total localization.

like you're right that transportation is small portion of it, but meat factories emit a SHIT TON of GHGs just by virtue of their operations and their size and scale. Saying that factory farmed meat results in less GHG than locally sourced meat is specious reasoning.

I mean yeah, there are a shit ton of variables, and that's why those guys spent a lot of time studying those variables so that they could draw those conclusions...?

shakey it's gonna take 10 pounds of grain to get 1 pound of red meat no matter if you're feeding cows in a factory farm or a cow in a pasture

er left out an ALWAYS there

like a lot of it depends on how the locally sourced meat is actually raised/processed. Someone raising a chicken in their backyard, they're GHG emissions aren't gonna be increased very much - it doesn't take much (if any electricity) to keep a chicken coop, and the other major factor is feed (and where does that come from, etc.)

xp

and then yeah cows are not chickens etc

I don't really eat beef, why do I care...

1000 people having backyards puts out more GHG than that chicken factory

this... just... waht this doesn't make any sense.

that report only talks about transportation, as far as I can tell...?

i don't know, shakey - a chicken is still an animal that's gonna need to eat probably at least 5 times its weight over the course of its lifetime

backyards = houses and cars and roads

if everyone in a city has a backyard to grow vegetables in, you have an environment that's less ghg-efficient in other manners!

since when are we talking about cities only?

you can live in my city without a car? (I did for years...?)

you guys are throwing around all sorts of variables like they're certainties or givens when they are um... not

you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)

why do I bother

otm

it just seems weird to see smart people arguing for industrial-scale factory farming. like wtf guys. it's a disaster.

everybody's got a roof, amirite

lol shakey, from my perspective it's not the factory farming that's the disaster, it's the fact that we've systematically built our food culture around animal protein

but locally grown vegetables ought to have a lower carbon footprint than produce shipped from south america, because the growing of vegetables doesn't really produce that big of a carbon footprint!

I think you have to look at this from the bigger perspective - like, the individual carrot I buy that was grown in brooklyn* might have a lower carbon footprint than the argentina carrot but could every city grow every vegetable that it wants to eat within X miles? no, there's gonna be economies of scale and better places to grow certain foods. w/ more transportation-externality type taxes certain things might actually become more economic to grow closer, but individual people 'buying local' is never gonna be enough of a thing to cause meaningful change. at the end of the day consuming less is still a million times more the answer.

*I do not eat brooklyn carrots fwiw

yeah, that's true - another tragedy of modern food culture is the expectation that every vegetable/fruit is gonna be in season 365 days a year

idk, how hard is it to plan for winter? can some tomatoes and stuff during the summer. potatoes and onions last a long time in proper, nonrefrigerated storage. properly hulled grains last a long time too. preserve stuff, pickle it. apples last for months! canned sardines! guess people aren't too thrilled that they can't have yellowfin tuna 365 days a year though.

also shakey at least for cows I'm willing to entertain the idea that a cow or a chicken is going to eat the same amount of food/emit the same amount of GHG no matter if it's raised in someone's back yard or in a factory farm. if you're talking about 1000 cows, I don't think it's crazy to think that it might be cheaper to heat one giant cow containment unit than it is to heat 1000 individual barns.

I realize that factory farming is as inhumane and cruel and invidious as almost anything else that humans have done in history - hey, I've read fast food nation! but there's enough factors involved, like you say, that I'm not going to automatically assume that a locally grown animal is going to automatically have a lower carbon footprint than a factory farmed animal.

lol delete the "at least for cows" part

it just seems weird to see smart people arguing for industrial-scale factory farming. like wtf guys. it's a disaster.

right but 'industrial-scale factory farming' is a bad thing but 'large farms that produce massive amounts of cheap food via economies of scale and allow most of our population to be arguing on the internet instead of working in the fields' is not a bad thing. that's not a defense of every aspect of how they operate, or even most of them.

you can put gardens/coops on roofs too (cool roofs! saves energy!)

why do I bother

― The Uncanny Frankie Valley (Shakey Mo Collier)

yeah it's this kinda stuff that's just like, okay fine, but you know what else you could put on a roof in san francisco? 10 more stories so people could live there. and maybe one day a million people will live in san francisco. or even two million. until then the nimby-environmentalist rich people imagining sf as some garden-city dreamland is pretty tragic cause it's one of the only places people can live in semi-density in the country and there's plenty of farmland in the metro area.

