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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.
It always seemed like a waste of money to me. After all, it's literally raining diamonds on Saturn.
If generics significantly disrupt the market, then the prices will drop way way down and they won't be a massive waste of money, at worst a small waste of money, and at best a very very durable shiny that lasts a long time and is cheap.
The monopoly/cartel was broken years ago, and they had to liquidate their stockpile. There is enough competition that natural diamonds are more or less set at market price. Granted, the price is inflated by marketing that drives up demand, but that's no different from most industries.
Diamonds aren't particularly rare, the only thing that makes them valuable is that DeBeers has been holding a very tight near-monopoly, so there's no free market.
Their operation is a reality version of the cartoon view of capitalism promoted by leftists for years. Every bad thing you can think of, they do, from the monopoly, exploitation of workers, callous disregard for humanity, and on and on. Capitalism and western society left this sort of bullcrap behind 100 years ago, but not these bastards. Anything that breaks their hold will be welcome from all sides of the spectrum,
And "the attraction" would be the blood of Africans that is spilled in obtaining them? The horrible working conditions that they are mined under? The environmental destruction that is wreaked by digging them up? Please help me out here, there are so many "attractions" to choose from.
I think they should absolutely be free to market/etc the terms "natural/mined" diamond vs "man made/lab grown" diamond, but "real" vs "fake" is incorrect and should be hammered on by agencies who regulate advertising and commerce.
Cubic zirconia is a "fake" diamond if it's sold as such. Man made diamonds are real, end of story.
Yeah, we should be really concerned for the interests of diamond companies.
Sounds like they can make 24,000 carats per year, or about 8% of the current worldwide annual production capability. The original submission contained additional information.
They aren't mutually exclusive. "Cruelty-free" natural diamonds already exist from mines in places like Canada and Australia with decent environmental, safety, and labour laws. That's why sometimes they brand them differently.
And have what are essentially slaves to dig up new ones.
Perhaps synthetic diamonds should be marketed as "cruelty-free diamonds". As far as synthetic vs. natural -- if it's made up of carbon atoms arranged in a face-centered cubic crystal structure called a diamond lattice (to paraphrase Wikipedia), it's a fucking diamond. All the work of digging up "natural" stones, etc ... doesn't make them better, just more expensive. Of course, I'm sure The Diamond Industry will disagree (and have me killed). :-)
The De Beers cartel has certainly put a lot of effort into controlling the diamond market so you may want to keep a low profile.
The Atlantic magazine's excellent article from 1982 enlightened my younger self as to the utter scam that is the diamond industry
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A house fire produces temperatures up to about 550C. The surface of a diamond will oxidize, necesitating polishing, between 700C and 1700C. With normal oxygen levels it's about 700C, in an oxygen-depleted environment such as a fire diamonds can be unharmed up to 1700C.
All gem grade materials are rare, composing just a tiny fraction of the earth. Diamonds are no exception to this, but among gems, diamonds are actually the most common.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Okay, I see you are able to be reasonable about this. So I have a few questions/observations.
The Native Americans and the Jews have also been victims of the most horrible forms of colonialism, institutional and interpersonal racism, or both. Why are they not topping the charts for violent crime like the blacks? Yes Margaret Sanger (Planned Parenthood's origins) was a twisted bitch to be sure, but no state actor has seriously tried to exterminate the blacks. This has happened to both the N.As and the Jews.
In the specific case of Haiti, the blacks overthrew their colonial rulers by military force, not unlike what the soon-to-be USA did to the British Crown. In fact the black Haitians enjoyed more support among the locals against the occupying forces than the 30% support rate the Founding Fathers had. Their revolution likewise succeeded. At that point they had full control of already established, already productive resources. The nation fell apart under their black rule, instead of prospering like the white-run liberated USA. This is something you seem to willfully fail to understand, though it has already been explained, perhaps because it does not fit your victim narrative?
The USA in particular has not been the object of colonization in a long time. It has, if anything, become a colonizer or former colonizer. So why is it that American blacks, part of this colonizer culture, still underachieve in every metric compared to whites, Jews and Asians? Why do they commit more violent crimes than anyone else? Why do they fail to father their own children more than anyone else? This one is key - oppression by another group would invoke "us against them", making blacks MORE LIKELY to look out for each other, not less.
The problem with political history is that there is a socially approved narrative which claims to fit the facts. Then there are the actual observable facts, several of which don't fit cherished narratives that make us feel good about ourselves, make us feel like we're real compassionate progressive type of people who are no longer part of the problem. All kinds of justifications will be used by people who don't want to believe a thing, especially with a subject like "political science" or sociology, something not subject to rigorous laboratory experiments like physics. You say that for the last 50 years writers have railed against the effects of colonialism? How about the hundreds of years prior to that when it was accepted fact that blacks were inferior? That _was_ the prevailing view for much longer -- if you are going to appeal to consensus, one of those is much more well established.
I'm just curious, would diamond wafers offer any serious advantages over current silicon? Heat conduction, maybe?
Long version: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369702107703498
Short version:
Diamond promises to be superior in most properties that are important for electronic components.
C - the footgun of programming languages