Obsoleting Barbie

[Tex]

"""Prices of Mattel Inc (MAT.O) toys like Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels cars have gone up as the company tries to compensate for increasing costs for materials like resin and rising wages in China. more here """


However lets look at obsoleting Mattel and manufacturing firms altogether.... this idea is bigger than rising wages it redefines distribution resources and some

heres what i mean good humans do yourselves and idea mashup and birth me a new idea virus.

"""""File-sharing site The Pirate Bay caused an Internet stir last week when it introduced a new content category called “Physibles,” essentially designed to allow people to pass one another physical objects for download. The term refers to data files that are actually able to become physical objects via 3D printing technology.

Before long, The Pirate Bay said in a blog post, “you will print the spare parts for your vehicles.” """

[YaelTheGreat]

Fucking Awesome.

[cleef]

Pretty amazing but i think a lot of this will depend on the cost of the printers coming down (not sure how many people have £15,000 sitting about) also the cost of the materials used will be a major factor

[1871]

And where will the raw material ingredients for the 3d printers and what they print will come from/ Or the processes used in their extraction?

quote;

No Man Is An Island



SOCIALISM WON’T be got by evolution but by intelligent design, though it would be nice to think there wasan easier way. The political shortcuts turned out tobe circular, but some people never give up hope thattechnology might open up some fast track to thePromised Land.

Of course there has been huge technological progress,but behind each screaming wave-front of optimism trailsthe long, Doppler-shifted whine of hindsight. For all thesmart phones and sushi bars we’re still slaves chained tothe day job, compared to whom the playboys and girls of the Neolithic seem to have enjoyed great diet and health,endless holidays and free art classes. The plough and the printing press were keytechnological developments in two of the most essentialhuman activities of all, production of material goodsand distribution of information. The whole trajectory of capitalism has been towards the ef
fi

ciency and economy of scale of mass production and distribution, together withtheir correlates, state-imposed mass ideologies. When thehorrors of Nazism and Soviet Communism turned peopleoff ‘mass’ concepts, and rising af
inluence meant people couldn’t be fobbed off with production-line uniformity, anew cult of the individual was born.At


first this ‘lifestyle’ capitalism was little more than amarketing scam. We could ‘individually’ commute to ourindividual replica jobs, eat our individual replica food inour individual replica residential boxes, while watchingmass-entertainment on our individual idiot-boxes.Advertisers called us princely consumers and we boughtthe


fllattery along with the products. The more we acquireda bit of individual ‘class’, the more we forgot the collective power of class consciousness. The more the notion of individualism was fostered, the more sheep-like we became. We didn’t mature into a society of individuals, wefractured into an atomised mass, our former commonality too

vulgar

to preserve. Technology is embedding the illusion

Under Sovietrule dissidents were forced to resort to self-publishingtheir own material, a dif

fi

cult and risky business knownas

samizdat,

or

self-made

. The desktop publishing andinternet revolutions have given us all the technologyfor this kind of independent self-expression. But peopleforget we are all products of society and therefore not sovery different, so the upshot of all this self-publishing,blogging, Facebook and supposedlyinteractive Web 2.0 is that we have endedup with in

fi

nite versions of uniformity.Homogenous variety, samizdat

become

same-as-that

.If we don’t see the illusion it’s because we don’t have the attention-span to lookat the big picture but only into a mirror.Instead of opening the doors to

in

fi

nity

we are mostly using the internet to create a narcissistic bubblearound ourselves, a self-promoting solipsism which closes out everyfact or idea which contradictsour own world-view. And theadvertisers are slavering to makeit more so. People [/b]now get differentresults for the same Google searchdue to ‘personality’

fillters they don’teven know about (New Scientist ,23 July). Each person’s

information environment

is determined not onlyby their own conscious likes and dislikes but also by automated trackers deciding what is good for them .Astoundingly, a similar thing could happen in the worldof production, with the development of individual 3Dprinting, now being called by some the second IndustrialRevolution. When the

Socialist Standard first reportedon this (August 2005) it was at an early stage, able toturn out fragile trinkets. Now it is possible to ‘print’ sophisticated equipment using composite materials withcomplex circuitry. The first 3D-printed Unmanned AerialVehicle has just been successfully fl

own (New Scientist ,30 July) and enthusiasts predict that in the future robots will walk out of printers, fully functional with batteriesincluded.If they were only foreseeing a revolution in new researchand development at the lab-bench, the optimists could well be right. The lag between plan and prototype iscertain to decrease by at least an order of magnitude.But no, they are talking about nothing less than the‘democratisation’ of production, just as the

digerati

talkedabout the democratisation of knowledge through theinternet. Even supposing 3D printers one day become ascheap as computers, this is still to confuse democracy, where people act together, with the cult of the individual, where people act alone en masse.While the new parochialism of the internet involves huge waste of heat and storage in order to deliver in

fi

nitelyslight variations of the same thing, so each person under the l l l u s i on of personal choicemay end up printing separately what they could have produced collectively.

