The once-endangered vicuña is thriving in the Peruvian Andes | Hacker News Reader

The once-endangered vicuña is thriving in the Peruvian Andes

bbc.com

71 pointsMiriamWeiner21 comments

I have a Vicuna scarf and I have to say it's a luxury item I was very happy to purchase.

The scarf itself looks and feels amazing. But best of all, every item made of vicuna wool is numbered and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity, that grants that the wool has been gathered in a respectful and sustainable manner.

Some may feel sad that conservation is promoted this way, but considering how the production of some luxury goods has a devastating impact on the environment, this seems like a better approach.

By the way, if Vicuna is too expensive for you, but still want a sustainable luxury item, look for Guanaco wool items.

Any chance you got it off an online store / a brand with an online presence? My roommates and I have been looking for one we can trust.

Vicuna (except from Argentina) is still CITES Annex II, which means that the export and re-export of the animal or any derivative must have a CITES certificate[1]. The Argentina vicuna is marked as Annex I (commercial export prohibited).

If the CITES DB is updated (no idea, sorry - and there's no data for 2018), in 2017 very few such trades were actually recorded[2].

I visited Peru a few years ago and there the vicuna products (retail) were accompanied by a certificate needed to get the products through customs.

[1] https://cites.org/eng/app/index.php

[2] https://trade.cites.org/en/cites_trade/download/view_results...

I got it from this online shop:

https://www.alpacacollections.com/100-vicuna-scarf-10549.htm...

I had to pay a (hefty) custom tax to import it, but I didn't had any other problem bringing it into the EU.

Rare to read positive news.

There is lots of positive news out there. Reforestation, garbage patch cleanup, Great Barrier Reef improvement. I’ve started prioritizing finding good news. Normal media channels will just get you depressed.

Yep, we are in a sustained global economic and technological boom that's been going on for decades. If it bleeds it leads is true of almost all news media, it's up to you to find good sources of information. The business news is actually a great source to prioritize as making accurate bets about the world is the most important thing to its readership.

The NYT does a whole section called "The Week in Good News", it's a nice palette cleanser.

https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/the-week-in-good-news

I follow the Good News Network on facebook, it's a good source for positive news, ranging from the small but heart-warming to the hugely important.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/

It's rare that positive news gets reported. It happens, but it's not exciting, generally. "Infant mortality rate in decline for 50th straight year" is great news, but it's not "news".

Instead, we get breathless headlines about shark attacks, which hardly ever happen. Our brains latch on to the wrong things most of the time. The news sucks because our brains suck. They're just giving us what we want.

I suppose it was a random example, but it's unfortunately a very bad one if it's about the USA, like most posts here presuppose.

The infant mortality in the USA certainly did not decline on every recent year[^1]. And the bad news is that this rate is extremely high for a rich country, with a value similar to Serbia, half more than the average rate in Europe[^2]. This last "news" was even reported under the title "Our infant mortality rate is a national embarrassment"[^3].

[^1]: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db09.pdf

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...

[^3]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/29/our-i...

It's not completely random, although I didn't fact-check absolute specifics like you did. What I'm going to do in response is fact-check long term trends, which was my point.

First site I checked shows that infant mortality in the US fell by about 50% from 1980-2010 (depending on category, but that's the trend in all categories). Someone did a paper on 1926 US infant mortality rates, and current rates are roughly 90% lower.

I'm not comparing to Serbia, or to last year. I'm comparing to decades ago. By focusing on trend rather than momentary detail, I'm seeing the positive where you're seeing the negative.

* vicuña.

English is such a plastic language that it even imports diacritics from other languages! Still, vicuna is also correct in English: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vicuna

But I guess importing letters from different alphabets is the limit.

EDIT: Actually ñ is a letter in the Spanish alphabet, so in this case, English has imported a foreign letter.

Note, if following old Spanish orthography one could simply spell vicuna with a double “n” as in “vicunna” and remain accurate. The thing above the n in the Spanish spelling of vicuna is actually a miniature “n”. So it’s a sort of stacked n digraph.

That doesn't hold for modern orthography though. Two consecutive ns (e.g. in words innato and perenne) are not pronounced as ñ.

Look at us arguing over English transliterated spelling rules again, as though it actually cared how much of another language's blood it spills as it hacks the raw, pulsing vocabulary out of their dictionary.

English will spell it as vicuna, vicuña, vicugna (like lasagna), vicunia, and vicunya, all at the same time, and Español will sit down and enjoy it, if it doesn't want its vowels mispronounced in an entirely new way.

True, but it holds for English orthography, and in this transliteration. Spanish writers can continue to use the digraph, of course.

> The thing above the n in the Spanish spelling of vicuna is actually a miniature “n”.

“originated as” is vastly more accurate than “is”; you wouldn't say that thing between the numbers in “1 + 2” is a ligature for the letter pair “et”, would you?

Wtf is that design, looks horrendous on a high res display. The BBC really has lost it's way with digital design.

Many comments celebrate this "good news". I hate to be the downer, and I dont want to say this article made me sad, but this is more "stopping some bad news". That's still good, and it's better than more bad news, but true good news is when we improve upon the norm, not when we stop one aspect of making things worse.

It is great when we can do things like cure diseases and genetic defects and reduce suffering, but I cant celebrate the same way when we are reducing suffering we created through sheer stupidity.

Humans cause a lot of suffering by accident, or by dint of competing with other species, and that sucks but isnt what I'm talking about. Cases where we know better and do the harmful stuff anyway are the ones that really get me. Stopping that is "good news" the way someone no longer punching me is good news.

[Edit: "computing" -> "competing"

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