Comment by potato3732842
5 hours 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.
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.
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.
Didn't most people in the original Gold Rush lose money too?
> 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.