I'm betting you're an American. You should read about Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia some time. Here's an interesting article detailing what's happening throughout those areas: women are hired in country A, by agents from country B, who tell the women that they're going to country C to be housekeepers, maids, or work in manufacturing jobs. Once they leave their country -- and often, pay for the ticket -- their passports are taken and they've become illegal aliens who are enslaved, for all practical purposes. The local police are involved, so that doesn't do them any good, and they're physically prevented from going to their embassies, who don't seem to have any interest in helping poor women, anyway.
The current estimates range between half a million and four million women being held this way. I have no idea how accurate that is, but as such, I don't think it's anything like a gross exaggeration to make the claim that involuntary prostitution is real.
I'll start this off by saying that I agree with you.
But, first off, many of the people who most vociferously defend keeping prostitution illegal don't care about the negatives of the current system. They think the idea is abhorrent, so they don't care what the cost/benefit analysis says. (See: war on drugs.)
Secondly, while there are always police to call, as the old sayings goes, when every second makes a difference the police are only minutes away. Extreme violence is not unusual, and hookers get killed on a regular basis. That might not be as much of an issue if it were legal, of course -- in fact, it probably wouldn't be. But the subject is one that's a lot more emotionally volatile than hair stylists, and a lot more likely to lead to violence.
>You have the motives correct, but you have identified the wrong group. "Married women" was what you were looking for...
Well, it isn't just married wives, but that does constitute most of the group, yeah. I just figured I'd throw out the general idea, without getting into realms that could easily, and justifiably, be called sexist.
People who model this economically claim that there's an interesting balance between prostitution and marriage. If many men didn't marry, the price paid for prostitution would rise quite a bit. It's a supply/demand thing.
The adultery/cheating thing could be modelled as a sort of tall poppy syndrome/crab mentality thing, but I think it's probably more biological than that: men tend to want to wander, women tend to want their men to not wander. (This is especially obvious in places like Cambodia or Thailand, where a large proportion of hookers have AIDS, so a wandering husband could be lethal.)
On the commodity consensual sex side of things, I've wondered enough to write some scifi stories about a potential future in which everyone has a job (nobody can afford to support a stay-at-home spouse) and most men have Japanese robots designed for, ah, intimacy, and most women have AI's designed for talking and emotional interaction, and everyone is quite content, and marriage is considered weird and old-fashioned. I absolutely don't think that things are as simple as that, but hey, that's what speculative fiction is all about, isn't it, is to postulate where things could go.
I was silently classing that under the economic/scab argument, although it might be sufficiently different to get its own treatment.
The interesting thing is the group of people who are against it for society, but for it personally, as was apparently the case with eg Marion Barry or Ted Haggard. But that's the case with lots of things.
In the US, there are (at least) two types of prostitution, and two main groups of opposition.
Some prostitutes choose to be prostitutes, because it offers them the best income per unit time: they're just doing business. That's what many Americans, particularly libertarians, think of, when they advocate legalizing prostitution. In many countries, this has been the model they've taken.
Some prostitutes are not willing prostitutes -- they've been forced into it. This is primarily seen in the US with child prostitution, where we don't recognize the child's right to choose that particular profession, but in much of the world there is a large market for what is essentially sexual slavery.
Now, for the opposition: religious conservatives don't like the idea of sex outside marriage for a number of reasons. They're actively opposed to legalizing prostitution. Many other people are passively opposed to prostitution because they mentally model it as scabs crossing a union line called marriage, and dragging down the value of sex, to get all economic about it. This general group is going to oppose *any* type of prostitution, whether by choice or coercion.
The second type of opposition: many people oppose prostitution because either they're worried that even if it's primarily voluntary, it'll lead to a rise in involuntary/coerced prostitution, or they have decided that *any* prostitution is involuntary. (See Andrea Dworkin's work, for instance, where she generalizes to claim that any heterosexual act is essentially coercive. I don't agree, but it's unquestionably an influence.) So while this group -- typically on the left/liberal side -- might consider voluntary prostitution okay, they're still uncomfortable with the whole idea.
A lot of European countries have legalized prostitution while making pimping illegal and heavily prosecuted, which would tend (on first inspection) to select for only voluntary prostitution: just business. The problem with this is two-fold. Prostitutes find they make more money, and are safer, when they have someone to back them up in the case of a dispute with a client. One work-around is collectives, or unions, where prostitutes work with each other, but there's a fine line between that and pimping.
