Submitted 16 hours ago by ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net to memes@sopuli.xyz
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/b56eb43f-9818-4a17-9602-7fe620e5c0c3.png
Use to work opposite a De Beers building that had a helipad on the roof. Choppers were always flying in and out.
Thought it was the CEO coming and going by heli, but turns out they were for diamond shipments. Safer to transport them by air than on the road.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
That said, part of the problem with lab-grown diamonds is that they’re not competing against a rare commodity. They’re competing against a powerful vertically integrated cartel. There isn’t any real diamond shortage, just a supply-side monopoly. There isn’t a natural high demand for diamonds, just a market saturated with aggressive advertising. There isn’t a wholesale diamond exchange judging the rocks objectively on their quality, just a series of elaborate marketing gimmicks and scammy sales goons trying to upsell you.
Diamonds have always been a racket. The one blessing of manufactured diamonds is that they’re no longer a racket putting market pressure on industrial grade diamond equipment. But the jewelry exists to separate gullible superficial status-fixated people from their money. Ethics was never part of the equation.
Best comment that I also hated reading all month.
So the answer is just to buy a lab-grown diamond, and then tell everyone it’s real, because once the poors have it, it won’t be cool anymore
The issue is he cartel. Telling people “I overpaid for a blood diamond” and flashing them your big rock does nothing to undermine the cartel in the long run.
Cool-ass economics fun fact, hell yeah
The dismal science
I like diamonds, my wife calls me a magpie. I buy her jewelry so I get to look at it while she wears it. That being said, I only buy jewelry with artificial diamonds for my better half. She jokingly reacts affronted when I tell her, with an incredulous face she will go “What? No children died for this? Some husband you are!”
I’m not even sure where the need for an expensive gem stone came from, diamond or otherwise.
My wedding/engagement ring came from an artist and the bands are sculpted and fit together. It’s beautiful and I never have to worry about the stone falling out of the setting, plus was in our price range. Gem stones can be nice, not arguing against them, but rings without them can be just as pretty and more affordable.
It was a marketing campaign from De Beers. Where else would it have come from.
Anything to the effect of “this ring isn’t expensive enough” is the only reason you need to never marry that person.
My (former) best friend got married young, and her and her husband had rings they got at the flea market that cost about 20 bucks a piece. I always respected the hell out of her for that. Her sisters tried to make it out like it was some kind of bad omen, or like it meant they didn’t love each other. She had a lot of pressure to cave into and act like a snotty brat about the cost of the rings. She never did, and loved her cheap ass flea market ring.
She turned out to be a terrible person in a multitude of other ways, but on that note, good for her.
Not the ending I was expecting.
I got married young too. My spouse didn’t even get a ring for the proposal. Total cheapskate! So anyways, I said yes.
Once you’re married and dealing with money together, cheapskate is a good thing. We had a minimalist inexpensive wedding.
i mean my partner just proposed to me recently using a ring pop 😂
Shit like that is why I think neuro-atypical people might actually be the correct psychological state and everyone else is just a “normal” animal.
An AuDHD perspective: Neurotypicals tend to lack curiosity and passion for interests. They’re less in-touch with their senses, sometimes needing mind-altering substances in order to appreciate basic sensory stimuli. Not only that, but they are overly-invested in “following the group” and “blending in,” even if it ends up harming them.
So yeah, you might be onto something.
Neurotypicals tend to lack curiosity and passion for interests.
When the interest at issue is human relationships and social norms, I think it flips the other way around.
Better to characterize things by what type of interests tend to appeal to which.
What self-important bullshit 🤣
I like to call it Attention Surplus Disorder. It’s crazy to me how most people can just focus on something for 50 hours a week that they’re not interested in at all, and this doesn’t set off warning bells in their head.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of antiwork neurotypucals, but it seems weird how many people actively support it.
Neurotypical // Neurodivergent
I often forget the term and end up using atypical.
I don’t listen to hip-hop.
I gave my wife a natural diamond engagement ring, but it belonged to my great-grandmother, so I felt that it was ethical enough. You can’t really do much about suffering 120 years ago (or whatever it was) and probably everyone involved in making that ring was treated like shit in one way or another because it was 1904 and everyone who wasn’t white, male and rich suffered.
The most suffering-free and eco-friendly ring is the one already made, so, you did the best thing!
I think so too, thank you.
My brain; “120 years? So the mid 1800s right?..”
I want to buy a synthetic gemstone that is impossible to be formed naturally. I’m sure there’s at least a few.
I want a stone so un-natural that the mineral is named cthulite.
In it, you see a tiny civilization. You are the cosmic horror.
Sorry, but the demon core is not for sale.
You can make a philosopher stone with some souls. Ironically still a lesser evil option than diamond.