This would be like boiling a single serving of rice inseparate pots, one grain at a time.

Capitalism is quitecapable of this sort of stupidity if there’s money in it.If the rich can afford to print whatever they want, itfollows that whatever mass-production still remainsmust exist only to cater for the poor, with all the qualityand variety that implies. The poverty gap could thenbecome unimaginably wide. In response to this, the poormajority might use the technology, with ‘hacked’ designsto get round regulations, to print their own guns andammunition. The most significant aspect of 3D printers is that theycan ‘print’ themselves. They can’t print food or organiccompounds though, or things larger than themselves.If 3D printing is the second industrial revolution, thennanotechnology is potentially the third. Eric Drexler isfamous for his inspirational writing about the possibilitiesof nanotech, but even he overlooked the obvious politicalimplication of a means of production that can reproduceitself. Not only would it abolish material scarcity (whichhas already effectively been done) but also any possible arti
ficial barrier to individual abundance (which certainlyhas not). What worker would consent to slavery whenthey had the means to provide all their material needsthrough a domestic replicating device, which itself couldbe infinitely replicated? Capitalism would collapse,practically overnight.No need to get too excited though. Nobody has comeclose to creating a self-replicating nanodevice, and like nuclear fusion it mayremain permanently years away. Even if it could be done, such a replicator couldrun away with itself and convert theentire Earth into ‘grey goo’. Even if it weremade safe, the ruling class would haveevery reason to ensure that the technology was never developed. Even if they couldn’tsuppress it, material abundance does notimply socialist consciousness any morethan knowledge implies wisdom. It’s nouse to live as a king in an empty palace.One way or another, socialists have still got work to do.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/63815104/Socia...ember-2011

[YaelTheGreat]

Question: How exactley would ou be able to create a barbie, or any other 3D object, using this print out? How do Physibles work?

[taif dhia]

(02-01-2012 11:35 AM)1871 Wrote:  And where will the raw material ingredients for the 3d printers and what they print will come from/ Or the processes used in their extraction?

quote;

No Man Is An Island



SOCIALISM WON’T be got by evolution but by intelligent design, though it would be nice to think there wasan easier way. The political shortcuts turned out tobe circular, but some people never give up hope thattechnology might open up some fast track to thePromised Land.

Of course there has been huge technological progress,but behind each screaming wave-front of optimism trailsthe long, Doppler-shifted whine of hindsight. For all thesmart phones and sushi bars we’re still slaves chained tothe day job, compared to whom the playboys and girls of the Neolithic seem to have enjoyed great diet and health,endless holidays and free art classes. The plough and the printing press were keytechnological developments in two of the most essentialhuman activities of all, production of material goodsand distribution of information. The whole trajectory of capitalism has been towards the ef
fi

ciency and economy of scale of mass production and distribution, together withtheir correlates, state-imposed mass ideologies. When thehorrors of Nazism and Soviet Communism turned peopleoff ‘mass’ concepts, and rising af
inluence meant people couldn’t be fobbed off with production-line uniformity, anew cult of the individual was born.At


first this ‘lifestyle’ capitalism was little more than amarketing scam. We could ‘individually’ commute to ourindividual replica jobs, eat our individual replica food inour individual replica residential boxes, while watchingmass-entertainment on our individual idiot-boxes.Advertisers called us princely consumers and we boughtthe


fllattery along with the products. The more we acquireda bit of individual ‘class’, the more we forgot the collective power of class consciousness. The more the notion of individualism was fostered, the more sheep-like we became. We didn’t mature into a society of individuals, wefractured into an atomised mass, our former commonality too

vulgar

to preserve. Technology is embedding the illusion

Under Sovietrule dissidents were forced to resort to self-publishingtheir own material, a dif

fi

cult and risky business knownas

samizdat,

or

self-made

. The desktop publishing andinternet revolutions have given us all the technologyfor this kind of independent self-expression. But peopleforget we are all products of society and therefore not sovery different, so the upshot of all this self-publishing,blogging, Facebook and supposedlyinteractive Web 2.0 is that we have endedup with in

fi

nite versions of uniformity.Homogenous variety, samizdat

become

same-as-that

.If we don’t see the illusion it’s because we don’t have the attention-span to lookat the big picture but only into a mirror.Instead of opening the doors to

in

fi

nity

we are mostly using the internet to create a narcissistic bubblearound ourselves, a self-promoting solipsism which closes out everyfact or idea which contradictsour own world-view. And theadvertisers are slavering to makeit more so. People [/b]now get differentresults for the same Google searchdue to ‘personality’

fillters they don’teven know about (New Scientist ,23 July). Each person’s

information environment

is determined not onlyby their own conscious likes and dislikes but also by automated trackers deciding what is good for them .Astoundingly, a similar thing could happen in the worldof production, with the development of individual 3Dprinting, now being called by some the second IndustrialRevolution. When the

