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by pure-awesome 2346 days ago
This point is made in the book "The Soul of the White Ant" by Eugène Marais, and is perhaps the primary thesis of the book.

It is a fascinating book, and I can recommend reading it, though having been published in 1925, it is possible some of the information is out-of-date.

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-White-Ant-Complete-Unabridged/dp...

"White Ant" actually refers to termites, though the same principles apply. The book was originally published in Afrikaans. According to Wikipedia:

> [The book] was plagiarised by Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck, who published La Vie des Termites (translated into English as The Life of Termites or The Life of White Ants), an entomological book,[3] in what has been called "a classic example of academic plagiarism" by University of London's professor of biology, David Bignell.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Marais#Theft_of_hi...

Following reference [4] led to this page which I unfortunately don't have the time to read in its entirety right now, but from a skim seems to have some interesting further information on termites:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070915005006/http://www.biolog...

1 comments

The hardcover version is only 814.57$
My goodness, would you look at that! Luckily the paperback is only 1% the price, so solid deal there!

I thought it's a data entry error, but no, it looks like that's the legitimate price range for the NEW hardcovers (the actual listed ones are even more!):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0007JVUSK/ref=dp_ol...

It's either a ripoff, or some sort of collector's edition original versions. Though if it were the latter, I'd have expected it to be advertised as such.

They’re priced by different algorithms that “outbid” each other.
Do they start them at $1'000 and let them bid down from there?
This isn't exactly related, but it's one of my favorite blog posts.

http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

One of the algorithms could be capped at $1000 for their inventory.