It’s only functionality was a button that when pressed displayed the text, “I am rich!”

There must be a lesson (or perhaps even a metaphor?) in that half a dozen or so copies sold. At least one or two of the "marks" claimed they bought it on accident. Maybe. Or maybe some people have a lot more disposable income than I do.

It still feels to me like developer performance art.

Not really a problem if you're the developer; just offer an absolute refund guarantee.

Hah!

The big issue with choosing a smaller, natural stone is you can't really be sure it's actually natural. The industry has so many unethical practices I wouldn't be confident in any "certification" that comes with a stone's origin. Even lower-grade stones might just be from lab rejects, or labs intentionally growing good, but not perfect stones.

Mined diamonds may actually be lab grown diamonds certified as mined.

The financial incentives only goes in one direction on this one.

I hear this a lot... But where can I buy a massive diamond 2nd hand for a few bucks?

Look up Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace in your area and you'll find plenty of cheap listings for diamond jewelry. Will you really take a chance on any of them though?

https://www.konkurser.dk/search/?s=diamant

It is in Danish, but it is bankruptcy auctions, the high price is the valuation (typically the retail price before bankruptcy), the low price is the final highest bid, all in DKK.

Edit: searched and found about 25 places, none of them have much inventory, most are lower quality (or incredibly expensive), many are in-person only with no real pictures you can see, closest I can find is https://www.catawiki.com but still for the type/size I've been looking for there's really only two options and both are lower grade.

> Diamonds are effectively worthless the moment they leave the store

That's not the case! You can have the stone removed from the ring and, in case you don't have the original certificate, sent to a certification authority (like GIA) to have it graded. I think it also, once graded, gets automatically laser-engraved (above a certain carat) but I'm not sure about that: maybe you need to pay for the laser engraving too. And it's then got a value on the market: there's a worldwide market (or several) and every single jeweler in the world can see which stones are available at which price depending on their specs and book any stone and have it shipped in a few clicks.

Source: I've got a good friend who's a jeweler and he showed that to me.

Now: fancy shops (with famous names) may make fun of people by selling them stones at 3x their values or more (I don't doubt that) but you can also go to an independent jeweler and have him model/build the ring (or he'll outsource the 3D modelling) then put the stone on it and you'll pay a price much closer to actual price of the stone (the jeweler doesn't really work harder for a 0.5 carat stone vs a 2 carat one, so the bigger the stone, the less is "wasted" on the ring).

Regarding the differing values: I think it's mandatory that every lab-grown diamond above a certain carat are laser-engraved so unless labs growing these diamonds are cheating, it's extremely hard to make a lab-grown one pass for a billion years old one.

https://www.gemsociety.org/article/lab-grown-diamonds-faq:

“Many lab-made diamonds have an inscription that identifies them as lab-made.

Diamonds can also have a lab report number inscribed on the girdle”

I think it’s very likely that, If that “above a certain carat” were true, that page would have mentioned it.

I also cannot think of a good argument why it would be reasonable to require producers of artificial diamonds to add such markers.

> I think it's mandatory that every lab-grown diamond above a certain carat are laser-engraved

That’s not “diamonds that are lab-grown by GEM Society members”.

Why would it be reasonable to require anybody who’s not the GEM Society to engrave their products, so that the GEM Society can protect its source of revenues?

But there’s also a lot of concern about stolen jewelry and even diamond swapping for seemingly legitimate businesses. So, not too hard to make it also sound like it’s for the consumers best interest.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/veblen-good.asp

Yes, but the subset of people that can afford and would drink a $200 bottle of wine is hardly any bigger than the subset of people that can afford and would drink a $2000 bottle of wine.

It makes perfect sense to me why people would drink the $2000 bottle of wine. Why not? They've got the money.

If you balk at a $2000 bottle of wine, you're probably not casually drinking $200 bottles of wine either - and if you are - you're in a very small percentage of people where the price difference means something. It's maybe 2% of the population.

