>Also I can’t imagine getting a box of seeds in the mail (unsolicited) and thinking to myself, “I should plant these and see what comes up!”
different strokes for different folks i guess, but that is absolutely something i would do. or would have done if they'd arrived in may, planting in august is kinda pointless where i live.
I believe this now makes you the cheapest subscription monthly order seed service.
You might have some trouble marketing this angle though, what with the hysteria over seeds from China right now.
I find a lot of the Chinese eBay sellers have a... bizarre... assortments of items for sale. I fear, one day, I'll order some USB cables, and get stuck having to explain to someone why child-sized lingerie has been shipped to my name.
So far, the only gross error I've had was a getting sent hairclippers instead of a Dreamcast controller. Could've used the clippers, but wrong voltage :(
Same. I can't believe the FUD that's going on. What's the worst that can happen with a seed?? It will not open a portal to another dimension! A plant will just grow out of it.
You keep it inside and take a picture and you will know if you will get nice flowers, or vegetables, or...nothing. Just leaves.
As a kid I loved to plant seeds in plastic cups and see what grew out of it, and trying additives to see if they could help the plant grow. Once I grew a little tomato, and ate it. I didn't drop dead from tomato consumption.
It's innocent and safe. The government should have no business regulating what people do with seeds.
Invasive species are mostly bad for ecosystems. They introduce a lot of unknowns. There is nothing safe for neither humans nor wildlife about possibility introducing invasive species.
Your passion for experimentation and cultivation is awesome. I get that you don’t want the government telling you what you can and can’t do. So, instead, what if you look at it as a fellow citizen asking you to please not plant random seeds from China in the ground outside, unattended.
Hence the 'keeping it inside' part. I would not plan outside a vine or something that may interfere with my other plants, until I know what it is.
Still, I fail to see the harm of growing the seed inside to identify the plant. People here have reported receiving cucumbers and strawberries. No one has reported receiving vines or anything else.
I am very surprised by the level of fear and paranoia regarding everything and especially China: we are looking at horse gift in the mouth, then saying it is a bioterrorism plot. Unbelievable!! When I was a kid, that would have been the best mail-order present ever!
Also, regarding kudzu and the like, I fail to see the harm. The environment changes. We may not like that, but that's how life is. Instead of trying to undo changes, maybe we should adapt to them.
Kudzu seems good for livestock, rich in protein and isoflavones. Trying to burn it seems to be due to a distinct lack of imagination and profit motive. It's a free input!!! Find new ways to chop it down to feed it to livestock. Make it into a food supplement.
Anything looks better than just destruction and nostalgia for the time it wasn't here. It's here now. Adapt!
>It's innocent and safe. The government should have no business regulating what people do with seeds.
I feel like that boat has flown, or whatever. It's kind of like saying the government should have no business checking passports or levying an income tax or something.
Modern geeks seem to only care about government control.
But I have read about the old time hackers, who yearned freedom and experimentation. It seemed to have been widespread: I have seen movies from the 1980s, and noticed the same thing: people seem less fearful, more open and ready to experiment.
It may sound silly to you, but I was awestruck by "Bill and Ted excellent adventure"!
Even with all the modern technology we have, I wish I had been born 20 or 30 years earlier, when freedom was still a thing and innocent fun was deemed innocent by default.
It’s still a country that has a massive portion of the population that’s poor. If you want the poor people in the world to stop trying everything they can get some of your money then vote for more income equality initiatives and cut your own salary.
This type of behavior is endemic with poverty and can be seen with Nigerian princes, Indian call center scams, or just your friendly San Francisco neighborhood bike thief.
This behavior has more to do with poverty and income inequality than Chinese people (or people of any country or race for that matter).
True, but the reason why would be carrying "a pet bird" vs. "a bag of dead birds", not the person being European vs. Chinese as you're trying to imply.
It's clearly the first line of a deeply rooted plot. These plants, when fully grown, will be identifiable from special satellites. They just have to get enough unwitting people planting them as well to make the strategic plants from sticking out.
That's just a hoax of an investigation. Tumble weeds were from the wild west days. It too was clearly part of the plot from China. As they built the railroads, they were doing their version of Johnny Appleseed dropping the tumble weed seeds. The whole of the US Southwest was a lush garden like area until these tumble weeds took over and turned it into a desert.
That seems like hysteria. Yes, birds can potentially carry bird flu. Also, Chinese culture is more open-minded about animal consumption than USA culture and health safety laws. Culture clash is more likely explanation than bio warfare.
If you want to smuggle bird flu into USA, are you really going to do it in a bag of whole dead birds, and not some processed form that is more convenient and less suspicious?
We're in the middle of a global pandemic quite possibly caused by Chinese people consuming animals that shouldn't be consumed. "Open minded" is not the right description for this behavior.
There are definitely incorrect animals to consume. I have no problem stating that it is wrong to consume animals from wild populations of species that harbor viruses potentially capable of infecting humans and causing a global pandemic. Also endangered species. If that's controversial, well, it shouldn't be.
That's why we should only consume pigs raised in captivity with no exposure to wild populations. If that's where you get your bats or pangolins from, and you actually have enforcement and verification of that, then no problem. (Except that pangolins are endangered of course.)
This strikes me as a first-world privileged thing, similar to how Europe built its industrial revolution on coal but now tries to prevent others from doing the same thing. Even in the US we eat domesticated livestock (cattle), cultivated but not domesticated livestock (bison), and entirely wild animals (deer). Any of these could vector a novel illness to humans.
About 350,000 deer are culled in the UK each year, the population is actively managed in many places of the country for various reasons [1]. Because of this, venison is not uncommon in our supermarkets. Should we just destroy the corpses instead?
Not all animal species carry the same risk. This isn't about privilege - or at least not anymore. Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved after food shortages and famines caused by e.g. the four pests and such. This is cultural. as are the unsanitary conditions at wet markets, and completely unscientific "traditional medicine" and the common notion that live beings taste better if tortured before death.
Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.
> Mainland Chinese learned to eat anything and everything that moved
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.
If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".
"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB
Not if they are from wild populations, or raised in a way that they could be exposed to viruses from wild populations, or if they are endangered species.
