The Mammoth Pirates – In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush

47 pointsposted a month ago
by ece20
(rferl.org)

19 Comments

weslleyskah

a month ago

I understand that the carved mammoth's tusks can be worth millions, but

> The market for powdered rhino horn in Vietnam is partly due to a belief it can cure cancer. By the time it reaches Vietnam, the horn will be worth more than its weight in gold.

So they even sell based on myths and legends? What insanity. I thought museums would pay for this. Not to mention the work an life conditions in these remote regions of Russia. This is one hell of a documentary.

potato3732842

a month ago

My educated guess based on the limited information in the article is the high grade stuff becomes decor of some sort. I suspect it's the chips and scraps from that process that get turned into magical cancer curing penis pills or whatever.

mmooss

a month ago

Social media is filled with myths and legends - almost certainly there has never been more misinformation and disinformation - and people act on them all the time. Lots of people die because of them.

And if you wonder how much people will pay, look at a lot of cryptocurrency, stock scams, etc.

potato3732842

a month ago

A summer away from one's family, doing hard work in the mud, eating highly processed food from cans and drinking tons of alcohol sounds like a real blast of a time for young men if not for the mosquitoes and questionable economics of it all.

It sucks that they'd destroying the land and the rivers but that's not new. Hopefully they find some equilibrium that legalizes what they're up to that maximizes the upside and minimizes the damage like more mature resource extraction industries do.

gnerd00

a month ago

> like more mature resource extraction industries

I have zero confidence that mature natural resource extraction companies are operating within sustainable bounds today, and a lot of evidence to back that up...

a large enough collection of resource extraction industries have already denuded vast areas and continue to do so .. combine with poisonous petrochemical products over time and industrial lighting and roads.. we are in a fast-paced extinction event.. "we" means a lot of economies..

It is "successful" in the short term to be greedy. Many companies today are successful.

moab

a month ago

This is a bad take. The article makes it clear that most of them will lose money on the venture, and the reason the prices are high are due to status-mining chinese elites and traditional-medicine paranoiacs in vietnam. It's a pretty dismal situation.

potato3732842

a month ago

If everyone lost money nobody would do it. Are they losing money because it's fundamentally unworkable or because it's illegal which makes it hard to do in a "professional" manner and therefore incurs efficiency penalties?

Your average 22yo isn't doing something like this with his buddies. Between the equipment, expertise, consumables, etc, etc, it's clearly the kind of thing that's organized and financially backed by someone (i.e. like most small business). So while most may lose money, we don't know if it's a "send out three teams and one winner pays for two losers" type situation.

The way I see it these mammoth bits are far more likely to be preserved if used as home decor or whatever somewhere in China than if they wind up rotting away when (let's be real here, probably not an "if") the permafrost melts or in some mine's tailings pile when some other industry comes through. If this was all above the table there'd be more ancillary industry around it too. Sure the tusk might be cost prohibitive but why can't every highschool biology department have a "worthless" femur or jaw or backbone segment? Oh, because it's illegal so "less profitable stuff" (i.e. same reason the cartel doesn't move low density product) like that gets discarded, that's why.

throw-the-towel

a month ago

Didn't most people in the original Gold Rush lose money too?

sigwinch

a month ago

Anthrax spores blasted out of the permafrost at pressure. It really seems like sooner or later, who could have guessed that this activity came with a curse?

metalman

a month ago

the ancestors of the men pictured in the article are "responsible" for introducing yersenia pestis/the plague into the world and europe in particular, from there habbit of eating marmots, which are the original plague vector then as now they are a fractious lot, given to grand gestures, a culture that is very similar to those ancient times, so they will not be taking any advice about health and saftey. The truth about a new plauge is that as humanity is digging into every last nook and crany on the planet, all day, every day, and then dragging whatever we find back to a lab and playing with it, at every university on the planet, and then heading to the pub after maybe not washing our hands, an ooopsy! is more or less inevitable be fun to see if there are lightly used level 5 air filters for sale somewhere, what withall the defunding going on....

mmooss

a month ago

> dragging whatever we find back to a lab and playing with it, at every university on the planet, and then heading to the pub after maybe not washing our hands, an ooopsy!

Reseach on potentially dangerous materials has been going on for generations; why would the outcomes be worse now?

asimovDev

a month ago

Does this affect archeological or any other scientific efforts negatively? Or is it the same as selling fossils online as souvenirs for couple dozen dollars? Well except the prices are in 6 digits and there's a seemingly considerable ecological impact

mmooss

a month ago

The fact that many in China value ivory is not unusual, in that different cultures value different things that have no productive value. How did ivory, which is valued in many places, become so much more valued by many in China?

zdc1

a month ago

I wonder how easy it would be to counterfeit a mammoth tusk

nkrisc

a month ago

Counterfeit ivory isn’t anything new.

gnerd00

a month ago

How are "mammoth pirates" newsworthy compared to a 20 year concerted campaign to reopen the US Arctic Oil drilling ? that is now reopening?

look - over there!

potato3732842

a month ago

Who's stock portfolio benefits from mammoth pirates?

Who's stock portfolio benefits from arctic drilling?

HarHarVeryFunny

a month ago

I don't know when this article was written, but this is nothing "new" - it's been going on for years.