This kind of isolation is very interesting to me. There is a lot of space out there, and there are probably a lot of acres that only get one human visitor every 5 years. I'd give myself a 1% chance of noticing the rifle if I walked past, based on this picture. So it's not at all surprising that the last time anyone looked at this tree was in the 19th century.
That region of the US, which is maybe half the size of Germany, has been largely devoid of human habitation since the neolithic Lake Lahontan civilization disappeared a few thousand years ago. It is difficult to overstate just how vast and uninhabited that area is.
When I was in my 20s, some friends and I would make long treks into the deep off-road parts of it to explore it precisely because so few people had been there in modern times. Back then, we made our way into areas where we were probably the first humans to come through since the 19th century. The area is actually littered with archaeological artifacts that remain undisturbed. Those were fun times.
Highway 50, which runs near there, has been dubbed the Loneliest Road in America (http://ponyexpressnevada.com/highway50/index2.html) and that's a relatively populated corridor in that area with small towns "only" 50+ miles apart. Great Basin in a national park but doesn't get a lot of visitors relatively speaking and most of those are either going to the caves or the summit of Wheeler Peak.
The areas right next to parking lots in National Parks are very busy, but usually once you get a mile down a trail, even in a very popular park, it's very nearly empty.
It does vary. The most popular National Parks certainly have their busy spots even a mile away from the road. But your basic point that people on/near road >> people on any trail >> people a few miles from road is absolutely true. Even somewhere like Yosemite, you can easily get away from the crush in the Valley and, especially with backpacking, can get away from most people all together.
I once found a $200+ pair of sunglasses (Oakley Juliets) under a tree in the Yosemite backcountry. They were moss-encrusted and half-buried in the humus but still perfectly serviceable once I gave them a quick wash/polish.
Might be worth it for Juliets - mine are ten years old and have taken a lot of abuse - (particularly being hit by the boom of dinghies and falls while skiing/cycling). I think I'm on my fourth set of lenses!
Not OP, but I too loose sunglasses all the time. I'm pretty sure those are mine. Now as soon as I figure out what Juliets are and where "Yosemite backcountry" is, I'll prove it to you.
Actually, I've been able to hang onto my most recent pair for well over a year now. The trick is never taking them out of the car. The way they get lost is you wear them from your car into some house and take them off.
That particular model is still in production, costs around $1000.
Yes, similar rifles can be had around $600.
There's an old (as in 1-2 centuries) aphorism that a good handgun costs about an ounce of gold. True then, true today; doesn't matter how currency fluctuates, solidly built classic products retain value.
I reworked that one for a developer talk at a Sun user's conference and told folks that SunOS would take $100 worth of disk drive space :-) Interesting both your version and mine have since been rendered invalid. As an ounce of gold is around $1200 and a really nice Glock 21 is only about $600. And a $100 of disk is like over 2TB these days.
There are a number of economics papers which evaluate economies in non-currency units, like hours of labor or commodity prices like gold or oil. It can illuminate strengthening or weakening efficiencies that a strict price analysis can miss.
Is there a secondary market for suits that I'm not aware of that isn't Goodwill? Clothing depreciation after purchase is almost as bad as cars, doesn't matter the quality.
It's a bit thin on the ground in the US. In the UK at least, the "charity shop" is an important part of the circulation of used clothes (and to a lesser extent books and ornaments). They are small and common rather than large and rare like Goodwill (I live in a medium-sized market town, population ~50,000, and there are dozens of them) and are usually run directly by charities with specific goals. It's a standard part of the culture to donate unwanted clothes, and the volume of donations is such that they usually only sell undamaged clothes. It's perfectly possible to only buy charity shop clothes, and because they're so cheap (price of a beer or two) one's wardrobe tends to grow quickly - until you run out of space and have to donate stuff to make room.
So it's a nice system. It's a shame that the US hasn't adopted it.
Used clothing markets in the US are so well supplied that donations are often packed into gigantic bales and shipped to Africa as mivumba, where they are recut into sizes more suitable for the local buyers. There is some debate as to whether the secondhand clothing trade to Africa helps or hurts the African economy, but I'm inclined to believe the former.
News and entertainment media will sometimes find an article of clothing with identifying marks in Africa and trace it back to the original owner as an anecdote for a story about some aspect of the industry.