I’m not sure being wild is a good indicator. I would think the opposite might be true wherein industrial farming and close quarters would cause more disease, just like how we talk about population density and covid-19. If you aren’t exposed to others, disease can’t spread. For instance, H1N1 didn’t start in the wild. And it didn’t start with an exotic animal. But it was a global pandemic.
The only position you can safely hold is to not eat meat. A weaker position could be around the sanitation and care of stock and its preparation. But what you eat doesn’t matter, be it pig or dog or squirrel or bat.
I'd say that capturing wild animals, then keeping them in cramped unsanitary conditions, along with other species, is the worst possible option for disease. Industrial farming only does one of those three.
That's a bit like the fallacy of relative privation: Because what the west does isn't as bad, they aren't culpable. Again, there was a global pandemic caused by pig farming just 11 short years ago, and everybody is still eating bacon.
Sure, but you need some threshold, otherwise you conclude you can never buy anything or see another person. "Buy no meat" is not fully safe either, so that's not the objective place to draw the line.
And I'm not trying to make an argument about "the west", it's just about specific animals and ways to get them.
"has caused a global pandemic" would be a terrible threshold. The set of global pandemics is far too small to draw meaningful conclusions about risk. We have other data about viruses in animals that should be used.
You’re missing my point. If the argument is: "We're in the middle of a global pandemic quite possibly caused by Chinese people consuming animals that shouldn't be consumed,” then I would like to be clear that swine should also not be consumed, as they too have caused a global pandemic.
You're missing my point. That statement is not my argument about which specific animals should be consumed. It's my argument about the parent comment's statement, which I am simply responding to and did not even claim myself, that Chinese people eat a wider variety of animals than we do in the US, and the behavior of eating a wider variety of animals should be considered "open minded," implying (and again this is the parent comment's argument, not mine) that the practice of eating a narrower variety of animals should be considered "closed minded". My argument was that the timing of said statement from the parent comment is extremely unfortunate given the fact that the current global pandemic likely originated in animals consumed in China and generally not in the US, and the general idea of restricting animal consumption for health reasons should not be considered "closed minded". That's it.
Now, that statement assumes that some animals have higher risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans than others, and if you disagree with that then you'll disagree with the statement, but the statement itself was not an argument about that point. Subsequently we have further argued about that specific point. I don't believe that decisions about which animals to consume should be based on cultural factors as you assume, but rather I believe that it should be based on relevant science (not simply "has this specific animal caused a global pandemic in recent history"). I believe that science does not support the idea that all animals or animal procurement practices have identical risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans. Therefore I support the idea of restricting consumption of some animals, especially wild ones (including some currently consumed in the US), and reject the idea that this is simply "closed minded".
Unfortunately the inclusion of the single word "Chinese" in my original comment has blinded everyone to the argument I was making, despite the fact that it was simply a response to the parent comment. It would have been a better comment, and made the same point, without the word "Chinese" in it. Please strike that word from my original comment and read it again.
You're right, I'm sure farming practices could be improved to help prevent pandemics. But it is false to say that all animals carry the same level of risk, and forgoing meat entirely is far from the only option to reduce risk.
Can I just say, people have been eating bats for millenia, and there's never been a global pandemic arising from bat eating in recorded history. In fact, in recent history, there's never been a definite zoonotic global pandemic even 1/10th as serious as covid. Swine flu and Bird Flu weren't close in severity, and came from eating common farmed animals.
Perhaps eating certain animals should be curtailed (I'm no expert) as long as it doesn't result in low protein intake. But, the anti-China sentiment is xenophobic.
The 2014/2015 Ebola crisis in West Africa has also been definitively traced to people eating bats. There's biological reasons why bats are reservoirs of viruses that are not harmful to themselves, but to many other mammals.
You can't just take every species that hasn't caused a global pandemic in the past and declare them all equally safe. There are differing levels of risk in different species, and not only that but in different farming and food preparation practices, and in captive vs. wild populations.
The common cold and flu come from
domesticated animals every year.
Pretty much all serious pandemics started in some other species of mammals, and then transferred to humans. Examples: SARS, bird flu, ebola, hiv, spanish flu.
(I agree that blaming Chinese culture for the problem is xenophobic nonsense though.)
Unfortunately there is no universal golden rule on what "should" be eaten or not. Especially when you are hungry and there isn't many choices. If you didn't die or get sick, you might choose to continue eating a "weird food" because they taste good, even when you have other choices.
It's bizarre to Americans that _some_ Chinese are eating bats[1] and snakes[2].
It's bizarre to Chinese that _some_ Americans are eating alligators[3][4], bears and frogs.
It is human nature to explore and try new things including animals for food. If one has known better, maybe it's better to educate others what are good/bad food sources, with proofs.
Mutual discrimination based on sensational news and locally-biased "common sense" are not making the world a better place.
There are different levels of risk. It's not all the same. I would be just fine with banning consumption of alligators, bears, or frogs if the risk is assessed to be as high as for bats.
I thought customs trying to control biological materials ("meats, fruits, vegetables, plants, seeds, soil, animals, as well as plant and animal products") coming into a country was a thing, long before present events.
Authorities get really uptight about invasive species and whatnot. Maybe groundless talk of biowarfare is "hysteria" but regulating biological materials going across borders is the norm as far as I know.
I can’t either! I’m surprised at the comments saying they totally would. I guess I remember the anthrax scare when I was little, so unsolicited packages have always freaked me out a bit.
It might turn out to be poisonous. If you can't precisely identify what you grow, get rid of it. To reduce contamination risk, roast it to a crisp, bleach or otherwise sterilize it. This doesn't just apply to exotic plants, but also to most plants of the family Apiaceae, as they can be hard to correctly identify and tell apart. Needless to say, many of them are noxious, poisonous or invasive, some all three of them, like the giant hogweed.
I got some in the mail a few weeks ago and thought about planting them. I've ordered seeds from the internet in the past and so I just assumed that I must have ordered these at some point and forgot about it.
