5 ms·

Good for them. It's literally the same material, and we can now use scientific and engineering advances to remove the need for people to toil and die undergroun

• goldcd 6y ago
  The flip side though, is that you're making diamond miners unemployed. I suspect if they had alternate employment opportunities available that were more pleasant/better-paying, they'd have already taken them. So losers are the poor folks digging in the ground and winners are the companies who've just built themselves a lab. Maybe a way out of this, would be price up the grown diamonds to include a charitable donation to help create alternate employment for the miners. Would be quite nice to have that representation included in the shiny thing on a finger.
  • rodgerd 6y ago
    > I suspect if they had alternate employment opportunities available that were more pleasant/better-paying, they'd have already taken them. Spoken like someone who thinks that mining is conducted by volunteers.
    • canadianfella 6y ago
      Employees.
    • goldcd 6y ago
      erm in the vast, vast majority of cases they are.. Most of the world's diamonds are coming out of open-cast mines and most of those are in Russia.
  • Nursie 6y ago
    This is the case with any advance, and could be said about all sorts of exploitative, dangerous forms of employment. In general we seek to remove these and consider it a good thing and an advance for humanity. Should I feel sad we no longer send kids up chimneys to sweep them? I agree that social programs are needed to help these folks, but I think even without them, undermining this industry is a win.
  • Swenrekcah 6y ago
    I've seen vidoes from some of those mines and I don't think the miners browse job openings with their morning coffee before heading off to work. I think they probably just do whatever the man with the (literal or figurative) gun tells them to.
  • himinlomax 6y ago
    > The flip side though, is that you're making diamond miners unemployed I'm responsible for many unemployed miners as I've never bought a diamond. Also you're responsible for unemployment in smiths by not buying horsehoes.
  • me_me_me 6y ago
    If we let them slaves free how are they going to feed themselves? See how similar that sound to what you are saying?
  • rakoo 6y ago
    This argument is as old as time. There even was a satirical text on the matter 2 centuries ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat#Economic_Sophisms_and_the_candlemakers'_petition) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat#Eco...: The Sun, being an infinite source of free light, is unfair competition to candlemakers and should be blocked to allow the economy to grow and people to make a wage.
    • fullshark 6y ago
      And yet we still don't have a good solution for the societal problems it causes.
• rodgerd 6y ago
  See also: the return of vinyl. Tube amplifiers. Yellow lighting. All from people arguing that poor reproduction of audio and natural light is superior!
  • Kye 6y ago
    The vinyl thing is ironic because the reason it sounds better is that it's such a horrible medium that only highly skilled production sounds right on it. Your half hour bedroom mix won't cut it.
  • shatnersbassoon 6y ago
    Tube amplifiers are still where it's at for guitars. Still not beaten despite the attempts of digital signal processing. The reason is that the same thing that makes it a bad general amplifier makes it an excellent guitar amp.
    • y2kenny 6y ago
      Can you elaborate more? What are the things that are bad for general amp but good for guitar amp? Is the amplification non-linear in some specific ways and how does it help with guitar music? (I know nothing about guitar except what it looks like.)
      • shatnersbassoon 6y ago
        General amps seek to diminish distortion. In particular: 1. Clipping - an overly amplified signal can have the peaks of its signal "clipped" off. 2. Cross-over distortion - because of the way most amplifiers work, one part of the circuit amplifies the positive signal, and one the negative (above and below the midpoint of the signal). Where the one part "crosses over" you can get a misalignment which results in distortion. 3. Harmonic distortion - for example the extent to which a 400Hz tone is translated into a certain amount of 800Hz, 1600Hz etc overtones. All of these things can actually result in a cool guitar sound in the right proportions. Hard rock in particular has strongly distorted sounds created by tube amps (for the most part). But even sounds which we think of as cleaner have a significant amount of tube distortion (e.g. the intro to Sweet Home Alabama, or the main riff of Day Tripper). If you put an electric guitar into a regular amplifier, in general, it sounds flat and terrible.
• simonh 6y ago
  If the best option available to people was diamond mining, by taking that away from them we’re by definition pushing them into an even worse option. That’s a big problem I have with a lot of the do-good commentary on developing world labour. Taking away options from people, even bad ones from our point of view, isn’t necessarily doing them any favours. None of these peoples options are going to look good to us. Actually helping these people means improving their existing options, or giving them new better ones. Having said that, I think given the other pretty grievous activities associated with the diamond trade, this is probably a good move. They’re not called blood diamonds for nothing.
