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 Genoside07 wrote:
I have worked in plastic packaging manufacturing business for the last 20+ years so I know a few things about plastics; I personally don't know to many of you and have no way of stopping someone from hurting themselves. But how many of us really wear safety glasses, dust masks, rubber gloves, etc every single time we work with our miniatures? I am not saying every single knock off miniature will hurt you, but extended exposure to some chemicals can cause liver and/or kidney damage. And I am surprised to hear someone tested the materials, because when we send anything out to private labs it usually costs a few hundred dollars, enough to buy a ton forge world stuff. So is getting cheap miniatures worth it?? That's not my call.. Its all about want and need. But if someone is already breaking the law by counterfeiting; do you think they are insuring the resin is cured properly or safe materials are used?

It's not counterfeiting, as they aren't passing them off as genuine.

What materials are there that would be hazardous under normal hobbying conditions that would do the job? How toxic would they be in the small amounts of material that are present in even a relatively large model like a tank or Knight? Would they be sufficiently poisonous that they could still do harm once sealed under primer, several layers of paint and probably a varnish coat (or two?)

I'm not debating that even "proper" resin is potentially toxic, but if one isn't casting it personally, I'm really struggling to see any danger at the levels of exposure that a typical hobbyist will be exposed to vs so,some who casts commercially for years or decades.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Not unless there's some cultural changes, which can happen, I wouldn't be holding my breath though.

What a completely jingoistic idea to express. Much more appropriate to expect the world to conform to a Western moral code than realize the world is a large place chuck full of different concepts of morality.

Instead of shaking fists angrily at China when their culture is at odds, try not supporting it. If countries that find their behavior reprehensible would stop doing business with them, there would be no problem.

I'll see your jingoism and raise you a hint of naïveté.

Sure, individual consumers could stop buying Chinese made product, which in turn would pressure companies into stopping buying their goods from Chinese factories, but the reality is that a source of cheap labour (and therefore cheap goods) is vital to the global economy, and it is currently China's turn.

The world could no more stop buying stuff from China than it could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow. It will continue until the Chinese economy develops to the point where it is no longer viable in this role, and then it will be someone else's turn (likely an African nation, or possibly South America.)

If one, as an individual, cares enough to boycott Chinese product, then the only thing that really gets achieved is a sense of doing what one feels is right. The odds of it making much of a difference is as likely as a thread created to call for a boycott of GW actually working.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
A machine will never replace a doctor truly. First machines can't design experiments. And can't anticipate everything.
But at least my job is safe, I doubt Cps worker will be replaced by robots........hopefully.

And that would be just wishful thinking.

We are about ten years away (probably less) from an AI that is human equivalent.

And a Doctor's job is not as complex, in terms of what they actually do as people think.

It is sort of like why a computer was able to beat Chess so early on.

A doctor's job is really just stockpiling large numbers of outcomes, and then cross referencing for a diagnosis.

And IBM's Watson does this far better than a human ever could.

I have been friends with most of they big names in Artificial Intelligence for around a decade now, and were it not for being slowed by a disability, I would now be in graduate school studying cybernetics. Google's Director of Engineering has told me that they will have a human level AI probably by 2020. My own studies (even though late in life in that respect...) are on augmenting humans so that we can keep up with the machines.

The only problem is that even will with augmented humans, we will still be more expensive and less reliable for almost all jobs than are machines.

As for CPS workers being replaced by Robots, China and Japan are working toward that goal even faster than is the USA (Although Google's Acquisition of Boston Dynamics is likely to alter that equilibrium somewhat), and it is likely to happen sooner than you think.

Dr. Ron Arkin at Georgia Tech has written a book about why many jobs that we tend to think of as being "forbidden' to robots would actually be better served by being done by robots (Soldiers, Prison Guards, Cops, CPS workers, ..... His list is incredibly long). He literally wrote the book for the US development of Autonomous Military Robots (armed and unarmed).

And he is not alone in pointing out these things.

And, as I was pointing out above, we need to be especially concerned about this, because, even in cases where robots might do a better job, as Dr. Sherry Turkle at MIT has pointed out in her work on the social implications of technology, while robots might be able to do a better job than humans in these roles in terms of the vast majority of metrics, there still remain social costs for replacement that go beyond just economics.