The fact that the human race sees scarcity as a good thing…
Is everything I need to justify misanthropy in its most literal form (Hatred of humanity)
It’s not so much people being attracted to scarcity, but decades of diamond industry propaganda having an effect on our culture. Even now there’s an active effort being put by the diamond industry into keeping natural diamonds the “forever gem” while artificial gems made in a lab are being portrayed as “everyday gems”, as in less prestigious.
Scarcity of what? Food, water, sanitary infrastructure, shelter, healthcare? Yeah that is bad.
Scarcity of pretty rocks, some people want to wear as accessoires? Fine whatever. Also i wouldn’t mind the mining of scarce and pretty rocks, if it wouldn’t go with the destruction of the environment and human rights abuses.
“Fine whatever” until someone thinks that the pretty rock that we used to base the entire financial system around is what we still should base it around, despite the fact that the whole economy could crash if someone digs a hole in the right place or develops some new refining technology.
Scarcity of anything is a bad idea. Shouldn’t we WANT to live in a land of plenty?
Incorrect. Scarcity refers to quantity, not quality.
For a few years I’ve saved this pic from previous similar posts in various places, no need even for freaking diamonds
Moisannaite gives the most rainbows, and I think they are gorgeous.
But I do love the sparkle of diamonds, and sometimes prefer it. Fortunately synthetic ones are easy to come by.
Is that a difference in the material, or is the Moissanite cut differently?
If Moissanaite just does that, then damn, that’s pretty.
Moissanite is a completely different substance than diamond, it’s a silicon carbide crystal, and it’s also made synthetically so no worries about exploitation mining, it’s also cheaper
Same with vehicles
This. If you really want an economical alternative, moissanite is a great option. Obviously not 1 for 1, but pretty damn close for jewelry.
They arguably refract better and don’t have a history of slavery and death.
I was, just moments ago, watching a video on the jerryrigeverything youtube channel about how industrial diamonds are made.
They aren’t that much cheaper
Getting there, but not down to what I’d call cheaper yet
1/10 to 1/20 the price. Literally an order of magnitude cheaper. I bought a bunch of people diamonds for Christmas this year.
1/10 the price of what though? Retail, wholesale, or something like that , I assume.
Which is fine, since you were responding to a vague two sentence comment. I should have done my usual long comment instead, it just isn’t something I really care about, so I kept it short. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t in that regard. Go mid to long, you have morons whining about the Kenney length. Go short, and someone is going to poke at it in one way or another.
I’m just glad the person poking at it was neutral to friendly about it :)
But, 1/10 the price of mined diamonds is still 1/10 the grossly inflated price of mined diamonds, not what they should cost based on a semi-fair market rather than the bullshit the diamond market is.
Making the diamonds still isn’t cheaper than pulling them out of the ground. I’m not aware of energy usage, environmental impact, or anything like that, but in terms of the production costs only.
That’s why man-made is cheaper; they’re competing against a rigidly corrupt and price fixed market.
Mind you, I also couldn’t tell you what the cost of mining the diamonds would be if slave labor wasn’t involved either. Could be that with fair wages, safety measures, etc, manmade would totally undercut natural again.
There, that’s the ten cent version instead of the penny cent version. Not gonna waste anyone’s time on the buck fifty version because I doubt anyone else cares, and I don’t care enough :)
For April Fools, Cards Against Humanity was literally selling diamond studded potatoes for $69.99 (USD) - and claimed a $1000 value, which I’m sure they would be at retail prices.
The FAQ said they had thousands of them, but I didn’t get there in time.
The suffering has absolutely nothing to do with their value. It’s shit like this dilutes the water of topical debate. But why does that matter when you can hitch your agenda to a sting of words that sound deep and impactful.
Here is a simple and easy to understand unbiased explanation of why diamonds are valuable.
“the suffering is what makes it special” is a simplified way of saying “the de Beers company ran hundreds of advertising campaigns with the express purpose of convincing people that lab diamonds, which can be made perfect in every way, are inferior to the products of their blood diamond monopoly, and since the resulting stone is the exact same the only thing we can assume they mean makes it better is the slave-labor used in their extraction”
MargotRobbie@lemm.ee 7 hours ago
At this point you’re not paying money for a diamond, you’re paying money for a certificate.
If you want to know how much a diamond is really worth, go to any jewelry store and ask them to appraise the resell value of your natural diamond ring with certificate and all, no matter how much you paid for it, they’re probably going to tell you only the precious metal setting is worth any money, and the rock itself is utterly worthless the second you received it.
Which makes diamond a terrible symbol for love.
WhatYouNeed@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Considering more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, maybe a worthless symbol is fitting.
TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 4 hours ago
“See, our love is just like a diamond: Turns to coal under high pressure and to smoke when heated.”