211–220 of 314 posts
Did people really believe this? Sounds like these people are as delusional as cryptocurrency folks. No bubble lasts forever. When will people learn. Nothing can go up forever.
Good! ... The DeBeers cartel is monopolistic and exploitative. There's an interesting article that talks about how they initially created demand for diamonds as they weren't commonly associated with an engagement. I'm glad to hear there's a competitor that should at a minimum lead to a price correction.
DeBeers having a monopoly isn't really true anymore. DeBeers lost an antitrust lawsuit in 2012 and had already sold off its stockpile by 2004 under increasing pressure for a lot of new mines opening up, particularly in Russia, which wrestled away their control of the market. Prices of diamonds have actually shot up quite a bit since DeBeers lost control but I don't know what the explanation for that is (maybe they we…
From the article: >The arrival of lab-grown diamonds has challenged the widely-held assumption that diamond prices could only go up I'll admit I don't know a lot about the diamond market and perhaps I'm misinformed, but how on earth was this a widely held assumption? In a world where people are increasingly aware that De Beers and other companies hold major stockpiles of diamonds solely to keep the price inflated, an…
An assumption can be widely held even if most informed people would dispute it. For example the widely held belief that housing prices will only go up, despite historical and theoretical arguments to the contrary.
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Saying lab grown gems are fake is like saying "Is that Orchid you bought me a fake from greenhouse or a real one that someone picked from a jungle?" It's funny what massive marketing campaign can do.
They should do what they did with pearls: start referring to the lab-grown ones as "cultured diamonds."
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Iron was more expensive than gold at the dawn of the iron age. The only way humans obtained iron was from meteorites.
I don't understand this statement, they could not mine iron ores but could gold ones?
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You can, but they aren't as cheap as I had been hoping. If I recall correctly from when I searched a few years ago, they are about 30-50% the price of mined diamonds. Much cheaper overall, but not at commodity levels yet. I had been hoping that they would be cheap enough to buy a few hundred, then hand them out as party favors to weird people out. At some point, I hope they get there. Rubies, on the other hand, are r…
Real rubies I awesome. I picked up 50 of them that are 1cm in size to replace the plastic ones that come in my board games. The weight of them in my hand is unexpected. The upside had to be when I brought them to work and got to pore a pile of real rubies into someones hands. Only "downside" is that even though they are really hard, they can scratch each other. But eh they are cheap enough that I just tossed them in…
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> Titanium is light, but my favorite thing is it is next to impossible to bend. This gives an insane amount of tensile strenght since it always wants to retain its shape. TBH I have no idea why we haven't seen Titanium in things like golf clubs, hockey sticks, baseball bats, tennis rackets, snowboards etc, where you could really use its springy characteristics to a huge advantage. I've always felt like it has a huge…
As far as I know, they are used quite heavily in golf and tennis equipment. Hockey sticks tend to be carbon fiber. I think the baseball wood/aluminum debate can't handle another metal Snowboards and such do benefit from being able to bend. I could see it more in alpine snowboard equipment, but again, I'm not sure that carbon fiber wouldn't be the better bet.
Now, slow pitch softball had Ti bats in the early 90's that added 10 mph. Even then some of the new composite materials out hit Ti.
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Iron was more expensive than gold at the dawn of the iron age. The only way humans obtained iron was from meteorites.
This is so incredibly badass. I mean, just imagine that the only practicable place to get this new, incredibly strong material, was from space. On the topic of found vs made materials: I’ve read that shipwrecks are getting mined as a source of steel because it’s more or less impossible to make new steel that isn’t contaminated by trace amounts of radiation from 20th century nuclear testing. While not a problem for sk…
> De Beers fights fakes with technology as China’s lab-grown diamonds threaten viability of the real gems From what I understand, these gems are actually better than natural ones, since they're 100% pure. Maybe it's time to call lab-grown diamonds "real" and mined ones "fake".
It's organic vs synthetic. Not real vs fake. There was a similar problem with Rubies and they detected the fakes by virtue of the fact that they were flawless.
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Aluminum in the 1800s was more expensive than gold, and was used as jewelry, fancy cutlery, the capstone of the Washington monument, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium Inexpensive mass production moved it from niche prestige uses to unlock its many utilitarian applications.
Iron was more expensive than gold at the dawn of the iron age. The only way humans obtained iron was from meteorites.