Uplifting News

No, I bet they are.

In the land of ever increasing red line, any stagnation is bad, any drop is catastrophic.

It's clearly beginning of an end for diamond mining.

The free market manages to solve a problem.

I wonder how much money it's going to cost the diamond lobby to un-solve it.

To be fair, diamonds are indeed rare on earth. But what made diamond price come crashing is because we now managed to synthesise the diamonds. These "fake" diamonds flooded the market. This is good news so that we don't have to rely on exploitative extraction of the mineral.

if you want to go to hell, just wait.

I’d really like some obsidian for a nether portal.

Water and lava buckets, you peasent

Diamond thermal paste is out there. It's okay, but like most thermal paste (besides liquid metal, which has its own issues), it doesn't give extraordinary results over anything else. People tend to really overthink thermal paste; it's going to give you maybe 4 extra degrees C, and that's already pushing it.

Graphene is an even better thermal conductor, and heat pipes are tons better than either. There's some work out there on enhancing heat pipes with graphene.

Industrial diamonds have always been on the cheap and that industry is far removed from the jewelry/gem industry, in fact a large majority of diamonds that are mined aren't gem grade, they're industrial grade. It's been growing and advancing despite the jewelry/gem market starting to fall.

and their hardness makes them useful in all saw-blades or drill-bits

There's nothing wrong with orderly carbon. There's more than a few things wrong with Debeers

The rock is quite useful as an industrial tool. It's when you cut it in to a fancy shape and wear it that it's pretty useless.

We use diamonds to test the hardness of materials, grind really hard things smaller, orient and locate specialized cutting tools, and cut through really hard things. Hell we sell garnet by the barrel to help cut through regular materials. Orderly carbon or, in many cases orderly aluminum oxide, is something we need a lot of. The price going down on those is actually good for manufacturing.

Fucking young people and their... lack of money!

The first thing DeBeers tried was "artificial diamonds have imperfections, you want a real rock that's selected to be as perfect as possible". Then the artificial industry made diamonds so good that you could only tell the difference from the lack of imperfections. Then DeBeers marketing changed to "it's too perfect, you want something that has the small imperfections of a natural process".

The suffering is the point

Same reason diamonds are valued in the first place. Marketing campaigns tricking the gullible majority and most of the rest conforming to not stand out and cause issues for themselves.

There is this idea that seems to be really pervasive that natural is always better. And it's not true so often. A common example I like to give is that natural almond extract contains cyanide and artificial almond extract does not. No, it isn't enough cyanide to kill you, but I would say no cyanide is better than some cyanide.

And a lot of those "natural is always better" people would happily take fentanyl over willow bark if they were in agony.

Not really. They will pay you as little as they can get away with. Often that's the value of the metals.