So it's not as simple as just saying 'legalize it'.
To put this in perspective, the court backlog in India may exceed 450 years. There are dozens of cases that have been in the court system for 20 years or more, and one that has been running since the 1870's.
Since the average court case in India is dealt with in under 5 minutes, I suspect their courts are a lot more crowded than ours, as well.
On the computer I'm typing this upon, the installation disc included three word processing programs, two compilers (one understands C, C++, pascal) two assemblers, skype, gimp,... well, I don't actually know. I'd estimate there are over 100 software packages on it. I did have to pay about a dollar for the CDR I burnt it onto, though. In contrast, I paid $1400 for the Amiga and another $300 for a SAS C compiler, and I think $50 for AmiWordStar. I even had to buy the software for a TCP/IP stack so I could modem into my local ISP in 1990.
Huh. That's interesting. My A1000 had no ROM whatsoever, basically -- just enough stuff to read off a floppy. My A2000 and A1500 both had bootrom but neither was OS stuff. I actually soldered in multiple sockets with multiple ROM, and switches to toggle the chip select to choose which boot ROM I wanted to use. But, regardless, that just contained a bootloader. I never got to play with an A4000, though, and maybe they were different. My A2000 is still running, actually. It has the 1.3 and 1.4 bios ROM in it, an overclocked CPU, and a card that allowed me to put in an extra whole megabyte of memory and a SCSI hard drive.
also bikely. It allows you to draw maps using google maps, with a 'follow road' option that really speeds up drawing (although it fails horribly when you forget and try to draw from a road onto a path Google doesn't recognize as a navigable road) and plots out distance and a profile/elevation view. It also allows you to import directly from a GPS. It has its problems and I'm not sure how big it is compared to eg bikemap, but it's what my friends and I use.
I'm unclear on what you mean about the Amiga. My first two had something similar to LILO on a floppy, and a second floppy that had the OS. Later ones used several floppies unless you installed to (owner-installed) HD.
None needed any extra payments to get the system functional: you had to buy a separate word processor, compiler and such, but that's not really different from most computers of the late 1980's.
Now we're talking about things I learned 20 years ago, so let's say I'm somewhat fuzzy on the details. However, my memory is that German chemists first found and named the carboxylic acids, since they were stinky and easy to isolate: formic, acetic, proprionic, and butyric acid. They already knew about methyl and ethyl alcohol from obvious sources, but when they were sort of standardizing common usage names, they ended up using methyl and ethyl from the alcohol family, and propyl and butyl from the carboxylic acid family, to define the numbers of carbons.
Caproic acid, which is what makes goats stinky (well, aside from their general goat nature) was named from the latin word for goat. I am fairly sure the same was the case with butyric, but if I'm wrong I'd be interested in hearing a better butter etymology.
I was actually basing that on a real-life incident at Hanford in Washington. They had lathes machining plutonium under oil lubrication, and they had drain systems to catch the oil and pump it to a place where they could recover the plutonium. At one point in the drain system there was a low point, that somehow the designers missed. Plutonium chips would settle there. At some point, enough had accumulated that it exceeded critical mass, and began to heat up, at which point the oil boiled, blasting all the chips up into the oil, where they slowly settled back down, starting the cycle over again. So it didn't explode, it just kept pulsing out these enormous blasts of energy that set off every detector in the whole area, and then stopped again in less than a second. Apparently it was extremely difficult to track down, as you might imagine. I was told this by someone who worked at Hanford, who said it had happened in the 1960's. So, yeah, all it'd do is melt the grease, but that's all he needed.
>During large thunderstorms, the sewer pipes often see huge flows that scour all the grease that people dump down the drain (DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!) in to large globs the size of beach balls. These tend to block flow at the waste-water stations and cause sewer backup
There's an easy solution to this problem: start dumping chips of plutonium down the all the drains. Whenever there's a stop-up, they'll collect in a mass and that'll fix the blockage.
You may observe that there are some collateral problems with dumping lots of plutonium down the drain. I have an answer for that, too: we train gorillas to go into the sewers and collect all the plutonium chips that haven't been used. Then once winter comes...
Be glad you weren't working next to an intense lachrymator like some of the ethyne derivatives. It's amazing to watch someone open a container in a fume hood and within ten seconds everyone in the lab is running for the door with tears streaming down their faces (and retching.)