anyway I tried to do some more research but got tired and lazy so I just found this nyt article inside

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

also just rummaging around on the internet the lowest energy input to protein output ratio I could find was 4:1, which was for chickens, but that's still pretty inefficient, you could use that feed and feed people with it instead

inside = instead

what is happening to my brayne, too much meat probably

fwiw I used to drive to work past a home that had two potbellied pigs and they'd always be out in the front yard grazing and oinking their way across the grass. I'd imagine those people never had to mow their yards! I doubt there's a net gain, but maybe we could hire out some artisanal goats to wander the yards during the day and their owners could make some awesome goat cheese.

I'm just spitballing but really, the factory farms vs other farms thing is pretty much a question of factory farms being pretty fucking braindead at this point in the game. Really, there are innovations and ideas every fucking year that would make large-scale farming more ecologically feasible without really economically compromising the operations.

Not sure how we got here from products of dubious quality being created by "craftsmen" but whatevs

DAYO STOP EATING MEAT YOU'RE KILLING THE PLANET AND YOUR CHILDREN AND THE PLANET'S CHILDREN

rip planet's children ;_;

I eat a tin of sardines every week, I have cream cheese too, I guess that's about it

if we all switched TO a standard sedan

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/2100/2112/sedan_1_lg.gif

I guess we are talking about this in a craftsmanship thread because it's pretty convenient to convince yourself that you're doing good for the environment by eating a grass-fed beef burger with artisanal american cheese or locally smoked hickory bacon when really you would do a lot more good for the environment if you refrained from eating that grass-fed beef burger and had a carrot some hipster grew on a rooftop in Brooklyn instead

fwiw there are areas where grass is everywhere and I think a handful of cows grazing over a few square acres really isn't what's blowing the planet's resources. If you're just eating those items, and mostly refraining from meat products otherwise, you're probably fine

yeah but how often does that kind of situation exist irl. are you the guy who butchers the cow?

if so, what kinda axe do you use?

1000s of people with animals in their backyard are unlikely to create the lakes of shit that factory farming tend to produce.

*high fives self for working 'outside chicken' into a serious discussion*

― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, November 4, 2011 11:44 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my man

that is true, but I was only talking about GHG. xp

Let's have some good locally-sourced vodka and discuss this into the evening.

1000s of people with animals in their backyard are unlikely to create the lakes of shit that factory farming tend to produce.

that's not because of some inherent flaw that a larger farm has, it's due to the fact that we poorly regulate these things and large farms don't have to pay for their pollution.

but my main point is that if you incorporate every single increase in ghg that comes w/ living somewhere w/ a backyard large enough to sustain you (your commute every day, the path of *every single thing you consume*, etc. etc.) the marginal environmental gain of that chicken in your backyard doesn't seem so impressive anymore. this is different if you're, idk, some old man in the middle of nowhere who leaves his self-sustaining farm once a year. anyway if you already have a backyard then yeah, why not, it's not like what you're doing within that limited context is *bad*, I was mostly talking about the 'let's turn cities into farms' fad.

"yeah, that's true - another tragedy of modern food culture is the expectation that every vegetable/fruit is gonna be in season 365 days a year"

thanks to global warming though you will probably be able to buy canadian pineapples in 20 years or so. brooklyn banana farms! we must have faith in the future.

and hepcats in brooklyn will totally be reviving long-forgotten heirloom banana varieties! the kind you could get before dole came along.

you'll have to dodge all the lunatics wielding artisanal axes during the 130 degree summers, but it will be worth it for that old world banana flavor.

Skot you are a national treat.

i'm kinda freaked by the weather.

was etsy the seventh sign in the bible? did not read too long.

q: does anybody know where I can find a locally hand fermented boombox, I need one for this look I'm putting together

I guess we are talking about this in a craftsmanship thread because it's pretty convenient to convince yourself that you're doing good for the environment by eating a grass-fed beef burger with artisanal american cheese or locally smoked hickory bacon when really you would do a lot more good for the environment if you refrained from eating that grass-fed beef burger and had a carrot some hipster grew on a rooftop in Brooklyn instead

― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Friday, November 4, 2011 8:39 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah I didn't bring up food in the first place because people think of food choices as an ethical issue I think even more than they do with local artisan axe choices, and there's the whole extra valence of you actually want to be healthy and feel satisfied when you eat. Also eating is required or you die. It feels like a related but distinct issue to me.