  • Nursie 6y ago
    I think that we shouldn't keep funding exploitative companies that treat people badly, and industries that are dangerous for workers and environmentally damaging. I think that's a win anyway. Here's another take - able bodied workers are less likely to be sucked into an industry which digs up shiny rocks to send overseas, and may be able to take up something of more benefit to the local economy.
    • crocsarecool 6y ago
      I’m worried that it takes a certain amount of poverty/desperation in the local workforce to be exploited heinously. For them, an exploitative job is probably the difference between eating a little or not eating at all. Yes, it’s good that they won’t be exploited once the mined diamond industry goes away, but I think they’re still getting the rug pulled out from under them. Their income is replaced with nothing, and in a country with a weak economy, there’s probably very little there to help these people in the interim. It’s a desperate situation, even if it’s for their benefit.
      • Digit-Al 6y ago
        There's a very strong chance I am completely wrong about this but my feeling on the matter is as follows. As long as mined diamonds are profitable there is a strong incentive for criminal interests to hinder any attempts to improve the lot of the local inhabitants so they have a continued supply of very cheap labour. If you make diamond mining unprofitable then the criminal elements move on to other more profitable enterprises. This leaves the local populace free from interference, and efforts by aid agencies to improve their lot may have a better chance of succeeding.
• rlv-dan 6y ago
  Why do people pay insane amount for a box copy of Super Mario Bros, a game you can play one pretty much any device. ROM dumps are literary the same data. I guess rarity is hard to set a price on. And people like being rare and unique.
  • Nursie 6y ago
    It's not exactly the same thing though, there's a difference there, you get the physical object. I agree that some people value rarity and uniqueness, but it doesn't look to me like diamonds (natural or otherwise) provide that.
    • thom 6y ago
      You can make or buy your own custom SNES cartridges with whatever ROM you like. They’re about $20 so clearly there’s more at work here.
      • Nursie 6y ago
        OK, but then there's still a physical difference, purchasing the physical object, including original box, published by nintendo, or reprogramming your own generic which will contain different electronics. But yes, as I said above, there is value to some people in the rarity and uniqueness of that original, even if you could pump out something that is to all intents and purposes identical. But diamonds aren't all that rare, the market is managed to restrict supply, even with that everyone and their grandmother has one on their finger. And few people (other than geologists I guess) are really bothered about the back story here. They have an idea about what's "real", and what's not, but that can change. (I also think where we're just talking about lumps of a material, it's slightly different to a manufactured object, perhaps)
    • bongobingo 6y ago
      They do. Actual diamonds have occlusions, slight color shifts, unique sparkle patterns, and other characteristics. Grown diamonds are too perfect, and it’s trivially easy to tell the difference. You don’t need a loupe at all. I don’t own any diamonds, but I like rocks and minerals. Hank from breaking bad would be proud.
• jonnydubowsky 6y ago
  Would the lab grown process tolerate adding in some super-fine particulate matter, added using a random number generator to control the amount? "Natural" imperfections on-demand?
  • Nursie 6y ago
    Most likely yes, this has already happened with other synthetic gems - look up star sapphires, once exotic and sometimes mounted on engagement rings alongside diamonds, the process to create carborundum was figured out, and then another to insert the right inclusion, and hey-presto, you can buy them in bulk for around $1 per carat. They can create bi-colour sapphires now too. A quick search of the internet turns up various articles about inclusions in diamonds deliberately introduced to control the properties of the resulting material. So if we're not there yet with synthetic jewellery diamonds, we will be. The sapphire market is interesting in some ways, 'natural' sapphires still fetch a few hundred dollars per carat. It genuinely fascinates me that someone would pay (as an example I just found) over £7000 for a ring with a 4.98 carat "natural" bi-colour sapphire set with six small 0.1 carat diamonds, when you can get a synthetic stone chemically and physically the same for around £12.
• boatsie 6y ago
  Last I checked, lab grown diamonds had no fluorescence. If that is still the case, it might make fluorescent diamonds more valuable than non, as a sign they are more “natural”. Though in the past fluorescence in diamonds was considered a negative trait.