Socialist Standard first reportedon this (August 2005) it was at an early stage, able toturn out fragile trinkets. Now it is possible to ‘print’ sophisticated equipment using composite materials withcomplex circuitry. The first 3D-printed Unmanned AerialVehicle has just been successfully fl

own (New Scientist ,30 July) and enthusiasts predict that in the future robots will walk out of printers, fully functional with batteriesincluded.If they were only foreseeing a revolution in new researchand development at the lab-bench, the optimists could well be right. The lag between plan and prototype iscertain to decrease by at least an order of magnitude.But no, they are talking about nothing less than the‘democratisation’ of production, just as the

digerati

talkedabout the democratisation of knowledge through theinternet. Even supposing 3D printers one day become ascheap as computers, this is still to confuse democracy, where people act together, with the cult of the individual, where people act alone en masse.While the new parochialism of the internet involves huge waste of heat and storage in order to deliver in

fi

nitelyslight variations of the same thing, so each person under the l l l u s i on of personal choicemay end up printing separately what they could have produced collectively.

This would be like boiling a single serving of rice inseparate pots, one grain at a time.

Capitalism is quitecapable of this sort of stupidity if there’s money in it.If the rich can afford to print whatever they want, itfollows that whatever mass-production still remainsmust exist only to cater for the poor, with all the qualityand variety that implies. The poverty gap could thenbecome unimaginably wide. In response to this, the poormajority might use the technology, with ‘hacked’ designsto get round regulations, to print their own guns andammunition. The most significant aspect of 3D printers is that theycan ‘print’ themselves. They can’t print food or organiccompounds though, or things larger than themselves.If 3D printing is the second industrial revolution, thennanotechnology is potentially the third. Eric Drexler isfamous for his inspirational writing about the possibilitiesof nanotech, but even he overlooked the obvious politicalimplication of a means of production that can reproduceitself. Not only would it abolish material scarcity (whichhas already effectively been done) but also any possible arti
ficial barrier to individual abundance (which certainlyhas not). What worker would consent to slavery whenthey had the means to provide all their material needsthrough a domestic replicating device, which itself couldbe infinitely replicated? Capitalism would collapse,practically overnight.No need to get too excited though. Nobody has comeclose to creating a self-replicating nanodevice, and like nuclear fusion it mayremain permanently years away. Even if it could be done, such a replicator couldrun away with itself and convert theentire Earth into ‘grey goo’. Even if it weremade safe, the ruling class would haveevery reason to ensure that the technology was never developed. Even if they couldn’tsuppress it, material abundance does notimply socialist consciousness any morethan knowledge implies wisdom. It’s nouse to live as a king in an empty palace.One way or another, socialists have still got work to do.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/63815104/Socia...ember-2011

thats some deep wisdom! reminds me of an adbusters article....

[Tex]

(02-02-2012 05:56 AM)YaelTheGreat Wrote:  Question: How exactley would ou be able to create a barbie, or any other 3D object, using this print out? How do Physibles work?

1865 Question: How exactly will the cotton be picked if we dont have slaves, How exactly will we send video messages with a fax machine thingy?

All good question at one point in time Yael but your brain is not concerned with content, just a new context and birth me some solutions.

Heres a possibility on How Physibles might work?

[1871]

I can see how the ability to create facsimiles by machine will cut down travel time, make things easier, etc. It seems vague as yet. But obsolete slavery? Cleefs comment still stands.
How does this 'obsolete' slavery? I take your point re: the production lines.It could be said that putting people out of work obsoletes (wage) slavery by replacing it with slavery without wages so there is a technology for the richest - ie: for a rich class who can afford the technology. In Africa the mobile phone revolutionised peoples lives for the better, but worldwide poverty hasn't been eliminated. I am definitely not rejecting the idea that technology has and will improve things but I am questioning the idea that its technology that necessarily improves things - it could equally be said that it is technology that has ruined things - just remember the environmental damage, or that our seas are full of waste plastic - I also have a deep unease that GM/altered crops are a disaster in waiting - I hope it isn't true but I think that there's so much evidence of the damage that technology has created.

I am wondering if the belief in the technology being the solution to the planets problems is necessarily true - I'm not advocating anti technology - but that post industrial revolutions where technologies improved leaps and bounds also saw massive conflict, world wars and environmental destruction. Why is it necessarily that new technologies are a panacea and not merely a different (new?) way of dressing up the old system?

