Scientists at De Beers Fight the Growing Threat of Man-Made Diamonds (wsj.com)

"In the past few years, lab-grown diamonds have become indistinguishable from natural diamonds to the naked eye..." reports the Wall Street Journal. This creates a problem for diamond-mining company De Beers. HughPickens.com writes: While synthetics make up just a fraction of the market, they have growing appeal to younger buyers -- a headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices, because traders, cutters and polishers are struggling to profit amid a credit squeeze and languishing jewelry sales... "Martin Roscheisen, chief executive of Diamond Foundry Inc., a San Francisco synthetic-diamond producer with a capacity of 24,000 carats, says he believes nearly all diamonds consumers purchase will be man-made in a few decades," reports the Journal. "To counter the threat, last year De Beers helped launch a trade association with other producers to market the attraction of natural diamonds. It also started marketing a new, cheap detector called PhosView, that uses ultraviolet light to detect lab-grown stones that quickly screens tiny synthetic diamonds.
It always seemed like a waste of money to me. After all, it's literally raining diamonds on Saturn.

Comments

Re:mountains of diamonds

[Anonymous Coward]

I was planning to buy a cultured diamond, specifically because of the environmental and human rights aspects, but I was put off by the prices. So I bought my wife a new Macbook Pro instead.

The important point is whether you got laid. I mean, if you're going to engage in the undeclared prostitution that is many marriages, well damn it, she should hold up her end of the deal.

Working conditions in Chinese factories are certainly better than in African mines.

So some of the worst civilian working conditions in China are still better than some of the worst civilian working conditions in an arbitrary African nation? I'm sorry but name for me just one majority-black nation (or hell, even a city) that is a pleasant, safe, prosperous place to live. Hell, do you know the history of Haiti? It had a prosperous mostly agrarian/plantation economy with relatively safe cities and farms, public sanitation, well established law. This is when the French were in control. Then the blacks intercepted a shipment of muskets and revolted. They quickly took control of a "made" nation! It went to shit soon after and has never recovered.

Blacks just can't organize peacefully at those scales. They're too tribal for that and too willing to fight one another. Even now, black males kill other black males far more often than racist whites ever did, even during slavery, even during Jim Crow, even in the KKK heyday circa 1920 (they had MILLIONS of members then). Of all the murders in the USA that police are able to solve, every year 51% or more of them are black males killing mostly other black males.

Generally, Chinese don't fight other Chinese as often or as fiercely. Not by a long shot. So yes, the way a Chinese factory employing Chinese workers owned by Chinese owners should happen to treat those workers, will still be better than the way blacks treat other blacks, anywhere in the world, time after time. I wish they didn't but they do. So can we all just be honest about this, because that's usually the first step towards a solution.