more sweet lab diamonds
another slashdot article about the diamond cartel and real lab-created diamonds.
also ten reasons why you really don’t want a diamond.
“…but in the end all diamonds are nothing more than tetrahedrally bonded carbon.”
“They should care it wasn’t pulled out of the earth. At gunpoint. From a mine where a war was waged to retain control of it. And polished by child slave labor in India. You shouldn’t marry retards who think a ‘real diamond’ is better. ‘Real diamonds’ and the DeBeer’s cartel have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths over what, in reality, are just rocks. Carefully explain that you can pay X, and have a completely flawless rock, or you can pay X*5 and have a slightly flawed rock with the blood mostly washed off of it.”
“The DeBeers story, and the history of the diamond as jewelry, is simply the story of the most successful marketing campaign in history. It is simply astonishing how the DeBeers cartel has managed to turn a fairly ordinary (but shiny) stone into one of the most expensive, sought after stones around. A stone that is so valuable that not only is it worth 2 MONTHS salary, but is so personal that it should never be purchased second hand.”
“Indeed, De Beers is a success based on marketing genius and supply side control (to fix prices to arbitrarily high values). The 2 months salary figure you mention was an etiquette rule created by De Beers, a wise benchmark to set the ‘value’ of diamonds. This ‘rule’ (which was a marketing creation) has been so successfully disseminated that it is now part of culture and tradition.”