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Comment by pg_bot | Hacker News Reader

There is a company called Niron Magnetics based out of Minnesota that looks promising. They are making an Iron Nitride magnet that supposedly is better than neodymium. Since it's made out of iron and nitrogen it should also be a lot cheaper to produce.

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Iron nitride is in many respects not better than neodymium, but certainly very promising nonetheless.

Diamonds are made of just carbon.

And are pretty cheap to produce relative to mine at this point

And your point is?

Diamonds are a cartel backed, price gouged, selectively distributed, commodity whose only production cost is digging them out of the ground.

On top of that they are pretty much the most common gemstone.

The cartel I mentioned earlier has also had a heavy handed approach towards the producers of artificial diamond.

All of this is a long winded way of saying “what is your point?” Diamonds and Common earth element man made magnets have absolutely nothing in common.

It’s just a brief counterexample aiming to challenge the parent’s argument that the relative cost of a material is determined by the relative abundance of its constituent elements.

Industrial diamonds are not that expensive.

Yep. And the DeBeers cartel manufactured their association with marriage despite being more common and more expensive than ruby.

Since diamonds are made of just carbon, they are cheaply produced using chemical vapor deposition.

https://fortune.com/2023/09/03/diamond-demand-falling-lab-gr...

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