All you may need is to throw the biodegradable package in trash. On a landfill site, where the seeds will arrive, they will grow and possibly even prosper.
There are tons of random reports of this too on Reddit and 4Chan, it's interesting to read and see the screenshots. You have random people saying the Government is lying and they'll plant it anyway to people saying it's typical Chinese Amazon scams to harvest reviews.
This seems the obvious Occam razor
Earring seller orders/sends fake earring packages and posts fake reviews.
With the trade war and espionage stuff heating up the cold war with China, one wonders if the Chinese Communist Party crack down on this to try to defend China's reputation and conserve their political capital for more substantial attacks on US, or encourage it to antagonize US into war?
What happens if US Customs cracks down on Chinese import fraud and drives up the cost of importing product? I always thought that cracking down on illegal-in-US behaviors like pollution and worker mistreatment would be a more morally defensible and socio-economically beneficial trade battle than arbitrary and capricious tariffs.
Well the Chinese Communist Party has the personal information of at least 44% of all Americans thanks to their hack of Equifax so it probably wasn't too hard for them to do a mail merge.
This is delightfully mysterious. Is this a biological disruption attack? An unlucky shipping glitch? The real answer is probably more boring but I'd like to believe it's something nefarious!
If it is an attack and we stop it, I suppose the next step is embedding seeds directly into biodegradable cardboard packaging. No one will think twice about tossing that without cooking to neutralise it.
That is super weird. I imagine it wont be long till the seeds are identified, but whatever the story is behind these, its bound to be at least mildly interesting.
We have two carriers sitting in the ocean near China right now due to tensions regarding their oceanic claims and Hong Kong, so people are a bit tense right now.
I find it kind of hard to believe the United States government hasn’t identified the seeds. I bet I could get a reasonably close ID with a photo of the seeds and Google. Surely there’s at least one government lab and several dozen government scientists capable of figuring it out.
There might not be. The USDA is a ghost town. Trump’s Ag Secretary abruptly (and possibly illegally) moved all of the research to Kansas City and a huge number of scientists didn’t make the move.
I wonder if this is an attack by a single or a small group of individuals against countries they dislike. This sounds like something you'd do if you wanted to make a dent that way as a regular person.
It's called brushing and basically a Chinese seller sends something cheap (like seeds, or trinkets) and then creates a review from "someone in the US".
The shipping portion is necessary because they need the tracking info for the sale to be counted.
edit:oops, accidentally mixed up churning with brushing. churning is something else
Not just that but there's also a method where the product name and photo is edited later. So they ship one dollar items and later edit it to be something much more valuable on amazon.
There are so many items that have reviews for obviously different items right now. I’ve seen it on a lot of COVID related items like no contact thermometers.
That's a longstanding Amazon bug. As I understand it, a seller can "hijack" the reviews of another product that's no longer available by registering their product as a variant of the existing one.
I had a similar experience trying to report a product that extremely misrepresented itself and yet had ~5 stars from reviews that were obviously assigned from an unrelated product.
My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.
That seems very short sighed of Amazon. The viability of Amazon's open marketplace depends on the review system. Once all trust in reviews is gone people will increasingly shop somewhere else (whether that's a shop with more reliable reviews or one that carefully selects what they sell)
The other issue I'm seeing with thermometers is that they are saying "FDA Certified." The FDA doesn't certify anything. They provide Pre-Market Approval in a letter.
A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.
This is the part that doesn't make sense: these items don't have Delivery Confirmation. They're untracked. I even entered in a few from the Facebook link below where people posted their own screenshots, and yep, UJ.........CN tracking numbers aren't tracked once they reach USA.
So what's the point of sending out anything at all?
Just include any old tracking number for any other legit purchase as proof of sending something on an illegit purchase.
I believe completely changing the listing can sometimes trigger a review. But most of the times, they change it slowly in separate revisions so it is impossible to detect.
It shouldn’t be impossible. Diff the latest revision with the first. If it’s simply a revision of an existing product, things don’t change that much. If it’s substantially different, it’s simply a new product. Even small revisions of products usually get entirely new product names and numbers. It’s weird to let one product hang around for 10 years and go through several changes.
Hell, don’t let the product name change. Have a base name and an extension that can be appended and edited, with a text requirement for each (eg 12 characters minimum for the product name and 30 characters max for revision extension.) Do something similar with the description content and have a space for product changes/enhancements following an uneditable and mandatory product description.
You’re trying to solve a social problem with a technological solution. The social problem is that Amazon doesn’t want to fix this. What Amazon wants is more sales, and as long as this kind of thing does not impact what they want, it would be a waste of money to do something which would not benefit them. Meanwhile, Amazon is a huge market for lemons¹ which drives out all sellers except the cheap junk ones, while simultaneously being so absolutely huge that nobody can realistically stop selling on Amazon or stop buying from Amazon.
It’s not that hard to do text similarity tests, but they also don’t need to: simply having a survey or report button would make this scam harder to pull off. You could even toss in a bounty like they do for choosing slower shipping.
Amazon doesn’t because they don’t care. It must not be costing them much money because we know they’re watching the numbers closely.
I've bumped into this when I went back to buy more.
This was a "Ultralight Backpacking Canister Camp Stove with Piezo Ignition 3.9oz!" for about $8. Now it is some sort of headphone jack. Several things like that, where the product that was previously ordered... changed. Most of the comments for this one are still about the stove.
That’s egregious. Why is so hard to find any kind of report button on the page (on mobile)? I’d like to at least tick some box saying something is amiss but I can’t find anything.
A headphone adapter that has "PIEZO ignition" and "Adjustable flame"... I've come across things like that but assumed they were weird database glitches. Didn't think they were deliberate.
I wonder if that's also what happened to this one, although it's only the picture that's out of place (but also amusingly relevant): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLGZD46
Yep, they now exist in capacities of up to 1 TB. Also, SanDisk were the first (and probably only) company to sell 200/400 GB microSD cards, supposedly so that they could lay claim to having the highest capacity micro SD card.
Some of it is to get the "verified purchase" reviews, but the specific discussion was around the Alibaba IPO and whether it can be used to inflate stock price via fake revenues.
