Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love for synthetic diamond to bring the price down on gemstones. A lot of people are engaged in arduous and risky work to produce natural stones. The environmental costs, too, are real. Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion tha…
We as humans just need to be less stupid. Srsly no one cares if a stone is real or not.
De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
181–190 of 455 posts
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#182What you are all not getting is that a diamond is not about its chemical properties, but about economic signalling. Just like artificial fur could not replace natural fur, man-made diamonds will never be the luxury item mined diamonds are today. Diamonds, just like gold, are not valuable because of their physical properties, but because they are rare. If someone invented a way to produce arbitrary amounts of gold at…
It's an interesting coincidence that artificial rocks came along at the same time that nobody can afford or even cares about the real thing anymore. What if manmade diamonds had come along during the boomer era when anyone could afford a house? What if newlyweds today had the buying power of their parents (the old rule-of-thumb for a ring was "one months salary"… hahaha)? "economic signaling" isn't going to save their industry and De Beers bloody well knows it. Good on them, btw, most industries deny the obvious and get steamrolled by upstarts.
(note: My father is a retired engineer from the mining industry, we literally have little bags of precious gems lying around for me to inherit; I'd tell them to liquidate, but anyone who's read the Atlantic classic from thirty years ago knows it's already pointless.)
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#183"Lightbox will transform the lab-grown diamond sector by offering consumers a lab-grown product they have told us they want but aren't getting: affordable fashion jewelry that may not be forever, but is perfect for right now" This is clearly a play to devalue the image of man made diamonds. "May not be forever" my ass, it's the exact same thing. Their goal is probably to try to quickly drive the price of man made dia…
I'd love for synthetic diamond to bring the price down on gemstones. A lot of people are engaged in arduous and risky work to produce natural stones. The environmental costs, too, are real. Modern high-quality synthetic materials, whether in gemstones or other uses, have so much to offer in fashion innovation. Indeed, diamond jewelers claim that silicon carbide (SiC) has "excess fire" as it has greater dispersion tha…
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farmer here: We apply glyphosate to both GMO (roundup ready) and non-GMO crops. The big difference is when: The roundup ready crops can have it applied early in the growing season. The non-GMO crops have to wait until just before harvest, when you don't care, or even prefer, that the crop dies.
What's the benefit to apply glyphosate just before harvest. Hasn't all the growing already been done? Is it to avoid bringing in bugs with the harvest?
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart move. Throw enough marketing dollars at misinformation and you can convince hordes of people to doubt facts. Case in point. Despite overwhelming evidence there are people today who still debate climate change.
At the risk of diverging into politics, it's amazing how "influencers" can do this with social media posts without spending lots of money. As long as the information is from someone (company/individual/etc) perceived as reputable, people will believe almost anything at face value. It's much easier than researching something on their own. Whatever the message, say it loud and often, and it becomes accepted as true. Ca…
If I found an “influencer” who was right on product recommendations 95% of the time it would be a relief and I’d be so happy to get all that research time back.
I think the bar for right enough varies among different people. And for some people it applies to everything from politics to science. These people are also likely to believe the topics too complex to follow in detail. If they choose a good person to follow they may be more right than if they researched themselves.
What you attribute to laziness could perhaps be seen in a different light: economizing time plus intimidation/fear.
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
We as humans just need to be less stupid. Srsly no one cares if a stone is real or not.
Everyone is "trying" to be less stupid. But selling my wife's diamond rings and buying cubic zirconia replicas at this point feels like a very stupid move even though I know I will net a bunch of money up front, I hear divorces are very expensive.
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart move. Throw enough marketing dollars at misinformation and you can convince hordes of people to doubt facts. Case in point. Despite overwhelming evidence there are people today who still debate climate change.
That's not how disbelieving works. People disbelieve facts that would cost them to believe. If I believe in climate change, I have to make expensive life changes (sell the SUV, buy a Tesla, etc). Therefore I will not believe in it. This belief is 100% honest, BTW. This is key to understand! For diamonds, the incentives are reversed. If I believe that artificial diamonds are as good as the natural kind, I can get a we…
I think "have to" is a bit strong. I absolutely believe in climate change. But I have no intention of selling (or stop driving) my 2004 Chevrolet Suburban.
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the staggering number of anti-GMO laws and business ad campaigns.
GMO are a very powerful technology. Like anything powerful, an intelligent person calls for caution. A lot of people are worrying about GMO in food because we don't have enough data about them. We are changing things that could have important biological, health and ecological impacts, but the companies producing them are not willing to test them extensively for safety during 20 years before selling them. We don't kno…
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how disbelieving works. People disbelieve facts that would cost them to believe. If I believe in climate change, I have to make expensive life changes (sell the SUV, buy a Tesla, etc). Therefore I will not believe in it. This belief is 100% honest, BTW. This is key to understand! For diamonds, the incentives are reversed. If I believe that artificial diamonds are as good as the natural kind, I can get a we…
Erm, I think it’s more like “I have a certain worldview that is only consistent if climate change isn’t real” or “this belief is part of my identity, which means the idea that it could be wrong is threatening to my identity”.
Re: De Beers admits defeat over man-made diamonds
#190Interestingly enough, this starts to bring up questions that have previously only been super active in science fiction circles, particularly, Star Trek: If you can perfectly recreate something down to the molecular level, what actually has value? (Assuming, someday, that synthetic versions are excessively cheap, in Star Trek's case.) If you can replicate cooked food perfectly, will people still claim that "real" food…
Star Trek frequently discussed things being slightly off when replicated. Troy wanted "real" chocolate when in a seriously bad mood. Picard kept cases of real caviar for special occasions. I mean, it's a writing trope designed to point out that they are far away from home and play with the concept that scarcity creates value and thus is interesting to human(oid)s. The ideals of a moneyless society by virtue of just b…
Right now there's currently a (publicly) huge 'security' margin on the time complexity of hash preimage attacks that allows the mining lottery of generating zero-prefixed hash collisions to proceed orderly for Bitcoin as an example. And while you might be tempted to say that because of the relative stability of BTC as a store of value for the past ~8 years is indicative of just how bulletproof that security really is, you might also realize that a market capitalization of only several billion USD is a drop in the ocean of _positive_ human monetary incentives to exploit, nevermind the alignment of negative incentives that work against anyone actually trying to make use of cryptographic breakthroughs in today's society whether as direct profit within the system as it exists today, revolution, or some other grand long-game.
In the P versus NP debate, our universe _could_ potentially be 'Algorithmica' although I know the majority of research mindshare is heavily assumptive of that being a trivially small possibility.
But there's also research lines on other forms of computational resource asymmmetry that we still assume exists but haven't really come up with proof for yet. For example, besides just deterministic versus nondeterministic polytime and the unproven assumption of one-way functions existing, there's also the open question of NC versus P, which roughly translates to the supposed asymmetry of parallel speedups versus sequential processing -- yet another potential source of scarcity if the current incarnation of crypto puzzles doesn't pan out. Computational space is another potentially unproven source of scarcity: PSPACE versus P.
Even really mundanely there potentially exists inversion 'crypto' puzzles of linear versus quadratic time, while not giving the exponentially wide safety margin every everyone expects for practically, could afford enough clearance to transfer and establish value at least between some highly centralized/colluding resource base against some very poor fraudster if that's the only threat model.
Humanities fascination with ascribing, denominating, and transferring 'value' between each other will be the most enduring and profound research avenues while our species last. And while to me that seems vapid to think that figuring out 'what exactly is money?' is the greatest question in the universe, maybe it really is.