Along with the complication of modern organisms living on abnormally low-14C carbon sources. Organisms living on oil/ tar seeps ; organisms living on carbonates and sulphates from salt domes.

A known type of problem, which is why raw radiocarbon dates need careful interpretation to get back to absolute dates.

If you have already been rejected once, you are obviously NOT an "ideal candidate".

For the first job. For the second, third, fourth opening ...

Pen and paper?

OK. I think I can top that.

My workplace left the shipyard in 2012 and is currently in another shipyard having some modifications done which include extending an Archimedian Screw system so debris can be taken to offloading stations at port or starboard.

That's 3000 year old tech, or pretty close.

Paper (papyrus) probably wins, but "pens" as in quill pens are I think somewhat younger.

All living dinosaurs are birds. You're wrong; Randall Monroe is right.

Words are important, particularly when you're talking about taxonomy.

Crocodilians (crocs and alligators), testudinid (turtles and tortoises), dinosaurs (including their minor group of birds), are all archosaurs, along with some extinct groups like mosasaurs. Lizards and snakes are on a different lineage. I forget where the pterosaurs fit in.

"Reptile" is a taxonomic bucket list. Best avoided.

Mammals are more closely related to the archosaurs than the lizards.

Birds are dinosaurs because they are the descendants of dinosaurs. It's called taxonomy.

Probably didn't have a penis either. You'd just rub your cloaca up against your mate's,and transfer the sperm that way.

Troofers believe in a whole bunch of things [...] that their psychic abilities aren't psychotic episodes,

Very nicely rude. Class insult. Well done.

Being elsewhere is my mechanism too. Despite having spent some of the last month working in Istanbul, which is not high on any sensible list of low-risk places.

But for pay, I'm prepared to take the risk.

I could just walk over to the sound to get sea water that could be easily distilled

I think it would be very instructive for you to try putting that plan through a trial run. Distilling water takes a hell of a lot of fuel. A hell of a lot.

(I used to run alcohol sills on various occasions.)

200,000 floaters, eh? That's a pretty good score, and higher than I'd generally expected for the expected Cascadia quake. But I still think that for the first megadeath quake, you're still probably looking at the Ganges plain. which is as badly overdue as Cascadia, but has much poorer building codes, infrastructure resilience, enforcement of building codes, and more aggressive microbiology.

Well, the last major quake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone was January 26, 1700 at about 9:00 PM,

No white man saw it, so it didn't happen.

(Yes, I am being sarcastic. But that's not far from the thinking of no small number of YECs.)

I work out in the real world and have spent about 8 months overall living and working on a coral reef, out observing every couple of days. That's probably more time than your collection of aquarium shop staff added together. I note that you don't claim to bring any field experience to the discussion.

As we say at work, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. And then we go and show the theoreticians that their theories are incomplete representations of reality.

Nobody sane "goes to Africa" to get their own supply of rhino horn. There's a well-established black market into which end users tap, and locally-based poachers supply. And every pair of hands along the way ramps up the price. If it's a factor of 2 every step of the way (typical for markets), then a poacher 10 steps from the end market may only receive a few hundred dollars for shooting a rhino and hacking off the horn.

The object of this exercise is to wreck "trust" at each stage of the pipeline, to the point that it is not economically attractive for the poachers to do the "hunt and kill a rhino" step. If it bankrupts intermediate dealers, that's an side benefit.

I'm by no means convinced it will work It's an interesting idea, probably worth following; but whether it works, fast enough, is a more open question.

Of course, if they could incorporate some horrible diseases with the rhino fake, so the end customers died, painfully and with obvious blue buboes, that would be even better. But that might trouble some people's ethics.