The other 97.75% isn't buying $200 bottles of wine. And the other 0.25% can buy $2000 bottles just fine.

I don't think this is correct. Most wine nerds/enthusiasts I know (and I include myself) would consider dropping $200 on one of their 'dream bottles' in the right circumstance, especially if splitting the cost with a couple of friends. I don't know a single person who would ever drop $2000 on a bottle of wine under any circumstance.

I also have a friendly relationship with a local wine shop, where I usually buy bottles for 10-15 bucks. They also carry (and sell) many bottles at 5K a pop and up.

And if you want to get all mathematical about it, assuming the right kind of power law distribution, it is more likely to see one person who would pay 2000 for a bottle than to find 2 people who would pay 200.

power law stats is weird. Once you are outside of the bell, the bell area has NO constraint on the observation. Unlike Gaussian and similar distributions, where probability falls off very rapidly as you move out of the bell.

Try hey will also burn readily at house firm temperatures

The reason why on an anvil you need to orient the diamond carefully to break is just because the tip needs to be facing some kind of reasonably hard material like tool steel, if it's being driven into mild steel, that will basically just act as a pillow for the diamond and allow the flat face to align parallel to the surface of hammer, minimizing the impact.

There is no practical value in jewelry anyway, it is a status symbol and the context of coming from the wild extracted under wild conditions (and maybe violently, ooh, blood diamonds, how exiting, erm shocking) has of course a higher symbolic value. So a artificial made one would be considered "fake".

Romanticism is not attached to logic. But it is still a real factor in human decision making. And to be honest, if I would be into jewelry, I probably would prefer the "real" one, too. But I am rather into extreme sports and any rings or alike are just dangerous baggage there (a friend of mine allmost lost a finger, while climbing over a fence and his ring got stuck on some metal piece).

But if your wife happens to be into it - applying logic here will be probably seen as a cheap way to save money.

What do you suppose is the value that distinguishes these two processes? The story? Or is it the persistence of the naturalistic fallacy, surfacing in all sorts of places and in all kinds of minds including those one would expect are habitually vigilant against what is essentially a generalized form of superstition.

Of course it is the story. The value in everything is the meaning we attach to it, not the thing itself.

With a natural diamond, it's the idea that you have a unique artifact formed over millions of years, an irreplaceable corner of the Earth and its history owned by you and you alone, which then suggests that you yourself have a certain uniqueness and irreplaceability.

You can argue that people should not choose that particular story and that particular meaning, but that's a moral argument, and not an argument about the object itself. (And if you choose to make that argument, I would first suggest introspecting over how much of your own stories and meaning are as arbitrary as that one.)

I don't care a bit for natural diamonds, but I have infinite respect for the stories and meaning people choose to embue their lives with. Ultimately, it's all we have.

In fact my username, chain of fools, is the title of a song whose lyrics, although very brief, are very much about believing stories told with the motivation to do harm - or at very least to deprive others of something valuable so that the teller can have that same something cheaply.

Diamonds are the hardest objects found naturaly. While everything around them was crushed and changed ober the eons - they persisted. And if polished they shined. And can cut any other known material.

It makes for a good story, which is why humans are after them, since a long time. Kings and queens wore them. Pirates stole and buried them.

Is the story justified categorically? I don't know, but it is an old story.

But personally I rather would like to have the sci-fi story, where diamonds are cheaply avaiable, as a very strong building material..

No it isn't. There are plenty of ugly diamonds — they are also formed over millions of years and are never sold to consumers. This is an ad hoc justification. People only cared about the beauty of the diamond until lab made ones came along. They are cut to increase the beauty. That already makes it processed. Nobody buys uncut diamonds. And I'm sure there are other stones formed over millions of years that are just black and nobody cares for. Raw olivine for example is priced by the ton. I'm sure there are even cheaper minerals at these depths that nobody cares about at all.

