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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.
And have what are essentially slaves to dig up new ones.
:T:R:A:N:S:
Hopefully before then, the main threat will become the consumer realizing they're a massive waste of money.
That is all I have to say about this.
It's so much more romantic to give diamonds that were mined by people on subsistence level wages in terrible conditions and then used to make massive profits by a parasitic organization that is dedicated to preserving a monopoly through artificial scarcity. What's "real" when the end result is the same, or perhaps even purer when man-made?
Diamonds are not as rare as some other gemstones. It's only the massive market manipulation that gives them their value.
The end of DeBeers cannot come soon enough.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
....yeah, fuck DeBeers in their cartel ass
-SaNo
Diamond Foundry Inc., a San Francisco synthetic-diamond producer with a capacity of 24,000 carats
A day? An hour? Per year? Their office safe can't hold more than that? How does this provide any sort of perspective?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"...a headache for mine owners, who are under pressure to cut supply and lower prices, because traders, cutters and polishers are struggling to profit...
When the retail end of this entire market reflects rather obscene profit margins, the real problem is rather glaring.
Sorry, but with the collusive pricing actions of the entire industry on the retail end of things, they are likely getting what they deserve. Pure unadulterated greed created these alternate products, and for valid reasons.
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). :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Pretty much.
If they hire some good marketers they can market them as 100% guaranteed cruelty free diamonds with little to no environmental impact (or at least less than digging them out of the ground), and on top of that 100% pure with no imperfections.
The difference between synthetic vs natural diamonds is exactly the same as between ice you get from putting water into your freezer vs that hauled from far-away mountains. The latter is expensive and dirty. If you want, you can put dirt into your synthetic diamonds too!
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
It's not even the digging up of natural stones that makes them expensive. De Beers grabs just about every source of natural diamonds that they can and stores them away. By limiting the supply, they can drive prices up. If all of the diamonds in De Beers storehouses were to go on the market, the price of diamonds would drop.
De Beers can't buy up the supply of synthetic diamonds, though. Any lab anywhere can get the equipment and start churning out synthetic diamonds. And whereas natural stones might be of varying quality, synthetics can be perfect every time.
De Beers is a monopolistic company that is suddenly finding itself facing competition. As such, they are reacting as monopolistic companies usually do - not by competing with a better product but by trying to shut down or shout down their new competition.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
and Trump has better odds being our next 3 presidents than I do getting married but I'll say this: No way in hell would I buy a woman a diamond engagement ring. Even without the ethical quandaries (blood diamonds anyone?) I'd still feel like a chump. I remember growing up thinking a diamond engagement ring was a 1000 year old tradition and finding out it was all made up in the 20s by marketing execs to sell diamonds.
Have you ever thought of it from her point of view? Think about what she is giving up for you. She is giving up looking for other mates. She is giving up her name. She is giving up a lot of things for love. She is choosing you over her friends. That is not to say that she would not still see her friends once in a while but when you get married, you are both supposed to make each other a priorty over your old "buddies". A diamond engagement ring is a symbol of your commitment level to the relationship.
I used to be a jaded nerd like you. Do you spend money on buying cars that depreciate in value, cannot love you back and you eventually have to replace? Do you spend thousands of dollars on technology that depreciate in value, cannot love you back and eventually breakdown or become obsolete?
How about thinking about showing your love and appreciation for the woman in your life with flowers once in a while and a diamond ring? Trust me, once you find that girl you will want to put a ring on it sooner rather than later.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I love that a good synthetic diamond simply can't be distinguished from the real thing without the aid of very advanced technology. Specifically, that even a trained diamond cutter with decades of experience working with diamonds can't tell without the assistance of advanced technology.
Then they try to tell the public that synthetic is somehow bad.
I am not a fan of margarine but this sounds like when the butter lobby managed to do things like prevent margarine from being coloured yellow after an unsuccessful attempt to get it banned.
I am willing to bet that what is coming is one of two things, or both. First is that you must label a synthetic diamond as synthetic. Or they will try to force people to label synthetic diamonds as something else entirely(as if they weren't chemically a diamond).
The next is a campaign of "fake means he doesn't love you"
Then it will turn out that they will go after any jewelers who cut, sell, design, or anything that anything to do with synthetics. Basically the rule will be, if you sale synthetics then you don't get to sell the real thing.
But when all this is over just look at what happened to the natural pearl industry after cultured pearls took over. There was a brief orgy of resistance, and then it all fell apart.
and De beers have even provide the tools to guarantee that you aren't getting ground mined "cruel" diamonds. The price of diamonds is all about the marketing so turn it around on the price fixing miners.
The demand is there. I looked at diamond prices last month, and "cultured" diamonds cost more than natural diamonds, for similar C4 (clarity, cut, carat, color). 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. Working conditions in Chinese factories are certainly better than in African mines.
I'd like to see natural diamonds outlawed. No, I take that back. That'd just create another black market. They should just be labelled with a warning like cigarettes. If most people knew the history of the DeBeers cartel they'd never buy anything but synthetic.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
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.
You come so close but can't see the forest for the trees.
That is, you basically outline the problem with colonialism and the extraction of resources from colonial lands and the socioeconomics of decolonization and the best you can come up with is that "Blacks just can't organize peacefully at those scales"?.
The effect of European colonization of black-majority lands and the socioeconomic problems that result from post-colonial conditions where foreign individuals and powers own the resources of those decolonized lands has been discussed by economists, scientists, politicians, journalists, and writers for the last 50 years. Here's a few Google results regarding the "effects of decolonization in Africa".
Maybe something other than the facts of political history prevents you from understanding why formerly colonized peoples who no longer own the resources of their homelands would struggle economically and sociopolitically.
blog
It is only "undeclared" by default. I have a prenup with a specific QoS guarantee. For each day that she breaches her contractual responsibility, I can legally keep 3% of my monthly income for my personal use.
That you pulled this off is unusual. The difficulty most men face is that women act like a collective guild staffed by shrewd bargainers who understand collective bargaining. Most women would leave you before accepting those terms. Even if they loved you.
A marriage without a prenup is inherently unfair. Your wife can compel you to financially support her, while you get nothing in return. So instead of letting your state legislators decide how your marriage will work, you and your spouse should decide that for yourselves.
And if children are involved, you will quickly find out that family courts hate men by default. The woman wins automatically in any sort of custody dispute, unless there is some exceptional circumstance (you have video proof + multiple witnesses that she is a crack dealer, or something like that). And the concept of alimony is something the feminists themselves would have eliminated on the grounds that it is insulting, if they had integrity. It once served a useful purpose, back when women did not work outside the home and had no real way to earn an honest independent living.
Alimony = the concept that a woman has a "right" to "get used to" the financial lifestyle you provided, a right that continues after she leaves you. Treating women as equals would mean eliminating the concept altogether, or having courts force a divorced woman to render sexual favors to her ex-husband as long as he keeps up his payments because that is the lifestyle that *he* got used to.
Oddly enough the feminists aren't eager to address the blatant sexual discrimination that is Selective Service (military draft) either. It's as though they want all the privileges of men but none of the burdens. That's hardly striving for equality.