That's the OLD way of thinking! The future is bigger and bigger vibe-coded machines for faster and faster vibe coding, oceans of unread code piped back into the intake valve, for the glorification of itself and its own inevitability. "Practical" "applications" are merely speedbumps in the way of our new Singularity Engines, shooting out million-line diffs that will not, and SHOULD NOT, be useful for anything. We will know when we have achieved success when we no longer even consider computer programming a tool for solving real-world problems.
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.
Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.
Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.
We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
…
https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...
This was a very enjoyable read for me. I’ve never played 40K but have always been impressed with the craftsmanship and dedication of the community.
I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned. My local game shop makes a lot of cool 3D printed stuff and sells it online or at cons, but even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself. This is ostensibly to cut down on the huge quantity of identical articulated toys.
But the bigger takeaway (i.e., the kit car Ferrari analogy), is similar to how I’ve been thinking about AI image generation lately. You can walk down the streets of New York and buy a counterfeit Birkin bag or Rolex from a street vendor. Are knockoffs “disrupting” the market? I guess, in a way. But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison. AI-generated “Ghibli” pictures are the same.
I remember when "Warty 40" was invented and largely supplanted Warhammer itself. I remember Citadel Miniatures and (A)D&D 1st editions, not to mention Traveler, Runequest, Tunnels and Trolls, Car Wars and many more. I was pretty decent at painting (quickly and accurately) and several kiddies used to pay me to get their latest regiment of space marines into action with the right colours. I went to a posh school and some of the kids had a lot more disposable income than me. I also had a lot more free time than I do now.
Nowadays I own a 3D printer (Prusa 4S+ with nobs on upgraded from a 3) and an IT company.
16 year old me would have committed ... a minor crime ... for the printer but given that IT was a Commodore 64, I'm not sure how I would have driven the thing.
However a 16 y/o me today with a 3D printer probably would be printing armies out of filament. I used to make plastic models too and saved up for several months to buy a double action air brush. My printer can churn out a small scale tank that rivals a Tamiya effort from back in the day. Some finishing is required but not much.
I might have a go at some Warhammer models and see how it goes, just for old time's sake ...
Pretty much the same age, generation and story. I also remember Traveller and Car Wars, and when 40K was first released as Rogue Trader (and when GW said that they were keeping plastic mini prices comparable to lead minis because the injection moulding equipment was really expensive, but once they'd paid that off they'd be reducing the price of plastic minis dramatically. hahahhahahhahhahah).
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you remember the first generation of plastic gobbos and dwarves in the Warhammer (not 40K) beginner box released back in the early 90's, where they obviously had two-part moulds and there were no underhangs anywhere on the models, then my FDM versions were more shit than those.
The author is spot-on about the hobby, and about the business model, and about 3D printing's place in it.
But have a go, it's a fun challenge for a 3D printer enthusiast :)
>
I had a go at FDM printing some minis, for old times' sake, and it didn't go well. The best resolution that I can get to is around 0.1mm, which is incredibly slow to print, and still not fine enough. The print layers are still visible, the detail is blurred. Sanding doesn't help that much; the face is still a mess. You can't paint individual eyeballs on them.
If you just care about the print layers, use a filament that is solvable in acetone, and use it to smoothen the surface. Of course, if you absolutely need the resolution, you likely must use a resin printer.
> But I think they also make the authentic item _more_ valuable by being so cheap and fake by comparison.
Depends.
Here in the balkans, for some reason, Louis Vuitton bags (the ugly brown one with lighter/gold lettering) have become popular with 'the kids' some years ago.. those bags normally cost as much as a modern laptop, some even much more, but due to chinese manufacturers and local market sellers, you can get counterfits for 10-30eur, depending on the design. Are the materials, seams, zippers, metal parts (well.. metallic painted plastic), etc. worse? Sure. But from far away, it's hard to notice the difference.
