My father was a diamond cutter (one of the folk who designed the modern “Portuguese cut” of the 70s) and he went through the evolution of diamond cutting from abrasion with copper disks (for cutting windows and facets) to laser cuts.
I distinctly remember going into the (then state-owned) workshops as a kid and watching the cutters at work with their loupes, and how they kept tabs on stones by checking in and out of the vaults little envelopes annotated with each step of the process - it was true craftsmanship.
Biggest stone I “saw” (they did resin molds of the large ones for senior cutters to measure and mark the places for clamping and cutting, and my father would bring some models home to study and review other cutters’ suggestions) was about 2x2x3cm, and IIRC it was cut down into many smaller ones due to impurities (you’d cut a window to peer in, assess where the impurities were and then plan the cuts to excise them or avoid including them into the finished cut).
The techniques are sure to be vastly different today, but the detachment with which he viewed his work was rather fun: they were intricate puzzles to maximize yield during the rough cut phase and reflectiveness during the shaping phase - they did the math by hand for the facet sizes and angles, and it took years to figure out the best ways to do some of the shaping in a reproducible fashion (that was his key achievement).
And all that time, they were “just pretty rocks”. He was very nonchalant about it, and never considered them of much value. DeBeers tried to hire him and he pretty much said he was done with the hype (rather amusing considering I’m about his age at the time and also fed up with our industry hype).
(Also, if you read Michael Crichton’s “Congo”, he got the diamond color names wrong)
Also, a note on the humanitarian side of things, but not directly related to mining: When the Portuguese colonies seceded in the 70s, many people returned or emigrated to Portugal with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and "diamonds" they had exchanged their farms and real estate for.
I remember a few dinner conversations about how a few of them came to my father to assess the value of those stones, and most were chunks of quartz or other worthless crystals.
I think some of those conversations were really tough, and one of the reasons he disconnected from work as much as he could (his hobby was electronics, and one of the reasons I got into computers was that he brought a Sinclair ZX81 from London after years of putting together various kits, including a HeathKit oscilloscope).
So, in a way, diamonds are the reason I do what I do these days.
I come from one of those families. My grandfather came back to Portugal from Angola soon after the war started. Unfortunately, he never got to trade his possessions for diamonds, so they had essentially their clothes.
I currently live in Sierra Leone working as a software dev, and just came back from an evening jog around the largest diamond mine in West Africa. It's crazy how much pain an misery diamonds have caused to this country. The citizens here in Koidu don't get any of the income of the diamonds, and live it extreme poverty... Meanwhile the guys from De Beers are living bougie lives in their maximum security compounds, with a pool, western supermarket and bar.
> As with any company anyehere, De Beers pays the share they are obliged to to the authorities
BP and Facebook aren't paying their share of taxes in the USA, do you think De Beers is going to do so in Sierra Leone?
The only difference is there are just enough tax dollars in the US to make life tolerable for the masses - cheap beer & cigarettes, sports on TV and elementary education.
And how, pray tell, do the incentives of a British oil company in another part of the world automagically imply the guilt of an African mining company in SL?
Or is guilt by association the new thing these days?
Show me where De Beers is not paying what the government of SL requires them to pay.
How much do you think Apple pays the US govt in taxes? The US is held together by taxes on the working man and small businesses. Massive corporations don't pay their fair share.
How can you expect the tax situation to be better in Sierra Leone?
Apple paid about $35bn in corporate income taxes globally in the last 3 years. Their effective global corporate tax rate is 24.6 percent and most of their taxes were paid in the US.
Yes that’s absolutely true, they do take advantage of international tax rules, but the insinuation that they pay almost no or very low overall corporate taxes is not true. I doubt the OP I was replying to expected the answer to be 24.6% of corporate income. I’ve got no objection to claims that’s too low, it’s a legitimate question, but let’s at least discuss this from an informed position.
Folks who enjoyed this article may also be interested in this one [0] from The Atlantic, published in 1982, which chronicles the rise of the diamond industry during the 20th century.
I still wish I'd discovered Moissanite before I got married. The rock would have been multiples larger and I'd have the satisfaction of not contributing to a monopolistic and exploitative industry.
I was fortunate enough to discover moissanite. Wife loves it, and the price was somewhere in the ballpark of 90-95% cheaper than an equivalent size diamond. The added benefit is, everyone thinks it’s a diamond and we haven’t yet felt the need to correct them...