But that aspect aside, there are slim pickings with respect to less casual attire in charity resale shops, especially if you stray too far from median sizes. Your best bet at finding a suit that you might actually want to wear is at estate sales for the recently deceased, or stores supplied by the unclaimed airline baggage clearinghouse in Alabama. The higher the value of the clothing, the less likely the owner is to give it up willingly.
We have plenty here in the US. I live in a town of population 70K and we have at least a dozen charity shops and probably as many consignment stores. Any place in the US I've spent significant time I've found at least one nearby charity shop for the rare occasions I needed a suit or peice of furniture.
I don't know who told you we haven't adopted that system. Tell them to look for a Salvation Army, they're like the Star Buck's of charity shops around here, there's one on every corner.
Thanks for the correction. My opinion came from my own experience living in the US nearly a decade ago. In my entire 20 years there I saw a single Goodwill and no Salvation Army shops (though I'm sure they existed). Perhaps I was unlucky, or unobservant, or things have changed, but at any rate from that environment the UK was a revelation.
Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Men's Warehouse, etc. You can also travel to Hong Kong, Beijing, or one of many other cities in Asia and have them tailored for much less than retail department store prices.
Good question, I'd like to see the answer from more knowledgeable firearms enthusiasts.
Likely because partly what is considered a "good" handgun advances with the state of the art, partly modern insurance and regulatory requirements drive up modern manufacturing costs, and partly because of market dynamics for the use cases a handgun is put to. If you were mass manufacturing a mid-19th century handgun, with no improvements in its tech or metallurgy, without having to pay for the operational insurance and regulatory overhead costs, and it was accepted by the firearms-purchasing public in the same per capita adoption rates as back when it was originally produced, I can easily see it being a lot less expensive. But the purchasing public seems to seek specific characteristics in modern firearms, these characteristics don't appear to align with "use old tech", and this tends to set a floor price from what I can tell as a casual user.
Interestingly, replica mid- to late-19th century handguns sell for around the $600+ USD mark in the US, for the enthusiast market. Well-cared for, lightly-used firearms are reasonably close to quality as new for most non-enthusiast level users, and even many enthusiast users. So if inexpensive is what you are looking for, a used firearm from a trusted user goes for roughly half to 2/3 of new prices these days.
I think it definitely depends, the firearms purchasing public is as diverse as most other groups.
As someone who collects both, I find it amusingly similar to camera gear. Nikon vs. Canon, Glock vs. Sig, 9mm vs .45 or was it APS-C vs. Full-Frame? In both cases there exists the mass-produced item most analogous to the "tree find". Glocks and DSLRs found at big box stores. Then there are collectibles such as Leica or something from the Springfield Custom shop, or Les Baer. I could go on.
At any rate, I think some things haven't changed, craftsmanship is still valued and prized, but the common purchase is definitely of the more affordable items such as the mentioned $600 price point.
Firearms (along with sewing machines) were one of the earliest products to be mass produced with interchangeable parts. There wasn't a modern assembly line yet, but firearms weren't hand-made in the sense they were during the 1700s, where one gunsmith would forge every part down to the screws. That is probably one of the major causes of the declining prices noted in the article.
Winchester primarily sells to the upmarket sector these days: rather than "everyman" rifles, they sell to nostalgic or well-off collectors and hunters who want to have high-quality polished walnut stocks, beautiful blueing of the metal, and even engravings on some models.
Somewhat like how muscle cars from the 60s have in some cases appreciated due to baby boomers.
Winchester still makes that 1882 .44-40 rifle, albeit indeed as a nostalgic collector's item. If they made it for the "everyman" market - not unreasonable as many similar guns are - the price would drop to about $600 (between scale of production and elimination of premium finishing).
Eli Whitney introduced (if a bit dishonestly) the notion of building firearms from interchangeable parts in 1801. So 120 years ago was almost a century after that, so the item in question certainly wasn't hand-made.
Unlike most other products, there is really no room for cost-cutting of parts on a firearm. A dishwasher or vacuum cleaner may be cheaply made and still satisfy use for upwards of a decade until it breaks and the owner, with only mild annoyance, replaces it (speaking from personal experience of late); solid steel components both durable and replaceable progressively give way to breakable & irreplaceable parts, tolerated by society because prices drop. A firearm, however, has serious demands for durability and safety (breakage can gravely harm the user, directly or indirectly), necessitating solid steel parts meticulously milled (or comparably advanced polymers molded to likewise high standards); it still takes about the same amount of work to make one today as 120 years ago, with little room for cost-cutting. That durability also means they don't really wear out (taking decades/centuries instead of months or years), so older items retain their value and stabilize the price of new ones. Ergo, the cost - relative to other invariant standards like mundane labor or precious metals - has remained largely unchanged.