Now, due to the huge cost difference between the original and the fake and easily obtainable fakes, most of such bags you see in the street are fakes.
Since it's hard to tell them apart, people just assume it's a fake bag, when they see someone carrying it. I personally know people who are pretty rich and buy expensive stuff "just to show it around", and they don't buy those bags anymore, because no one thinks it's an original bag. A 100k mat black mercedes? Can't fake that. 30k gold watch? Sure it can be fake, but few people wear watches nowaday, even fewer notice them, and very few people assume that the watch is fake. But a 3k louis vuitton handbag? In whatever shopping center or larger cafe/club you go with that, there will be a couple more girls with similar, fake ones.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
That is not true. I have a resin printer that is around 3 years old (Anycubic Photon Mono M5s) and it has a level of detail that simply cannot be matched by injection molded parts. I have printed some miniatures that have details much smaller than a human hair, like the needle of a syringe in 32mm scale.
Once painted, the figurines are indistinguishable from non-3D printed ones unless you pick them up (they're heavier often).
That said, the article is still right. Resin printers are a massive pain. They're highly toxic, and the time spent preparing, and then post-processing is quite high, but also stressful because of the toxicity. I use my filament printer almost every day, but my resin printer has been collecting dust because of this.
Plus, one thing that the article misses, or rather, casually omits, is that some people want a customized base fig. They'll still put the time, the effort, the whole shebang. But they want to do it on something that is different on a foundational level from what's for sale on official channels.
Such as, I dunno. A proxy that looks like a...
Either way, no, I don't take Resin Printers as a market disruption either. But I have a rather more positive take on them: They probably grow the market itself. Because there are more people getting into the hobby. Well, that and stuff like 10th edition probably helps a bunch.
> I remember a lot of the early hype around 3D printing, most of which hasn’t panned out where the consumer-hobbyist-level machines are concerned.
In my opinion people simply stopped following the big visions of that time and got satisfied with the current state of 3D printers instead of continuing to iterate on highly experimental designs that could bring the world nearer to these visions.
Cory Doctorow waxed lyrical for many years about the ability to 3d-print clothes and other Maslow-hierarchy needs. Even the most experimental of designs haven't approached that yet... and I think we'd now be scared of increased PFAS levels even if we could.
3d printed shoes are… almost a thing(1). Clothes, not so much… some experimental high fashion fabrics, but nothing you’d wear under normal circumstances.
But to your point about PFAS, afaik no common 3d printing materials contain PFAS - at least not filament ones, i don’t know much about the resin printing world.
The only place PFAS is used in an FDM printer is the filament guide some printers have. That's a Teflon tube that the filament travels in towards the hotend.
Bowden style printers tend to have a long tube, direct drive printers sometimes have a short tube fully contained in the hotend assembly.
I don't see how PFAS can be used as a filament in FDM printer. It's not a thermoplastic, that's one of its advantages as a material.
Do they? The high quality fake Rolex that only a watch nerd can tell apart, vs the shitty fake Lolex are different worlds. Similarly, the AI fake Ghibli of myself is just fun. Would it mean more if if flew to Japan and commissioned a painter at Ghibli-world for $3,000 to make the same picture? Sure, but I'm not going to do that.
There's a part in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where the narrator's friend's bike needs some fixing, and the narrator said (I paraphrase) "you could use this piece of aluminum from a soda can to fix it", but the bike owner thinks that's blasphemy, the only way to fix it is with a part from the bike manufacturer...
I like where you are going with this and love that you dropped Zen here. Permit me to riff/add color, please.
Zen tries to draw a distinction between mental models with an object/subject separation and alternatives.
There are sane and insane reasons why we might adopt one or the other model.
An object/subject thinker might obsess over status symbols, but also the frame itself can lead to discomfort over using the "wrong" part.
Witness something like this in buy/build discussions where cargo-cult thinking plays a bigger part than rational thought. This probably goes well beyond object/subject thinking.