I also went with moissanite. My wife (then girlfriend) was in the "2-3 months salary for a diamond" camp which I find incredibly crass. Saved $15k on the diamond by going with moissanite and spent a fraction of that on getting a nice custom ring + wedding band made by an independent local jeweler instead. I was happy to support a local craftsman rather than DeBeers & co.
Yeah I told her exactly what it was when I gave it to her. We had had several discussions prior about my feelings about the diamond industry and the surrounding social expectations, so she knew I wasn't going to get her a diamond.
If she thought I gave her an expensive diamond and then learned from a jeweler that it was in fact a moissanite I would expect her to be upset about me misleading her.
2-3 months of salary for me would be a substantial contribution towards a deposit for a flat.My fiancé would smack my face if I'd spend it on a shining rock )
I was upfront with her about my dislike for the diamond industry and my feelings about spending 3 months salary on a diamond. I told her that I wasn't getting her a diamond and told her exactly what it was when I gave it to her.
I don't think I changed her perspective necessarily, but she knows what she got and respected my reasons for that decision. She didn't break up with me over it anyway.
> everyone thinks it’s a diamond and we haven’t yet felt the need to correct them
It also avoids conversations that have few good outcomes. Tell someone who spent $$$$ on a diamond that you think diamonds are a waste of money or a humanitarian disaster, and it's not a great way to start a conversation. There are also other colored stones that I think are nicer looking than diamonds, but moissanite provides a nice way to stay within cultural norms without necessarily[1] contributing to the problem.
[1] Obviously actively fighting against the whole diamond industry is better, but we all have to pick our battles.
Synthetic diamond will eventually become so easy the industry won't be able to supress it anymore. The collapse will be interesting, in the bloddy sense of the term I suspect.
Synthetic rubies and sapphires have been around for over 100 years and are dirt cheap ($10 for a 15mm one on eBay). However, the market for natural rubies and sapphires is still going strong. A high quality natural Ruby costs about the same as a similar sized diamond. There's no reason to believe the diamond industry is going to crash any time soon.
> Synthetic rubies and sapphires have been around for over 100 years and are dirt cheap ($10 for a 15mm one on eBay).
Rubies are much cheaper than that.
At least, I used to order them from Pehnec Gems at prices more like $3 per (in lots of 10+). I haven't bought them in years and pehnec.com currently resolves to 10.0.0.1; not sure what's going on.
"Synthetic" diamonds are better in all objective criteria that "natural" diamonds. Before they were a thing they would even be considered top quality diamonds.
Once they were mass produced the criteria changed and now the "natural" with higher degree of impurities (a previously undesirable trait) are considered better.
It's not about the rock. The rock is a placeholder. It's about how much you spent on the rock (commitment) and the fact that it's not available to everyone (social proof).
Yeah, one of my physics teachers did a job for a diamond company where the goal was to ADD impurities to a diamond, because diamonds with (the right?) impurities are colored, more rare (?), and fetch a higher price.
It is extremely difficult to create large, colorless, flawless synthetic diamonds. Currently synthetics are primarily used for industrial applications like drill bits.
Nice try. Manufacturing them also has non negligible costs. I'd only buy synthetics anyway. Not very keen on 18th century slavery, which is pretty close to what happens in diamond mines. In addition to that synthetics are more pure, so better quality if the cut and polishing is done right.
The above comment is correct. De Beers bought Lightbox to position synthetic diamonds as for “everyday jewelry” rather than special occasion jewelry such as engagement rings. So it essentially is to help protect diamond price levels and the allure or scarcity.
Synthetic diamonds are not easy to produce and they take time and energy (literally). The only reason synthetics are made is because the price of real diamonds help prop up the price of artificial ones. If the market collapses, as you predict, than artificial diamonds don’t become economical to create any more. My prediction: new mines will continue to be found and real diamonds will have the same market hold they have now in 20 years.
Research on bulk synthesis of diamond will continue for the foreseeable future, it's just too important a manufacturing material. It will be a massive win for thermal engineering when semiconductor chips can easily be embedded in a diamond matrix.
One downside to moissanite: I bought some earrings that I thought were nice looking and affordable. My wife doesn’t wear them very often and instead wears real diamond earrings that were the same price because the moissanite is too big.
Exact same situation here. Wife gets complimented on it all the freaking time and not a single person has ever thought it was anything but a diamond. One of the best decisions of my life second only to marrying this woman!
