a bag from peak design!

A few things I've learnt over the last year or so:
1) I hate having lots of small pockets on a bag. It takes too long to pack, and too long to find anything. A few large pockets with flexible dividers and a couple of smaller dump pockets work better for me.
2) Laptops belong at the front of the bag. That way the back can curve to match the contours of my body.
3) Zipped openings should open *wide*. I've snagged too many cameras trying to pull them out through a narrow zipper.

Don't think this bag will really work for me.
 
YYV_146 said:
*Sign* It's this argument again.

Let's see. First of all, In current Chinese cities if you are single and make less than $230 per month(from memory, don't know if this is outdated) you qualify for aid. That means that unless you're not registered and work illegally, the very least you'll get is about $10 per work day. But in reality very few people work at this wage level, just as few people in the US actually make (exactly) the legal minimum wage.

Now the wage-purchasing power divide would have been true a decade ago. But at the moment the labor cost gap between US and China has softened quite a bit, partly because of the stronger Yuan and partly because manufacturing sector wages have not moved in sync with inflation in the US. Current estimates range from 35% to 60%. Certainly not the $1/hour figure you quote.

Of course, I don't know what labor source Peak Design uses, and shame on them if they use illegally sourced workers. But realistically, it seems to be a nice and solid bag. People that can make high quality bags tend to be compensated accordingly. I also assume that Peak Design is a smaller company, and tends to drive costs up across the production chain as such.

Tl;dr: Super-cheap labor in China is largely a myth. Especially for high quality items.
Click to expand...


Bull****. If the labor weren't super-cheap, American companies would not bother manufacturing things in China or Vietnam. Like most Americans with a little money, you don't give a damn about those who need to work for a living.

I don't have that luxury. As a teacher, I am concerned about the future my students will have. For many of them, the future is bleak. There are no jobs here that pay decent wages for people who are not smart or wealthy enough to acquire advanced degrees. That doesn't make them unworthy of living decent lives.

What'll happen to them? Some of them will end up doing things that respectable folks don't approve of, like selling drugs or joining gangs. Everyone wrings their hands and cries about our huge prison population, our cities blighted by violent gangs and drugs, but no one will face the real cause. Our country's manufacturing base, the source of our prosperity, has been given away to countries whose governments are hostile to us and our way of life so that a few assholes can be a little richer, and the price is paid by poor kids in our inner-cities, by the small towns that are dying, and our disappearing middle class.

Our school year begins in three weeks. As always, I'll have a bag of healthy snacks to hand out to students who are hungry in class. Many of them do not eat at home; the school lunch is their only meal, and they still feel hungry during the school day. Hard to learn when you feel that way. You should see the way some of the kids look when they see a bag of nuts, an orange, or even a candy bar on a teacher's desk. Makes me want to cry.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
Bull****. If the labor weren't super-cheap, American companies would not bother manufacturing things in China or Vietnam. Like most Americans with a little money, you don't give a damn about those who need to work for a living.

I don't have that luxury. As a teacher, I am concerned about the future my students will have. For many of them, the future is bleak. There are no jobs here that pay decent wages for people who are not smart or wealthy enough to acquire advanced degrees. That doesn't make them unworthy of living decent lives.

What'll happen to them? Some of them will end up doing things that respectable folks don't approve of, like selling drugs or joining gangs. Everyone wrings their hands and cries about our huge prison population, our cities blighted by violent gangs and drugs, but no one will face the real cause. Our country's manufacturing base, the source of our prosperity, has been given away to countries whose governments are hostile to us and our way of life so that a few assholes can be a little richer, and the price is paid by poor kids in our inner-cities, by the small towns that are dying, and our disappearing middle class.

Our school year begins in three weeks. As always, I'll have a bag of healthy snacks to hand out to students who are hungry in class. Many of them do not eat at home; the school lunch is their only meal, and they still feel hungry during the school day. Hard to learn when you feel that way. You should see the way some of the kids look when they see a bag of nuts, an orange, or even a candy bar on a teacher's desk. Makes me want to cry.
Click to expand...

Your actions are admirable. I don't think anyone can deny that, nor that there is a very real poverty issue in the US. But trade protectionism isn't the solution. I consider myself a moderate on the economist scale of sanity, and I agree that under specific circumstances, countries need to protect their own industries. The US? Not so much the case.

I don't really know how to start addressing these questions without delving in 50-page responses. But let me say this: the principles of what made the US great are free markets, and the process of capital finding ways to expand itself. And if you want to talk about specific ways of dealing with the problems that this process causes...there are good options.

I'm a strong supporter of a negative income tax in the US. It's a clean, elegant, efficient way of transferring wealth from high-earners to low-earners. Will it actually help or reach the children at all? Likely. But in the current political climate there's very little chance of that idea becoming a reality.

