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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.
Well her guns are USP 9mm, and the variants of the USP are used by the German military. However, the extended barrels and weighted match are only used in competition shooting and never . . . oh you mean her other guns. Definitely fake.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
"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.
But it is not "really" illegal.
Just as stealing $5.00 out of your girlfriends wallet may be illegal, but selling drugs to schoolchildren is "really illegal".
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
My coworker is an amateur paleontologist. He has a reasonably serious collection that takes up most of his house, and does a lot of trading as well as collecting. He has a lot of stories about fakes.
"Dominican Amber" is this beautiful, amazingly clear, amazingly inexpensive amber from the Dominican Republic. Except that when you do some research, it all comes through one company, who has filed patents on taking ground-up amber fragments and re-melting them under pressure into new-old amber.
Likewise, there are some amazing specimens of fossil fish coming out of China, where their skins are fantastically preserved so you can easily see individual scales. Only, a lot of them are completely identical. They're not cast replicas, though: they took an original, cast or machined a negative in metal, then put pieces of slate on top of the negative and vibrated it until it has excavated a perfect copy into the slate -- so it's pure, natural, ancient rock with something that looks exactly like a fossil. In fact, it's pretty hard to tell the difference even for people who know fossils, unless they have a microscope and some time to inspect the edges where the fossil meets the rock.
He said there are also loads of intricate fossils, stuff with lots of fine features (like the tentacles on squids) that have actually been broken off, and a talented fossil restorer has just cut a new one in the rock itself to make the fossil look complete.
All of these, like the fake antiques, have made the real ones less expensive -- but at the same time, they make a market larger, because more people can afford to buy, and at some point that could make the demand rise sharply overall, even though the individual pieces cost less, still contributing to increased demand for originals.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
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.
as someone who owns a Roman coin I've looked into this (I've only got the one because my collection is primarily of hammered English silver coins). Silver which has been out of the ground and moulded for 2000 years or so takes on some certain characteristics which set it apart as being old, so you do actually need old coins to pull off convincing fakes. How they make money on it is in melting down (or at least heating up) the coins and then remoulding them into more expensive (i.e. rarer) coins. The roman coin I've got was a little over £20 (from a reputable dealer) because it is of an unpopular Emperor and was found with a lot of others - if you can re-hammer a £20 coin into a £200 coin you can see where the profit comes from
What really bothers me about all this though is less the ripping people off (which is annoying, but so far I don't think I've been got - hint: buying only relatively inexpensive coins and insisting on knowing providence on more expensive ones helps) but more that these people are destroying the world's history to turn some quick money now (for the same reason I don't support irresponsible metal detector users - you need to report any important find!)
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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