It doesn't really matter, tbh. The patent for moissanite is held by Charles and Colvard, so no matter where you shop for them they will be coming from them (and should have an authenticity certificate too, btw).
Charles and Colvard has an online shop you can find by googling.
No affiliation, my wife's stone is just also a moissanite.
Charles and Colvard actually lost their patent a while ago...I wanna say two or three years in August?
I'm a huuuuge proponent of moissanite, but it's one of the reasons I am slightly wary of purchasing moissanite online without at least speaking to the seller. Moissanite doesn't always come with a certificate. In my mind, though, if you love it and can afford it, who's to tell you it's fake?
I wish manufactured diamonds were more prevalent before I got married. There's still a slight look and feel difference between these things. I feel the diamond still looks slightly more sparkling in light. This is all subjective of course...
While cubic zirconia has a lower refractive index than diamond (making it less "brilliant"), moissanite actually has a higher refractive index than diamond.
As thousands know, it's not enough for you to discover it, you need to partner to discover and appreciate it, and as a couple not be peer pressured by your partner's judgmental friends, or you need to keep a lifelong secret that you might be the villain for making the ethical choice.
It's hard to take diamonds seriously any more. This is a diamond factory in China.[1] That's the "high pressure high temperature" process, a huge room of very strongly built presses. There's also the "controlled vapor deposition" process. Alibaba has huge lots of diamonds produced that way. Those are real diamonds. Mostly. You may get cubic zirconia.
Cubic zirconia is so cheap that those stones come in plastic bags and are sold in lots of 1000.
Distinguishing CVD diamonds from natural diamonds is getting harder each year. The diamond industry treats flawless, clear diamonds as the ideal, and that's what CVD produces best - perfect crystals with only carbon. It's based on a process from semiconductor manufacturing. Distinguishing good CVD diamonds from natural now requires rather elaborate equipment.
The only real benefit to distinguishing is to pay more for the same thing. A person asking to prove something is "real" is literally volunteering to overpay.
Imagine having two ot of the otherwise same thing in front of you but one comes with an optional marketing hype tax.
Except the diamonds discussed in the article are from Botswana, where the article states "the firm paid the Botswanan government eighty-five million dollars in taxes, and nearly thirty million in royalties, on profits of about a hundred and eighty-five million."
To be fair, paying the government in taxes and royalty does not mean that the diamond is not obtained through exploitation of the local population while the corrupt officials took the money (this sometimes happened in my country).
I don't really know about Botswana though, if those money actually go to the Botswanans then good for them.
> I don't really know about Botswana though, if those money actually go to the Botswanans then good for them.
Botswana is probably the best run and least corrupt country in Southern Africa (maybe all of Africa). They've never had a war of any kind, are incredibly friendly to everyone regardless of skin color, etc. etc.
They are famous for tricking the British into giving them mineral rights before they were granted independence, and have used that money wisely the benefit the local people. Huge success story, and fantastic country.
I think you'd need to replace the diamond / expensive jewelry thing with something that appeals to the younger generation. I am not in that generation so I am not sure what that would be, but here is an idea.
The diamond idea is based on having something that resembles luxury, like yachts and expensive champagne. It was initial marketed on the idea that you only love someone if you sacrifice your salary for a month or two to buy a ring. We can keep that concept (because that'll be tough to change) but shift the object:
Somehow we want to make all that kind of stuff look morally disgusting, i.e. private jets with CO2 emissions that help kill the planet and people with floods and fires, and rich snobs spending money on pearls when they could be donating to charity. Another 2008 crisis which will happen like clockwork would be a great wave to surf for getting momentum behind the idea. More homeless middle class and rich bankers will make people angry.
The idea is to make luxury and opulence (but not necessary money) seem bad to the middle class, in the same way as advocating slavery would seem bad.
Then the replacement could be a donation to the charity that the receiver of the engagement ring chooses. The ring could be a simple 18ct gold band or gold plated. It could be 3D printed from an unusual material. Doesn't matter that it costs $50 or whatever, it's now just a symbol, it could have imprinted on it the cause that was donated to.
The $10M would be spent on seed funding for a company to sell this kind of product, because then it's profits can be reinvested in marketing it further, rather than the "1 superbowl ad" that someone else mentioned in jest.
You’re totally naive if you think other gems are mined more humanely than diamonds. Just look at the countries about half the diamonds are coming from these days - Russia, Canada, Australia. You think it’s going to be more humane and ethical to mine sapphires in Madagascar or Lapis in the mountains of Afghanistan?