The status symbol thing can be more than posturing for prosperity. Some people get their identity tangled up in brand separate from social concerns.
I talk with LLM's about this sort of thing quite a bit more than I talk with humans. I get irritated when LLM refuses to allow for shorthand language. I hope I don't come across like that.
I agree with what I read as the sentiment from your last line, there's something that can be unsettling about objects carrying more than their intrinsic value.
> even Etsy is now cracking down on prints of “commodity” STLs. IIRC under their new policy, you can’t sell a print you didn’t design yourself.
Not really true. There was a lot of drama about this when it came out, but I suspect there were more videos on YouTube about the subject than there have been actual products taken down over this. You just have to disclose that you made it with design partners. (ie, an STL you didn't create)
I waited what I thought (and what was suggested by enthusiasts to be) long enough for the tech to be mature and approachable, and finally bought a highly-recommended beginner printer about three years ago.
I’ll never touch the tech again. The chemicals seem sketchy as hell (I don’t really want any hobbies that make me feel like I need a dedicated area of my house that I only enter while wearing significant PPE, and with gloves that never leave that dirty-zone) and after probably ten joyless hands-on hours burned over a couple weekends, I never got the fucking thing to print a single one of its test designs.
Seems like yet another fiddly hobby for its own sake (that might eventually yield some not-remotely-worth-the-cost fruits) rather than a useful tool. I don’t need what it offers that bad, the amount of money and time I’m going to put toward it in the rest of my life is zero. It’s probably a fine activity if the act of fiddling with 3D printers is the main draw for a person. Otherwise, no.
I would never recommend a resin printer to someone new to 3D printing. They’ve come a long way and are reasonably reliable now, but it’s not a good place to start.
I was never a fan of 3d printers, but now own 2 fdm printers that I'm quite happy with. One is an industrial nylon printer, one a prosumer printer (h2c) for everything else (the nylon printer is much faster than the h2c, printing cf nylon at 30 mm^3 easy. It is also accurate enough at that speed that there are no obviously visible layer lines).
I've probably owned 6 or 7 over the past 10 years, mainly to check out new technology and such.
I also own a very nice wood cnc and a very nice metal cnc, and use both a lot. Since they are 6 figure machines, they get modified instead of replaced ;).
So I have never been afraid to spend money to try things. I also have no issue modifying things (I have rebuilt entire cnc cabinets and mechanicals from scratch, rewritten the plc programs, etc). I donate the things I'm done with to friends or schools.
I say all this because I have also tried 4 resin printers over the past 10 years, and cathartically thrown every single one in a dumpster to avoid anyone else experiencing them.
While they have come a long way, selling any of them as a beginner level printer for someone new to 3d printing should be a crime. I can't think of a faster way to turn someone off from 3d printing. If you are doing product development or dentistry they can make sense. If you want "click button, wait, receive printed model" like most beginners, they make no sense because of the workflow.
Ironically, the one parson I know happy with their resin printer uses it exclusively to print Warhammer 40k minis (he uses one of my old fdm printers for other stuff).
It really depends on what your end goal & use case is. Resin printers are pretty phenomenal for any kind of product development and are very much a useful tool in the industrial design space.
That said, casual hobbyists should almost always start with an FDM (filament) printer as a first printer. Sorry to hear you had such a bad experience :/
It's the perfect "I just want my 3d printer to be a tool" printer.
There are better options now, of course, but it's one of the best purchases I've ever made.
Much better than my Printrbot Metal Plus, which turned out to require all the tinkering of a budget printer at the price of a high-end printer.
I've extensively used Prusa MK3/MK3+, Creality K1, Bambu A1 and Bambu P1S.
The K1 is the fastest but the worst hardware. We were joking they have a half life of about 3 months.
The Prusa's are workhorses, they break too but at far longer intervals, they're simple and infinitely more repairable to the point that I've 'remixed' the printers to different sizes (600 mm high, as well as 1x1 meter) modifying the firmware as needed.
