Do we really want our kids to enjoy fluorescent-lit warehouses full of cheap crap that will be thrown away a couple months after it's bought?

There's something to be said for getting rid of excessive waste and unnecessarily large warehouses of "cheap junk", but it's also worth remembering that toys play a very important part in teaching children fundamental skills like hand-eye coordination, simple problem solving, fostering imagination, etc.

It's a game of "what-ifs", but I'm fairly confident in saying I wouldn't be pursuing the career I am now if I had never had the experiences of walking down the Lego aisle at the toy store and falling in love with piecing together toy cities.

Same - except for me it was also Capsela (now called IQ Key), a bunch of cheap plastic crap that let you engineer modular machines.

I think the medium that kids play with 'toys' has changed with tablet and phone devices. Now they're solving puzzle apps and building Minecraft cities - whether or not that's a good or bad thing, I'm not sure, but it doesn't bode well for toy stores.

I think so too, but I wonder about the long term effect that doing everything in the virtual world will have on abilities in the physical world. It's extremely anecdotal, but my little brother, who almost exclusively plays Minecraft, seems to have a fantastic imagination but very poor fine motor skills. He has trouble doing anything physical that requires not using a keyboard and mouse.

I feel like there's a point far into the future where they might consider the current technology age as a turning point in our evolution as biological beings. Consider a future 1000 years from now, after we've spent a thousand years interacting with the virtual world. Imagine a world where the virtual is indistinguishable from the physical - where the virtual IS physical, and the physical IS virtual. Virtual worlds that are infinitely customizable, creating scenarios for your mind that are infinitely more compelling than what you can experience in the purely physical realm. Reset your life to any point in time. Fast forward. Rewind. Play through every conceivable event. Travel to any destination you can imagine. Meet anyone or any creature. BE any creature. Live an existence that can be shaped by your very whim; reality could be whatever you wanted it to be, changes made as quickly as thoughts come and go. For all intents and purposes, you are the architect of your own reality. God.

Computer chips implanted into the body to regulate vital functions. Nanobot technology to repair or modify biological cells. Countless methods to sustain and prolong your biological life.

Eventually the biological dies, but the virtual simulation is not interrupted. Instead, your consciousness is uploaded to the world's mainframe server, where your mind is allowed to continue on it's journey of self-discovery within the virtual world. You and your loved ones can continue to interact virtually, forever. Where you can continue to explore, to learn, and to experience life long after your death.

You are virtually immortal.

Since we don't understand the nature of consciousness there is zero evidence to indicate that mind uploading will ever actually be possible.

Being "alive" forever, virtual or otherwise, sounds creepy and revolting. You are welcome to it, I think [1]; I and many others enjoy the inherent richness that comes with the ephemerality and unpredictability of biological life.

[1] my concern is how this line of thinking and "living" might continue on a path of mindlessly destroying everything that isn't it.

Hello, Neo! Follow the white rabbit?

Capsela! THANK YOU! I've been googling "little plastic bubbles with gears in them" occasionally for years without finding these.

Between this, K'nex and the original Macintosh my life as a programmer was more a destiny and less a choice :P

Edit: Holy shit, when I google "little plastic bubbles with gears in them", Capsela comes up. Maybe google has gotten better at vague searches in the last decade :P

Oh I remember seeing these on rare occasions. They felt very sciency, I would have enjoyed throwing my brain on them as a kid.

We got along fine without them for tens of thousands of years ;)

You're a bit too cynical even though the subject is interesting. Childhood is full of crap that is magical to the eyes of kids. I wished I and others had clearer, cleaner and more serious things to grow and learn; but in a way I'm not sure it's neither both possible nor worth it.

And similarly the notion of "place" is melting in this era. No more music shop, useless, you can buy a Trillion things on whatever. Same for toys now. But I think humans have a thing for local space. Culture in a way. Every shop used to be customed in weird ways. Some people would waste their time there and find things randomly. They would discuss with owner tastes. Going to a toy store was a treat in itself, even when you couldn't get one.

Right now they're going away, but like vynil some will reopen when people miss them too much.

Local will re-emerge with tighter communities. Suburbs are unsustainable wastes and we'll have to adapt by reforming walkable cities. Kids will have tons to explore at that point, like they used to.

AR/VR will enable more spatially interactive technologies as well. Pokemon Go was a fad but I think it heralds a yet-to-come wave.

>Local will re-emerge with tighter communities. Suburbs are unsustainable wastes and we'll have to adapt by reforming walkable cities. Kids will have tons to explore at that point, like they used to.

The suburb hate bandwagon on here has gotten way out of hand. They are not inherently unsustainable and it is not a "waste" to spend a bit more resources to make a space that's nicer to live in. Not everybody wants to have to walk everywhere/take public transit and live like a sardine in a can getting accosted for spare change all day. And are you saying you'd really let a kid "explore" in a city? You're not even particularly safe in a "walkable city" as a lone adult if you go down the wrong street or you're not paying attention.

