Slashdot Mirror
A Step Toward the Diamond Age
An anonymous reader writes "Carnegie Institution researchers have learned to produce 10-carat, half-inch thick diamonds at rates of about 100 micrometers per hour, which in the diamond biz is blazingly fast. And these aren't cruddy, yellow diamonds either, but gem-quality stones. The goal: A 300 carat beast in whatever shape they want."
It doesn't matter. Some other rare thing will replace the diamond and nobody will want diamonds anymore (except for industrial purposes). When it comes to women, it will still just be a matter of how much you are willing to spend to get a piece of that self-absorbed, attention-seeking, validation-needing ass. If diamonds become as cheap as glass, something else will become common to replace them as a means of proving your desperation for a piece of ass by buying something technically worthless and useless.
Do you want to bet how long it will take for a certain criminal, monopolistic, little-african-children abusing cartel to have the research grants revoked, and if that fails, to have an accident happen to the scientists in question?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Yes, thats right, a lump of crystal dug out of a large, polluting hole by minimum wage (if they are lucky) workers by sheer luck, and used to prop up massive corps is SO much better than one produced in a demonstration of our ability to solve extremely difficult technological problems, and produce an identical item.
Of course, in a few years you wont be able to tell which is which, so long as they work out how to add in a few imperfections to make the grown crystal look as poor as the natural one.
About damn time, another artificially produced drain on the common mans pocket toppled.
Maybe that is why DeBeers is fighting this kind of efforts, especially since these artificially produced ones are of better quality than the real ones.
Diamonds are not beautifull when you find them. It is a like a little rock, rough surface, irregular shape, until the cutting and polishing takes place. These artificially made diamonds (it is a diamond, DeBeers does it not want to have that name), are having the basic shapes and most likely will need less cutting.
When there are enough diamonds available, I guess that we will find new applications for it, more usefull applications than a show off how rich we are.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
With the availability of high quality artificial diamonds, we could stop diamond mining. Unfortunately, the diamond mining industries are trying to perpuate their expensive and destructive extraction business by trying to create a special mystique around "natural" diamonds.
So, be aware that the high price you pay for a "natural" diamond is a direct result of the rather unnatural destruction of the environment, together with monopolistic prices charged by the diamond cartels. There are better ways to say "I love you" to someone.
Its amusing that people are automatically assuming that mass producing diamonds would make the diamond market collapse. While it certainly is a possibility it is highly unlikely due to the following reasons. 1) DeBeers can launch a new marketing ploy and sell their diamonds as naturally forming diamonds compared with man-made diamonds. They could have a larger range of diamonds and infact increase their revenue potential, by charging a higher premium on naturally occuring diamonds. Think of it as a comparision between driving a toyota and a bmw. Toyota for the masses and bmw for the clients who can afford that level of a machine. 2) All tin foil hat conspiracies aside, jewellery is not the only area where diamonds are used so extensively. While it is the most talked about and marketed, diamonds have significant number of uses in industry that such a cheap form of making diamonds would accomodate. 3) Imagine the industries this is going to spawn. Right now they have technology to do laser cutting or painting your picture into glass. Imagine doing the same with a diamond. Debeers will survive, as they will adjust their business model to accomodate this.
A large part of a diamond's appeal is that something so stunningly beautiful was formed naturally. We can produce pretty, sparkly stones, but they can never be as beautiful simply because we produced them.
Nice try. Natural diamonds are hardly beautiful. Only when you carefully cut them exactly the right way, and polish them properly, do they appear so beautiful. And it's really hard to argue that diamonds are more beautiful than any other gemstone - almost all of which can be created in the lab now, by the way.
No, diamonds are just the most expensive gem. For no good reason. And thankfully, perhaps not for much longer.
Not to mention that the diamond industry (the mining one that is ala debeers) is absolutely TERRIFIED of cultured stones and takes every opportunity to trash them, saying that they're "not as good as natural stones"...
Because... They cost less?
It's certainly not because they look any different unless you're an expert in gemstones with good-enough gear to do some very specific testing. Certainly no consumer is going to be able to notice the difference.
But it's all just a big ego trip anyway - "my wallet is bigger than your wallet because I can drop (insert number here) dollars on a hunk of carbon)."
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
I think I saw a documentary at Discovery Channel about some Russian company that already produces the machines for some years (could be this company). According to the show the traditional diamond industry was so worried that they developed an expensive laser system to discriminate the artificial ones from the natural ones. They could then issue a certificate of 'garanteed blood money' (TM). As a hollywood star/gangsta rapper you of course want to make sure that your hard earned money is well spent on some evil warlord somewhere in Africa.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
To Quote
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
. . .the larger the diamond is, the more likely there's a significant impurity in it. Impurities drive down the price of diamonds significantly.
Which they have because they are created in an impure environment. Even with current technology one of the ways to identify a man made diamond is that it's "too pure" and "too perfect."
Thus DeBeers again have managed to have it both ways. Purity drives up the cost of a natural diamond, but makes a man made diamond worth less.
You're trying to apply logic to the matter.
Silly boy.
KFG
plus I don't think man made diamonds are ever going to eclipse natural ones for jewelry, there is just no cache (can't be bothered to find the accented e at the end of that word) attached to them.
It's "cachet", no accent.
If you think manmade diamonds won't be as popular as natural ones, look at cultured pearls. There's very little cachet to naturally occurring pearls.
a "good" natural diamond, which won't glow, and a "bad" manufactured diamond, which is "too perfect".
Natural diamonds can be blood diamonds. Cultured diamonds aren't. How does this make natural diamonds "better" than cultured diamonds?
No, it isn't romantic unless you spend the DeBeers required two months salary on the thing.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
DeBeers are the biggest bunch of capitalist fucks outside
Off topic, but why is anyone who acts greedy always denounced on Slashdot as a "Capitalist"? Capitalism is generally characterized by a free market - the DeBeers corporation is a Cartel that controls the supply of diamonds to maintain an artificially high price. This is about as far from a free market as you can get.
Same for Enron really - They're not capitalists, they're con men.
Why?
Which all just highlights how shallow and unromantic the jesture actually is.
Because in the real world, the behavior of companies like Enron and DeBeers is where capitalism leads without government regulation. Free-market ideologues like to tell us that "the market will take care of it," but very often, it doesn't.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.