Part of my job involves detecting and identifying counterfeit money in many forms, going back 2500 years (not Secret Service, but sometimes parallel).
Starting around 1990, extremely primitive fakes of all sorts of older silver coins started showing up out of China—everything from ancient Greek and Roman to American silver dollars. Tourists started showing up after trips to the Far East, convinced they had scored bargains, wasting countless hours of the experts at auction houses like Sotheby’s, Heritage, Spink, etc. But the Chinese forgers had the time and the willingness to learn, and now some of their fakes are really skillfully made. I mean to the point of “this LOOKS OK, but something is off about it, even if I can’t pinpoint it.” Then, when an Athenian tetradrachm from 2500 B.C. or an American silver dollar from 1795 shows traces of titanium, the scam is blown, but sometimes it mow comes to that.
The point is that the Chinese have nothing but time and a willingness to learn from psst mistakes, and they move at lightning speed, too—the bad guys as well as the good guys. The glacial pace of socialist bureaucracy is a thing of the past. If our technology gets poorly imitated there, they realize it very quickly now, correct their mistakes, and surpass the original if they can. Pollution and low/slave wage labor are not hindrances. They are to be taken seriously. Not all of them, but enough of them.
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