Digging for Diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas
afar.com
afar.com
I think that the 'cultural reasons' they're referring to are probably more likely to be stereotypes around those areas being home to backwards inbred hill people who marry each other's cousins at gunpoint, have two teeth remaining, use outhouses, etc, etc.
Every group needs some other group to look down on, I guess.
This certainly isn't about politics as, well, there pretty much isn't a more conservative place than where I come from. It didn't occur to me that someone would inject left/right politics into my comment, but I guess that's just the way things are now.
Plenty of routes to responsible use - and there needs to be evidence to back accusations: especially against an individual who's presumably done nothing wrong.
> was encouraged to keep the stone in its rough form—no polishing, no cutting. “It’s a beautiful chocolate diamond,” Kinard says. “It’s a nine-carat diamond. Those are very rare, and very hard to come by.
It might not be worth very much. Diamonds are not rare, are not particularly beautiful when uncut. The valuable diamonds are the diamonds that can be cut to produce a flawless gem.
Though note that those aren't rare either. A diamond has no resale value; jewelers already have all the diamonds they're allowed to sell.
Source: Worked at a diamond wholesaler for years, sat next to the owner as he bought, measured, evaluated diamonds.
With Russian and Canadian mines coming online over the past two decades it's become clear that they cornered the market to keep prices stable. Volatility has gone through the roof but diamonds haven't become genuinely cheap.
In retrospect this should have been obvious. Cornering the market completely for 80 years would have been impossible if diamonds weren't still pretty rare.
It makes me wonder what other myths I have kicking around my head.
Very well said. I grew up in a middle-middle class family in India, and my Mom would not have let my Dad buy her any jewellery with his hard earned money.
Gold’s performance has been quite subpar for the past few decades.
The more you read about diamonds, the more they sound like a scam to sell overpriced wedding rings.
(See the meaning of “bear trap” in both the hunting and financial sense)
That is because they are. There are much better ways to signal whatever people used to signal by buying diamonds, at least on the higher end of the wealth scale. Not least because you can just get a synthetic diamond and no one can tell the difference, so now they try to sell “stories” behind it to create artificial scarcity.
As fishy as all of that market smells, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of diamond buyers are getting CZ or moissanites for their money.
You can pretty much drive an hour of out Sydney or Melbourne to some rivers and turn the soil and make up to minimum wage extracting river gold, but you can't run a motor doing it or use any equipment that is larger than what you can carry.
A lot of independent mining is like that - it's borderline low wage work but with the promise of a lotto ticket sprinkled in to keep you working.
In hindsight, each time I would bring it up my parents would have something of an "oh shit, anything but that!" reaction and would quickly distract me with some other activity or suggestion, and to date I've never been.
I'm certain that to them, the suggestion was essentially to drive several hours out and back to play in the dirt.
(this article is well-written and quite interesting, btw)
There are dozens of us!
"Despite the challenges and restrictions of the COVID pandemic, 129,218 people traveled to Crater of Diamonds in 2020 for what was a record-breaking year, with more than 80 carats of diamonds unearthed"
At $10 a visit the entrance fees add up to a lot more than the value of diamonds found. Kind of like a lottery, but more interactive.
This citation the first Google hit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018438
However, I highly recommend to anyone to instead check out the nearby dig-your-own quartz crystal mines in the town of Mount Ida. You are pretty much 100% guaranteed to find some decent sized quartz, whereas finding a diamond in Crater of Diamonds is much, much more rare.
https://www.academia.edu/19688604/Kimberlitic_Rocks_of_Centr...
But it is an interesting place. There is a moment when I looked up and stared at the dirt field and thought. There is a volcano underneath us... I am standing in a crater.
It is fun but work.
While you're in Arkansas, rent a mountain bike near Eureka Springs or Bentonville and go shredding.