The murky business of crystal mining | Hacker News Reader

The murky business of crystal mining

theguardian.com

39 pointslaurex26 comments

>He never planned to make much money from selling them and still, today, spends much of his time advising customers on, “say, which stones are best for anxiety, or which are best for blood disorders.”

Jeez, this guy is openly admitting to practicing medicine here. Somebody should actually call the FDA/AMA/police.

you also believe people selling mid life crisis people sports car fall in the same category?

terminally ill patients, or those with a slowly deterioration condition who lost hope in Western medicine ... their attitude is that "at least it won't do harm, so what do I have to lose?" Doubt that this group of vulnerable people that are preyed upon here can be compared to somebody shopping for a sports car.

sports cars provide their claims (fun, performance, image, etc), healing crystals don't.

No one buys a sports car to remediate a physical illness. ( well, maybe depression or other related psych problems? )

The car salesman's hyperbole will not kill me, in most cases.

A person telling me to use a gem to heal cancer is, in effect, harming me by prompting me to waste my precious time on ineffective treatments with no basis in reality.

We have "mined" crystals in Arkansas before. Which really consisted of my kids and I digging around in the dirt until we found something.

It was fun though. And they look cool.

We just did this over Memorial Day weekend and it was a blast. My 7 year old daughter starting coming home with "cool" rocks in her pocket last year and we just encouraged the interest, went to a local geology show, and got hooked. Now I'm in the back yard cleaning 50 lbs of quartz, clay, and rock in various sizes.

I don't know how ethically we mined (dug in dirt), however, since I heavily relied on my daughters as underage and super-distracted workers.

Oh and I had to raise my voice at my wife (not normally super-nerdy) to tell her to stop, that we had to take the truck back . But she was hooked, and the story has entered family lore.

Outside the mouths of mines (old gold mines, such as in the Colorado mountains) are great places to find crystals and rocks with formations. If you're willing to smash bigger rocks, sometimes you're rewarded with an internal structure.

I first learned about this stuff from the game manual of Conquests of the Longbow. Knowing the spiritual properties of different minerals and gems got me past the guard at the swamp monastery. And I haven't found it useful since.

I bet someone could make some money by inventing a process to "re-naturalize" synthetic mineral crystals to make them look more like naturally-formed mined crystals. It would be unethical lucre, of course, but I might still be able to live with myself if I rationalized it as undercutting Goop, rather than just hoodwinking regular people.

The only ailment you can't cure with bunkum is stupidity.

Anecdotally, I've noticed a rise in interest in collecting crystals and various rocks as a hobby in some of my social circles. In some part, it is because they may have some powers. Or it is fun to imagine it--like a lottery ticket.

But they are also often quite beautiful, and for what it's worth a relatively inexpensive hobby.

> In some part, it is because they may have some powers.

What.

I will shamelessly admit to being an ardent fantasy fan, reading lots of silly things for the fun of it, imagining other silly scenarios for fun.

But this sort of... mass delusion that spirituality and feelings trump reality is baffling and concerning.

Crystals do have power: piezoelectricity.

Hug a crystal, get a shock.

Do they still sell those DIY crystal radio set kits? Getting kids to build these again and realize the crystal properties are well understood and not magic might solve some of the crazy.

I went camping at Mt. Shasta a year ago. There are tons of these gem/crystal stores in the town.

Sure many of them are very pretty to look at, but the way people talked about healing and energy I had a hard time not laughing.

These people also claim to be self conscious and care about the environment, but seem to have no understanding of where them gems came from. I could be wrong, but I think more are coming from china and are nearly the equivalent to blood diamonds, using the poorest labors to mine them.

It was very surreal. Other than that Mt. Shasta was beautiful, the laval tunnels were awesome.

This was somewhat tongue in cheek, but again I liken it to people who buy lottery tickets for the entertainment of spark their imagination of what they'd do with a windfall.

That said, there are plenty of folks that make room for "God." Crystals just don't have big churches or enough followers to normalize belief in their "power."