The Bambu A1 is much better engineered than the Prusa, but the software sucks and the company behind it sucks even more they work, until they break and then they are as often as not complete write offs but it can take a considerable time before they break. The P1S is a better version of the K1 hardware wise but the software and user interface are absolutely terrible, there is no USB port that is normally accessible the one that is there doesn't work and it does not support folders. They are essentially forcing you to use their closed-source cloud based software. You can run the printer in lan only mode but you still have no idea what that cloud plugin is up to and there are multiple reports of large data streams with unknown contents making it to Bambu owned servers.
Without details on what you were using, I can't be certain, but this absolutely is not my experience.
I got started in 2017 with an Ender 3, and extremely cheap printer with a basic set of features. I improved it by adding a bed leveling sensor and flashing new firmware, along with adding a tool steel nozzle and heater, and a 3d printed housing replacement for it's screen which included a place to mount a raspberry pi, running octoprint, to manage it remotely, and a webcam on a stick mounted to the Z rail. It worked pretty good, and building it was fun.
However in the intervening years, I also bought a Creality CR-6 Max, a much larger printer with a built-in bed leveler. It too got a pi and a webcam, but nothing beyond that, and it too worked well. However both those printers required constant maintenance, troubleshooting and overall fiddling. It remained my niche hobby.
I've since upgraded to a Bambu Lab H2D at great expense ($3,200 retail, utterly dwarfing the sub-$500 printers of before) and honestly, it's like a different tech all together. I don't even NEED a computer, really, unless I want to use one: I can find stuff on my phone, download it, and send it to the printer over their cloud service. And no troubleshooting really to speak of, I think I've had like 3 prints that did some weird shit and required a figure or two, but absolutely no comparison to the other machines. And in fact it's so bulletproof that my wife, who is utterly uninterested and frankly a bit hostile to tech, now uses it more than I do. She says it's a slightly trickier version of a Cricut, which is just WILD to me coming from my experiences with the Ender and Creality before it.
All of these are of course FDM printers. I have also played with a Photon Mono X I got from a friend who didn't want to use it with their birds in their home, and that one while requiring more fiddling and more chemicals, is also virtually bulletproof with regard to print quality, and you get better finishes with some tradeoffs (vulnerability to sunlight, figuring out curing vs. over-curing, what have you) which sounds a bit more like what you were dealing with. I could absolutely see that souring your opinion if you started there, that's not a beginner machine IMHO.
Yes. The Earth and its formations are art. I disagree that art requires consciousness and intent, but those admittedly do improve its value [to me]. (For reference, I value AI content/art poorly and avoid it)
We have at least established that very boring pieces, such as Andy Warhol's Empire, Kazimir Malevich's White on White, and John Cage's As Slow As Possible, are not art.
I think you're saying bad art is still art, but I'm unsure what to do with the second sentence. I'm toying with "an encoding of art is not art", which might mean that art has to be available to an audience.
I wish there were a good workaround for those of us condemned to MS365/Outlook. Outlook desktop is very unstable and buggy, and Outlook web is full of weird antipatterns. For example, it is absurdly annoying to get a direct link to an e-mail message in Outlook web. If it were easy, I would just pass that url to org-protocol in the browser and keep my tasks organized with backlinks to the e-mails that originated those tasks or projects.
As it is, my emacs and e-mail are almost fully separated due to (I'm assuming intentional) lack of a simple method of interoperability.
I have been able to use mu4e with my o365 account using davmail (https://davmail.sourceforge.net/). I will say it was a bit of a pain to get authentication right, and involved a lot of trial and error.
Oh goodness, truthfully I'm not sure how well I understand it. I initially set it up a few years ago, and recently futzed with it after my organization changed something about their auth. My configs aren't really in a shareable state so I hope this ramble is at least somewhat helpful.
