[hanamizu]

More troubling, even scientists have fallen prey to the extraordinary craftsmanship of the Chinese fake fossil artists

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The fact is that there are well over a billion people living in China. They have a history of craftsmanship. There are millions of Chinese who can paint pretty good fake Van Goughs and fake spiders. And there are hundreds and thousands who can create outstanding fakes. Was it Stalin who said that “quantity has a quality all its own”?

[kearnyirish2]

I picked up a bundle of camping gear years ago, and it included a couple of knockoffs of scout mess kits. They didn’t put the scout emblems on them, and if they did you’d realize they were fake immediately - they were far lighter than the real deal. The plates could easily be bent in half like a taco; that would take real effort with the genuine ones. I simply gave them to a flea market vendor to make what he could from them; I couldn’t in good conscience even ask for $1 each.

I see this cheap crap all over Ebay and flea markets now; oddly enough, decades-old Japanese or Taiwanese versions which were considered inferior at the time are head and shoulders above the ChiCom crap - even after all that time.