But it is economics that is predominantly driving this replacement, social costs be damned.

In terms of piracy.... We have our civilization being threatened to be pirated by automation, leaving humans with little to do.

That could be either the best, or the worst thing that ever happened to us, depending upon how we react.

MB

Yep. In the 1800's things were made in Britain and New England because it was cheap and there was capital. Then in the 1900's it was America as a whole and then Germany and Japan got in on the act because again those places were cheap post war and produced quality goods. Now those three countries can't do it as cheaply but still make quality goods and its moved on to China and other places like Vietnam for cheap. Then it'll be the next country. Eventually everyone becomes better off. The end.

I CA quite frankly see a ban on AI.

 Azreal13 wrote:
I'll see your jingoism and raise you a hint of naïveté.

Sure, individual consumers could stop buying Chinese made product, which in turn would pressure companies into stopping buying their goods from Chinese factories, but the reality is that a source of cheap labour (and therefore cheap goods) is vital to the global economy, and it is currently China's turn.

The world could no more stop buying stuff from China than it could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow. It will continue until the Chinese economy develops to the point where it is no longer viable in this role, and then it will be someone else's turn (likely an African nation, or possibly South America.)

If one, as an individual, cares enough to boycott Chinese product, then the only thing that really gets achieved is a sense of doing what one feels is right. The odds of it making much of a difference is as likely as a thread created to call for a boycott of GW actually working.

You kind of missed my point. I don't expect people to stop buying cheap, made in China goods just as I don't expect people to suddenly realize that the way that they were reared and the culture they originate from are not the golden bastion of purity that all should aspire to emulate.

Ah, ok, the bit where you said that people should stop doing business with China threw me off.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
A machine will never replace a doctor truly. First machines can't design experiments. And can't anticipate everything.
But at least my job is safe, I doubt Cps worker will be replaced by robots........hopefully.

I forgot to include this:

http://www.wired.com/2009/04/newtonai/

Computers have been able to design experiments for some time now.

My own field of study (Systems Theory - Computational & Systems Biology) has basically codified the means of creating automated Systems Analysis and Modeling.

We are basically in the end-game of our current computing paradigm, not to mention way-of-life.

This is why we are having so many disorienting issues crop up like miniature piracy, where the technology to do so has become so inexpensive, and easily available that anyone can produce what used to be specialty items.

And we wrestle with the peripheral issues of morality concerning these changes, dancing around, in an effort to ignore the elephant in the room, the central issues that must be confronted.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Col. Tartleton wrote:
Yep. In the 1800's things were made in Britain and New England because it was cheap and there was capital. Then in the 1900's it was America as a whole and then Germany and Japan got in on the act because again those places were cheap post war and produced quality goods. Now those three countries can't do it as cheaply but still make quality goods and its moved on to China and other places like Vietnam for cheap. Then it'll be the next country. Eventually everyone becomes better off. The end.

This isn not true while a periphery remains.

We are likely to see an end to the requirement for labor before Africa becomes the periphery of manufacturing.

MB


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I CA quite frankly see a ban on AI.

That will never happen, as it would be nearly impossible to identify.

Plus the term "Artificial" Intelligence is a misnomer. The intelligence is just as real as ours.

It would just exist in/on a different substrate, which might not be inorganic (in other words, it could be just as organic as our brain, simply better optimized).

Ted Berger at UCS has effectively solved most of the issues surrounding creating prosthetic neural appliances, which means that he could, in theory, construct a wholly prosthetic brain.

Combine this with the work of Henry Markham's Blue Brain (and successors), and Dharmedra Modha's SyNAPSE, and you could built a synthetic brain that vastly outperformed our own.

MB

BeAfraid wrote:
This is why we are having so many disorienting issues crop up like miniature piracy, where the technology to do so has become so inexpensive, and easily available that anyone can produce what used to be specialty items.

No is isn't, because miniature piracy has nothing to do with modern technology. Recasts are made with the same old resin casting techniques everyone has been using for decades. The only difference between recasting in 1970 and recasting in 2015 is that the internet has allowed a shift from "I know a guy who knows a guy" to Chinese businesses openly advertising their recasts on ebay.

