craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

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)