A terminal diamine only one carbon off cadaverine is named putrescine. It's also pretty nasty. Even purified butyric acid is astoundingly horrible stuff: years later, even a whiff of slightly rancid butter (from which name butyric acid derives) makes my stomach turn.
I am told that circa 1998, Adobe had posters up in their offices that said something like: "In 1975 there were 20 professional Elvis impersonators. In 1995 there were 30,000 professional Elvis impersonators. By 2035 one of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator. Our job is to capture that market."
On the maybe-inna-lab side, if you didn't want to be discovered you'd release it in an area where you'd reasonably expect a new disease to be discovered: a rural area where people, chickens, and swine live in comparatively close proximity. (And Mexico is an extra plus because it's much easier to smuggle samples from US labs to Mexico than to India or China: you just drive.)
On the other hand, the CDC is spending some time and money investigating claims that the first cases were actually in San Diego in September: it's not at all clear it actually started in Mexico. (read the wikipedia page on the outbreak for more details.
It takes me about 15 minutes longer to ride my bike to work than to drive, and about 30 minutes longer home at night (because of geography and prevailing winds.) It directly saves me $4/day in gas (at $2/gallon, 40 km each way) and probably saves another $1 or so in wear and other consumables. I can't really factor in depreciation because I've already bought the car and it's not going to depreciate much more slowly with 80 km/day less wear on it. So in the end it comes down to a time vs. money tradeoff. In my case I'd be doing about an hour and a half of bike riding a day *anyway*, so doing that (and then another half hour) using the same time I'd be sitting in my car comes across as a big win, but that's not true for most people.
Nah, it's reserved for MOOs. secret.router.on.the.moo.MOO is actually a text-based VR specializing in dusty conspiracy theory role-playing. And furries.
I do that: the area I live is awash with fossils. But they're only from a few eras. My coworker is trying to put together a collection that rivals a museum's, and has pieces from almost every continent, from hundreds of places on each, many being the only site where a given fossil has ever been found.
Yeah, locally we have ammonites and trilobites by the bucketful and every couple of years someone turns up a dinosaur. About 10km from my house there's a field full of dinosaur tracks. It's neat to look at.
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.
I live in alkaline territory so pine needles are wonderful.
If you're bored and want to play chemistry, there are some flowers that change color dependent upon soil pH and content, so you can grow a row of flowers and turn them alternately white and blue by judicious dumping of eg coffee grounds or pine needles. I seem to remember Hydrangea work like this, among others.
In fact, there are a whole class of parasitic flowers that *look* like perfectly normal plants but sneak their roots inside other plants and harvest chemicals from them, and use some of those chemicals to color their flowers.
It's an Open Secret that Military Intelligence will use Super-Secure Windows XP! Then they can eat some Jumbo Shrimp while watching Virtual Porn, and when the super security is Found Missing, they will Act Natural about this Minor Crisis. It's my Unbiased Opinion that this will become a Tragic Comedy.
The idea of using mulch to control weeds is at least 4000 years old. Sure, it works really well. Why use hair? Buy bales of hay, and break off 20 cm thick flakes. Put them over the ground end-to-end, leaving spaces for the crop stems. And there's the reason people have moved to pesticides: it isn't labor-intensive. You don't win anything by having hand labor to install something that only increases your yield 30% unless you're a backyard gardener. You can spray pesticides over 50 acres in an afternoon.
I use hay to mulch in my garden. It works amazingly well. At the end of the year it's broken-down enough that the tomato roots have grown up into the lowest layer, right at the ground level, to use the proto-compost. The only drawback is seeds in the hay sprouting when it's rototilled in.
Likewise, ground cloth with holes cut out for the plants you want, works really well -- better than pesticides -- but then you have to deal with a bunch of somewhat broken-down ground cloth at the end of the year.
Not that this helps your case -- because believe me, I've worked in situations where if you called in sick with bubonic plague you'd probably still get fired if you didn't come in to work -- but my current department manager has said repeatedly that we are so busy, as a group, that we don't have time to be sick. As such, anyone who comes in sick, threatening to infect other people, will be immediately sent home, and possibly fired if this is repeated behavior. It's a nice change from previous jobs.
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I'm betting you're an American.
You should read about Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia some time.
