- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
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We’d much rather spend money on fabulous vacations or boring mortgages.
Come crashing down
Crashing down
I wish.
Nothing says “I love you” like a detonation nanodiamond
I bet there still over priced.
No, I bet they are.
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.
In the land of ever increasing red line, any stagnation is bad, any drop is catastrophic.
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?
The free market manages to solve a problem.
I wonder how much money it’s going to cost the diamond lobby to un-solve it.
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.
They’re not especially rare, not even gem-quality ones. For several generations, almost every married woman in a western country had a diamond on her finger of some size. They found plenty of them to serve that market. The mines created artificial scarcity by colluding together.
If lab grown had never happened, diamond mines might not have been able to serve industrial customers. Industrial customers don’t care how it looks as long as it cuts, and so lab grown has been good enough for decades. Thus, you can get a two-pack 4.5 inch diamond angle grinder wheel at Home Depot for around twenty bucks.
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.
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…
Finally, rocks might be worth what rocks are worth.
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.
Diamond thermal paste is out there. It’s okay, but like most thermal paste (besides liquid metal, which has its own issues), it doesn’t give extraordinary results over anything else. People tend to really overthink thermal paste; it’s going to give you maybe 4 extra degrees C, and that’s already pushing it.
Graphene is an even better thermal conductor, and heat pipes are tons better than either. There’s some work out there on enhancing heat pipes with graphene.
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
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
Literal monopoly company should have been banned from imports to the US dozens of years ago.
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
Scratching things is super useful. We have so many tools based on exactly that principle
Yes, there just isn’t all that much use I would get from it personally, and I think diamond tools are already not all that expensive.
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
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 first thing DeBeers tried was “artificial diamonds have imperfections, you want a real rock that’s selected to be as perfect as possible”. Then the artificial industry made diamonds so good that you could only tell the difference from the lack of imperfections. Then DeBeers marketing changed to “it’s too perfect, you want something that has the small imperfections of a natural process”.
The suffering is the point
Yup. It someone wasn’t killed for it, it’s less valuable.
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).
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
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.