Basically DavMail connects to outlook at creates a local smtp and imap server which I connect to with mbsyc and msmtp. Mu indexes these emails from the local server created by DavMail, and Mu4e displays them and sends them with that local server as well. Once you have DavMail setup you can basically follow any standard mu/mutt/msmtp/mbsync tutorial, just use localhost and the ports exposed by DavMail.
Getting DavMail setup can be the tricky part, I remember having a lot of trouble, but I think it was related to the fact that the config I was editing wasn't being picked up systemd service that was controlling DavMail. The best advice I can give you is experiment with different authentication modes (davmail.mode in the config) and try sending mail to the DavMail server in an attempt to trigger it to do the authentication workflow.
In the end, set davmail.mode=O365Manual and davmail.url=https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx
Upon attempting to send an email from mu4e it opened up a browser to do a microsoft authentication, and then I believe it saved a token in my config file (variable davmail.oauth.<your email>.refreshToken) which has been handling authentication without issue for the past few months.
Some miscellaneous notes. First, this may have been harder for me as it was not possible for me to use the DavMail GUI which might make the authentication workflow easier. I also have two email username@organization and first.last@organization. I have all of my davmail,msmtp, and mbsync configurations using username@organization, My mu4e config references the username@organization maildir folders, but my user-mail-address variable is first.last@organization and that is what recipients see (although mu complains about not knowing about the first.last account). Lastly, this DavMail setup isn't mu4e specific, I initially used it with mutt, and it worked for that as well.
I hope this is helpful, if there's interest I can try to go through the setup from the beginning and create a more in depth tutorial. I wish Microsoft did not make this such a pain, and I wonder if DavMail's days of effectiveness will soon be over...
I STILL don’t get this obsession with “participation trophies.” I’ve never seen one, I’ve never met anyone who says they’ve awarded one to someone, and I’ve never met anyone who received one.
I’ve seen very minor “door prizes” that say, thanks for attending this event, etc. But this “participation trophy” canard has coasted for 30+ years now.
I got one at a tae kwon do tournament when I was in middle school. It was my first time entering something like that, I lost immediately and was not feeling great about it. I just wanted to leave. My dad made me go back to pick up a trophy from this giant table full of participation trophies. I didn’t want it. I don’t know what happened to it. I didn’t understand why anyone would want a memento of an embarrassing loss. Participation trophies are stupid, or for people who are too dumb to realized they lost and it’s a pity trophy. Picking up that trophy was worse than the actual loss, I remember being more upset about that dumb trophy than anything else.
This was back in the 90s.
In something like a foot race, I get it. Most people running a marathon aren’t trying to win, they are just trying to finish, or hit their personal targets. They can still have a “win” without coming in first. But in a sport where there is a clear winner and loser, I felt insulted getting a trophy just for showing up. At 11 or 12 I already felt too old to be treated like that.
I think this marathon attitude of not trying to win but to hit personal targets could be applied in other areas of life and in other sports even with clear "winners". None of this is about the destination. We all arrive at the same one.
I like having a physical representation of something I did that pushed myself. In the case of a marathon it's normally a t-shirt. No one makes fun of that. But that t-shirt is 100% a 'participation trophy' but worse, it's literally announcing to the world when worn 'I participated'.
So many anti-participation trophy tough guys wear these participation trophies all the time. Vietnam hat? Participation trophy. Fun run shirt? Participation trophy. Iron man shirt? Participation trophy. Police/military challenge coin? Participation trophy. Facebook picture post of an event you did? Believe it or not, participation trophy.
But then it's given to a kid? Beyond the pale! Ridiculous! Why give them a memory/momento that they played baseball, that they showed up to sparing event, or did a form demo in front of judges. All things very intimidating to kids. I remember showing up to pee-wee football after doing badly in the game. As a kid it was intimidating to show up after doing poorly. That stuff can be as mentally pushing themselves as a marathon for an adult. Such a weird/small/toxic mindset to criticize rewarding that behavior, or thinking the kids that showed up all season for a losing team didn't accomplish anything.