Here's an interesting article detailing what's happening throughout those areas: women are hired in country A, by agents from country B, who tell the women that they're going to country C to be housekeepers, maids, or work in manufacturing jobs. Once they leave their country -- and often, pay for the ticket -- their passports are taken and they've become illegal aliens who are enslaved, for all practical purposes. The local police are involved, so that doesn't do them any good, and they're physically prevented from going to their embassies, who don't seem to have any interest in helping poor women, anyway.
The current estimates range between half a million and four million women being held this way. I have no idea how accurate that is, but as such, I don't think it's anything like a gross exaggeration to make the claim that involuntary prostitution is real.
I'll start this off by saying that I agree with you.
But, first off, many of the people who most vociferously defend keeping prostitution illegal don't care about the negatives of the current system. They think the idea is abhorrent, so they don't care what the cost/benefit analysis says. (See: war on drugs.)
Secondly, while there are always police to call, as the old sayings goes, when every second makes a difference the police are only minutes away. Extreme violence is not unusual, and hookers get killed on a regular basis. That might not be as much of an issue if it were legal, of course -- in fact, it probably wouldn't be. But the subject is one that's a lot more emotionally volatile than hair stylists, and a lot more likely to lead to violence.
>You have the motives correct, but you have identified the wrong group. "Married women" was what you were looking for...
Well, it isn't just married wives, but that does constitute most of the group, yeah. I just figured I'd throw out the general idea, without getting into realms that could easily, and justifiably, be called sexist.
People who model this economically claim that there's an interesting balance between prostitution and marriage. If many men didn't marry, the price paid for prostitution would rise quite a bit. It's a supply/demand thing.
The adultery/cheating thing could be modelled as a sort of tall poppy syndrome/crab mentality thing, but I think it's probably more biological than that: men tend to want to wander, women tend to want their men to not wander. (This is especially obvious in places like Cambodia or Thailand, where a large proportion of hookers have AIDS, so a wandering husband could be lethal.)
On the commodity consensual sex side of things, I've wondered enough to write some scifi stories about a potential future in which everyone has a job (nobody can afford to support a stay-at-home spouse) and most men have Japanese robots designed for, ah, intimacy, and most women have AI's designed for talking and emotional interaction, and everyone is quite content, and marriage is considered weird and old-fashioned. I absolutely don't think that things are as simple as that, but hey, that's what speculative fiction is all about, isn't it, is to postulate where things could go.
I was silently classing that under the economic/scab argument, although it might be sufficiently different to get its own treatment.
The interesting thing is the group of people who are against it for society, but for it personally, as was apparently the case with eg Marion Barry or Ted Haggard. But that's the case with lots of things.
In the US, there are (at least) two types of prostitution, and two main groups of opposition.
Some prostitutes choose to be prostitutes, because it offers them the best income per unit time: they're just doing business. That's what many Americans, particularly libertarians, think of, when they advocate legalizing prostitution. In many countries, this has been the model they've taken.
Some prostitutes are not willing prostitutes -- they've been forced into it. This is primarily seen in the US with child prostitution, where we don't recognize the child's right to choose that particular profession, but in much of the world there is a large market for what is essentially sexual slavery.
Now, for the opposition: religious conservatives don't like the idea of sex outside marriage for a number of reasons. They're actively opposed to legalizing prostitution. Many other people are passively opposed to prostitution because they mentally model it as scabs crossing a union line called marriage, and dragging down the value of sex, to get all economic about it. This general group is going to oppose *any* type of prostitution, whether by choice or coercion.
The second type of opposition: many people oppose prostitution because either they're worried that even if it's primarily voluntary, it'll lead to a rise in involuntary/coerced prostitution, or they have decided that *any* prostitution is involuntary. (See Andrea Dworkin's work, for instance, where she generalizes to claim that any heterosexual act is essentially coercive. I don't agree, but it's unquestionably an influence.) So while this group -- typically on the left/liberal side -- might consider voluntary prostitution okay, they're still uncomfortable with the whole idea.
A lot of European countries have legalized prostitution while making pimping illegal and heavily prosecuted, which would tend (on first inspection) to select for only voluntary prostitution: just business. The problem with this is two-fold. Prostitutes find they make more money, and are safer, when they have someone to back them up in the case of a dispute with a client. One work-around is collectives, or unions, where prostitutes work with each other, but there's a fine line between that and pimping.
So it's not as simple as just saying 'legalize it'.
