This takes me back to my working days. I worked in a prison so we had a whole procedure for recovering contraband that people had swallowed. It specified how many hours a person had to be watched and how many times they had to defecate before they could be released. (It’s trickier than you’d think. For example, there was a minimum time involved - otherwise, a person could swallow something and defecate without worry for several hours while the contraband was working its way through his stomach and intestines.)
Surprisingly, one thing that wasn’t outlined in the procedure was how you searched the feces. So different methods were developed, from the merely unpleasant to the truly god-awful. I’ll spare you the details.
Me, personally? I was a supervisor. My part of the procedure was assigning somebody else to the job and then calling them up every few hours to see how things were going.
Re: how long it takes for an ingested item to travel the length of the GI tract to one’s anus, I was under the impression it was on the order of days, not hours. A miner could work a 12-hour shift, and he’d still have to hang around for a couple of days to assure he didn’t smuggle any diamonds out.
It’s a different matter, I suppose, if the miner is inserting them in his rectum instead of his mouth.
Oh ok, I was extrapolating from gold mining. You mean people walk out of diamond mines with rough stones, not pieces of rock? Either the mines are smaller than I thought, or diamonds are much easier to find. What’s an easy way to distinguish a diamond from a worthless stone?
I think in the cases you mention, marine and open pit mines, the work is more mechanized and less unskilled labor, so stealing is harder. For one, there’s less human contact with the mined material. Also, if the mine isn’t dark and noisy, people are going to get suspicious if someone starts swallowing rocks.
The story I linked in post 8 is from 1999 but is clear that the Namibian beach mines rely heavily on laborers and that theft is (was?) rampant. At Alexkor, officials openly said theft was at 30 percent, or $15 million per year. And Alexkor was small potatoes compared to Namdeb, a rough estimate of the theft there was up to $160 million a year.
Again, the article is 12 years old, maybe they got the security figured out since then.
It was part of the financial crisis. New York was hit hard. Government departments were told to reduce their budgets and those of us who were eligible to retire but had chosen to keep working were strongly “encouraged” to retire.
Which didn’t really save the state any money. The Department of Corrections reduced its budget because it could replace us old-timers with newer people who had lower salaries. However those of us who retired all started collecting our pensions (but pensions aren’t counted as part of the DOC budget).
Yes. In the Namibian works, what they’re mining is essentially ancient gravel beaches. The diamonds are one kind of pebble in the gravel, but the stuff isn’t consolidated into rock yet.
Scratch something hard with it. Crystal watch face, for instance.