For my own part I forget to eat all the time and never know what to eat and then I get grouchy. I also like going out to nice restaurants and eating animals.

dayo otm all over this thread

meat is so delicious, think it might get better the further it travels

that's not because of some inherent flaw that a larger farm has, it's due to the fact that we poorly regulate these things and large farms don't have to pay for their pollution.

WE HAVE A WINNER

Or more accurately, they only get slapped with a large fine when they fuck up so badly that they kill entire creeks/rivers.

dayo somewhat otm, but the "everyone stops eating meat and the system is fixed" solution is so obvious and irrelevant to what will ever happen in most countries that currently eat meat, let alone the US. Getting people to eat a lot less beef, more sustainably farmed chicken & some pork, and getting this whole fish mess sorted is going to knock out a good third of the prob

the glut of awful, pointless "white whiskies" that you can get now

whatever the fuck this is referring to it made me very glad I live far away from the Big City

The fifteen minute designer "moonshine" fad.

I think I missed my chance to make a mint on designer Mason jars.

this is my answer to everything but we should just make meat really expensive. and if all environmental costs were accounted for it already would be. we don't have to force people to be vegetarians and the idea that that could happen worldwide in the next 100 years is pretty lol. we just need mcdonalds hamburgers to be $20. voila. xp

Probably someone should post that times article about the death of authentic unique specialness or w/e

this is my answer to everything but we should just make meat really expensive. and if all environmental costs were accounted for it already would be. we don't have to force people to be vegetarians and the idea that that could happen worldwide in the next 100 years is pretty lol. we just need mcdonalds hamburgers to be $20. voila. xp

― iatee, Friday, November 4, 2011 11:18 PM Bookmark

Well we could start by not subsidizing corn, which is a lot of the feed for that hamburger.

btw those extinct bananas scott refers to make me get all misty-eyed, I will pay top dollar for artisanal banana

xp oh lol moonshine, yes I've seen the designer moonshine and had a lol from that

I said this on another thread, but I get annoyed with stuff where the handcraftedness is marketed as novel when it really isn't, like "Hey, let's take something ordinary like ICE CREAM but make an HIGH QUALITY VERSION with GOOD DAIRY" um that already exists and costs like half as much as your version of it.

sometimes they make weird flavors I guess

that's true. I was pretty ecstatic from momofuku's cerealmilk ice cream tbh

The Haagen Dazs (so authentic it has a made up ethnic-looking name!) "five" series is pretty good and about as mainstream commercial as it gets

They really need to bring back their green tea one

never mind, their website claims that this flavor is still made!

bbl, off to the grocer

the glut of awful, pointless "white whiskies" that you can get now

whatever the fuck this is referring to it made me very glad I live far away from the Big City

― pathos of the unwarranted encore (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Friday, November 4, 2011 11:15 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://deathsdoorspirits.com/pages/spirits/spirits.php
http://www.bullyboydistillers.com/bully-boy-whiskey.html
http://highwest.com/index.php/spirits/high-west-silver-whiskey-western-oat

It’s akin to vodka, but with bolder flavor notes.

looooooooooolllll

Buffalo Trace has one too, iirc

It's basically whiskey before it's been put in a barrel. Some places put it in a barrel overnight so it counts as "whiskey" since there's some minimum requirement for that nomenclature.

noun, noun, noun, noun, and adjective

what's really regrettable is that the notion that beef = the best of the meats is entering the mindspace of countries where culturally that was never the case (like china)

Another problem I have with the "local grass-fed beef" thing is just that it feeds into this notion that we can have whatever we want ethically and sustainably. Some of it is so indulgent -- borderline gluttonous -- and it's like the ethical trappings just excuse that.

Not one mention of vinyl yet in this thread?

i thought the local grass-fed beef thing was less about ethics/sustainability and more about taste/quality. at least i think thats where it originated...

Yeah, and it sets up beef as a luxury/premium good, which I think is fine in the mid term. If the only beef you eat is this premium grass fed stuff, then you're probably only having it once in a while. Eating Hamburger Helper daily as your staple is going to burn through more beef total, right?

