301–310 of 619 posts
I would like to take this moment to thank https://diamondssuck.com/ for preventing me from buying my wife a diamond, and getting her a much prettier moissanite instead. It's been on hn's front page several times.
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This isn’t some random person off the street, this is someone you’re hopefully spending the majority of your life with. It’s ok to be picky.
The point is there's no one who is not irrational. It's foundationally human.
A line should be drawn when the irrationality of one causes inarguable and debilitating friction in the relationships of that person.
In other words : It's okay to be the person who loves pink, dresses in pink, bathes in pink -- until it disallows that person to find meaningful work/friends/mates/whatever; then it's more than just human irrationality, it's the inability to cope with others and the world at large.
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The reality is the person with lower leverage in the relationship does the keeping of the one with higher leverage happy. In marriages men have the lower leverage due to various reasons. One of which is favorable treatment of women in the family courts.
If you’re thinking about marriage in terms of leverage you’ve guaranteed you’re going to find out about those courts.
The reality is that in every relationship (whether marriage, business, friend, sibling, whatever) one person will have more leverage than the other.
That's not the problem. The problem is when the party with the leverage uses it! The phrase "happy wife, happy life" is problematic because it normalises the usage of this leverage.
(And if you think women have all the leverage in the average relationship, just wait till you get to over 45 and the kids are all old enough).
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Gold, just gold, is an investment simply because people value it - it's a shiny noble metal that stays "pure", ergo percieved value. From a resource utility PoV it costs more to source than copper or aluminium which are nearly as conductive - so they win out for electronic and power transmision applications. There are applications where gold is the clear winner - "forever" circuits and switches that are worth the ext…
Copper is significantly more conductive than gold. Folklore holds a.myth that gold is really good, but basic physics disagrees.
/s
I would like to take this moment to thank https://diamondssuck.com/ for preventing me from buying my wife a diamond, and getting her a much prettier moissanite instead. It's been on hn's front page several times.
Guys, buying diamonds, can complain all day about what a rip off it is (it is). But if you apprise your fiancé of the alternatives / opp costs (moissanite, man made, second hand, etc) and she still wants a new diamond, just get her a new diamond. It will make her happy for years. My wife had her heart set on a pink diamond, so that’s what I got her. I made it clear though that if I got this, she is not getting a new…
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I wouldn't marry anyone whose happiness is dependent on a artificially expensive hard and shiny rock whose prestige was inflated for years by an industry built on slave labor, especially when far less expensive alternatives exist. If she is apprised of the alternatives and still demands "No I want EXPENSIVE shiny thing" then it's cultural shaming factoring into the decision making. You have to reevaluate what she see…
Yikes, that's quite the binary distinction... Surely there is room between those subjective descriptions of people for "hey, I like this thing even though it's irrational, ok?" Let people live their lives and you do you. People aren't a "provider mannequin" just because they like to make their partner happy.
However, I personally think the "rings must have a very expensive diamond" thing to be very silly. I know that it may be subjectively very important to the potential recipient, but that it seems to sometimes really be so inflexible feels murky in the "what normally tacit power dynamic in this relationship is this revealing?" sort of way. The only significant tangible difference between the diamond and moissanite is the mental totem: "It is a diamond, he bought a diamond for me. He wanted to buy something else but I wanted this and he got it". Which is a problem when it comes to that: that the recipient cannot budge on something so arbitrary. It feels more like the whispers of the DeBeers cultural brainwashing: "You don't deserve to have her if the sacrifice you made to purchase this wasn't big enough"
If a woman gets X amount of utility from a diamond ring over an alternative, how would it be invalid if I said I got -X utility from having to purchase it?
This is one of those hard to beat arguments where I know I'm not facing a purely rational point of view. I understand it, that's why I added the first paragraph of this response. It's one of those issues where I feel I'd need to have a Christopher Hitchens level of rhetorical skill to make any headway in my favor.
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In almost all states, courts will order engagement rings to be returned if the marriage is canceled, and the giver wants it back. This is likely a legend.
Thats exactly my point: the whole infrastructure of breach of promise, (somewhat) rarity of diamonds etc has been obsolete for decades, almost a century in the US. Any point of an expensive engagement ring has not had practical value in living memory. Just a residual, empty practice.
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Yikes, that's quite the binary distinction... Surely there is room between those subjective descriptions of people for "hey, I like this thing even though it's irrational, ok?" Let people live their lives and you do you. People aren't a "provider mannequin" just because they like to make their partner happy.
acknowledgement of irrationality, especially one that isn't accompanied with a wish to better themselves away from that irrationality, would be a major red flag for me personally entering into a long-term relationship. there is also a great distinction between "Yeah I know another helping of chocolate syrup on my ice cream is a bad decision, but it'll make me feel good today.", and "You need to make a 10kUSD+ purchas…
I would like to take this moment to thank https://diamondssuck.com/ for preventing me from buying my wife a diamond, and getting her a much prettier moissanite instead. It's been on hn's front page several times.
Guys, buying diamonds, can complain all day about what a rip off it is (it is). But if you apprise your fiancé of the alternatives / opp costs (moissanite, man made, second hand, etc) and she still wants a new diamond, just get her a new diamond. It will make her happy for years. My wife had her heart set on a pink diamond, so that’s what I got her. I made it clear though that if I got this, she is not getting a new…
Yeah right! Things like diamonds are not about having shiny things, they are about getting shiny things.
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I wouldn't marry anyone whose happiness is dependent on a artificially expensive hard and shiny rock whose prestige was inflated for years by an industry built on slave labor, especially when far less expensive alternatives exist. If she is apprised of the alternatives and still demands "No I want EXPENSIVE shiny thing" then it's cultural shaming factoring into the decision making. You have to reevaluate what she see…
>I wouldn't marry anyone... yeah but I wouldn't tell someone that seems reasonably happy with the person they married that I wouldn't marry them. As long as we're listing the things we wouldn't do.
If I disagree with it, I'd think "their loss, sucks to have weird arbitrary standards"
If I agreed then I'd have been lying about my happiness with the relationship.
Either way some things need to be said. I haven't seen any good arguments in favor of purchasing a diamond ring which don't seem to dismiss and devalue the agency and right to an opinion of the purchaser.