[Tex]

Thank you Yeal and 1871 and all good humans contributing to this post, can we find common ground in this FANTASTICALLY written below article by Seth Godin.

Start;
The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiencies are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping... in the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expectations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything

End.

[taif dhia]

(02-02-2012 01:54 PM)1871 Wrote:  it could equally be said that it is technology that has ruined things - just remember the environmental damage, or that our seas are full of waste plastic - I also have a deep unease that GM/altered crops are a disaster in waiting - I hope it isn't true but I think that there's so much evidence of the damage that technology has created.

disaster in waiting? more like disaster now. just google "Gmos super weeds" that shit alone will end industrial agriculture as we know it. as we speak, they are developing a new generating of transgenic crops to be resistant to 2-4-D (agent orange), as a last ditch effort against these massive weeds, even though there is massive evidence of birth defects w/ that herbicide (didn't they learn their lesson? the herbicide tolerant genes will just transfer over to the weeds within a few generations). then theres the scientific evidence ( that wasn't funded by big ag) of the health issues.... allergic reactions, mineral uptake blockages, organ failure, sterility, etc, etc.... ( trust me i could go off on this subject, one of my specialties, should probably start a thread bout it sometime) yeah, every tech has its pros and cons, im not anti technology but some cons outweigh the pros so heavily that i begin to question the sanity of those who control the application. the genetic pollution of GMOs will be around longer than even our nuclear waste..... its amazing how many people of scientific backgrounds are in complete denial about this, and react quite irrationally and emotionally when asked pretty simple questions about this tech.... there is a lot of corruption ( by big ag) of the scientific institutions, peer review magazines, NPR, etc on this subject.

[1871]

Quote: taif

disaster in waiting? more like disaster now. just google "Gmos super weeds" that shit alone will end industrial agriculture as we know it. as we speak, they are developing a new generating of transgenic crops to be resistant to 2-4-D (agent orange), as a last ditch effort against these massive weeds, even though there is massive evidence of birth defects w/ that herbicide (didn't they learn their lesson? the herbicide tolerant genes will just transfer over to the weeds within a few generations).

Shit! !!! No I didnt know that !!

This sounds like your area of knowledge taif dhia - yes you should put up a thread about it. I never heard of that before - what knowledge I have on the issue is limited to factory farming and Monsanto. Though I think we would derail this thread by talking about GMO's I think the assumption that technology is always an advancement usually leaves out any kind of social or political analysis of whether in reality it doesnt keep the disaster going but in another way.

The 3D printer seems to have specific applications. The guy ioperating the machine here was actually printed from resin from one of the machines himself;






Tex - Seth Godins idea doesnt stand up. Film-makers for instance can produce work on the computer but monetisation out of it isnt widespread on the internet - people still rely on cinema and television is (still) either corporate or centrally(Govt.) owned and regulated. Some uses obviously the internet has created (in creation of ideas, marketting,etc )but in his article there is that 'sink or swim' philosophy Ive heard before - coupled with vagueries that leave it to conjecture.

The recent SOPA debacle is istructive in this. Massive entertainment corporations with closed shop practices and monopolies on distribution and exhibition fight to protect billion dollar profits fight to protect their market. Why do you think this is?

[Tex]

"""""people will soon be able to download files of physical objects and print them out at home. Although being able to print out a new mug or toothbrush at home sounds magical, I said that there would surely be copyright problems that occur as a result of this technology’s going mainstream.

This theory struck oil this week when the Pirate Bay, a notorious peer-to-peer file-sharing Web site that is a source of free copyrighted music and movies, said it was creating a new download section on its site that would enable people to freely take files a 3-D printer can recreate into physical things.

In a blog post, the Pirate Bay Web site declared its entrance into a new copyright battle thusly: “We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles.”

Physibles? O.K. But what makes the declaration by the Pirate Bay different from other copyright issues is that some of the objects people upload to the site — and others then download — might not actually break copyright laws.

In my November column, titled “The 3-D Printing Free-for-All,” I spoke with Michael Weinberg, a senior staff lawyer with Public Knowledge, a Washington digital advocacy group, who explained that copyright law did not always apply to recreating physical objects.

Mr. Weinberg said that because of old copyright rules, recreating an object that is considered “useful” is not actually a copyright violation. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected,” he said in the interview. A useful object may be patentable, but we are talking about copyrighted plans.

Of course the Pirate Bay isn’t the first Web site to offer the ability to download files that can print objects. Web sites like Thingiverse, a free online site that offers schematics of more than 15,000 objects, have been around for some time. The announcement by the Pirate Bay will bring this issue a lot more scrutiny and, I dare say, heated talk.

As a result, we could be on the verge of a new series of legal battles centered on people who download 3-D files. """"""""""""