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....

Counterfeit ivory isn’t anything new.

> like more mature resource extraction industries

bad news - a large enough collection of resource extraction industries have already denuded vast areas.. 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.

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.