>and 'justice' moves at a snail's pace.
To put this in perspective, the court backlog in India may exceed 450 years. There are dozens of cases that have been in the court system for 20 years or more, and one that has been running since the 1870's.
Since the average court case in India is dealt with in under 5 minutes, I suspect their courts are a lot more crowded than ours, as well.
On the computer I'm typing this upon, the installation disc included three word processing programs, two compilers (one understands C, C++, pascal) two assemblers, skype, gimp, ... well, I don't actually know. I'd estimate there are over 100 software packages on it.
I did have to pay about a dollar for the CDR I burnt it onto, though.
In contrast, I paid $1400 for the Amiga and another $300 for a SAS C compiler, and I think $50 for AmiWordStar. I even had to buy the software for a TCP/IP stack so I could modem into my local ISP in 1990.
Huh. That's interesting.
My A1000 had no ROM whatsoever, basically -- just enough stuff to read off a floppy.
My A2000 and A1500 both had bootrom but neither was OS stuff. I actually soldered in multiple sockets with multiple ROM, and switches to toggle the chip select to choose which boot ROM I wanted to use. But, regardless, that just contained a bootloader.
I never got to play with an A4000, though, and maybe they were different.
My A2000 is still running, actually. It has the 1.3 and 1.4 bios ROM in it, an overclocked CPU, and a card that allowed me to put in an extra whole megabyte of memory and a SCSI hard drive.
Presumably coz Google doesn't have tens of thousands of armed employees legally empowered to kill.
also bikely.
It allows you to draw maps using google maps, with a 'follow road' option that really speeds up drawing (although it fails horribly when you forget and try to draw from a road onto a path Google doesn't recognize as a navigable road) and plots out distance and a profile/elevation view. It also allows you to import directly from a GPS.
It has its problems and I'm not sure how big it is compared to eg bikemap, but it's what my friends and I use.
I'm unclear on what you mean about the Amiga.
My first two had something similar to LILO on a floppy, and a second floppy that had the OS.
Later ones used several floppies unless you installed to (owner-installed) HD.
None needed any extra payments to get the system functional: you had to buy a separate word processor, compiler and such, but that's not really different from most computers of the late 1980's.
Now we're talking about things I learned 20 years ago, so let's say I'm somewhat fuzzy on the details. However, my memory is that German chemists first found and named the carboxylic acids, since they were stinky and easy to isolate: formic, acetic, proprionic, and butyric acid. They already knew about methyl and ethyl alcohol from obvious sources, but when they were sort of standardizing common usage names, they ended up using methyl and ethyl from the alcohol family, and propyl and butyl from the carboxylic acid family, to define the numbers of carbons.
Caproic acid, which is what makes goats stinky (well, aside from their general goat nature) was named from the latin word for goat. I am fairly sure the same was the case with butyric, but if I'm wrong I'd be interested in hearing a better butter etymology.
I was actually basing that on a real-life incident at Hanford in Washington. They had lathes machining plutonium under oil lubrication, and they had drain systems to catch the oil and pump it to a place where they could recover the plutonium.
At one point in the drain system there was a low point, that somehow the designers missed. Plutonium chips would settle there. At some point, enough had accumulated that it exceeded critical mass, and began to heat up, at which point the oil boiled, blasting all the chips up into the oil, where they slowly settled back down, starting the cycle over again. So it didn't explode, it just kept pulsing out these enormous blasts of energy that set off every detector in the whole area, and then stopped again in less than a second. Apparently it was extremely difficult to track down, as you might imagine.
I was told this by someone who worked at Hanford, who said it had happened in the 1960's.
So, yeah, all it'd do is melt the grease, but that's all he needed.
>During large thunderstorms, the sewer pipes often see huge flows that scour all the grease that people dump down the drain (DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!) in to large globs the size of beach balls. These tend to block flow at the waste-water stations and cause sewer backup
There's an easy solution to this problem: start dumping chips of plutonium down the all the drains. Whenever there's a stop-up, they'll collect in a mass and that'll fix the blockage.
You may observe that there are some collateral problems with dumping lots of plutonium down the drain. I have an answer for that, too: we train gorillas to go into the sewers and collect all the plutonium chips that haven't been used. Then once winter comes...
Be glad you weren't working next to an intense lachrymator like some of the ethyne derivatives. It's amazing to watch someone open a container in a fume hood and within ten seconds everyone in the lab is running for the door with tears streaming down their faces (and retching.)