(also a health thing, i.e., grass-fed beef doesnt have mad cow disease)

male model/knife-maker in today's times:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/timely-christopher-harth/

CHRIS HARTH IS A NATIVE MINNESOTAN LIVING IN BROOKLYN. HE'S MAKING HAND CRAFTED KNIVES, END GRAIN CUTTING BOARDS AND HARDWOOD CHARCOAL UNDER THE NAME NY CUTLERY. ALL HIS MATERIALS ARE RECLAIMED, THE METAL COMES FROM USED SAW MILL BLADES AND THE HANDLES ARE HARDWOOD SCRAP FROM A FURNITURE MAKERS BIN. HE IS ALSO MAKING CHARCOAL THAT COMES FROM (GLUE FREE) OAK SCRAP. THIS STUFF BURNS HOT AND FAST, THE KIND YOU WANT TO COOK YOUR DRY AGED RIBEYE OVER. ALL GOOD STUFF.

http://www.thewilliambrownproject.com/2011/04/ny-cutlerybrooklyn-ny.html

A sharp education
Everyday I spend working on knives I learn more about being a craftsman. There are tips and tricks one can learn from reading books or watching instructional videos, but there is something physical and internal that can't be put to words when it comes to an action that needs to be repeated thousands of times over to create just one knife. The profiling of a blade, the grind geometry of the cutting edge, the shaping of the handle, the polishing of the steel... it is all meditative and soothing to me on the physical level. My hands, wrists, arms, shoulders, and hips all play a part in the subtle dance that I am refining as I improve my technique at the work bench.

Yesterday I was graced with a visit from Matthew Hranek, the man behind The William Brown Project. He heard about my knives, cutting boards and hardwood charcoal from a mutual friend, Michael Rudin, who spent a lively afternoon enjoying bourbon and venison in my backyard a couple of weeks ago. Matt is one of those fellows that has seen his share of the world and has taken the time to edit his experiences into a lifestyle that is quite admirable. He procures his own wild fish and game, raises heritage breed pigs, frequents flea markets near and far in search of the curiosities that spark his interest, and makes wonderful photos to share on his blog from the experiences.

Matt arrived in the early afternoon while I was profiling a Bowie knife for Miss Amber Doyle of Doyle Mueser. Sparks were flying and I had on my leather apron and goggles. We chatted about our common interests and mutual friend, Michael. It turns out that they traveled to a little fish shack called Lou's a few miles up the shore of Lake Superior from where I grew up in Duluth, MN to photograph the operation. It's a big-small world as I often say. If you find yourself on Scenic Highway 61 make a stop at the smokehouse and get a nice fillet of smoked whitefish and you will be pleased.

The Bowie knife for Amber Doyle is now on the grind geometry phase. This is where the knife gets the angles and attributes that make it cut the way it was intended - both ways, as David Bowie would tell you himself. I am about to start my delicate dance with the knife again today. This is the most critical phase of the process which will dictate whether or not this knife is a success as a user tool. I never thought that the process would feel so rhythmic, and from the perspective of the casual observer it may seem brutal and dangerous, but through my hands, shoulders and hips I sway ever so gently as the steel grinds away revealing a tool that is functional. This is indeed a SLOW dance.

http://www.notquitenigella.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/jpeterman.jpg

He seems to like his job. That's something.

A few days after finishing a foraging knife with a short, curved blade for cutting back toward the thumb, Harth used it himself to gather chanterelles for a delicious ravioli.

looooool the nyt is so trolling us

...a reportedly delicious ravioli.

don't really need a knife to gather mushrooms

What would you use for a weapon if they fought back?

occurs to me that audiophilia is like an advanced version of all this

you mean vinylphilia? there are plenty of audiophiles who swing wildly in the other direction, like a V.U. needle.

keep trying to resist the urge to argue about this but...between knives made by OH NO HIPSTERS!!!1!! and one made by people who aren't being paid a living wage, gimme the oh no hipster knife

nah I mean like Monster™ Cables audiophilia, not so much in regards the hand-made/artisanal sound, but in the pursuit of the truest/most authentic listening experience that is really just conspicuously consuming Veblen good wooden receiver knobs or whatever the balls those people spend their money on

xp seems fair to me aero

also would purchase a children's book entitled "Oh No! Hipsters!"

ok time to go to my local neighborhood artisanal butcher to buy some local free range ground beef (seriously this is what I'm doing now)

keep trying to resist the urge to argue about this but...between knives made by OH NO HIPSTERS!!!1!! and one made by people who aren't being paid a living wage, gimme the oh no hipster knife

