Posted inEditor's Pick

Can Rob Kalin Scale Etsy?

“Etsy has made it possible for a lot of small businesses to get off the ground,” says Dale Dougherty, co-founder of O’Reilly Media and the publisher of Make magazine, which covers the do-it-yourself economy. “But even the most successful crafters run up against the limits of their own labor. Handmade can be a limited idea.” […]

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The Printed World

The printing of parts and products has the potential to transform manufacturing because it lowers the costs and risks. No longer does a producer have to make thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of items to recover his fixed costs. In a world where economies of scale do not matter any more, mass-manufacturing identical items may […]

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Detroitism: What Does ‘Ruin Porn’ Tell Us About the Motor City?

“Red Dawn 2,” the forthcoming sequel to the nineteen eighties B-movie about a Soviet occupation of America, was shot last year in downtown Detroit. A long-abandoned modernist skyscraper coincidentally undergoing demolition served as a backdrop for battle scenes between American guerrillas and the Communist occupiers, now Chinese. For weeks, Chinese propaganda posters fluttered in the […]

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What Good Is Wall Street?

Much of what investment bankers do is socially worthless. “I asked him how he and his co-workers felt about making loads of money when much of the country was struggling. ‘A lot of people don’t care about it or think about it,’ he replied. ‘They say, it’s a market, it’s still open, and I’ll sell […]

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