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.
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?
Good. Fuck rich people.
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.
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.
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It’s clearly beginning of an end for diamond mining.
In the land of ever increasing red line, any stagnation is bad, any drop is catastrophic.
I’d buy more diamonds, but I spent all my money on avocado toast.
Good. Hope the whole industry goes bust.
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.
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.
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 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.
Or dismembered by militia for not working fast enough
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
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).
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.
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.
They’re too common to be truly valuable, though, and that’s before factoring in that you can just make them now.
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
Fucking young people and their… lack of money!
Seriously! Fucking bums! Just borrow a few million from your parents FFS
Diamonds are worthless outside of industrial uses.
I disagree. They ARE pretty. Just not as pretty as a rose or a sunset and yeah best used as industrial tooling.
I would rate them above roses personally. Below a good sunset though; nearly nothing manmade beats those
Good sunsets are frequently man-made too, the most beautiful red glowing ones own their look to dust - air pollution.
Yes, but you can’t take a good sunset and put it somewhere where you can look at it whenever. Pictures don’t really convey the full experience.
Pedantry because funny: Diamonds and Roses aren’t man made either. On a more serious note, some things aren’t beautiful because they last but because they are fleeting.
Any rose you buy at a florist or other store is the product of centuries of selective breeding by horticulturists. So they are, in that sense, man-made. And now they’re getting into genetic modification.
In fact, if you bought someone a dozen wild roses, they might be disappointed.
Really, virtually anything plant-related you can buy in a store is a human creation at least in part. We don’t think of flowers we tend to grow and buy as domesticated, but they are.
Diamonds and Roses aren’t man made either.
Yeah, but have you seen an unprocessed diamond? They don’t look all that interesting, especially when compared with other natural crystals. It certainly isn’t what most people think of when they picture a diamond.
Lots of diamonds are man made, and most people can’t tell them apart from natural diamonds, especially without a microscope.
True. My wife specifically requested a Moissanite. Most engagement rings are (sadly) still natural diamond.
Ain’t that the truth
The same can be said for precious metals as well except precious metals can’t be manufactured. Their natural scarcity gives them some value beyond their utility.
Diamonds however are not scarce.
I bet there still over priced.
No, I bet they are.
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.
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.
Prices are so bad that De Beers is for sale?! Wild.
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.