It is ad hoc, yes, but is not the only justification.

Diamonds are also rare (unlike olivine) and clear diamonds are pretty (unlike ones with lots of inclusions). We can like things for multiple reasons.

Only if you define them such that you exclude lab-made diamonds. But I agree that we can like things for multiple reasons and that rarity is a part of the demand for diamonds.

In any case, I believe people will eventually forget about "unnatural" diamonds. People will be more creative with thier works if a failure does not cost so much, and the average size will be larger. Consider that modern farmed perls were once considered unnatural. But they are not only cheaper but more uniform than wild ones and now nobody buys those.

Diamonds are just about the only thing I can think of where artificial and natural are encouraged to be seen as equals. I’m sure some people have a naturalist/spiritual angle, but I’d bet most are simply applying the wisdom of so many other shopping areas to this one.

Well I say we should avoid artificial distinctions - such as the one between natural and artificial!

An artificial diamond would be something like cubic zirconia.

> ... has of course a higher symbolic value.

To some people, others of us think that it's frickin amazing what can be done with machines in a lab, and that the sheer ingenuity and advanced tech used to make that lab-created gem is awesome.

Anyone can dig shiny rocks out of the dirt.

so my plastic bottles are naturally grown?

There is no such thing as natural versus unnatural, this dichotomy is a holdover from the time when we believed there was another plane of reality outside or distinct from the "natural" universe, which was somehow tainted by flaws unique to humans, being creatures with one foot in both realities.

I realize it sounds like a technically correct Internet argument of the nitpick variety, but I think that the norm of asseting an unchallenged bias toward "natural," and against "artificial," could use a general reassessment as it is constantly exploited by people using this ultimately baseless distinction as a way to bias opinion uncritically toward one kind of behavior or another.

https://www.teachersource.com/product/preforms-and-caps/chem...

Don't enrich Russia by buying mined diamonds, but there's definitely a compelling argument for lab-grown ones.

Amplified?

You're only considering intrinsic value. That's helpful for raw commodities.

For nearly everything else, value is tied to perception, history, etc.

If I have two identical baseballs, they're both "just" baseballs. But one of them could have much more value due to its history: maybe it was a homerun ball by a famous player, or a ball that I or a family member hit/caught. Same function. Could be otherwise identical, but could also be worth very different amounts.

The stories we tell is where the primary value is.

In this case, your wife values the story of a natural diamond that was formed through long, natural processes and required the effort of finding, excavating, cutting and so on.

Now you could disagree with that story, or you could dislike the tellers and amplifiers of that story, but the fact remains that your wife and many others value that story, making it more precious than merely "shiny carbon."

This is branding and marketing 101. Humans are storytelling machines and they understand value largely via stories and relationships. Misunderstanding that is a failure to understand essential human characteristics.

> Misunderstanding that is a failure to understand essential human characteristics.

I’ll add that to the list of human behavior that I don’t really understand.

Note: my engagement ring cost $12.00 on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/TIGRADE-Titanium-Polished-Wedding-Com...

I see this come up a lot, but I doubt very much that this story forms part of many people's thinking.

People want the status symbol and they want what they perceive as the ‘real’ thing, not what they rightly or wrongly perceive as an imitation.

As such ‘natural’ diamonds currently have successful marketing around them. I really don’t think an appreciation of the geology figures in many peoples minds. Geologists excepted of course.

Humans are indeed story telling machines, but you know what else they are? Hierarchy-driven apes who love showing off shiny, expensive shit to make themselves appear high status. The emergence of chemically, physically identical synthetic diamonds has triggered this in really very predictable ways - rationalisations of prior behaviour and desperate searching for ways to utilise this new phenomenon to maintain or elevate status.