So since the cost of recasts will always be cheaper than buying legitimate Forge World models, what would actually motivate people buying recasts to buy the real thing instead?

 Bookwrack wrote:
So since the cost of recasts will always be cheaper than buying legitimate Forge World models, what would actually motivate people buying recasts to buy the real thing instead?

Well, there is always the minor possibility that the person is scamming you. If you buy from Forge World you don't have to worry that you might have just given your credit card away or that you'll end up with a piece of junk. Forge Will at the very least replace any defective product. No such guarantee from a guy in China.

 Bookwrack wrote:
what would actually motivate people buying recasts to buy the real thing instead?

They seriously need to up their quality control. Not to mention join the rest of the world and stop doing things through fax and phone.

 agnosto wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Not unless there's some cultural changes, which can happen, I wouldn't be holding my breath though.

What a completely jingoistic idea to express. Much more appropriate to expect the world to conform to a Western moral code than realize the world is a large place chuck full of different concepts of morality.

Instead of shaking fists angrily at China when their culture is at odds, try not supporting it. If countries that find their behavior reprehensible would stop doing business with them, there would be no problem.

What? I feel like insulting you but that would be against the rules.

I never said they should change I never said they would change I never said I'm shaking my fist at them, don't put words in my mouth. I was simply commenting on the fact "it would never change" as being "well it could, if there was a cultural change".

I won't deny that I don't think a knock-off culture is a desirable one, but don't make gak up that I never said and then attribute it to me, tyvm.

 Bookwrack wrote:
So since the cost of recasts will always be cheaper than buying legitimate Forge World models, what would actually motivate people buying recasts to buy the real thing instead?

FW could easily narrow the gap in price and quality enough to make the risk, long waiting times, hassles with Engrish and stress of dealing with customs not worth it.

More importantly, they could narrow it enough so that customers wouldn't feel like they're being ripped off, which makes piracy really easy to justify to oneself.

For example, Anvil Industry stuff is, to my knowledge, also all produced in the UK yet costs pretty much half of what FW charges for kits of comparable size and quality. So it's clearly feasible to charge less.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 Genoside07 wrote:
Just a word of warning, China doesn't have as many safety regulations like most other countries; Your major concern should be, what is the materials to make these?; It could be something very toxic and make lead of years past look like nothing. Add on top of a guy working out of his garage using what he has on hand; Might end up in the hospital and loose a few fingers from a cheap miniature.

Or, by applying Occam's Razor, it could simply be resin. Resin is not expensive, there is little room for using some cheap, more toxic, alternative, plus it is poor business practice to kill your customers.

Frankly the whole "Chinese recasts will poison you" thing, and I'm not specifically attacking you, it is something that gets brought up every time this subject gets broached, more or less, smacks of a scare story trotted out by the uninformed and those with a vested interest.

The problem is that there are nuggets of (very scary) truth amongst the scare stories.

Two scares I remember in the states with chinese produced goods was a powdered baby milk contamination that had lots of chemicals and materials found in wood flooring laminate in it, and pet food that had toxic filler mixed in with it.

There is currently a laminate flooring scandal with lumber liquidators that the Chinese produced and assembled wood flooring is giving off enough volatile organic carbons to make air quality inside some claimants in Nevada's home technically considered of a quality unsafe to breath.



In short, yes you're probably mostly fine. However the deviations where Occam's doesn't work are fething scary. I don't blame people for not buying chinese products that aren't hyper regulated through several layers of corporate oversight and regulation. It's not perfect as the above examples prove, but its better than one off garage businesses like a recaster. Caveat emptor.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
For example, Anvil Industry stuff is, to my knowledge, also all produced in the UK yet costs pretty much half of what FW charges for kits of comparable size and quality. So it's clearly feasible to charge less.

Yes, but Anvil have a slower release rate, don't employ figure painters or traditional artists and, until recently, didn't publish rules (and those were Kickstarted).

I've never had a quality problem with FW (apart from slightly bent barrels).


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Haight wrote:
The problem is that there are nuggets of (very scary) truth amongst the scare stories.