A friend had his information (leaked from some company who he used to buy products from its database) used for this. I wonder if they usually get their information from stolen user DBs
I don't understand. Why do they need to ship anything in the box at all? They could ship empty boxes and still have tracking numbers show as delivered.
Customs might get even more suspicious about seeds, since (1) there are all sorts of regulations about agricultural imports and (2) the seeds could be for an illegal substance, such as marijuana.
In China they usually need to pay 1 to 1.5 dollars for someone willingly doing it for them, it's open secret and an entire industry, it feeds platform's ranking/recommendation system to get ahead, sometimes platforms actively encourage it.
You may have heard of the Singles Day shopping event, it's common for sellers to boost their revenue that day to meet requirements from platforms, like selling a cheap T-shirt for $150 then refund it upon receiving the package.
It's like the physical delivery version of the photos I've seen of a single human operating 40 budget $100 Android phones, all on different VPNs and Google play accounts, to do review stuffing. It is its whole own industry. Kind of like how online game gold farming is an industry.
But seeds cast a whole other dimension onto this problem... It is not a problem if they send you a cheap plastic bracelet but seeds can have unforseen consequences
Indeed, the seed page on Aliexpress is one the most peculiar thing I've seen in a while, blue strawberries, giant tomatoes (advertised to be as big as a watermelon) and all sorts of other weird fruits.
I spent 5$ on these a while back with some friends, about 50% never arrived and the other 50% didn't sprout. Could be my bad though.
Just reminded me of someone I knew back in 2015 that ordered some of these strange off color blue strawberries and fruits, most of his Chinese seeds did not germinate, but the few that did were a strange little regular plant that were not thoroughly bred well. I would never try to order seeds outside of your local famous standard seed houses.
As someone who is a biologist in Australia, oh my god is it a headache to get seeds into Australia. Lots of paperwork involved if we actually want to grow overseas plants, much easier to import extracted RNA or DNA (but way riskier for the research, shipping companies aren't trustworthy in keeping smaller shipments on ice).
The dogs and the x-ray at the airport are not for drugs, they're mostly biosecurity, too.
I can't see something like the OP happening in Australia, it would get destroyed at the border
Fellow Australian here, and I've always viewed our biosecurity as being pretty tight and effective, too.
Apparently however small innocuous packets/letters don't receive quite as much screening, as I've heard of people getting marijuana seeds in the mail just fine.
Considering how one or two seeds can be enough if the purpose is simply to acquire the species it seems like an impossible task to prevent that.
It's far more difficult than drug smuggling which only works in some reasonable quantity - and becomes more like information smuggling in biological form where you only need one copy.
"The precedent-setting agreement classifies a spacecraft as an export. Once launched, satellite components were judged to be “severed from the possibility of trade within the United States” and therefore considered to be exports, according to Customs officials."
It is because of our early history - heavy with hubris - with introduction and escape/release of cane toads, prickly pair, tiger pear, rabbits, foxes, camels, fruit fly, etc ... that Australia is now extremely cautious.
Meanwhile New Zealand looks at Australia, pulls out their own biosecurity system and says "That's not a biosecurity system. That's a biosecurity system.
NZ is the only country I know that makes you take your shoes off in the airport... in order to scrub and bleach them (to be fair they were hiking boots, though not obviously filthy). What service!
True, but NZ has also learned it the hard way. There was once a vibrant birdlife in the South Island, especially. There is some early settler who said that the morning birdsong in Queenstown was deafening. Cats, introduced by European settlers, killed off a lot of the native birds, and the ecosystem is only recently hobbling back to normal (have done birdwatching in NZ).
If you are interested in bird conservation in NZ, please visit Karori park in Wellington and contribute.
BTW: some parks in US also have installed brushes to wipe your boots for preventing the transmission of invasive species seeds. I think there are a few in Wisconsin that I remember.
Some preserves in California have trays of disinfectant to step through, specifically for Sudden Oak Death. It’s a pathogen transmitted through dirt, so in the very few places that aren’t affected yet it’s hard to keep out.
Well their government already sent out coronavirus to the world (by not closing down wet market, by carelessly releasing the virus from the Wuhan lab, whichever) that killed our grandparents and destroyed our economy.
I doubt these seeds can do worse. Unless they are radioactive seeds.
Yup like wooden crates packaging actual products but infested with emerald ash bohrer or asian long horned beetle larvae. Only NZ and AU have an effective biisecurity policies.
I have shipped some of my belongings from Scandinavia to California and back, in plywood crates. Shipping company said that if the crates were untreated, customs in both ends would bake them at rather high temp to kill insects (content still inside). Unsure if that is true or just a myth to make people comply
Not really. Apparently folks can order these seeds already? So its happening, notice or no notice. It seems inevitable that seeds of every plant will be in gardens of every conceivable corner of the earth.
Starting in the 1700's with botanists traveling the world to collect and disseminate them. Which gave us modern corn, wheat, flowering plants, grasses, succulents and nearly everything we grow, harvest and appreciate today. May be a little late to start being concerned about this.
It seems inevitable that seeds of every plant will be in gardens of every conceivable corner of the earth.
Not inevitable at all. Try arriving in Australia with a piece of fruit in your hand luggage, or try arriving in New Zealand with mud on your walking boots, and see what happens.
I actually arrived in New Zealand with mud under my walking boots once - we had been trecking on Rarotonga, Cook Islands the day before, and I had not read the customs rules for NZ before filling in the paper slip, shortly before getting off the plane (if I remember correctly, it was approximately 10 years ago) - I had to wash the soles in a shallow tub with some sort of squishy pillow in it.
I ordered some seeds off Amazon from what I thought was a local seller for a regional plant.
The seeds arrived months later, well after planting season, from Kazakhstan. The customs declaration called them plastic beads, but they were definitely seeds. I destroyed them, because I couldn't know for sure they really were what they said they were - seems unlikely a niche regional American plant would be available in Kazakhstan.
Would Australia really be able to stop these cases where they lie on the customs form?
It sounds like you have less than a passing familiarity with the issue. We have a better understanding of the dangers of invasives and a better regulatory framework to control them than we did in the 1700s. We have eradication programs trying to limit or stop the spread of some of the worst species. Most of them are not beneficial crops.
