The original Super Mario Bros sold ~40 million copies, excluding all the re-releases. It’s not a rare game at all. You can buy the cartridges on eBay for less than $10. Complete in box versions for a few hundred at most.

The only thing rare about this big sale is that it’s sealed in the box in perfect condition. All that extra money just for packaging material. Collectors are truly weird.

I saw an "unboxing" video for Nintendo amiibo's recently, by a collector who had amassed a large collection (all of them?) was unboxing them on video. The unboxing process obviously de-values each of the items, but the amazing thing about it was how shocked he was at the detail & manufacturing quality of the figures after removing the packaging: details he couldn't make out at all when they were packaged.

It's so strange. Buying boxed items with no intention to (ever?) unbox essentially amounts to just paying for the box itself, rather than the contents.

Natural diamonds are really cheap. You can go online right now and buy rough diamonds for $3.50/carat. Diamonds that you would want to put into a ring are much rarer and diamonds have all the qualities that jewelry enthusiasts want are rarer than that.

We need to start thinking about jewelry like hi-fi audio. If you just want to listen to good music then lord knows you don't need a $10k setup. You hit diminishing returns really fast and your untrained eye isn't gonna be able to tell the difference between a $500, $2,000, and $10,000 diamond -- they will all be pretty. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.

> But that doesn't mean that there aren't people who do notice and do care.

And even more people who only notice when they're told.