A friend of mine got some Grot Tanks off eBay. When he opened the box they stunk of solvents. After a week of washing/scrubbing/soaking they still stunk of solvents so he threw them out rather than risk anything. I saw (and smelt) them - they looked OK but were very brittle and an off-white/yellow resin.

As with everything else in this world, there are professional, competent and trustful recasters, and there are ones who are not.

I've hold recasted models in my hands and never saw, felt nor smelled anything suspicious about them, always looked like pretty inocuous resin (in diverse kinds, colors and qualities).

You just have to be careful regarding who you do business with. Tip: the cheapest seller tends not to be the best one.

 BrookM wrote:
Not to mention join the rest of the world and stop doing things through fax and phone.

Forge World (and GW for that matter), are hurting themselves by not having an active social media arm. Emails and Newsletters is all they have, and I wish they did more. However, you are off base with this statement. I just logged into my FW account and see that I've made 16 orders since September 2010.

I order Forge World from my computer. No faxes or phone calls required. Now I can even use paypal.
I've only ever talked to someone at FW at Conventions, and they didn't try to pass me any Flavor Aid.
I've never had to fax anyone anything.
The 1 time I had an issue with an order, it took 2 emails. 1 email to explain the issue, and 1 email to thank them for correcting the issue.

Brook is specifically referring to their free shipping promotions, which over the last few years, while everyone else and his dog simply have a voucher code entry at the checkout, have required, at least under certain circumstances, people to fax their order through.

It is a thing.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Brook is specifically referring to their free shipping promotions, which over the last few years, while everyone else and his dog simply have a voucher code entry at the checkout, have required, at least under certain circumstances, people to fax their order through.

It is a thing.

Ah. That's pretty dumb.

To return to the toxin fears, it really sounds like some people are letting their paranoia get the better of them.

Yes, there were issues with baby powder, and other products too I'm sure, but to use those as a reason not to buy a completely different product from totally different people isn't really logical. I mean, there's that old conspiracy theory about car makers calculating the cost of compensation for causing deaths against the cost of a recall to fix dangerously faulty cars, does that mean I shouldn't buy a stereo from that country? Should I not drink coke because cigarettes can give you cancer?

Equally "they smelled a bit different, so I threw them away" while perfectly understandable, is an emotional, not logical, reaction. I'm pretty sure the number of things that smell and pose no risk to health far outnumber the things that do, and, again, it is important to differentiate between "toxic if you do something weird like eat it or sleep with it at night" and "toxic if you handle it and treat it like any other model."

Plus if this were a realistic problem to be worried about, then given the sheer quantity of stuff that China makes it should therefore be happening more often, no?

 Sigvatr wrote:

 DarkTraveler777 wrote:


Azreal, you speak with certainty that fear of poisonous resins from China/Russia is a non-issue. Care to share your knowledge on why you think the safety of those materials are beyond questioning? I'd even open this question up to anyone else in the thread that is qualified to answer it. Concerns over toxic materials has kept me from purchasing non-counterfeit resin models Russia and China in the past so this is an area I'd like to learn more about.

As we have a little daughter, we had our stock of FW stuff checked. Resin (or rather: in general, production quality) used had a lower quality than comparable GW models and toxicity levels were slightly higher, but still far from being actually toxic. Stuff checked were a Giant Squigg, Squigg Gobbla, Fire Elemental, Tomb Stalker, 6 Sentry Pylons and 2 Pylons. Bought from 2 different retailers.

Checked? By whom? How much did that cost?

To be honest, the most disturbing thing in this business is that copies are more often of higher quality than the original (talking about the pieces: better molded, less bubble/gap troubles, ...). And they are cheaper.

Sure, piracy is bad, but I believe there is still something wrong with how Forgeworld handle their products. IP aside, they shouldn't be so expensive while being sometimes a true horror to build.

But then again, Forgeworld customers are way too lenient with them. I can understand why they can get upset when they realize someone in China can give them the same product but with better quality for a lower price. It's like rubbing in their face the fact they did pay a lot for nothing (or worse, for something of a crapper quality).

Even more if the pirates act very professionnal. They did change a lot over the years.

 Sarouan wrote:
To be honest, the most disturbing thing in this business is that copies are more often of higher quality than the original (talking about the pieces: better molded, less bubble/gap troubles, ...). And they are cheaper.