Maybe a little too soon to just give up completely?
The fiat monetary system has broken capitalism.
How insane is it that all of the most profitable strategies are those which are based on wasting products and energy?
Wasting postal service and products to write your own fake reviews, wasting electricity to mine Bitcoin, wasting office space to create useless office jobs, news websites which waste people's attention on tabloids, gossip and fake news instead of real news, wasting capital on startups (Snapchat, Uber, WeWork, Softbank)...
Is this why I get magazines in the mail that I don't subscribe to? For the past six or seven years we get magazines like Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and a couple others off and on. I haven't bought or subscribed to a paper magazine in 20 years, yet these keep showing up in the mail.
I thought maybe it was the publication trying to adjust their demographics to increase rates (we live in a zip code with lots of college graduates and high incomes).
I know I used to receive several free magazines because having a large audience for advertisers is apparently more profitable than actually selling the magazine. But I don’t remember ever receiving a magazine I didn’t ask for.
The same thing happened to me, I started getting Cosmopolitan and InStyle unsolicited. It happened shortly after my college-aged daughter bought a small Coach bag (using a credit card on my account), so I assumed they determined our household was the right demographic for their advertisers.
I guess you don't have to be there if you mail them out, but man if you were for some reason wanting to spread an invasive species.... you could just plant the seeds yourself....
You would also be able to target what you might want to happen and where.
Random individuals would seem sort of silly to target unless it spread dramatically or was something else.
Just doesn't make a lot of sense as a sort of intentional invasive species thing.
The receiver will just throw the seeds in the garbage, and depending on the hardiness of the seeds, that is as good as planting them in the garbage dump.
When I visited my local garbage dump with school I was impressed with the number of pumpkin plants growing out of the piles of garbage. I wonder why pumpkins grow so well there.
The pictures from the VA story look like morning glories; the WA pictures from facebook look like citrus or a melon. I'd think any sort of "bio attack" would use a consistent medium.
Seeds are a bitch, too. It's usually hard to hide anything in them, isn't it? That's one of the reasons plants make them, they're less vulnerable to infections etc.
"Invasive!" is a boogey man, here. So many things are invasive, especially now. Ask, instead, "could i buy this seed somewhere else grow it legally?" I expect the answer might well be "yes".
I had this too, but from Ukraine. I didn't get the seeds, just a letter from customs that they had destroyed some seeds that I'd never ordered. Really peculiar.
If I wanted to clandestinely introduce invasive species, I would of course not send seeds from whatever suspicious country to random people. A package marked as e.g. folk art piece would be used, containing seeds, maybe covered with fertilizer, as a filler of an actual e.g. animal figure, or something. The package would arrive to a package consolidation service and packaged, along with some other goods, with a US originating address.
That package would be taken by an agent who would rip it and throw it away onto some strip of farming land along a busy road, while driving there at night, reasonably far away from home. The agent would not understand that this action is the "payload" of the mission, and would never associate the incident with the seeds' country of origin.
If I can come up with this trivial plan in 5 mins, a secret service would, too.
So no, this certainly is not a clandestine operation by a serious nefarious actor, it's a silly e-commerce shtick by a small-time seed seller.
We know from history that bad guys sometimes have terribly poor opsec.
But again, if I were in charge I would never ever give the people packaging the seeds in China any address in the US except the parcel consolidation service address, or any idea that such other addresses may exist.
And look, I did not serve in the secret service a single day. I bet people in the Chinese secret service department that works on clandestine operations abroad are at least as qualified as me.
> They are sending these seeds to many people in the US, aka
> PRC supporters. Or even those pressured to do their work.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted, this is entirely a viable exercise in economic disruption (whether intentional or not). You can definitely get at least 1 in 1000 to plant them (intentionally or unintentionally).
Remember for example the old trick of leaving USBs in company car parks. You can tell people a billion times not to plug random crap into their machines, but you'll find at least one person willing to do so at each company. The problem got so bad that they had to glue the USB ports at some places.
> Invasive species can destroy an economy. Devastate it.
100%, it's why many Countries have such very strict laws regarding bringing organic foreign goods across the border.
> I'm not saying the PRC is doing this, but if I was trying
> to harm the US.. I'd do all sorts of evil things like
> this.
If they are shipping from China, you can likely say they are originating from China. Whether or not it is nefarious is another question altogether. With just a few thousand dollars (to cover shipping) they could cause massive damage.
This actually happens all the time as it happens, people buy random seeds from Amazon (for example) and receive something that should really not be planted in local soil. Without planting them, it can be quite hard for the average person to tell them apart.
FSB tactics, on the other hand, involve doing almost everything they can to signal that they were the perpetrators while at the same time denying responsibility.
It’s a weird way to flex, братан, but the diplomatic and psychological impact of the attack is far more effective than the attack itself.
Example: Russian poisoning suspects say they were only visiting cathedral
I'm always curious about new slang or jargon but can't place this sense of 'Bratan' in the context of espionage/geopolitics. Flexing brotherhood? Flexing manliness?
It’s the the “bro” in ”weird flex, bro”, which is US English slang meaning “that’s an impressive display of strength which I also find to be bizarrely convoluted”.
“Flex” in that slang term isn’t precisely a “display of strength” but rather “a display of one-upmanship[1]” in any form. A weird flex is specifically one-upmanship in a form where nobody else was really competing over it in the first place. It’s “weird” because you’re trying so hard to out-compete others in a category where nobody else is trying to compete at all, and where, therefore, a category where it’s very easy to “win.”
Most Guinness World Records are weird flexes: not hard-fought limits of discovered human ability, but rather something one person decided to prove they could do that nobody else has really even cared to challenge them about since.
Ah, makes sense now, thanks for the explanation. I must have missed the comma first time round, and thus thought that "bro" was the thing being flexed.
It's really just political gaslighting and has been going on since the Soviet era. Frida Ghitis used just that term to describe the ridiculous denials from Russia when presented with evidence of Russian operatives active in Crimea.