I'm also a strong supporter of subsidizing technology training and the teaching of programming skills. Today it is one of the most valuable skills for someone without higher education. And funding public education through land and property taxes is a fundamentally broken design. But after some three decades since researchers reached consensus on this, things seem to stay the same.

This stuff might be a lot more boring and technical than "take our jobs back!", but it deals with specific problems given the specific constraints of modern economies. As long as this is a economically liberal country, those manufacturing jobs won't magically come back on their own, so one has to look for alternatives.

As to your first assertion. First, I'm actually not an American. Second, I make a truly pitiful amount of money given my education. Third, I make that amount because people everywhere in the world seem to not care about those that actually want to help people make better livings. But I still like my job, and feel that the costs are reasonable. So there's that.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
As a teacher, I am concerned about the future my students will have. For many of them,

the future is bleak. There are no jobs here that pay decent wages for people who are not smart or wealthy enough to acquire

advanced degrees. That doesn't make them unworthy of living decent lives.
Click to expand...
I understand where you're coming from, but also understand there are people in China, or Vietnam, and lots of other places besides, who feel much the same way.

YYV_146 said:
I don't really know how to start addressing these questions without delving in 50-page responses.
Click to expand...
That's certainly true. I'd bet that if we could all sit down over coffee or beer or whatever then many of us who appear to differ about some of these things would find we really feel much the same way. Fixing things, however, is a whole different matter and probably involves other 50(+++) page screeds which probably wouldn't help since that involves politics - and even if we could agree about that (far from certain), most who vote (in countries which allow it) wouldn't, and either couldn't be bothered thinking things through (they've more than enough to deal with) or have allowed themselves to be sloganised into thinking that up is down, left is right and blue is yellow.

Which makes it difficult to figure out what to do as an individual, aside from participating (full disclosure: I attended a political meeting last night, for whatever that's worth) and making consumer choices (further disclosure: the camera bags I use are manufactured in the US or the UK, aside from two Lowepro camera pouches: I'm not sure how right or wrong that might be, but it's what I've done - and I'd buy Australian if there were appropriate product to buy).

Back more-or-less on proper topic, though, I'll not be buying this particular camera bag, not because it's made in China but because it doesn't really suit my needs, nor do I think it looks especially like something I'd carry as it doesn't suit my style (yeah, right, like I have anything approximating 'style' 🙄).

...Mike
 
Amazing how a thread can go from "Hey, look at this bag!" to discussions of geopolitics and economics in a couple of eye blinks.

Back to the bag: it's an interesting design. It's a bit large for my taste and most needs, and I wonder about its wearability: will it conform to the body well, etc.

It's nice to have options. This one would probably be most useful for when I want to carry equipment on the order of the Nikon F6 kit, but my Tenba Messenger Mini does that well enough already. For day to day, I'm finding the little BLB Evans Walker mark II to be just about right.

G
 
We've been worked into a hole here in the States. As companies chase lowing costs at all costs the companies that supply raw materials and skills located here in the US drop off the map (read go out of business). There are great bags built here in the US, but these kids focused on differentiation that was lower cost to produce the final product overseas. They had experience with other products and it's not a bad approach from a capitalistic perspective.

From the economist perspective it's size would do little to impact the root problem we have created, many young adults can't find a job that will allow them the ability to live near the same level that their parents did at the same age. There are lots of jobs but the way that a starter job led to better job that led to an even better job without a college degree (and experience), the ladder to raise yourself up is mostly gone. Chopped up and burned to fuel the fire of the Wall St. Profitability craze.

Efficiency is highly over rated for anyone but a stockholder/owner.

We have the skills to build some very small run products here, the tools for mass production are coming back, but the number of jobs it's takes to build many products is nowhere near what it took to build say washing machines 30 years back is much lower.

Perhaps we need to look to the approach that Sam Adams uses, design centrally and brew (make) locally. We have a lot of old industrial parks that could be reworked to support state of the art smaller manufacturing.

Could you build a camera here in the states today and make money?

B2 (;->
 
Saul said:
I wonder if the world needs yet another camera bag?
Click to expand...
Unless you've found a perfect one (do tell: we're all looking) then the only answer is "of course the world needs a new camera bag" if only so we can buy it and decide it's awful. Then store it with all our other awful, useless, camera bags.