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, November 6, 2011 2:23 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

if you don't buy the serially oppressed knife, that person is gonna lose her job and become even more unable to live :(

make sure to pick up some brioche buns xp

btw this ^xp^ is why utilitarianism and consequentialism more generally are complete horseshit

edit his experiences into a lifestyle

this is such a disgusting phrase!

everyone should just buy less stuff, regardless of where it comes from

alternative to 'below-living wage' is not necessarily 'living wage' iirc

everyone should just buy less stuff, regardless of where it comes from
yeah - it's weird to me though that in the artisanal etc mindset there isn't more of a culture of re-use; it's there (see: a trillion etsy shops making use of found/repurposed materials) but like...idk I have this idea that if there were a cultural movement to stop producing shit for a year or two, to just quit making new stuff for a while, it'd be good for everything. I guess if yr position is more extreme ("you don't need more stuff whether it's new or used") then it doesn't matter, but that horse has left the barn in this culture, ppl are gonna consume, the only q is whether it's going to use up more resources or less.

there are things we can do to make environmentally unfriendly consumption more expensive than less-environmentally unfriendly consumption

if people stopped producing shit then you couldn't convert labor into value

capitalism would be ruined

the marxists would win

one of the thing drives me nuts is lamps -- and similarly cheap and simple electrical goods -- being apparently considered unrepairable nowadays, so that you have no choice but to chuck em out when they stop working

millions of non-economists would starve

it's not that they're considered unrepairable, it's that they're cheap enough that it's not even practical to repair it unless it's a really expensive lamp

(sound of 100 ilxor minds churning to come up w/ a good lamp joke)

there are things we can do to make environmentally unfriendly consumption more expensive than less-environmentally unfriendly consumption

yes but most of them involve doing an end-run around democratic processes which puts you in a tight spot, no?

xp @ mark s not just lamps!! when I was a kid there were these big awesome electrical-age TUBE TESTERS at supermarkets, and at shoe repair shops too if I remember right. they were for checking the tubes in your television for whether they were the source of why your TV wasn't working. (presumably also for your radio or amplifier.) present philosophy of "it's cheaper to replace than repair" 1) sucks and 2) is true; I can get a new TV cheaper than I can repair my new-ish TV

yes but most of them involve doing an end-run around democratic processes which puts you in a tight spot, no?

yup, pretty hard to convince a majority of americans that they're not paying enough $ for shit. at the same time we genuinely are overpaying for other things (housing, transit, health care) so even middle class people feel poor. everything's related and fixing those issues is gonna have to happen before we can get people to feel like they should pay more for consumer goods.

you can convert labour into value if decrease production, also marx was right so w/e

i guess my opinion is:

- productivity gains are generally p good for ppl at the bottom since they make goods cheaper and increase wealth
- reverting to pre-industrial means of producing goods is p stupid for that reason
- at the same time many industrial/postindustrial goods dont reflect their 'true' cost since producers take advantage of all sorts of externalities
- if you want to own a tv you should be paying the cost of poisoning the air above shenzen &c
- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

- if you want to own a tv you should be paying the cost of poisoning the air above shenzen &c

lol TVs weren't always made in Shenzen man!

- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

ya can u get on this? we need an answer by like... 100 years ago

we used to poison the air over pittsburgh...toledo...akron.... man those were the days

it's so nice that america's skies don't have to be polluted anymore, we can just outsource it to china

we used to poison the air over pittsburgh...toledo...akron.... man those were the days

who can tell me with a straight face they wouldn't repoison akron & toledo to bring back the glory days of shenzen

shenzhen used to be a nice quiet fishing village. 30 years ago a fisherman would catch a fish.