This reminds me of the notable video of parent's brawl at the kid's baseball game this past week. The camera person keeps calling for angels to come and stop the fight. The fight stopped...eventually. Probably because of the angels she called.

> This was somewhat tongue in cheek, but again I liken it to people who buy lottery tickets for the entertainment of spark their imagination of what they'd do with a windfall.

People actually win the lottery. I think that's a big distinction.

How many people have been harmed by pseudo-science quackery like crystal healing? How many crystal enthusiasts have skipped doctor appointments because of it?

I'd wager that more people are harmed by pseudoscience and religious false pretenses than they are by the state lotto, but alas I have no number to back up my hunch -- and they're hard numbers to come by.

There are a lot of people who have been helped by religion though, and to make a fair accounting you need to count them. I know a devoutly Catholic couple who has taken in several foster kids and adopted them because they think it’s the Christian thing to do. Also the beggars who get alms at mosques or the hungry who are fed at Sikh gurdwaras. Or the people who suffer huge tragedies like all of their children dying and get some measure of comfort in religion.

I am not sure if people in this thread are anti-crystal, or if they are anti anything not science-based. Like, something must be rooted in science or there can not be a good thing.

Are the folks downvoting also against all forms of religion?

>I'd wager that more people are harmed by pseudoscience and religious false pretenses than they are by the state lotto, but alas I have no number to back up my hunch -- and they're hard numbers to come by.

It is hard to measure the effect of religions, however, it is pretty obvious the lottery is not good for poor people.

In the US alone, 35 billion dollars spent by the poorest third of households in 2014--half of all lottery purchasing. [1]

Americans that make $13k or less spend 9% of their income on lottery tickets [2]

I think may be better off buying crystals or going to church, because lottery windfalls also often result in misery. [3]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/lotteri...

[2] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-the-lottery-ha...

[3] https://time.com/4176128/powerball-jackpot-lottery-winners/

There's always the placebo effect which is a sort of power.

I will say, geodes can be pretty amazing.

At least they're mostly harmless. To the mark who buys them.

But don't put malachite in your mouth. Or... other places.

Back in the '80s the same crowd was chasing channelers and "spirit guides". They were the reason ST:TNG had a Ship's Channeler, er, "Counselor".

that's an interesting thought, ST:TNG without woo.

Without Whoopi and the Counselor and their magic episodes it'd cut the library down like 20 or 30 percent I bet.

Personally I think the ST woo started way before TNG -- but I do think that it was presented and turned into viable story the best in TNG. That said, pseudoscience/magic/woo was around and plentiful around the world during the production of the original ST too, maybe that content was also prompted by the popularity.

Speaking of space-magic, if anyone reading is into space+scifi/fantasy and you enjoy Star Trek, check out UFO and Space:1999, or really any Gerry Anderson. Lots of similar topics, and its fun to determine which series did which subplot first.

At least the holodeck cut down on the amount of inexplicable time travel, theme planets, or theater-loving superbeings in order to get to the alt-history episodes. That excised a big source of random woo, and replaced it with one frequently malfunctioning plot device.

If the writers of the original series wanted to set something in Victorian England, they had to invent an Victorian England planet, and then they could only use it once. The next generation writers could decide Data liked Sherlock Holmes, and have that be his recreational holodeck thing, just like Captain Picard had the hardboiled-detective noir novels.

I thought the position of ship's counselor made sense, but not as a psychic bridge officer. That seat seemed more suited to a crisis negotiator type of person--the kind you'd ask to talk the aliens into powering down disruptors and releasing a hostage. Instead, it was "I sense anger and frustration, Captain."

And Guinan trod perilously close to the "magical negro" trope at times, and definitely embodied the "the bartender" trope.

TNG really had terrible, terrible writers. Any interesting idea was certain to be trivialized before it reached the soundstage.

If you do buy crystals, be sure to check youtube on how to "cleanse" and "align" your crystals; otherwise you might not get the results out of them that you expect.

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