What I got was a literal trophy, not a t-shirt or something else. A t-shirt or other momento for an event is fine, but a trophy implies a win.
There was a vendor at the tournament selling throwing stars and stuff. I got one of those. That was my momento from the event (which I still have a know exactly where it is decades later). It was something I wanted that I wouldn’t have got had I not pushed myself to show up. Running across that is a fond memory, while running across that participation trophy brings up pretty terrible memories.
I’m not against rewarding pushing yourself for showing up, but as a kid, the trophy was the wrong reward for me, it felt insulting. An event t-shirt would have felt much better.
I got participating trophies from soccer or karate when I was a child. I also got larger trophies when I won events. Even as a freaking eight year old I understood that this was the same as a t-shirt. It was a fun memento from a sports season or a sparring tournament. I do not believe I know a single person who feels negatively about such things.
Surely after years of screaming about participation trophies there should be some evidence that this harmed kids if it were a real thing, right?
The first trophy I ever got was when my first ever soccer team took first place for the season, so maybe that distorted my view. The only other trophy I ever got was that tae kwon do participation trophy, so I wasn’t collecting these things at every event like t-shirts. A trophy felt like it meant something, which is why the participation trophy felt so humiliating.
I could argue that harmed me. I never entered another tournament after that. The walk to pick up that trophy is a core memory, and one that I didn’t want to relive at any future events. Had I gone, lost, but got a cool shirt, I probably would have been down to get more cool shirts. Had I gone to more, maybe I could have improved and won a trophy that actually meant something.
And I enjoyed my trophies that I got merely for participating even alongside the ones I got for winning. They became memories that I could relive. "Oh, that was the season where my good friend Kevin was on the team."
When people screech about participation trophies being modern degeneracy I want to see actual data demonstrating some real harm. Because from where I sit I see a nice thing being done for children and joy coming from that.
A lot of organized running events give everyone a medal as they cross the finish line.
Part of my brain thinks it is a racket. The organizer buys them for $X and sells them to the event for a multiple. If that isn't the case, it still makes sense for whoever makes them to promote the idea, because they get to sell more of them that way.
I have a whole closet full of this heavy junk - its not like I am going to hang them up and display proudly in my home. "Hey check this sweet medal from the 50K I finished last in 12 years ago!"
At least race participation shirts have some utility.
This is fine. Getting yourself into shape to even be able to finish a 5k or better is an accomplishment in itself. There is no comparison to the trophies that every little leaguer gets for having parents drop them off at practice.
There are a handful of people who enter these events trying to win. They get money. For the rest of us, finishing represents a victory over the couch, that pint of ice cream, or general malaise towards bettering ourselves.
So I’ll take that finishing medal and be proud of it.
Besides, the same boomer generation who complains about participation trophies is the same generation who invented them.
A similar thread that you should have seen is grade inflation.
Most people get A's and don't learn that much, teachers are punished for giving bad grades, a lot of people graduate without much added knowledge or skill.
I would prefer no grades, but telling so many people they're doing top notch work when they aren't is a problem.
Here in this thread there are people who are insisting that the harm is specific to the physical object of a trophy, not some general thing given to everybody who shows up.
The participation trophies of the 80s and 90s were for the parents, not the children. (See sibling comment with 'tae kwon do tournament.') Perhaps it made parenting easier, "Be proud you tried, this shiny bauble is all the proof you need!" Or, IMO more likely, the parents liked the affirmation it awarded them for their effort and/or they made for easier status signaling when displayed in a pile for house guests to admire.
I know as a kid I never gave two poops about 'em. They felt condescending.
Getting a thing showing that you participated isn't such a weird concept. It's just a physical momento, like a t-shirt from a concert or a lanyard badge from a convention. Getting a medal for doing a race is fine. It's a thing I can hang on my wall that I can look at and remember I did that 10k that time. A trophy is a bit weird and overkill, but a simple momento is just that.
