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The Knife Maker

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Re: The Knife Maker

#91

Post by sliverstorm »

patio11 wrote: post #33

I'm torn between "This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him." and "The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion." (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc. This topic makes me positively Marxist. There…

I'm torn between dearly loving spending my time on crafts such as this, and being unable to give a strong rebuttal to your criticisms of the handmade movement.

Re: The Knife Maker

#92

Post by bryanlarsen »

culturestate wrote: post #48
apechai wrote: post #19

Beautiful knives. I hope the handmade movement really takes off. Maybe people could consume less but unique artifacts that have a real story behind them rather than accumulating mountains of mass produced, generic stuff that ends up in a trash heap a couple of years later.

There is a happy medium with mass production - the main issue is that many people (in my observation) no longer value quality equally to price, e.g. the cheapest pot from WalMart will do, and when it chips or warps next year we'll just spend $15 on another one instead of buying a single $50 version that will last. One of the greatest lessons that I've ever learned in business is that you shouldn't spend extravagantly…

In many cases the $15 pot from WalMart is better than the $50 pot. It's thinner than the $50 pot, so it reacts to adjustments in temperature a lot faster. The coating is simple thin Teflon, so it wears out a lot faster than the $50 pot, but it actually has better non-stick properties than the $50 pot.

I've got expensive pots, but the skillets that I use the most are a $5 teflon/aluminum skillet I got from Loblaws that I replace every 6 months, and a $15 cast iron skillet I got from a flea market that I properly seasoned and I expect to last 100 years.

Re: The Knife Maker

#93

Post by JabavuAdams »

freemarketteddy wrote: post #85
JabavuAdams wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing works. This is an example of marketing based on authenticity. Regarding perfection: machines are much more capable of perfection re: manufacturing than humans. Where I think we get confused is that in the past only corporations had the capital to mass-produce, and they have an incentive to "race to the bottom" in terms of production cost. Although it's not the goal, usually quality suffers as a result. So,…

> It's clear to me that the goods manufactured by passionate, talented, (and largely under-capitalized) craftspeople are inferior to what could be made by automation. That is not true for all goods....I cannot forsee a computer making a better painting than a good human artist in the near future....In fact I cant even forsee a computer understanding what a good painting actually is in the near future...This holds tru…

I can foresee software being able to discern good paintings from bad based purely on supervised learning from examples, with today's technology. I.e. humans label paintings as good or not good and the machine learns to extrapolate from this. Is there a consensus among humans about what makes a painting good, though? Perhaps we could settle on well-made. I.e. I may not like an artifact but I can agree that it's well made.

Creating good paintings seems like it should be doable, but take a couple/few decades.

Music should be a lot easier, as music is a much simpler signal than images. I'll probably start with music.

Making maille: http://www.mailleartisans.org/articles/articledisplay.cgi?ke...

Rolling plate armour edges: http://www.ageofarmour.com/education/armour_rolled_edges1.ht...

Armour reading list: http://www.ageofarmour.com/instock/books.html

Machine Learning: http://www.ml-class.org/

AI Composer: http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/09/music-created-by-learni...

Re: The Knife Maker

#94

Post by ctdonath »

spacemanaki wrote: post #49
patio11 wrote: post #33

I'm torn between "This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him." and "The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion." (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc. This topic makes me positively Marxist. There…

"functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion" I haven't actually used this guy's knives. But I've used cheap knives and I've cut myself on cheap, dull knives that don't hold their edge. And I've used moderately expensive knives. It's night and day. Cheap knives just aren't functionally equivalent. The same can be said about coffee, chocolate and other fair trade stuff. Ground Maxwell coffee that…

Indeed. "Functionally equivalent" all too often misses the point.

Endless arguments have been had over Apple computers vs. "functionally equivalent" computers for far lower costs ... funny thing is, it's Apple that has achieved "most valuable company worldwide period" status, showing customers see something superior in addition to the standard simplistic comparison charts.

Ditto cars. For years I wondered "what is it about BMWs and other German cars? ok, they're built nice, but really - why?" Then I drove a Mercedes on the Autobahn. Sometimes you just can't quantify in simple charts the difference between "can do" vs. "excellent" - but customers demand and pay for it.

Coffee? Snob here. Haven't gone so far as roasting my own, but have gone thru endless varieties, roasts, and makers to settle on palatable superiority.

Beer? No, it's NOT an acquired taste. Bavarian brews bought & imbibed in Bavaria are 100x better than the canned swill here.

But of course, the cheap & premium stuff are considered "functionally equivalent" by the rabble. Let them be content in their ignorance.

Re: The Knife Maker

#95

Post by onemoreact »

spacemanaki wrote: post #89
onemoreact wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between a premium brand, and a premium brand that promotes fair trade. As a friend used to work in a supermarket used to say, when the oranges got a little old we would relabel them as organic and increase the price. Note: I buy organic food, but I try and verify it's a bettor product before it's a habit. Otherwise it's vary easy to spend more money on something you like less.

