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eBay Fakes Devalue the Craft of Tomb Robbing
James McP writes "According to an article on Archaeology, fake artifacts being sold on eBay have caused the bottom to drop out of the low-end artifact market. This outcome is exactly opposite to what archeologists feared would happen when eBay came on the scene. A side effect of more and more forgers getting in on the act has been a dramatic increase in high-quality fakes that can fool experts and illicit collectors alike, lowering the price for high-end artifacts as well. It's a lot less cost-effective to go tomb raiding than to make your own fakes, especially since selling fake artifacts isn't really illegal."
Wow, who could have ever thought new technology could have beneficial side effects? That's just crazy.
I'm glad to see this get press. Maybe some people will think twice about jumping on the alarmist "Must Fear Everything New" bandwagon.
Then again, it double's their potential for attention-whoredom: make news talking up your baseless dire predictions, then make news with the shocking revelation that, not only did your predicts not come true, the opposite happened! Who could have seen this amazing twist ending!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
"100% Authentic" is a classic example of a common advertising dodge. It's not a sentence, it's a meaningless fragment without an object, subject, or a verb. The implication is that you're saying that the object right there on the same page is 100% authentic, but they're not responsible for your misunderstanding.
This is a particularly good example, because the sentence not only lacks an object, it also lacks the object that is supposed to be related to the object by the descriptor "authentic". Not only do we not know what is supposed to be authentic, but we don't what class of thing it's supposed supposed to be an authentic member of!
So (unknown object) (is a) 100% Authentic (unknown thing). A perfectly meaningless sentence fragment. Caveat Emptor.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
My sister has lots of testicles. She's a veterinarian. Isn't it funny how most female veterinarians don't see any connection between their fascination with castration and their inability to keep a boyfriend for very long?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
More accurately, and more abstractly, it's cracking the DRM on matter.
Once you can replicate something perfectly right down to the molecular level, there is no longer any difference between the original and the duplicate, because there's
Sure you could say that you know, because you made the replica, but if I take both pieces, hold them behind my back for a moment, shifting my arms, you've lost that.certainty too.
Personally, I love seeing scarce goods copied perfectly and can't wait for this to happen to more things.
The diamond industry comes to mind. DeBeers has been trying desperately to convince everyone that "diamonds are valuable", and now that we're getting good at making copies, they're changing their tune to be, "natural diamonds are valuable". Which basically just proves them to be shysters all along. There was really nothing special about them before, and there's even less now, but they're trying desperately to cling to their business model of convincing people that something is valuable, then holding monopolistic stockpiles of it and releasing just a trickle.
Question everything