Well, push the commodity price to the limit. LVMH designing purses with diamond studs? Bedazzled dresses? Jewelry shifting more to intricate designs, brand increasing in importance, and more use of gold or platinum?
If a girl in Iowa can easily get a 3 carat diamond ring, what will the girl in New York now want?
I bought my wife a simple gold band. We were students. I told her how Americans spend so much money on diamonds and she was like, "that's stupid, you could go on such a good vacation and have nice food."
This article is absolutely an advertisement for the subject company. It is an interesting article but when reading it please keep in mind that it is not objective about its subject and is being used to promote a pro-diamond agenda.
Yeah. You can get artificial diamonds of pretty much every color. They aren't super popular though because everyone will assume that the diamond is artificial or even fake because natural blue diamonds cost $1 million.
The right way to shake this industry would be to obliterate it completely. Finding another useless piece of glass and selling it for $$$ is not shaking anything.
Society would have to work to convince people that status symbols are not worth pursuing. Unfortunately, based on my experience of how people’s brains work, that is quite an uphill battle.
People over here in Europe are not that hung up on diamonds. Not saying we don’t care about status symbols, because we most certainly do, just wanted to point out that it’s definetely doable to “eliminate” diamonds from the “status showing” game.
While status symbols exist everywhere, this specific obsessing over diamond rings and being "shamed" if you don't get one is pretty US-specific. In Hungary, for example, many couples just get simple, golden rings without any gemstone. A wedding ring traditionally isn't supposed to be flashy here.
> Society would have to work to convince people that status symbols are not worth pursuing.
On this note, a book recommendation: The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions.
Thorsten Veblen, 1899.
More relevant now than ever. From Wikipedia, a short summary:
> a treatise on economics and a detailed, social critique of conspicuous consumption, as a function of social class and of consumerism, derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labour, which are social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
I can imagine if you "know the truth" about the business you're in you might want to get out. I felt like that about certain financial jobs I've had in the past. The actual work felt like it provided no real value to society, but the intellectual challenges were what kept me there.
That's interesting. I actually feel quite differently about my own experience in finance.
HFT is a great example mentioned by a sibling comment. You kind of need some number of traders out there to make sure that market prices are honest and fair. HFT has done a great job of reducing (a) the number of people involved in trading per dollar traded and (b) the amount of money made by traders per dollar traded.
"keeping markets efficient" is how I justified what I did. But what's that number N of market participants where N+1 brings a de minimis improvement in efficiency. I think the number of market participants (large institutional players) is already well over N. To the point where its just computers churning trades.
To be clear, nothing wrong with that. But from a personal perspective you start to question your contribution.
I'm very far from the finance world so please correct me if I'm saying something stupid.
But how does eg an algorithm that sells stock when the newspaper headlines have a "negative sentiment" help ensure that "market prices are honest and fair"? What's "honest and fair" about stocks across the board dropping because of bushfires or a virus outbreak, only to rise back to pre-headline levels half a day later?
The best way to make a correct prediction is to continually update your estimate as new information comes in. As it comes in. That’s all the markets are doing.
When the virus starts, the markets adjust downwards because there is a chance that virus kills tens of millions, which would have severe economic impact.
As the world public health starts to reduce the error bars or bad outcome likelihood, the market adjusts.
The problem is that you’re thinking of something as having a concrete value. Instead, think like Tetlock teaches in superforecasters. Then you will have a better model of what’s going on.
>The actual work felt like it provided no real value to society
A sign of a broken system that needs urgent repair. Most financial jobs, hft, adtech jobs... We have our best minds working on things that do not provide any useful value to society. This is not a good state of affairs.
I can’t speak to finance but I get confused when people bash advertising in broad strokes. People running businesses need ways to exchange money for new customers. That’s advertising. Making that more efficient might surely be annoying but a complete waste of time?
I think you have a vast disconnect between the reality of advertising today vs. the quaint mid-20th century mental model that you seem to hold. Or you're being entirely disingenuous about what people complaining about "advertising" mean.
If modern advertising 1) did not vacuum up personal data in extremely invasive ways, 2) didn't distort the entire business models of the largest tech companies against the interests of the overwhelming majority of their users, and 3) wasn't a broad attack vector on that same user population (dark patterns, outright malware delivery, just plain terrible UX everywhere, etc.)... then there'd probably be very little complaint about advertising, relatively speaking.
