Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
newyorker.com
Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
1–10 of 130 posts
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#2The right way to shake this industry would be to obliterate it completely. Finding another useless piece of glass and selling it for $$$ is not shaking anything.
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#3My father was a diamond cutter (one of the folk who designed the modern “Portuguese cut” of the 70s) and he went through the evolution of diamond cutting from abrasion with copper disks (for cutting windows and facets) to laser cuts.
I distinctly remember going into the (then state-owned) workshops as a kid and watching the cutters at work with their loupes, and how they kept tabs on stones by checking in and out of the vaults little envelopes annotated with each step of the process - it was true craftsmanship.
Biggest stone I “saw” (they did resin molds of the large ones for senior cutters to measure and mark the places for clamping and cutting, and my father would bring some models home to study and review other cutters’ suggestions) was about 2x2x3cm, and IIRC it was cut down into many smaller ones due to impurities (you’d cut a window to peer in, assess where the impurities were and then plan the cuts to excise them or avoid including them into the finished cut).
The techniques are sure to be vastly different today, but the detachment with which he viewed his work was rather fun: they were intricate puzzles to maximize yield during the rough cut phase and reflectiveness during the shaping phase - they did the math by hand for the facet sizes and angles, and it took years to figure out the best ways to do some of the shaping in a reproducible fashion (that was his key achievement).
And all that time, they were “just pretty rocks”. He was very nonchalant about it, and never considered them of much value. DeBeers tried to hire him and he pretty much said he was done with the hype (rather amusing considering I’m about his age at the time and also fed up with our industry hype).
(Also, if you read Michael Crichton’s “Congo”, he got the diamond color names wrong)
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#4I still wish I'd discovered Moissanite before I got married. The rock would have been multiples larger and I'd have the satisfaction of not contributing to a monopolistic and exploitative industry.
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#5We should crowdfund a PR campaign that diamonds are synonyms for death and exploitation, and it’s more humane for “any gem but a diamond”.
A $10 million campaign or so, targeting youth especially, can have tremendous impacts on future generations.
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#6E.J. Epstein's "the death of the diamond" was a great read. But, since 1984 is long behind us, kind of wrong.
I had no idea how much bort the world consumes. Industrial diamonds are .. industrial. Hard to feel romantic about drill bits and cutting saws.
Also the simplicity of the financials to lend liz Taylor the dough to buy the diamond .. Who actually bought it if the money came from the shop?
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#7Folks who enjoyed this article may also be interested in this one [0] from The Atlantic, published in 1982, which chronicles the rise of the diamond industry during the 20th century.
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-yo...
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#8The right way to shake this industry would be to obliterate it completely. Finding another useless piece of glass and selling it for $$$ is not shaking anything.
Society would have to work to convince people that status symbols are not worth pursuing. Unfortunately, based on my experience of how people’s brains work, that is quite an uphill battle.
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#9E.J. Epstein's "the death of the diamond" was a great read. But, since 1984 is long behind us, kind of wrong. I had no idea how much bort the world consumes. Industrial diamonds are .. industrial. Hard to feel romantic about drill bits and cutting saws. Also the simplicity of the financials to lend liz Taylor the dough to buy the diamond .. Who actually bought it if the money came from the shop?
[deleted]
Re: Shaking Up the Diamond Industry
#10We should crowdfund a PR campaign that diamonds are synonyms for death and exploitation, and it’s more humane for “any gem but a diamond”. A $10 million campaign or so, targeting youth especially, can have tremendous impacts on future generations.
Except the diamonds discussed in the article are from Botswana, where the article states "the firm paid the Botswanan government eighty-five million dollars in taxes, and nearly thirty million in royalties, on profits of about a hundred and eighty-five million."
Seems pretty good deal for the Botswanans.