241–250 of 511 posts
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While I agree with your point, I also agree with GP's point. The difference between you and him is what you consider "lavish". For many, spending $20K on a wedding is "lavish".
Measuring across countries in a $ figure doesn't quite capture it. I'd use something like percentage of annual disposable income
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Well, not quite. They were making diamond windows from atmospheric carbon dioxide at room temperature in household machines or machines you could rent at the post office. We’re a ways off from that yet.
Also the whole aerostat thing where you make a diamond "balloon" full of vacuum that floats in air, using the strength of the rigid diamond to avoid it being crushed and popped. I'm no materials-scientist, but I did some napkin-math on that once and it came out to some ridiculously-thin-sounding layer of diamond.
Vacuum volume 1.00 m^3
Vacuum radius 0.62 m
Air density 1.23 kg/m^3
Displaced mass 1.23 kg
Diamond density 3250 kg/m^3
Diamond volume 3.77E-04 m^3
Sphere surface area 4.84E+00 m^2
(Thin shells can be approximated by ignoring curvature)
Shell thickness 7.79E-05 m
Shell thickness 77.94 μm (microns)
Human hair thickness 17 to 181 μm (microns)
Remember: The walls of party-balloons and soap-bubbles are a very different situation: They can have extremely thin skins because the gas inside is doing almost all the "don't get crushed" work, the skin is really just there to keep the two gases from mixing.
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Quick note that a very nice 2ct stone has never cost $200,000. Not sure who was trying to charge you that much in 2012 or why, but gem diamond prices haven't changed much in the past 30 years, although there was an uptick in the covid/inflationary years, and a reversion to trend more recently. https://www.pricescope.com/diamond-prices/diamond-prices-cha...
Even today, Tiffany will want to charge you $142,000 for a 2ct IF (internally flawless) colorless (D) diamond. Not quite $200K but nonetheless.
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The realities of this market have not hit the consumers. Even young people are still out there spending 5-6 figures on a rock and ascribing real value and aspirations towards eventually "upgrading" into said rocks from perhaps an existing synthetic alternative already set in the ring. Even if the supply side price argument is so perverted now, we still have a culture that wants to put a high value on this object for…
I am curious to know if there is precedent for goods losing their veblen status.
Mechanical watches, perhaps.
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And I'd be very happy to see the demise of De Beers. It's amazing that De Beers can thrive for more than 100 years, but still, using clever marketing and tight control of supply to artificially jack up the price of diamond is counter-productive.
I have heard that they are the ones that made diamonds the engagement stone, and that was relatively recently. My mother and grandmother had sapphire engagement rings.
https://theeyeofjewelry.com/de-beers/de-beers-jewelry/de-bee...
I know a jeweler personally that sells synthetic and natural diamonds. He can spot the difference from a mile away between a synthetic and a natural diamond (synthetics look extremely pure and have no flaws). His wealthy clients buy natural diamonds. Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.
If you can buy a knockoff Louis Vuitton for 5% of the cost of the real one, great, go for it! Most people won't be able to tell the difference (I certainly can't). But the market for authentic Louis Vuitton isn't going anywhere, and the people that can afford it will buy the real ones, and the people that can't will buy the fake ones.
As long as there's a distinction between natural and synthetic, synthetic diamonds will drop to a dollar a carat while naturals only become more of a status symbol.
EDIT: changed real to natural when referring to diamonds
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Also the whole aerostat thing where you make a diamond "balloon" full of vacuum that floats in air, using the strength of the rigid diamond to avoid it being crushed and popped. I'm no materials-scientist, but I did some napkin-math on that once and it came out to some ridiculously-thin-sounding layer of diamond.
Redoing the napkin math because I can't find the original and I've somehow nerd-sniped [0] myself. Assume a sphere that contains a cubic meter of air and is neutrally buoyant: Vacuum volume 1.00 m^3 Vacuum radius 0.62 m Air density 1.23 kg/m^3 Displaced mass 1.23 kg Diamond density 3250 kg/m^3 Diamond volume 3.77E-04 m^3 Sphere surface area 4.84E+00 m^2 (Thin shells can be approximated by ignoring curvature) Shell th…
Or perhaps they just build surfaces out of more complicated things than carbon. Hydrocarbons could be as easily assembled as diamond with similar techniques, and are a lot lighter than pure carbon. Plus they would want to put electronic advertising on the surface of the ball anyway, so it’s got to have a bit more going on to form LEDs and whatnot.
I don't see demand for natural diamonds going anywhere. There's a reason that Rolex, Cartier, and other luxury brands don't use cheap, synthetic diamonds in their products. I know a jeweler personally that sells synthetic and natural diamonds. He can spot the difference from a mile away between a synthetic and a natural diamond (synthetics look extremely pure and have no flaws). His wealthy clients buy natural diamon…