100% would sacrifice toledo & akron to make that fisherman happy

- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

the key is that 'consumption' includes services and 'goods' that are 1s and 0s. and we should encourage a shift to that type in the long run and in lots of ways it's happening already. otoh is buying an iphone app for $5 better for the world than buying a hamburger for $5? if you just isolate that purchase, yeah, but a. can't isolate that b. I guess we're also more willing to spend money on these 1s and 0s in a world where we can already afford the material goods we want.

idk aero, I guess my point is that if america wants TVs then america should be ready to handle the pollution that comes with it instead of dumping it all elsewhere

it's so nice that america's skies don't have to be polluted anymore, we can just outsource it to china

chinese air pollution already reaches california iirc

Has anyone informed the Minnesota ilxors that they may be untapped reserves of cultural capital? This knife dude seems to have a fair amount of press relating the fact he is from REAL PLACE, MINNESOTA

idk aero, I guess my point is that if america wants TVs then america should be ready to handle the pollution that comes with it instead of dumping it all elsewhere

― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Sunday, November 6, 2011 3:12 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

or rather, that if americans want flatscreen TVs, then hopefully they would not be against paying a higher price so that the waste associated with manufacturing TVs doesn't get improperly dumped into the environment, whether that environment happens to be in china or in toledo

but that would mean TVs would cost more, guess it's okay for poor people in china to suffer from heavy metal poisoning in their land and in their food so that joe sixpack can watch football on his 60" as cheaply as possible

ya can u get on this? we need an answer by like... 100 years ago

ok c u soon

dayo I'm not sure who you're arguing w/. I'd be in favor of heavy enough tariffs to stop China from ruining itself to provide worthless consumer goods to the west, but can you really put that ruin on the west? China had several systems that didn't result in the destruction of China, they had various pluses and minuses; participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind, but I don't think western demand gets to shoulder all the blame for the fate of rural China

participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind

wait what

I think China about thirty years from now will make the worst years under Mao look like a picnic

there really isn't any way to make 30 million people starving to death look like a picnic

hold that thought man!

a key component of a good picnic is making sure that everyone has food

lol max u are on fire today

arguably that is the #1 most important characteristic of a good picnic

ants

picanic baskets

China had several systems that didn't result in the destruction of China, they had various pluses and minuses; participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind, but I don't think western demand gets to shoulder all the blame for the fate of rural China

wait what? I'm as critical of deng xiaoping as anybody but this is just trolling

I do agree though that if china could get into a time machine and go back to mid-qing dynasty living, everybody would probably be better off

right but where are you going to make that time machine, shenzen?

bespoke time machine handcrafted in brooklyn by artisans

dayo I'm not sure who you're arguing w/. I'd be in favor of heavy enough tariffs to stop China from ruining itself to provide worthless consumer goods to the west, but can you really put that ruin on the west?

heavy-tariffs to stop china from letting american businesses make things and sell things to americans is patronizing 'stop-hitting-yourself'-esque logic btw. otoh you can argue that china's currency manipulation is *bad for people in china*.

there isn't an easy answer for 'how do you lift a billion people out of poverty without fucking up the world'. you can blame the west for having fucked up consumption patterns and being way behind the curve when it comes to dealing w/ its own environmental issues and you can blame the chinese government for being very short-sighted when it comes to the real costs of pollution. but tariff wars aren't gonna help anybody in any sense, esp. since any long-term solutions require a lot of international coordination.

man dayo knows his dynasties, qing dynasty even tried to stop footbinding

the qing dynasty was doing pretty well til the british showed up

the qing dynasty world was doing pretty well til the british showed up

heavy-tariffs to stop china from letting american businesses make things and sell things to americans is patronizing 'stop-hitting-yourself'-esque logic btw.

in re: this, what if somebody is actually hitting himself

as long as america is around countries are going to have lots of help w/r/t hitting themselves

isn't there already legislation re: pollutant-heavy manufacturing/processes and disposal of waste etc in the US?- ie the very type of attempt to force companies to pay environmental costs up-front that lamp suggests?

Cos I mean, presumably that's one of the major factors that makes it cheaper to manufacture abroad.

and if you accept that the globalised economy makes it inevitable that developing economies will tend to take on the tasks that become problematic in eg US, are we going to start seeing fair-trade flatscreens?

selling for 4x the price of the regular flatscreen but made out of papaya or something

Or what's the suggestion?

there is more legislation here than china obv, tho generally not anywhere near the realm of 'factory x pays for all its environmental externalities'.

china actually has pretty strict safety laws, its just that nobody follows them and the courts dont enforce anything

strict environmental laws

refreshing and healthy benzene

yeah tbf i hadn't ever assumed 'sufficient' legislation but that underlines the point, really- even with light regulation, the problem just goes elsewhere without solving anything in terms of global impact.

benzene rings, the lord of them all

when they fix things in china they'll just move all the factories to SE asia, when SE asia outlaws they'll just move the factories to the parts of africa that aren't war-torn