A lot of firearm prices are driven by "willingness to pay". I can't find the source as it was a long time ago, but I remember reading that Glock can manufacture a handgun for under $200 (they sell for $600).
If you think about it, a gun is nothing more than a collection of milled (or cast) metal parts. A certain level of precision is required, but the material and manufacturing costs (with automated CNC) are pretty small.
Wild! I already learned something today -- read this and gut reaction thought to myself it has to be much higher, but I was wrong. Apparently I don't know how big the Great Depression really was.
A 30 year old iPhone? (If it was, as suggested in the article, lost about 100 years ago.) Sure, the gun will have retained its resale value, but the owner will have also had years worth of use.
I experienced this when I went to Colombia. Their peso generally goes for a quarter to a third of a dollar. But prices are also cheaper. Something that costs a dollar here will cost one or two pesos there. So there's the multiplier of currency / price difference.
There's also the multiplier of the amount of money people make. This one's harder to nail down, but just because something costs $600 in real money doesn't mean that that will feel like $600 coming out of your pocket when you spend it. I can spend $600 weekly without batting an eye, but someone at my relative social station in Colombia probably wouldn't be able to, their salary would be less even accounting for the currency difference.
There's also access to credit. A purchase is much easier to make when you can get someone to finance it for you.
There's a lot more to relative value than just currency differences.
Why would you expect that? If the purchasing power of that wage isn't the same, then it will feel different. If the only thing changing is the currency value, then sure, it will feel similar. Currency exchange rates != purchasing power.
The reason there's a difference between the two is that currency exchange rates are calculated using different inputs than purchasing power rates are. Purchasing power compares things like milk and eggs and gas whereas currency exchange is mostly limited to fairly liquid financial instruments like bank notes and bond instruments.
Making such corrections is interesting. I'd like to hear more comments on it.
Whether it's equivalent current value is $600 (as posted elsewhere) or $5400, both numbers are believable. The functional difference between a modern $600 rifle and a $5400 one is, to most casual observers, minimal - though the owner may have reason to pay $4800 for that difference.
In modern terms, anyone selling a $5,400 rifle would be hard pressed to sell 2,500 of them, let alone 25,000 to the civilian market. And while we're making adjustments, the US population in 1900 was just a hair over 75m, meaning that one of these was produced for every 3k people.
Don't let the raw numbers fool you - this was an everyman's gun. A good one, yes. Still though, an everyman's gun.
You do wonder if the ower had heart attack or some other acident and there is a set of human remains nearby presumably local scavengers might make it hard to find much forensic evidence.
Have you been to Little Sparta? I saw that Little Sparta was a big influence for the couple that created Jupiter Artland (and they have works by Ian Hamilton Finlay) - we went just before it closed for the winter and I thought it was incredible:
I've been the Jupiter twice and enjoyed both times. I'd known about Goldsworthy and he's why I went in the first place but have gained appreciation for others like Jencks etc.
The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, had me at its name. I'll be going along there to. Cheers, pal. Thank you very much.
Not sure, but by the way, Great Basin National Park has some of the oldest trees in the world, bristlecomb pines. They are used to study past climates through dendrochronology. If you ever get a chance to go to GBNP, do. It is completely beautiful and the "sky island" ecology is not one you would expect to find in the middle of the Nevada desert.
@rifleman44 ha! I was thinking the same thing. The tree looks like it has a small trunk. I was thinking there can't be 100 rings and if there were, it would be the whole tree.
I'm Mr. Skeptical... It's hard to believe with the tree growth and over a hundred years of weather that the gun stayed propped up like that. It does look a little wedged between two trunks but wow...
Because the marginal value is higher. Wander around on Mars for 10 minutes and bring back some samples and you are guaranteed to discover something new and important - same can't be said for wandering around my local park.
Conspiracy theory: it was recently used as a murder weapon and left there to stump the investigation. This is of course not true, but fun to speculate about.
