tentacuddles:purloinedinpetrograd:A Harvard Woman Figured Out How To 3D Print Makeup From Any Home C

tentacuddles:purloinedinpetrograd:A Harvard Woman Figured Out How To 3D Print Makeup From Any Home Computer, And The Demo Is MindblowingGrace Choi was at Harvard Business School when she decided to disrupt the beauty industry. She did a little research and realized that beauty brands create and then majorly mark up their products by mixing lots of colors.[…]Choi created her own mini home 3D printer, Mink, that will retail for $300 and allow anyone to print makeup by ripping the color code off color photos on the internet. It hooks up to a computer, just like a normal printer. [x]this is it folks. the future is here, and apparently it is going to look goddamn beautiful.BLESS THIS FUCKING WOMAN THO.Here’s A Table from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Control+f “cosmetics” and you’ll see that 134 thousand people in the US work in soap, cleaning compound, and cosmetics manufacturing. Tech like this seems great at first blush, but it would put some of those 134k people out of work, and replace their jobs with… this lady having a monopoly on all cosmetic production tools in the US for the rest of her life, and her children having it after that.The cosmetic industry is hardly generous to its laborers or fair to its consumers, so the promise of tech like this seems an unalloyed good initially; it did to me too. But this “disruptive innovation” narrative is deceptive. Sure, the people who own these companies don’t deserve absurd profits. But what happens to those 134k people they pay to make the stuff they overcharge you for? They still have to make money and provide for themselves and their families: how do they do that when these jobs are gone? Where do they go and what do they do instead? Earlier generations thought purely with their pocketbooks and the result of that is the wage-stagnant and fire-at-will economy we’re all living in today. We have to do better. We have to start thinking through the economic and social implications of our commercial decisions. The proper solution to unfair pay and high product mark-ups isn’t tech that puts people out of work; it’s legislation that restricts and prohibits abusive industrial and commercial practices. I’m not saying tech like this should never be taken up, but if it is going to be accepted it needs to be done in a controlled and responsible, considered way; one that accounts and plans for the livelihoods of those unemployed by it. That doesn’t necessarily mean ~consumer activism~, organized political action and legislation is a better avenue, and it doesn’t necessarily mean re-employment, in a world where comfortable incomes were guaranteed tech like this would only “disrupt” the question of what people do with their day, but there has to be a better way than the haphazard “market driven” approach we’ve taken so far.Replacing hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods with 1 patent-born billionaire is not just a bad trade, it’s a socially fatal one. It’s a trade I feel like we’ve already made too damn many times. There’s gotta be a better way. -- source link
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