251–260 of 511 posts
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How will they maintain their jewelry business ? It feels like Sony CD-R drives in the Playstation era.
Maybe they'll just stop caring about it because they have a much better new business. The same way rolls royce no longer sells luxury cars to stuffy British aristocracy but makes a mint building huge jet engines.
That's a good article. The whole history is there. The commercial side has made huge progress, too. Look up "diamond making machine" on Alibaba. You can buy a high-pressure, high temperature six sided press for about US$200,000. A chemical vapor deposition machine is about the same price. De Beers, the diamond cartel, has an R&D operation, Element Six. They sell synthetic diamonds for lasers and other exotic applicat…
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…
Not 100% sure but it shouldn't be too expensive too "add" a few flaws if customers wish...
If case 2 happens, it just means that diamonds get replaced with something else like gold, and gold luxury items become much more expensive. In any case, your future wife probably doesn't really want that massive synthetic diamond. It's a human thing, whether we (the HN crowd) think it's ridiculous or not.
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How will they maintain their jewelry business ? It feels like Sony CD-R drives in the Playstation era.
Maybe they'll just stop caring about it because they have a much better new business. The same way rolls royce no longer sells luxury cars to stuffy British aristocracy but makes a mint building huge jet engines.
RR cars has been a BMW subsidiary for 21 years, having been separated out from the aircraft engine manufacturing business in the 1970s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Motor_Cars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings
(unless that's exactly what you meant of course, Rolls Royce Holdings indeed no longer makes the cars... )
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I am pretty sure, diamonds would make awful eyeglasses. While their index of refraction is high, which makes glasses thin, their chromatic dispersion is high. That is the very thing which makes their glitter so colorful. For good optical systems you want to try to reduce the dispersion, to 0, if possible. Another story is the scratch-resistance. For that it would be sufficient to coat the surface of the lens with a t…
> While their index of refraction is high, which makes glasses thin, their chromatic dispersion is high Isn’t the layer caused by the former? For a given required refraction, isn’t the chromatic dispersion the same? In complex lenses corrections can be made, but for a simple single eyeglass lens, how is chromatic dispersion affected by anything apart from simple refraction?
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…
Calling one "real" and not the other is the wrong. Synthetic diamonds aren't an imitation. The distinction is "natural" and "synthetic".
> Not because it's a "better investment" but because they can.
From my experience it's to show off (that's the whole point of jewelry) and they'll be happy to tell you about their real diamond anytime the conversations ventures to anywhere near anything remotely related. I'd imagine the only people impressed are other suckers who happen to be poorer.
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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…
Perhaps they use a diamond frame filled in with graphene instead. Still seems pretty unlikely though. And probably too easy to puncture, ruining the vacuum. 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…
So while many smaller spheres--or pockets sharing walls--might be easier to engineer, the square-cube law [0] eats away at your lifting-power as everything becomes mostly-diamond with very little air-displacing vacuum.
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Maybe we can have diamond-based scratch protection on smartphones?
I wonder if the process would be cheaper than the current high end (smart)watch and lens practice of sapphire coating?
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So did Princess Diana. Some of this is regional -- the US is the epicenter of marketing diamonds while other places don't value them so much.
Both me mum and grandmum were British.
But then you don’t say grandmom either and it’s just occurred to me that you were probably joking.
Sigh.
Over the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in cheap lab diamond and moissanite producers in China and India. 10 years ago, it was hard to find quality lab diamonds at a reasonable price, and moissanite was still reasonably expensive at $400-600/ct. Today, given cutthroat competition and "race to the bottom" pricing strategies, lab diamonds are ubiquitous, extremely high quality, and cheap. Less than $200/ct…
> I expect diamonds to lose almost all of their value. Artificial diamonds, you mean. The natural ones will keep their price, just as "hand-crafted" goods did (and, I suspect, as "human-produced" content in the future will); it's a matter of status and signalling that you can afford to buy an inferior, more expensive product.
I think this is a bit of a strong prediction. It's already been interesting to watch the rhetoric switch from "Natural ones are stronger and more pure" to "Manufactured diamonds don't have the flaws that give character". Which itself is fairly short-sighted, we can already manufacture things like star-sapphires with specific impurities in them.
So in the end all that will be left is "this one is natural". It will be a 'veblen' type signal for some people... but maybe it'll start to be a signal of gullibility, and also of recklessness or callousness, because diamond mining has both environmental and human costs.