What's worrying to me is that it's by no means unique to Russia, even if they have perfected it. The current president of the United States does not consider himself above using the exact same rhetorical strategy.
A few years ago, some folks sent out some advertising letters that contained flower seeds in the paper. You could literally bury the paper in the ground to grow the flowers.
Honestly, if you really wanted to do it, all you'd need is a single person in a car with a giant bag of seeds. How many could a single person plant in a week going for walks in conversation areas? What if you had 10 people or 100? Way more efficient than mailing the seeds out and hoping people plant them.
285 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadAlso I can’t imagine getting a box of seeds in the mail (unsolicited) and thinking to myself, “I should plant these and see what comes up!”
Edit, found more about this here: https://www.wusa9.com/mobile/article/news/local/virginia/vir...
Along with a story of a Chinese National attempting to transport birds into Virginia which are known to be transmitters of Avian flu.
different strokes for different folks i guess, but that is absolutely something i would do. or would have done if they'd arrived in may, planting in august is kinda pointless where i live.
My seeds arrived about 2 years ago, from China, entirely unannounced, and directed to my address in London, but with no name.
They turned out to be strawberries. Nothing unusual about them as far as I can taste...
They inspired me to make a service for other people to get random gifts from China... [1]
[1]: https://erraticpacket.com
The examples you give like a bike repair kit are not really enticing.
I only need that from spring to summer. My greenhouse isn't setup yet.
From googling there appears to be quite a few, both curated and otherwise, what I saw ranged from $3 per shipment to $15+
So far, the only gross error I've had was a getting sent hairclippers instead of a Dreamcast controller. Could've used the clippers, but wrong voltage :(
You keep it inside and take a picture and you will know if you will get nice flowers, or vegetables, or...nothing. Just leaves.
As a kid I loved to plant seeds in plastic cups and see what grew out of it, and trying additives to see if they could help the plant grow. Once I grew a little tomato, and ate it. I didn't drop dead from tomato consumption.
It's innocent and safe. The government should have no business regulating what people do with seeds.
If I ran things, I’d develop an avena-specific herbicide, and drop it from helicopters every spring.
Replacing it with natives would lower the fire risk substantially, and probably also cool the hills off a bit during the summer.
Your passion for experimentation and cultivation is awesome. I get that you don’t want the government telling you what you can and can’t do. So, instead, what if you look at it as a fellow citizen asking you to please not plant random seeds from China in the ground outside, unattended.
Still, I fail to see the harm of growing the seed inside to identify the plant. People here have reported receiving cucumbers and strawberries. No one has reported receiving vines or anything else.
I am very surprised by the level of fear and paranoia regarding everything and especially China: we are looking at horse gift in the mouth, then saying it is a bioterrorism plot. Unbelievable!! When I was a kid, that would have been the best mail-order present ever!
Also, regarding kudzu and the like, I fail to see the harm. The environment changes. We may not like that, but that's how life is. Instead of trying to undo changes, maybe we should adapt to them.
Kudzu seems good for livestock, rich in protein and isoflavones. Trying to burn it seems to be due to a distinct lack of imagination and profit motive. It's a free input!!! Find new ways to chop it down to feed it to livestock. Make it into a food supplement.
Anything looks better than just destruction and nostalgia for the time it wasn't here. It's here now. Adapt!
I feel like that boat has flown, or whatever. It's kind of like saying the government should have no business checking passports or levying an income tax or something.
But I have read about the old time hackers, who yearned freedom and experimentation. It seemed to have been widespread: I have seen movies from the 1980s, and noticed the same thing: people seem less fearful, more open and ready to experiment.
It may sound silly to you, but I was awestruck by "Bill and Ted excellent adventure"!
Even with all the modern technology we have, I wish I had been born 20 or 30 years earlier, when freedom was still a thing and innocent fun was deemed innocent by default.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagus_asparagoides
Oops!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asparagus_asparagoides
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides#Toxicity
Keen to try it though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchineel
> A gum can be produced from the bark which reportedly treats edema, while the dried fruits have been used as a diuretic.
> Um... China... what’s the deal?
China's a country of over a billion people.
Let's not attribute the actions of individuals to sinister top-down plot from the CCO politboru until there's actual evidence.
This type of behavior is endemic with poverty and can be seen with Nigerian princes, Indian call center scams, or just your friendly San Francisco neighborhood bike thief.
This behavior has more to do with poverty and income inequality than Chinese people (or people of any country or race for that matter).
I seriously doubt that. It's a police state, but let's not exaggerate, eh?
https://youtu.be/hsWr_JWTZss
The other common name ("water caltrop") is illuminating.
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/kudzu-entanglement-...
If you want to smuggle bird flu into USA, are you really going to do it in a bag of whole dead birds, and not some processed form that is more convenient and less suspicious?
Implying there are 'correct' animals to consume
Kinda like the swine flu?
[1] https://www.bds.org.uk/index.php/advice-education/why-manage...
Stop bending over backwards to excuse antisocial behavior. Not all cultural practices are positive and need to be celebrated.
That's an incredibly broad brush you're painting with there. China has as much culinary diversity as geographic regions with smaller countries. If you throw it all in one pot, you might end up with "anything and everything", but almost nobody would eat all that.
If it looks as if there was such a thing as "Chinese food", then only because the majority of early Chinese immigrants to North America came from only four counties in Guangdong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siyi , establishing a standard for Chinese restaurants that later ones had to follow to seem "authentic".
"Weird" food is generally confined to regional delicacies. E.g. 土笋冻 (sipunculid worm jelly) is pretty much only made in Quanzhou in Fujian, even though the worms it's made of can be found elsewhere. (The Chinese Wikipedia article mentions they actually have to import them now because the local stock suffered from pollution.) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%9F%E7%AC%8B%E5%86%BB
The only position you can safely hold is to not eat meat. A weaker position could be around the sanitation and care of stock and its preparation. But what you eat doesn’t matter, be it pig or dog or squirrel or bat.
This is disingenuous. That was nothing like this pandemic.
Don’t say seat belts don’t matter for us because the other car was a hatchback instead of a pickup. They were both still car accidents.
