521–530 of 619 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have an extremely hard time understanding how marrying my wife made me more likely to break up with her.
Divorce court is the incentive.
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Love is irrational. If you avoid all irrational things, you are not human.
I would even say it's perfectly rational. Having someone who understands you and supports you, reliably by your side is a huge boost to your capacity to reason.
But Love is also not tied to marriage, as registered outcomes show.
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Divorce court is the incentive.
The availability of divorce means that failed relationships (which the availability of divorce does not cause) which end up in marriage can be resolved, but neither marriage nor the availability of divorces causes most of those relationship failures.
It is, and continues to be, that the extremely unbalanced (against the man) outcome of divorce creates a massive power unbalance in the relationship. And that's the incentive.
As the almost-guaranteed to be greatly benefited party, pressing the button is, rationally, a much better option than trying to resolve any issues in the relationship.
A relationship w/o marriage lacks this perverse incentive.
I will pass on giving Her a diamond and a government-endorsed knife to stab me with. We are supposed to be equal and this shit is ridiculous.
Note I am ending my participation on this discussion here, on my end, as it has started to go in circles, some heat is sensed, and I can tell it will not be productive to go any further.
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Thats exactly my point: the whole infrastructure of breach of promise, (somewhat) rarity of diamonds etc has been obsolete for decades, almost a century in the US. Any point of an expensive engagement ring has not had practical value in living memory. Just a residual, empty practice.
Every aspect of a wedding outside of the government paperwork is without practical value. It's almost like the practical value isn't the only thing that matters.
Has anyone ever tried to sell an engagement or wedding ring with diamonds? You get cents on the dollar. Even or I should say especially brand names like Tiffany. The whole thing is a scam from start to finish and I wish I could go back in time and avoid the entire thing.
Unknown quality ~6.5 mm second-hand lab-grown diamond : $0.8k :
https://louped.com/lab-grown-diamond114927.html
High quality ~6.5 mm new lab-grown diamond : $1.2k :
https://www.whiteflash.com/loose-diamonds/lab-created-diamon...
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Crappy ~6.4 mm second-hand natural diamond : $3k :
https://louped.com/gia-certified-round-diamond-114841.html
https://www.freediamondreport.com/report/lab/GIA/cert/545639...
High quality ~6.5 mm new natural diamond : $3.5k-3.9k :
https://www.whiteflash.com/loose-diamonds/round-cut?carat=0....
(Clarity doesn't seem to matter that much, because it has not much effect as long as it can't be seen to the naked eye, which in these except the worst one it probably won't be ? https://beyond4cs.com/clarity/ )
The diamond industry has a terrible problem. They promoted diamonds as "perfection". The most valuable diamond is supposed to be a crystal with no flaws. Then they ran into the semiconductor materials industry. Wafer fabs want every atom where it is supposed to be. So semiconductor materials manufacturers are very good at making crystals with few or no flaws. So, now the synthetic diamond market looks like this.[1] D…
Diamonds are still too expensive as long as you can't get phone screens, PC heatsinks and chip wafers made from the stuff.
[1] http://usapplieddiamond.com/products/heat-spreaders/
[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/this-diamond-transistor-is-still-r...
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Haha, yes indeed. It'll be the free-range eggs equivalent for buying jewelry. Ethically farmed from happy wedded couples.
I don't think people who insist on diamonds care about how they are sourced. After all the blood diamond thing didn't stop anyone. What people want is to be skillfully lied to.
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But who goes around asking their friends to let them test their diamonds with their thermal tester?
Insane people, but let's not pretend those don't exist.
The diamond industry has a terrible problem. They promoted diamonds as "perfection". The most valuable diamond is supposed to be a crystal with no flaws. Then they ran into the semiconductor materials industry. Wafer fabs want every atom where it is supposed to be. So semiconductor materials manufacturers are very good at making crystals with few or no flaws. So, now the synthetic diamond market looks like this.[1] D…
That first link makes me want to buy some 1 carat CVDs to play around with. I mean at those prices, making my own diamond chandelier isn't too out of the question.