The story here is a prime example. When both 'prettier' and 'not real' can no longer be defended, a new rationalisation for the large outlay of cash, and new explanation of how this makes the outlayer special, must be found. It doesn't have to be true (please don't try to tell me that all women have some sort of innate appreciation of carbon geology, I'm sorry but I don't believe it) it just has to sound right and allow the teller of the tale to continue to claim the high ground.

Because otherwise we have to face up to questions like "Did I spend all that and not prove I'm better than Bob who spent half as much?" and "Was I just doing this because of peer pressure and societal expectations? What does that say about me?"

For simplicity, I was considering "story" as part of the "status" side too (i.e.- there's a story here that I'm better than you for these reasons).

I know it's Hacker News, but come on folks, it's not that hard to understand that marketing, branding, storytelling and whatnot are real, meaningful forces in human dynamics.

Maybe if artificial diamonds are made from forsaken orphan ashes they would have a similar sentimental value.

Unless you’re willing to bundle everything beyond pure Buddha-tier equanimity as “character flaws.”

it’s unfair to draw the line between “useless thing you were socialized to spend money on” and “useless thing someone else was socialized to spend money on.”

"Failure to see reason" is probably the next biggest red-flag/dealbreaker for me.

I'm going to die alone.

Then there's consumer electronics manufacturing... ...or being a tourist to the Saudi Arabia/Turkey/Russia/UAE where modern-day slavery is taking place at scale.

Out of sight, out of mind.

We’re all deluding ourselves for the sake of sanity + having nice stuff.

So a shiny thing that’s less expensive actually doesn’t satisfy the same role.

A shiny thing that’s just as expensive but less valuable (ie lower $/karat, ie lab grown) is so large as to out itself as not-the-truly-ridiculous waste of money that a real diamond is supposed to be for its signaling value.

You can't fix the whole world with personal choices, like an eyedropper against the ocean, but you can still opt out of the worst excesses without having to compromise every modern convenience.

I don't really think there's an unbiased way to ask. 'Lab-grown or natural' makes the latter sound more 'real' and better. 'Ethical or blood sweat and tears' is obviously out. 'Lab-grown and technically superior for the same money, or natural and more flawed' is about the best I can come up with, but the former is just objectively the correct answer isn't it? I don't see how anyone could understand the question and answer the latter. There just isn't a reason to prefer natural, all else being equal, for an item of personal jewellery that you're going to wear?

Lab-grown diamonds are the same thing as natural, the same material, and can be produced to a higher specification for the same cost as finding (due to scarcity, labour, etc.) an objectively worse stone. (Or equivalently a given spec can be manufactured cheaper than it can be found.)

The correct flower analogy would be growing nicely coloured varieties in a nursery vs. hunting for those random mutations in the wild.

(Nobody does the latter!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

Or the cheeky version: use such a rule to determine the clarity, colour, etc. of natural diamond you want; then buy that lab-grown and pocket the difference.

(I have a friend who used to have a job drawing cut plans for diamond wafers at Kyocera Unimerco.)

My first thought is that the high conductivity doesn't necessarily mean it won't, being loose and hand-wavey with terminology because I don't know it, fracture with thermal shock, like non-borosilicate glassware (don't change the temp. too quickly) say, or ceramics (don't introduce too much of a temp. delta across the item, e.g. heating on a hob)?

Second thought is 'is it too much better than copper', in the sense that is the conductivity no longer the limiting factor? Copper is prized (and actually bloody hard to get these days - afaict everything on Amazon is copper-coloured or at best clad aluminium) because of fast 'response time' to change in heat, as you adjust the burner or pull it off the heat altogether. Conductivity also helps with even heating of course, but it doesn't help it cool particularly, which is limited by the rate of loss due to convection through air (and what's being cooked, which is what we want to limit if we're hoping for it to cool) and radiation?

While a lab grown diamond might be technically superior, there's something sort of romantic and interesting with the fact that it has been in the earth for a billion years and somehow made its way into your ring.

That said, my wife has a lab grown diamond in her engagement ring.