And I'm not trying to make an argument about "the west", it's just about specific animals and ways to get them.
If the threshold is: has caused pandemic, then swine is off the table, pun intended.
Now, that statement assumes that some animals have higher risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans than others, and if you disagree with that then you'll disagree with the statement, but the statement itself was not an argument about that point. Subsequently we have further argued about that specific point. I don't believe that decisions about which animals to consume should be based on cultural factors as you assume, but rather I believe that it should be based on relevant science (not simply "has this specific animal caused a global pandemic in recent history"). I believe that science does not support the idea that all animals or animal procurement practices have identical risk of transmitting novel viruses to humans. Therefore I support the idea of restricting consumption of some animals, especially wild ones (including some currently consumed in the US), and reject the idea that this is simply "closed minded".
Unfortunately the inclusion of the single word "Chinese" in my original comment has blinded everyone to the argument I was making, despite the fact that it was simply a response to the parent comment. It would have been a better comment, and made the same point, without the word "Chinese" in it. Please strike that word from my original comment and read it again.
Perhaps eating certain animals should be curtailed (I'm no expert) as long as it doesn't result in low protein intake. But, the anti-China sentiment is xenophobic.
Interesting. Source?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1539106/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200210144854.h...
https://www.the-scientist.com/notebook/why-bats-make-such-go...
Pretty much all serious pandemics started in some other species of mammals, and then transferred to humans. Examples: SARS, bird flu, ebola, hiv, spanish flu.
(I agree that blaming Chinese culture for the problem is xenophobic nonsense though.)
It's bizarre to Americans that _some_ Chinese are eating bats[1] and snakes[2]. It's bizarre to Chinese that _some_ Americans are eating alligators[3][4], bears and frogs.
It is human nature to explore and try new things including animals for food. If one has known better, maybe it's better to educate others what are good/bad food sources, with proofs.
Mutual discrimination based on sensational news and locally-biased "common sense" are not making the world a better place.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_as_food [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_soup [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_meat [4] https://youtu.be/V-mJ0UWfxno?t=266
Authorities get really uptight about invasive species and whatnot. Maybe groundless talk of biowarfare is "hysteria" but regulating biological materials going across borders is the norm as far as I know.
You mean like how pedophiles are more sexually open minded?
Is that just because of the fear you might spread an invasive species, or is there some other risk trying to grow an unknown plant entails?
Indeed.
This seems the obvious Occam razor Earring seller orders/sends fake earring packages and posts fake reviews.
With the trade war and espionage stuff heating up the cold war with China, one wonders if the Chinese Communist Party crack down on this to try to defend China's reputation and conserve their political capital for more substantial attacks on US, or encourage it to antagonize US into war?
What happens if US Customs cracks down on Chinese import fraud and drives up the cost of importing product? I always thought that cracking down on illegal-in-US behaviors like pollution and worker mistreatment would be a more morally defensible and socio-economically beneficial trade battle than arbitrary and capricious tariffs.
Weird.
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/10/804501991/chinese-hackers-cha...
Friends in the UK are reporting it happening there, and are being advised to either burn or boil seeds for several minutes.
Anyone know what this is about, what the actual purpose is?
1. We have no idea what kind of seeds they are, and they could be invasive.
2. The packages originate from China.
The juxtapoisition of the fact that they could be invasive and that the packages originate from China make it sound like a Chinese plot.
They never actually connect those dots, though.
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/10/759053717/critics-of-relocati...
The shipping portion is necessary because they need the tracking info for the sale to be counted.
edit:oops, accidentally mixed up churning with brushing. churning is something else
Should be easy to catch these.
It's incredibly despicable people are finding a way to risk people's lives over covid for a dollar in profit
I found one obvious one the other day, but after about 15 minutes of searching couldn't work out how to report it without a seller account..
My impression is that Amazon doesn't want to know: good reviews, fake or not, drive more transactions in the short term.
A lot of these thermometers also aren't approved. They haven't done a 510k submittal to market these products in the US. Please check that any thermometer you buy on Amazon has a 510k approval letter logged by the FDA, or it may not provide accurate temperature information.
So what's the point of sending out anything at all?
Just include any old tracking number for any other legit purchase as proof of sending something on an illegit purchase.
How isn’t this enabling fraud?
Shouldn’t be able to completely change the listing. Versión bumps might be ok maybe?
Hell, don’t let the product name change. Have a base name and an extension that can be appended and edited, with a text requirement for each (eg 12 characters minimum for the product name and 30 characters max for revision extension.) Do something similar with the description content and have a space for product changes/enhancements following an uneditable and mandatory product description.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Amazon doesn’t because they don’t care. It must not be costing them much money because we know they’re watching the numbers closely.
This was a "Ultralight Backpacking Canister Camp Stove with Piezo Ignition 3.9oz!" for about $8. Now it is some sort of headphone jack. Several things like that, where the product that was previously ordered... changed. Most of the comments for this one are still about the stove.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004U8CP88
All Amazon cares about is sales. Nothing else.
I wonder if that's also what happened to this one, although it's only the picture that's out of place (but also amusingly relevant): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLGZD46
Someone should weaponise the ability to change the product description to embarrass Amazon in to fixing the problem.
https://www.techradar.com/sg/news/this-1tb-microsd-card-high...
But...how do I get the gas base for my headphone jack adapter then? Well, at least it has an adjustable flame.
There was an almost identical scam which has been going on for a while called "Brushing"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushing_(e-commerce)
Some of it is to get the "verified purchase" reviews, but the specific discussion was around the Alibaba IPO and whether it can be used to inflate stock price via fake revenues.
I only was able to track down the glowing review for the bartender kit, I have no idea where the other stuff was purchased from.
I don't understand. Why do they need to ship anything in the box at all? They could ship empty boxes and still have tracking numbers show as delivered.
You may have heard of the Singles Day shopping event, it's common for sellers to boost their revenue that day to meet requirements from platforms, like selling a cheap T-shirt for $150 then refund it upon receiving the package.
I spent 5$ on these a while back with some friends, about 50% never arrived and the other 50% didn't sprout. Could be my bad though.