If you can form that argument more convincingly than Jane Jacobs I'll give it more thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

A lot of people simply dislike density beyond the density found in small towns and suburbs and are willing to pay a bit of a premium for that living condition. The author even "admits that the ideas of the Garden City and the Decentrists made sense on their own terms: a suburban town appealing to privacy-oriented, automobile-loving personalities should tout its green space and low-density housing. [Their] anti-orthodox frustration stems from the fact that their anti-urban biases somehow became an inextricable part of the mainstream academic and political consensus on how to design cities themselves[.]"

I noticed that the author mentions that a busier city street is safer from violent crime but doesn't acknowledge that very busy streets are also havens for pickpockets, whereas you generally get it both ways on mostly-vacant-except-cars streets in lower density areas with little to no violent crime.

Really recommend reading the book as she addresses all of that in depth.

Haha sounds like your kids will be spending most of their time at their friends house with the "cool" parents

They will only appreciate your dedication to environmentalism when theyre older

You didn't enjoy that when you were a kid? I sure did.

Of course if they didn't let me play with the stuff and instead made me keep it in the box on the shelf, I'd be wealthier today.

I figure we do more damage by limiting their exposure to other people and places filled with sites that they cannot truly experience just by ordering stuff over the internet. we are raising future generations in an environment where it becomes deadly easy to isolate one self from the world.

that environment also gives you the ability to teach your children. from making choices, to behaving in public, to seeing other children do both, to being out of the house in a noisy environment that is strange, exciting, maybe even a little scary, all the while with a parent to help them understand.

plus where does it end, how much do we write off due to our prejudices?

Yes we do.

Because right now the only thing kids want to do is click buttons on a computer.

That is not that much different than playing with mindless toys. Research on device usage with children is mixed to say the least.

Most online games are skinner boxes. Just press button over and over. With basically no creativity - or even the possibility of it.

A physical game is not like that. For a young child there is no such thing as a "mindless toy".

You don't need cheap plastic crap though, wooden toys and well made plastic toys can last generations.

Some baby/toddler toys look very much like Skinner boxes to me, intended primarily to keep the child occupied so the parent/carer doesn't have to bother with interacting.

The web is great when you know exactly what you want to buy. Brick and mortar is great when you’re still deciding.

Web is very very far from solving the browsing problem. Sometimes I know I want <new toy> but have no idea what exactly I want. So you go to the store to look around.

Sometimes I also like to ask the sales associate, “I have so and so nephew, what should I get for them?”. Web still sucks at solving the librarian/curator/advicegiver problem.

> Web is very very far from solving the browsing problem.

I may be a rarity, but I still miss Blockbuster for this reason.

That's part of why I've got several shelves of DVDs. Browsing is enjoyable, and I was able to pick up a lot of movies cheaply when Blockbuster was going out of business.

Those "fluorescent-lit warehouse full of cheap crap that will be thrown away in a couple of months after it's bought" still exist, they're Amazon warehouses now, though.

Good riddance. Turn them into multi-use developments and let local stores start to repopulate the area. Like a forest after clearcutting for agriculture.

Edit: at least in already-built-up areas. Tough to say what to do in remote places where you have the "no jobs -> no money -> no spending -> bad place to start a business -> no hiring -> no jobs" feedback loop.

For at least 3 of those companies, the "one reason or another" is private equity vampires.

Unfortunately they failed to anticipate the future during the 1990s, which is especially egregious in the case of Sears which started out as a mail-order only business.

Maybe they will live again in virtual reality.

Those toy stores were worthless palaces of consumerist made-in-china crap. I'm happy to see them go.

Where did you buy your Star Wars action figures? Your Lego sets? Or did you not play with toys as a kid?

As a kid I never bought my toys... My parents sometimes bought them while we were shopping in the toy department of a store like Fred Meyer or Walmart, occasionally other random places like gas stations or movie rental stores, but the general department store is where we'd go when I needed a toy-gift for a friend/relative (unless it was something more specific like some packs of pokemon cards where then I'd go to the card store). Usually I'd only get toys wrapped up on holidays like Birthday/Christmas/Easter and it didn't matter where they came from.

This is true for me too. My parents never took me to a toy shop. They bought what they thought was good and gave it to me. I had a lot of toys.

I never needed to go to one of these stores to know what I wanted, they just happened to be the most convenient place to get them. I now shop at Lego.com for Lego's for me and my children and Amazon for most other things. Avoiding toy stores and advertisement heavy entertainment has given me and my spouse great control over the toys that we introduce to our children and household.

In my day, the Sears X-mas catalog was awesome for that. It was like Amazon in paper form, and I'll always remember the Star Wars or GI Joe figurine scenes nostalgicly.

Man, screw Legos.

It was K'Nex all the way for me.

you can buy the same stuff from Amazon... or Walmart...