...Mike
 
mfunnell said:
That's certainly true. I'd bet that if we could all sit down over coffee or beer or whatever then many of us who appear to differ about some of these things would find we really feel much the same way. Fixing things, however, is a whole different matter and probably involves other 50(+++) page screeds which probably wouldn't help since that involves politics - and even if we could agree about that (far from certain), most who vote (in countries which allow it) wouldn't, and either couldn't be bothered thinking things through (they've more than enough to deal with) or have allowed themselves to be sloganised into thinking that up is down, left is right and blue is yellow.

Which makes it difficult to figure out what to do as an individual, aside from participating (full disclosure: I attended a political meeting last night, for whatever that's worth) and making consumer choices (further disclosure: the camera bags I use are manufactured in the US or the UK, aside from two Lowepro camera pouches: I'm not sure how right or wrong that might be, but it's what I've done - and I'd buy Australian if there were appropriate product to buy).

Back more-or-less on proper topic, though, I'll not be buying this particular camera bag, not because it's made in China but because it doesn't really suit my needs, nor do I think it looks especially like something I'd carry as it doesn't suit my style (yeah, right, like I have anything approximating 'style' 🙄).

...Mike
Click to expand...

Well, my 50 pages is mostly going to be charts and equations. One of the luxuries of doing economics is that you can be further or closer to reality as you want. But (ideally) solutions to global problems should involve big data, lots of theoretical background and expert opinions - that's my 50 cents.

But we as people who are involved in policy are trained from the beginning to pay attention to the aggregate and not the individual. For example, I can completely understand where the IMF and Germany are coming from, but if I were a Greek citizen right now I would be absolutely furious. Now if you could force a country to suffer to help it in the long term, would you do it? I think that characterizes a lot of the sentiments here. Change is painful and maintaining a status quo is also painful.

As for the bag, I've noticed that among "tech" forums the reception has been fairly positive, and among "photography" forums the opposite is true. It definitely has that over-the-top "Silicon Valley" look. PD's camera clips are truly marvelous if you like to shoot with more than one body, and if you use those the argument for this bag is a lot stronger 😀
 
Have to laugh a little bit...

I've been carrying the M4-2 all week in the BLB Evans Walker bag ... mostly because the Street Strap standard length (47") is on the verge of being a little too short. I swapped the 52" Street Strap over from another camera this morning and, darn, I don't need a bag at all now!

Unless I want to carry a second lens and film ...

Well, it made me laugh. Mostly at myself. ;-)

G
 
Thanks for pointing out that Kickstarter project, Joe! I just backed it.

Recently I've had the Filson Harvey Messenger for a couple of days before I returned it. The quality was disappointing for a 325 EUR bag and it did not feel like a bag designed for its intended purpose, but a bag modified in an attempt to suit that purpose.
This bag on the other hand does not look much like a camera bag, which is great, because I like having a presentable messenger bag which also keeps my camera safe. Until now my main bag was a custom Timbuk2 messenger with a single 3rd party insert for my camera or the snoop insert for carrying more gear around. Now I just have to wait until December. 🙂
 
I prefer the Courierware camera-friendly messenger bags (and the BBB variations). Softer, pliable, collapsible wins it. Especially if I'm riding. To each his own.
 
I did find it amusing that in their video they throw a Chrome bag against the wall, a brand that's based, designed and made in SF.

They've recently launched a small series of camera bags aimed directly at street shooters,

http://www.chromeindustries.com/uk/en/catalog/category/view/s/camera-bags/id/12/

I have the tiny one, and it's absolutely up to Chrome's usual "bombproof" standards.
The other ones will be as sturdy, they're just not the layout I like.

No connection with Chrome at all, I just have a couple of bags, and there's one in the Peak video so I thought it was worth mentioning
 
BlackXList said:
I did find it amusing that in their video they throw a Chrome bag against the wall, a brand that's based, designed and made in SF.

They've recently launched a small series of camera bags aimed directly at street shooters,

http://www.chromeindustries.com/uk/en/catalog/category/view/s/camera-bags/id/12/

I have the tiny one, and it's absolutely up to Chrome's usual "bombproof" standards.
The other ones will be as sturdy, they're just not the layout I like.

No connection with Chrome at all, I just have a couple of bags, and there's one in the Peak video so I thought it was worth mentioning
Click to expand...

interesting looking bag, I have a Domke F2 which I love but it would be nice to also have a mini bag/pouch for quick walks or don't need to bring too much gear with me.
Out of curiosity but from what I've read on some reviews, the sling bag feels heavy after a while because of the buckle?
 
The Buckle definitely adds some weight, but I haven't found it oppressive in the slightest.
You do know the buckle is there, but the strap adjuster is always by the buckle so it's always to hand, plus whatever you're putting in the bag is heavier than the buckle.

The push button strap is Chrome's trademark, so it's on everything they do.

Also handy for many people, the loop of the metal strap works as a bottle opener.
 
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