A terminal diamine only one carbon off cadaverine is named putrescine. It's also pretty nasty. Even purified butyric acid is astoundingly horrible stuff: years later, even a whiff of slightly rancid butter (from which name butyric acid derives) makes my stomach turn.
I am told that circa 1998, Adobe had posters up in their offices that said something like:
"In 1975 there were 20 professional Elvis impersonators. In 1995 there were 30,000 professional Elvis impersonators. By 2035 one of every three people will be an Elvis impersonator. Our job is to capture that market."
Which I thought was funny on at least two levels.
On the maybe-inna-lab side, if you didn't want to be discovered you'd release it in an area where you'd reasonably expect a new disease to be discovered: a rural area where people, chickens, and swine live in comparatively close proximity. (And Mexico is an extra plus because it's much easier to smuggle samples from US labs to Mexico than to India or China: you just drive.)
On the other hand, the CDC is spending some time and money investigating claims that the first cases were actually in San Diego in September: it's not at all clear it actually started in Mexico. (read the wikipedia page on the outbreak for more details.
It takes me about 15 minutes longer to ride my bike to work than to drive, and about 30 minutes longer home at night (because of geography and prevailing winds.)
It directly saves me $4/day in gas (at $2/gallon, 40 km each way) and probably saves another $1 or so in wear and other consumables.
I can't really factor in depreciation because I've already bought the car and it's not going to depreciate much more slowly with 80 km/day less wear on it.
So in the end it comes down to a time vs. money tradeoff. In my case I'd be doing about an hour and a half of bike riding a day *anyway*, so doing that (and then another half hour) using the same time I'd be sitting in my car comes across as a big win, but that's not true for most people.
Nah, it's reserved for MOOs. secret.router.on.the.moo.MOO is actually a text-based VR specializing in dusty conspiracy theory role-playing. And furries.
I do that: the area I live is awash with fossils. But they're only from a few eras. My coworker is trying to put together a collection that rivals a museum's, and has pieces from almost every continent, from hundreds of places on each, many being the only site where a given fossil has ever been found.
Yeah, locally we have ammonites and trilobites by the bucketful and every couple of years someone turns up a dinosaur. About 10km from my house there's a field full of dinosaur tracks. It's neat to look at.
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.
I live in alkaline territory so pine needles are wonderful.
If you're bored and want to play chemistry, there are some flowers that change color dependent upon soil pH and content, so you can grow a row of flowers and turn them alternately white and blue by judicious dumping of eg coffee grounds or pine needles. I seem to remember Hydrangea work like this, among others.
In fact, there are a whole class of parasitic flowers that *look* like perfectly normal plants but sneak their roots inside other plants and harvest chemicals from them, and use some of those chemicals to color their flowers.
It's an Open Secret that Military Intelligence will use Super-Secure Windows XP! Then they can eat some Jumbo Shrimp while watching Virtual Porn, and when the super security is Found Missing, they will Act Natural about this Minor Crisis.
It's my Unbiased Opinion that this will become a Tragic Comedy.
The idea of using mulch to control weeds is at least 4000 years old. Sure, it works really well. Why use hair? Buy bales of hay, and break off 20 cm thick flakes. Put them over the ground end-to-end, leaving spaces for the crop stems.
And there's the reason people have moved to pesticides: it isn't labor-intensive. You don't win anything by having hand labor to install something that only increases your yield 30% unless you're a backyard gardener. You can spray pesticides over 50 acres in an afternoon.
I use hay to mulch in my garden. It works amazingly well. At the end of the year it's broken-down enough that the tomato roots have grown up into the lowest layer, right at the ground level, to use the proto-compost. The only drawback is seeds in the hay sprouting when it's rototilled in.
Likewise, ground cloth with holes cut out for the plants you want, works really well -- better than pesticides -- but then you have to deal with a bunch of somewhat broken-down ground cloth at the end of the year.
>employers tend to be unsympathetic
Not that this helps your case -- because believe me, I've worked in situations where if you called in sick with bubonic plague you'd probably still get fired if you didn't come in to work -- but my current department manager has said repeatedly that we are so busy, as a group, that we don't have time to be sick. As such, anyone who comes in sick, threatening to infect other people, will be immediately sent home, and possibly fired if this is repeated behavior.
It's a nice change from previous jobs.