Put another way: no one gripes about the existence of Craigslist. Thought experiment: what if the targeted advertising model was illegal, both enforceable and enforced with teeth. How much of what's detrimental about modern advertising would simply vanish, like a bad memory?
This is a direct corollary of the existence of the internet and the effect that had on the scarcity of information that supported the local newspaper model. Ben Thompson has written a number of great articles diving into this topic at Stratechery[1]. I understand why blaming CL seems like it should be a thing, but it's absolutely the wrong target: the very existence of the internet made newspapers utterly unsustainable because the scarcity they depended on vanished.
Not taking sides but what you described were the natural developments of "making advertisement more efficient", people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers, therefore making advertisement cheaper and more efficient. If this is a net positive or negative for society is something I'll stay out of.
Efficiency is overrated. It's an acceptable rationale for destruction and exploitation (the process demands it), but that acceptance doesn't make it a good thing overall.
>people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers
I mean, did they really? Where can I read about these successes?
I think the parent comment was referring to adtech in particular, which I agree isn't inherently bad, but which currently has a model of:
1. Slurp up as much data as possible no matter how sensitive and no matter the societal cost.
2. Use that data purely to increase the efficiency of wasting an enormous chunk of the world's bandwidth and computing resources (anecdotally, something like 30% of my traffic before I started blocking everything at a dns level) _pushing_ ads to anyone who might match by any means necessary whether they want them or not.
I might even acquiesce to some form of push-based ads being broadly beneficial (e.g. for truly novel offerings), but for almost everything that currently shows up as an ad I would much rather be able to efficiently search for it and find it once I'm actually ready to buy than to be inundated with hundreds or thousands of worthless ads ahead of time in the off chance that they'll bring a particular product to the forefront of my mind and sway my purchasing decisions.
That's kind of the point of frameworks like async/await :) Adtech is using a polling system to try and demand my attention with a, let's say, 1% success rate, but we could cut down the noise 100x simply by awaiting my next purchasing decision.
The parent said adtech, not advertising. What we call adtech today is advertising plus tracking. The tracking part is what most people seem to have a problem with.
Yep, the marketing for diamonds was a prime example of that.
But at least De Beers didn't try to track individual brides and grooms and show them different diamonds based on what they were talking about on the phone. Maybe they do now.
I still say we ignored the Main Street and non-scale non-flow micro-sensitive and disaggregated or rather yet to be aggregated, customers, not whole by reasons superficially readily learned.
Sobel's The First Junk Bond, gives the mechanics of preservation of the vast onshore reserves, until (I don't have the recall but I think Sobel gives the trigger price) $50/B plateaux.
In 95 I wrote the level of inefficiency in agency transactions was 60%.
In 2018, stories on the embedded framework fraud of online advertising buying, gave the same number for the new system's inefficiency.
Print, my world despite the gasping inhalation of every party I speak with, remains almost unchanged in headline volumes, despite the unbroken prophecy of all trade journalism.
If you think into the problem some more, I believe that you will conclude, on the face of the natural problem and without need of further information, that exit from a complicated family concern is the provision of the older generations and never in the realms of practical viability for those who inherit legacy management and ownership.
I am very much interested in knowing your thoughts, should you, on reflection find my point above not to be self evident.
I distinctly remember going into the (then state-owned) workshops as a kid and watching the cutters at work with their loupes, and how they kept tabs on stones by checking in and out of the vaults little envelopes annotated with each step of the process - it was true craftsmanship.
Biggest stone I “saw” (they did resin molds of the large ones for senior cutters to measure and mark the places for clamping and cutting, and my father would bring some models home to study and review other cutters’ suggestions) was about 2x2x3cm, and IIRC it was cut down into many smaller ones due to impurities (you’d cut a window to peer in, assess where the impurities were and then plan the cuts to excise them or avoid including them into the finished cut).
The techniques are sure to be vastly different today, but the detachment with which he viewed his work was rather fun: they were intricate puzzles to maximize yield during the rough cut phase and reflectiveness during the shaping phase - they did the math by hand for the facet sizes and angles, and it took years to figure out the best ways to do some of the shaping in a reproducible fashion (that was his key achievement).
And all that time, they were “just pretty rocks”. He was very nonchalant about it, and never considered them of much value. DeBeers tried to hire him and he pretty much said he was done with the hype (rather amusing considering I’m about his age at the time and also fed up with our industry hype).
(Also, if you read Michael Crichton’s “Congo”, he got the diamond color names wrong)