I always have to think about "Eighty percent of success is showing up" when I read about participation trophies. I think it's a good idea to stimulate participation. "Winning" is something you only do if you participate a lot.
They were a thing in the 90's and 00's for some K-12 events as fallout from the children's excessive self-esteem building movement. They usually took the form of cheap little ribbons rather than trophies. I always thought they were insulting and reminders of losing so I threw them away.
We had them in the 1980s in elementary school, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_trophy says the practice is over a century old, and the "backlash against participation trophies intensified in the 1990s."
There's no need to take my work for it. The Arlington Heights Daily Herald Suburban Chicago (1975-11-28) article at https://archive.org/details/arlington-heights-daily-herald-s... describes how every soccer team member at a high school got a participation trophy.
Speaking of ribbons, the same Wikipedia page points out "the US military has awarded ribbons to anyone who participates in surface combat".
"I spent a year at Microsoft working on Windows 3.1. During that time, I received three team T-shirts, a team rugby shirt, a team beach towel, and a team mouse pad. I also took part in a team train ride and a nice dinner on the local "Dinner Train" and another dinner at a nice restaurant. If I had been an employee, I would also have received a few more shirts, a Microsoft watch, a plaque for participating in the project, and a big Lucite "Ship-It" award for shipping the project. The total value of this stuff is probably only two or three hundred dollars, but as Tom Peters and Robert Waterman say, companies with excellent motivation don't miss any opportunity to shower their employees with nonmonetary rewards."
If you go to some youth sports league, it is common that every kid will get a medal or trophy regardless of which team in the league won or lost.
But it also exists for adults. Go to the NYC marathon? Everyone gets a medal. I’ve participated in a lot of organized bicycle rides. The rides aren’t even competitive like the marathon is. They are not races. But at the finish line everyone gets a medal regardless of what distance they rode, or how quickly.
The harsh truth about the participation trophies is that boomers complain about them the most, but they are the ones responsible for them! I’m a millennial. I remember being in a youth basketball league in middle school. Our team did not win. At the final day, every kid on every team got a tiny trophy. I was very confused by this at the time. I expected only the best team to get anything. But who was running that league and decided to hand out those trophies?! Our boomer parents!
Marathons and long bikes at least require you to perform a major amount of training and focus.
Not everyone that starts at the line gets a medal because there are people that don't finish and they don't get their medal.
Once you start moralizing about only winners should get medals or trophies, then you have to start looking at arbitrary distinctions like men's and women's different divisions, age divisions, weight divisions, pro versus amateur, college versus high school.
Really the extension of logic is that only the champion of a given sport or event at the very highest level should get a trophy.
I think what rubs a lot of people about youth sports participation trophies, is that you're basically rewarding just showing up, well devaluing actual focus training preparation or genetic advantage of the better players.
A participation trophy is for finishing a sports season, or finishing an event (maybe a martial arts event, maybe a marathon). Finishing is something that can be especially challenging to finish/comit to week after week as a kid when your team isn't even winning, or you know you have zero chance of coming in first.
I've worked in the corporate world for decades across multiple different sectors and I've never seen anything like one. I'm in the UK though - maybe it's different where you are.
I find it hard to believe that the UK corporate world is so different that they don’t have mandatory trainings with fancy certificates presented to you at the end.
Oh that, yeah I've seen pointless certificates given out for doing crappy mandatory training courses.
Although, the only place I've seen them is in a company whose HQ is in the US. So maybe that is more of a US thing too.
To be honest, I never saw them as a participation reward. Everyone hates doing the damn things in the first place, nobody cares about getting the certificate.
That's only if you're at a place that wants to make it look like they care. Most of the places I've familiar with really don't even put forth that level of effort.
Worth pointing out that a child of the 90s would have boomer parents. The very same generation that complains about the trophies invented the practice.
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