> There is a difference between a premium brand, and a premium brand that promotes fair trade. That's true, but when it comes to coffee, in my experience the two overlap a lot.

Sure, I am not a coffee drinker, but I can see where they might overlap a lot. I am just suggesting that the kind of things you do to get great coffee might enable you to call it free trade coffee, but that does not mean simply buying free trade coffee means it's great coffee.

Or more generally beware of the hype cycle. It starts with people that believe in the product and add quality in areas that are important but less noticeable. Then get's taken over by people that find out they can increase their markup by ticking off some check boxes. Until, all those hidden values are lost and all your left with is the minimum required to pass the test.

Re: The Knife Maker

#96

Post by rmc »

mapleoin wrote: post #12

This is the most inspirational/life-changing video I've seen all year. I really think that there is a huge amount of stuff that we could start building or making locally, individually with skill, craft and dedication. I would love to be able to work with my hands in a workshop, learning to make unique and masterful things from a master craftsmanship instead of sitting for 8 hours a day in the office dealing with thin…

You investigate if there are any hackerspaces near you. They are a modern incarnation of the teaching each other & learning things. Probably a bit more electronic & technical aimed, and less traditional crafts, but they would be interested in traditional crafts. My local space has a woodwork room.

Re: The Knife Maker

#97

Post by theThirdMan »

dangrover wrote: post #88
mapleoin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that fair trade coffee benefits "the white man" rather than the producers in the third-world country? That's exactly the opposite of what fair trade means. Also, hand-made isn't fighting against capitalism, it's fighting against mass-production, sweat-shops and machine-people jobs like the ones portrayed on Chaplin's City Lights or even Discovery Channel's How It's Made .

No, but the price difference between buying normal and fair trade (as a consumer) is much larger than the price difference between the underlying coffee crop used in each. Tim Harford wrote about this: http://timharford.com/2008/04/business-life-fair-trade-or-fo... In some cases, he says, fair trade is 10X the margin! Fair trade exists to segment the market and collect more consumer surplus (more than it exists to im…

If anyone would like to read more on the externalities of fair trade:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj27n1/cj27n1-9.pdf

Re: The Knife Maker

#98

Post by ahlatimer »

freemarketteddy wrote: post #85
JabavuAdams wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketing works. This is an example of marketing based on authenticity. Regarding perfection: machines are much more capable of perfection re: manufacturing than humans. Where I think we get confused is that in the past only corporations had the capital to mass-produce, and they have an incentive to "race to the bottom" in terms of production cost. Although it's not the goal, usually quality suffers as a result. So,…

> It's clear to me that the goods manufactured by passionate, talented, (and largely under-capitalized) craftspeople are inferior to what could be made by automation. That is not true for all goods....I cannot forsee a computer making a better painting than a good human artist in the near future....In fact I cant even forsee a computer understanding what a good painting actually is in the near future...This holds tru…

No, computers aren't very good at creating unique things without explicit instruction on how to do so. But they are very good at replicating things to an exacting standard. In the case of a painting, a computer could probably make an exact replica of an already existing painting far better than any human artist could.

In the case of knives, a computer could make a copy so exacting that it would be indiscernible from any of the knives this guy produced if given the instruction and materials to do so. The only thing that would give the computer made knives away would be that they would be too perfect (if perfect is measured by how close it falls to the original), while the knives produced by hand will all have inconsistencies because they were made by something that isn't precise to a micrometer.

Speaking of which, that's part of what I think drives the hand-made movement: you're buying something unique. Even if that particular artist made a hundred of them, there are no two exactly alike.

Re: The Knife Maker

#99

Post by Zak »

rmc wrote: post #72
sliverstorm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the handmade movement extravagantly wasteful? The main resource added in handmade prodcuts is time, and unlike helium, crude oil and heavy metals, time is not a scarce resource we risk using up.

Time can be used up. We all have a finite number of hours. Everyone dies.

Time must be used up.

You don't get to just stop using your time until you have something in particular you want to use it for. If making something by hand is rewarding to you, and someone else will pay you for it then it's probably a good use of your time.

Re: The Knife Maker

#100

Post by rdl »

mc32 wrote: post #78
patio11 wrote: post #33

I'm torn between "This guy clearly enjoys his work, bully for him." and "The handmade movement is an extravagantly wasteful alternative to a factory in China to give rich white people an opportunity to demonstrate their social superiority over people who use functionally equivalent objects produced in an efficient fashion." (c.f. organic food, fair trade coffee, etc etc. This topic makes me positively Marxist. There…

I like positively middle class factory produced Global knives. That said, to me, this movement is just an extension of the "Home Depot"/DIY effect --nothing more. It's not egotistical whites or egotistical Japanese who make hand-crafted goods only because they can afford to. It's people who enjoy craft for the sake of craft, rather than a show of superiority.

If you want to go beyond (upper-middle) class with Global, you can go to Japan to buy the only-in-Japan Global-Pro line. It's hardened more (and thus more prone to chipping or breaking if abused), but even better than the regular Global series for most kitchen tasks.
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