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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

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 underground to get them.

Hopefully the process is more environmentally friendly too.

They are real diamonds.

I find it hi-goddamned-larious that the moment these became viable, the industry switched from "Diamond purity is the be-all and end-all and you must have the clearest, most pure" to "Oh, well of course it's all about having the right impurities to increase sparkle and character, lab-grown diamonds don't have character"

Just like with sapphires, if we're not there already I'm sure it won't be long before exactly the right type and number of impurities or faults can be introduced to mimic any natural diamond.

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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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

> Actual diamonds have occlusions, slight color shifts, unique sparkle patterns

All of which can either be recreated in a lab now, or are likely to be possible before long. See for example synthetic star sapphires.

> I like rocks and minerals

Good for you, so does my step-dad (he's a geologist). The man was a nightmare to try and drag around the New York museum of natural history, I thought we'd never get out of the mineral section...

A large majority of people don't pay insane amounts for collection items. A large majority of people pay insane amounts for jewellery though.

Original Super Mario Bros carts are rare, diamonds are not. Natural diamonds have an artificially reduced supply thanks to a cartel, if their market actually functioned they’d be very cheap.

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.

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.

> And people like being rare and unique.

It's amazing how powerful the marketing narrative must be for something extremely normie and prescribed to be viewed instead as "rare and unique".

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?

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.

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.

See also: the return of vinyl. Tube amplifiers. Yellow lighting. All from people arguing that poor reproduction of audio and natural light is superior!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

If we let them slaves free how are they going to feed themselves?

See how similar that sound to what you are saying?

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#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.

And yet we still don't have a good solution for the societal problems it causes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree with you. I think it will all work out for the better. I just think the path between exploitation and greener pastures may be a rough one if there is no support structure to keep people from getting desperate once they are jobless. It’s hard to look to the future when you’re worried about putting food on the table tonight. It’s a good thing that this is happening, but I sympathize with the people affected because it might get worse before it gets better. I hope they can keep their chins up and see that there is a huge light at the end of the tunnel.

> 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.

If your business is to force people into slavery, then it is part of your business to remove other avenues for them to get out of slavery.

>If your business is to force people into slavery, then it is part of your business to remove other avenues for them to get out of slavery.

I suspect your sentence got a little mangled. It sounds like you're saying that businesses should try to prevent people from getting out of slavery by removing other avenues by which they could free themselves.

I suspect you mean that they should create those avenues for freedom, instead.

>It sounds like you're saying that businesses should...

They are saying slavery based businesses should... If you profit off slavery you don't want it to end.

I see. Thank you.

But then the best option would be to fix the business, not take it away and put more pressure on people, forcing them into another slavery.

Who said anything about slavery? The vast majority of third world workers mining diamonds do so in the regulated commercial sector. These are largely technical engineering jobs that bring investment in infrastructure into the country, certainly much more so than many other local opportunities. A single mine like those in Botswana can employ thousands of people, and be the core of the local economy. I'm not saying there are no slaves in diamond mines, but if so it's a marginal source.

Oh my good grief. What on earth did you think I was advocating?

> If the best option available to people was diamond mining

The best option available to a person in the short term is not necessarily the best option for a society in the long term. In this case, it almost certainly isn't. Compare "resource curse" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

> 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.

Couldn't you say that about any and all technological advances?

So far these diamonds were both the primary cause of conflicts, as well as the main way of financing and prolonging them. Wars are expensive, so if you take money out of the game many militias/ fractions/ criminals will simply loose interest in those territories, and that should reduce the corruption and make things more stable for people there. In theory, that's way more important for progress than outside help, although it will also be needed.

Imagine the next war will be financed with NFTs.

Not really. NFTs are closer to paintings and intellectual property than conflict diamonds/minerals.

That was a joke..

If it isn't diamonds, it will be land, water rights, drug distribution, religious purity, and on and on.

Diamonds are just another means of gaining power and wealth. They're only a problem in societies that don't have the mechanisms for dealing with inevitable power and wealth disparities.

> Actually helping these people means improving their existing options, or giving them new better ones.

Yes. A basic income for which one doesn't need to go into the diamond mines, for example.

Or how about a functioning government with minimal corruption for starters? clean water? a functional banking system? access to education? UBI is putting the cart before the horse

How do you implement UBI without any centralized government and in some cases a functioning currency?

Charities like GiveDirectly do it using various mobile baking programs along with physically driving shipments of cash to remote areas that don’t have phone access. It’s a complicated problem that involves a lot of human time but it’s also a mostly solved problem.

https://www.givedirectly.org/ gives a basic income to poor people. It's not universal.

Well of course, that's what I'm saying, just taking away jobs for miners doesn't do that.

It's a resource curse.

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