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Diamonds Suck (2006)

diamondssuck.com

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Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#101

Post by LeonM »

Freak_NL wrote: post #46
retSava wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's upsetting. As soon as merchandise X is prefixed with "wedding", the cost is doubled. Wedding cake? Boom. Wedding napkins? Check. Etc. It's astonishing how easy it is to fall into the trap of "it's just a one-time event", "it's the most important day of my life", etc.

> "it's the most important day of my life" Implying that its all downhill from there. I find this such a depressing way of looking at life.

It's the same as someone who says:

"But you only turn 18 once!"

Which is true for every birthday.

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#102

Post by koolba »

charlesdm wrote: post #6
isostatic wrote: post #4

> If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship - there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt. Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014, while the average engagement ring was $5600, or 19% of the cost [0] https://www.val…

Not everything is about money though. Want to have an extravagant wedding? Fine. Want something basic? Also fine. Yes: diamonds, jewellery, mechanical watches etc are all bad value for money. People don't buy them because they're bad value. They buy them because they like wearing them, and women buy jewellery because it makes them feel pretty. That's life. It's fine throwing money away sometime.

> That's life. It's fine throwing money away sometime.

Sure if you have the money. The problem is that most people don’t and spend what would be a down payment on a house on complete bullshit. It’s a terrible way to start a marriage and likely leads to higher rates of divorce.

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#103

Post by zeroxfe »

Oras wrote: post #98

I know I will get a hell of downvotes for this, but "Brainwashed" term can also be applied to people trading Bitcoins? Some people agreed that it is valuable and gave some tokens a huge value and its a market now.

Diamond prices are artificially inflated by a single organization. Bitcoin is priced by the market.

(Yes, there is lots of manipulation in the latter, but it's still not comparable to diamonds.)

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#104

Post by johannes1234321 »

tzaman wrote: post #14

Out of curiosity, what's all the fuss with engagement rings in the first place? When me and my wife got engaged, I gave her nothing (nor did she expect anything), just asked her to marry me and she agreed, we kissed and that was it. We did, however, made wedding rings, which together were about $1300, but that's because they were made out of gold. Why overcomplicate things? :)

This is the result of marketing of the De Beers corporation, who ran large campaigns about "Diamonds are Forever" and how important an expensive engagement ring was. That stuck quite well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers#Marketing

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#105

Post by shoo »

retSava wrote: post #22
isostatic wrote: post #4

> If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship - there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt. Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014, while the average engagement ring was $5600, or 19% of the cost [0] https://www.val…

Yeah, it's upsetting. As soon as merchandise X is prefixed with "wedding", the cost is doubled. Wedding cake? Boom. Wedding napkins? Check. Etc. It's astonishing how easy it is to fall into the trap of "it's just a one-time event", "it's the most important day of my life", etc.

> Yeah, it's upsetting. As soon as merchandise X is prefixed with "wedding", the cost is doubled. Wedding cake? Boom. Wedding napkins? Check. Etc.

i believe one partial cause of this is because there are higher expectations around the quality of goods and services applied for weddings. e.g. if you make fancy decorated cakes to order, what are the odds that the customer or one of their relatives is going to go berserk and refuse to pay if it has some perceived flaw? probably higher if you are making the cake for a wedding compared to some other arbitrary event.

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#106

Post by arkh »

isostatic wrote: post #4

> If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship - there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt. Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014, while the average engagement ring was $5600, or 19% of the cost [0] https://www.val…

> Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014

Averages are mostly useless for this kind of things where some people can go crazy on prices. What is the median? Are other deciles available to check?

But I think the most important would be with the cost of a wedding / current capital owned and cost of wedding / revenues ratios.

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#107

Post by lordvigm »

isostatic wrote: post #4

> If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship - there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt. Average U.S. wedding cost $30k in 2014, while the average engagement ring was $5600, or 19% of the cost [0] https://www.val…

Holy shit 30k? Hopefully the average is just skewed up by rich people. If middle class people are plunking down that much, it would be insane

Re: Diamonds Suck (2006)

#109

Post by andrei821 »

> Isn't it amazing (and scary) how brainwashed people are about the "value" of diamonds, even though they're not actually worth that much?

It seems to me that the same strategy is curently used in the crypto ecosystem.

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