Though optimistically, perhaps the worst and most destructive invasive threats have already arrived?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosecurity_in_Australia
Apparently however small innocuous packets/letters don't receive quite as much screening, as I've heard of people getting marijuana seeds in the mail just fine.
It's far more difficult than drug smuggling which only works in some reasonable quantity - and becomes more like information smuggling in biological form where you only need one copy.
"The precedent-setting agreement classifies a spacecraft as an export. Once launched, satellite components were judged to be “severed from the possibility of trade within the United States” and therefore considered to be exports, according to Customs officials."
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toad
If you are interested in bird conservation in NZ, please visit Karori park in Wellington and contribute.
BTW: some parks in US also have installed brushes to wipe your boots for preventing the transmission of invasive species seeds. I think there are a few in Wisconsin that I remember.
I doubt these seeds can do worse. Unless they are radioactive seeds.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_long-horned_beetle
Starting in the 1700's with botanists traveling the world to collect and disseminate them. Which gave us modern corn, wheat, flowering plants, grasses, succulents and nearly everything we grow, harvest and appreciate today. May be a little late to start being concerned about this.
Not inevitable at all. Try arriving in Australia with a piece of fruit in your hand luggage, or try arriving in New Zealand with mud on your walking boots, and see what happens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosecurity_in_Australia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosecurity_in_New_Zealand
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-36052243
The seeds arrived months later, well after planting season, from Kazakhstan. The customs declaration called them plastic beads, but they were definitely seeds. I destroyed them, because I couldn't know for sure they really were what they said they were - seems unlikely a niche regional American plant would be available in Kazakhstan.
Would Australia really be able to stop these cases where they lie on the customs form?
Maybe a little too soon to just give up completely?
Wasting postal service and products to write your own fake reviews, wasting electricity to mine Bitcoin, wasting office space to create useless office jobs, news websites which waste people's attention on tabloids, gossip and fake news instead of real news, wasting capital on startups (Snapchat, Uber, WeWork, Softbank)...
Anyone see the pattern emerging? Waste = profit
I thought maybe it was the publication trying to adjust their demographics to increase rates (we live in a zip code with lots of college graduates and high incomes).
You would also be able to target what you might want to happen and where.
Random individuals would seem sort of silly to target unless it spread dramatically or was something else.
Just doesn't make a lot of sense as a sort of intentional invasive species thing.
“The government of Virginia wishes to clarify there is no such thing as magic beans...”
I wish they'd went with a Glomar Response[0]. "The government of Virginia can neither confirm nor deny the existence of magic beans."
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response
Seeds are a bitch, too. It's usually hard to hide anything in them, isn't it? That's one of the reasons plants make them, they're less vulnerable to infections etc.
"Invasive!" is a boogey man, here. So many things are invasive, especially now. Ask, instead, "could i buy this seed somewhere else grow it legally?" I expect the answer might well be "yes".
[VA] https://www.wdbj7.com/2020/07/24/got-seeds-you-didnt-ask-for...
[WA] https://www.facebook.com/WAStateDeptAg/photos/a.101510256200...
Some possibly biased but interesting references on Chinese government efforts in this area.
I hope she doesn't join a radical militant outfit when she grows up.
That package would be taken by an agent who would rip it and throw it away onto some strip of farming land along a busy road, while driving there at night, reasonably far away from home. The agent would not understand that this action is the "payload" of the mission, and would never associate the incident with the seeds' country of origin.
If I can come up with this trivial plan in 5 mins, a secret service would, too.
So no, this certainly is not a clandestine operation by a serious nefarious actor, it's a silly e-commerce shtick by a small-time seed seller.
They are sending these seeds to many people in the US, aka PRC supporters. Or even those pressured to do their work.
And they simply got the address wrong, a few times out of thousands.
Invasive species can destroy an economy. Devastate it.
I'm not saying the PRC is doing this, but if I was trying to harm the US.. I'd do all sorts of evil things like this.
But again, if I were in charge I would never ever give the people packaging the seeds in China any address in the US except the parcel consolidation service address, or any idea that such other addresses may exist.
And look, I did not serve in the secret service a single day. I bet people in the Chinese secret service department that works on clandestine operations abroad are at least as qualified as me.
> PRC supporters. Or even those pressured to do their work.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted, this is entirely a viable exercise in economic disruption (whether intentional or not). You can definitely get at least 1 in 1000 to plant them (intentionally or unintentionally).
Remember for example the old trick of leaving USBs in company car parks. You can tell people a billion times not to plug random crap into their machines, but you'll find at least one person willing to do so at each company. The problem got so bad that they had to glue the USB ports at some places.
> Invasive species can destroy an economy. Devastate it.
100%, it's why many Countries have such very strict laws regarding bringing organic foreign goods across the border.
> I'm not saying the PRC is doing this, but if I was trying
> to harm the US.. I'd do all sorts of evil things like
> this.
If they are shipping from China, you can likely say they are originating from China. Whether or not it is nefarious is another question altogether. With just a few thousand dollars (to cover shipping) they could cause massive damage.
This actually happens all the time as it happens, people buy random seeds from Amazon (for example) and receive something that should really not be planted in local soil. Without planting them, it can be quite hard for the average person to tell them apart.
It’s a weird way to flex, братан, but the diplomatic and psychological impact of the attack is far more effective than the attack itself.
Example: Russian poisoning suspects say they were only visiting cathedral
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/russian-tele...
I'm always curious about new slang or jargon but can't place this sense of 'Bratan' in the context of espionage/geopolitics. Flexing brotherhood? Flexing manliness?
Most Guinness World Records are weird flexes: not hard-fought limits of discovered human ability, but rather something one person decided to prove they could do that nobody else has really even cared to challenge them about since.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-upmanship
What's worrying to me is that it's by no means unique to Russia, even if they have perfected it. The current president of the United States does not consider himself above using the exact same rhetorical strategy.
For those that don't get the joke (this is a joke)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2017/03/20/c...
https://www.cheerios.ca/bringbackthebees/
plantable seed paper:
https://buddyburst.com/products/plantable-seed-paper/postcar...