- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
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Good. Hope the whole industry goes bust.
26% down from a wildly inflated peak isn’t all that earth shattering tbh.
However the growth in popularity and price drop with synthetic diamonds - that’s what’s newsworthy here.
It’s clearly beginning of an end for diamond mining.
Bottom falls out on commodity made artifically rare through imperailism and corruption. Is this the part where I’m supposed to feel bad for De Beers?
To be fair, diamonds are indeed rare on earth. But what made diamond price come crashing is because we now managed to synthesise the diamonds. These “fake” diamonds flooded the market. This is good news so that we don’t have to rely on exploitative extraction of the mineral.
Also because newer generations just aren’t sold on diamonds being a luxury item anymore. Your average Joe just isn’t paying their rent or more on a diamond engagement/wedding ring like they used to because, well, that’s their rent payment or mortgage for something that’s gonna lose value the second they walk out of the store.
I’d buy more diamonds, but I spent all my money on avocado toast.
I’d like to see new uses for diamonds that take advantage of their material properties. For example, the thermal conductivity of diamonds is very high.
Industrial diamonds have always been on the cheap and that industry is far removed from the jewelry/gem industry, in fact a large majority of diamonds that are mined aren’t gem grade, they’re industrial grade. It’s been growing and advancing despite the jewelry/gem market starting to fall.
and their hardness makes them useful in all saw-blades or drill-bits
Finally, rocks might be worth what rocks are worth.
Thank goodness, maybe I’ll finally be able to buy a diamond pickaxe for what few emeralds I have. I’ve been having to use stone tools in this economy and I’d really like some obsidian for a nether portal.
if you want to go to hell, just wait.
I’d really like some obsidian for a nether portal.
Water and lava buckets, you peasent
They said they were using stone tools. You think they’d have spare iron lying around for a bucket?
Name checks out…
I respect jewelers and stonesetters as an art, but the rock itself has negative value in my eyes.
There’s nothing wrong with orderly carbon. There’s more than a few things wrong with Debeers
yeah, like the heat conduction thing is super cool, and the ability to scratch literally anything, while not particularly useful, is still pretty neat
I bet once diamonds get cheap enough CPU manufacturers will start using them as heat spreaders on their high end chips
Literal monopoly company should have been banned from imports to the US dozens of years ago.
The rock is quite useful as an industrial tool. It’s when you cut it in to a fancy shape and wear it that it’s pretty useless.
We use diamonds to test the hardness of materials, grind really hard things smaller, orient and locate specialized cutting tools, and cut through really hard things. Hell we sell garnet by the barrel to help cut through regular materials. Orderly carbon or, in many cases orderly aluminum oxide, is something we need a lot of. The price going down on those is actually good for manufacturing.
But the industrial rocks are 90% manmade, the stonesetter diamonds were mined with slave labour or close to it, and people probably died for them.
I own twns of thousands of diamonds. most of them are embedded in metal plates and I use them to sharpen chisels. A few are on little wheels I use to cut steel.
Fucking young people and their… lack of money!
Seriously! Fucking bums! Just borrow a few million from your parents FFS
You know, it must be that food and rent are a bit higher priority than the pressure stones… especially when more and more people cant afford those… food and rent i mean.
I find the thought funny … propose to your love with a hamburger instead of a ring…
A hamburger? My wife is worth a high end porterhouse for sure.
Not just murder. Mildly premium murder at the very least.
Good should never be so high. Artificially inflated prices. Due to one company holding the diamonds
i never understood why a mined diamond has a bigger value than an artificially made one when the only difference is the suffering of the workers. ppl who like diamonds are stupid.
The suffering is the point
Yup. It someone wasn’t killed for it, it’s less valuable.
For a long time (and maybe still currently I don’t know) they weren’t able to make diamonds bigger like people want. So for a small diamond it might not make any sense, but there was a point where ones we made weren’t meeting what people wanted.
synthetic diamond sizes keep getting bigger, but it is much harder to make them I think
As of 2023 the heaviest synthetic diamond ever made weighs 30.18 ct (6.0 g); the heaviest natural diamond ever found weighs 3167 ct (633.4 g). Wikipedia
That would be 1.7 vs 181 cm3
Well, if they’re getting that big, that’s big enough for a lot of jewelry now.
Yes, I would imagine that size would be comically large for like a ring or something
Same reason diamonds are valued in the first place. Marketing campaigns tricking the gullible majority and most of the rest conforming to not stand out and cause issues for themselves.
Diamonds do make sense as gemstones because of their hardness. They’ll stay scratch free for life. But ya, the diamond industry is garbage.
They’re too common to be truly valuable, though, and that’s before factoring in that you can just make them now.
Maybe, but realistically, most jewelry will have them inlaid in gold anyway, which is not hard at all. So you need to take care not to scratch it regardless of what gem is used.
Also, many other gems are harder then steel which is about the hardest thing your jewelry would come into contact with.
So I would say the benefit is minor.
There is this idea that seems to be really pervasive that natural is always better. And it’s not true so often. A common example I like to give is that natural almond extract contains cyanide and artificial almond extract does not. No, it isn’t enough cyanide to kill you, but I would say no cyanide is better than some cyanide.
And a lot of those “natural is always better” people would happily take fentanyl over willow bark if they were in agony.
I think a better analogy would be oxycodone or hydromorphone over opium but your point stands
Another aspect of this is that “natural” things like supplements are not usually “naturally occurring” but rather highly refined.
Snake venom is natural 😊
Indeed. As is arsenic. You can even find it in water supplies (especially in the U.S., where there are “acceptable” levels).
Diamond coin! With a hologram of Trump doing Queen Victoria
Paying overprice for a lump of carbon is insane.
My mother was always bitter that an anniversary ring my father gave her turned out to be synthetic, but I think back in the 80s lab grown diamonds went cloudy after a while.
She could also have been complaining about anything and Everything my father had done 24/7 once the separation and inevitable divorce were in effect.
