Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
491–500 of 511 posts
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
No cover, just straight up gorilla glass victus. And it's not just key metal deposited on the screen, there are deep grooves cut into it.
I believe you, but there is some other explanation here- it warrants further investigation. You can scrape a regular glass window (about MOHS 6.5) clean with a razor blade (about MOHS 6.0) and it is impossible to scratch it, just from that tiny difference in hardness. I do this all the time, e.g. recently to get paint that my kid painted on the house windows off. Your brass keys should only be about 3.0, and gorilla…
I think you may be onto something here. Taking apart old machinery I have often observed that the hardened part of a shaft is worn and has a noticable groove detectable with a fingernail. However the part that rubbed on it is often much, much softer eg a rubber oil seal. My theory is that the much softer material is so soft that microscopic inclusions of something much harder (grit?) are caught in the material and then abrade the harder shaft. Something similar may be occurring in the keys on glass case?
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#493Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> Artificial diamonds, you mean. Synthetic diamonds, you mean. There is noting artificial about them! They are diamonds.
They were created by humans; therefore, "artificial", or "manufactured". Just because there is no practical way to distinguish them from the ones that appeared naturally doesn't mean they weren't created artificially.
"But this is a purely philosophical difference then!" Yes, it is. Humans still take such silly differences into an account, consider e.g. replicas of artwork made by the original artist themself. Are they genuine? Debatable!
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's a tradeoff. I found out the hard way that newer Pixels have incredibly soft screens to avoid cracks and shattering. Unfortunately, they're so soft that a fingernail (a 2.5 on the Mohs scale) will leave huge gouges quickly. Fortunately, there's third-party covers that use an adhesive that fills in the scratches well.
That's a little hard to believe. There are resin finishes that are hard to scratch by fingernail.
Think about it; you couldn't put a fingernail scratch into a cheap soda glass beer bottle. Why would Google make a phone with glass that could be scratched by a nail, let alone easily? Does that even exist? Perhaps there is some coating on the glass you didn't remove and that's what you're scratching?
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#495[deleted]
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#496This is true with some qualifications. If you're interested in the kind of investment grade diamonds that a major auction house would deal with, then you're looking at heavy weights and/or fancy colors that synthetics can't reach yet. In the diamond trade the word "paragon" is sometimes reserved for flawless or near-flawless stones above 100 carats, of which there is a long list of famous examples, but the largest ge…
Though if you are interested in investment grade diamods I'd say it is time to get out - diamonds have never been as rare as investors like to pretend, and things are going to get worse.
Diamonds have been used as plot devices in movies and TV shows as a liquid asset for criminals.
*Spoiler Alerts*
Marathon Man (don't watch if you're squeamish about dental practices) with Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Man_(film)
Also the 2021 Irish/Belgium TV series, Hidden Assets, involves diamonds.
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why though. Like, genuinely, why bother with the mined ones? "This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire, and that makes it rare and valuable." It's just a weird flex at this point. It marks you out as someone who doesn't care about the wellbeing of others. But every time someone gets excited about natural diamonds they try to justify that synthetic ones just aren't the same. I think that…
> "This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire." Dude, the copper in your phone required untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire. You want to profess some grand moral judgement about purchasing mined minerals, but I guarantee all of that moral judgment goes out the door when it comes to products that you can afford and want to buy.
Are you arguing for a nihilistic worldview where one should abstain from caring about suffering and exploitation, or just calling OP a probable hypocrite? If the latter, what position do you take that isn't hypocritical?
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#498I bought our wedding rings back in 2011, and I was very annoyed to find that the synthetic diamonds were better quality but always came with some sort of laser engraving to mark them as "fake," essentially as a way to protect the natural diamond market.
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because eye surgery can't take the place of corrective lenses in all cases: it's not a full replacement for glasses or contacts. For people the farther ends of the spectrum (either needing very light correction, or extremely heavy), surgery doesn't work, or for very high prescriptions it only helps but it's not enough by itself. (Ophthalmologists please feel free to chime in.) And there's other reasons people are…
Laser eye surgery cannot fix the problem of the lens having become inflexible and losing its focusing range. In such a case, surgery can only change where the focal distance lies.
Laser eye surgery won't do that, but intraocular lens implantation could. I think those lenses still don't work that great for reading, but I imagine they will eventually.
Re: Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and cheaper than mined
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "This diamond caused untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire." Dude, the copper in your phone required untold human suffering and exploitation to acquire. You want to profess some grand moral judgement about purchasing mined minerals, but I guarantee all of that moral judgment goes out the door when it comes to products that you can afford and want to buy.
Are you arguing for a nihilistic worldview where one should abstain from caring about suffering and exploitation, or just calling OP a probable hypocrite? If the latter, what position do you take that isn't hypocritical?
It's pretty clear, no?
Are you asking me for a non-hypocritical position on the diamond market? My position is simply that natural diamonds are a luxury item. Claiming that there's suffering involved in obtaining natural diamonds and therefore you should only purchase synthetic (non-luxury) diamonds, is a view that is inconsistent with the way most people live. Otherwise, we'd all stop buying clothes, shoes, cell phones, coffee, etc. Essentially every product you use, unless you take extreme care, involves human trafficking at some point in the supply chain.