Sure, piracy is bad, but I believe there is still something wrong with how Forgeworld handle their products.

I find the phenomenon of how a later generation copy is better than the original somewhat magical. Truly magical. Amazing people those Chinese!

The one recast item i have in my possession - a torso, which I've acuired via roundabout means - is poor quality, took a lot of work to fix. It's from one of the better-known sellers I believe (but not the more recent expensive seller who says all the other Chinese resin is poor quality and toxic). It's fine, allowed me to get a good model using a bunch of other bits which would otherwise have been useless.

But I can't help thinking that those promoting recasts are even more prone to hyperbole than the gwombles or whatever the current derogatory term is...

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

But I can't help thinking that those promoting recasts are even more prone to hyperbole than the gwombles or whatever the current derogatory term is...

Depends from which you are buying. You have to be aware the times when copies always meant bad quality are in the past.

Now, there are people who act more "professionnal" and use the new technologies to make their copies.

I saw quite a lot of them and talked with "bad players" who bought to some "known" pirates with "good reputation" (yeah, it sounds strange). That's definitely another league we have there.


But then, you can also close your eyes if you like it better that way. Will not change the fact it will still exist.

 Azreal13 wrote:

It's not counterfeiting, as they aren't passing them off as genuine.

How many of these recasters are specifically stating that the models you are bidding on are recasts?

Edit note:
That's not an attempt at "Gotcha!" posting or anything. I'm really curious, as I don't browse feeBay at all and am wondering what people consider necessary for the "passing them off as genuine" caveat to have been met.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 agnosto wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Not unless there's some cultural changes, which can happen, I wouldn't be holding my breath though.

What a completely jingoistic idea to express. Much more appropriate to expect the world to conform to a Western moral code than realize the world is a large place chuck full of different concepts of morality.

Instead of shaking fists angrily at China when their culture is at odds, try not supporting it. If countries that find their behavior reprehensible would stop doing business with them, there would be no problem.

What? I feel like insulting you but that would be against the rules.

I never said they should change I never said they would change I never said I'm shaking my fist at them, don't put words in my mouth. I was simply commenting on the fact "it would never change" as being "well it could, if there was a cultural change".

I won't deny that I don't think a knock-off culture is a desirable one, but don't make gak up that I never said and then attribute it to me, tyvm.

You'll note that nowhere in my statement did I address YOU, personally. I simply observed the jingoistic attitude expressed through the comment; one (or its like) that you may have expressed but is often stated. So rather, my comment, though addressed at something you typed, is more a statement on a prevailing ill in Western society. Espousing the changing of a culture because it doesn't fit the expected "norm" of someone's country of origin is exactly one of the larger reasons for conflict in the world; "They don't think like us, they need to change!"

Since you took what I stated personally and seem to be under the misguided assumption that you don't actually ascribe to such a sentiment, I'll quote this statement from you earlier in the thread:
[quoteI know it's a cultural thing, but personally I like the fact we live in a culture where an artist can make a living off their work without having to find a wealthy patron to support them, I'd rather it stayed that way.

HivefleetO beat me too it. All this talk about recasts as 'better' was very... odd. At a maximum, they're only going to be about as good as the original models recieved from FW, so if what the recasters are selling is so good...

BookW has a point. The fact that I don't feel ripped off by FW prices is just my opinion, but it doesn't matter how much they lower costs, the recasts are always going to be signifigantly cheaper. FW is never going to catch up, because all the recaster needs is to buy one set of models from FW and a resin casting setup and they're good to go. I'm reminded of a screed I read about a guy justifying why he pirated all his video games - because once a game was made, the only cost was the disc, so charging (it was yen but the USD cost was)$80-$100 was stealing out of his pocket, so the companies had no one to blame but themselves.

There are a lot of problems with that statement, and I'm pretty much seeing the same flaws in the 'no problem with recasts' posted here.

What would be a price that'd have people choose FW over the recaster? $5 more? $20? You're going to run into the fact that catagorically, there is always going to be a signifigant price difference. If FW lowers the price as much as possible, but you want a nice set of big legion tanks and you still save a hundred dollars buying from the recaster, will you go with FW anyway?