(Please no one get pedantic on ring cost to me, absolutely not the point of this comment)
Also, ‘a few days salary’ rather defeats the rituals purpose.
If the desire is emotional, then there’s no reasoning with it anyway. (And not everything in life need be logical.)
You might not value it, but I dare say you value things that I don't value.
Define artificial tradition. Yes someone can invent it, but it requires people to actually adopt it. All the trappings of Christmas were invented by someone. They aren't 'artificial' though
Artificial tradition as in created by a marketing campaign to sell a product. Same things as eating “KFC on Christmas” in Japan or more recently “Happy Honda Days” just slightly older and more widespread.
>Value is defined in free markets by what you can sell something for
So if someone can sell you a diamond for X, it is worth X. So the diamond is worth what you're paying.
Was Christmas created to sell Christianity?
I just don't get the distinction. A 'natural' tradition isn't somehow more wholesome, we've just forgotten who invented it. And the meaning still derives from the people partaking in that tradition.
Note quite, when most people buy land the seller doesn’t receive the full amount you pay realtors get their cut of the transaction. Same deal with used cars etc, the transaction costs are removed from the sales price when calculating value.
Commercial Diamonds are just an unusually extreme case.
> I just don't get the distinction. A 'natural' tradition isn't somehow more wholesome, we've just forgotten who invented it. And the meaning still derives from the people partaking in that tradition.
The meaning of diamonds still derives from advertising which is the haven’t stopped because people stop caring when they do. This clearly demonstrates the artificial nature of what’s happening.
Nobody needs to advertise saying excuse me if you bump into someone in a crowd, that has been maintained culturally for a long time without outside influence.
Saying someone created it therefore it’s all the same is a meaningless statement. People create different things, saying someone created something doesn’t imply what that thing is.
In my country house selling generally uses an agency model, I (optionally) employ someone to market my house.
I get the full value, and then pay them a fee.
A second hand car seller sells the car, they make money by adding value. If I choose to buy a car I can go direct to a seller but they may not have want I want, may not be available at convenient times, and I'll have less come back if things go wrong.
>Saying someone created it therefore it’s all the same is a meaningless statement. People create different things, saying someone created something doesn’t imply what that thing is.
You're implying who created that thing is more important than what the thing is.
So can we agree that it's the thing that's important, not who made it.
It really doesn’t matter how the transaction is structured, sellers can do that legwork themselves but that’s also a cost. If you sell your house for 1 million and taxes eat 10k and the agents eat 10k then the house must be worth 980k to you because that’s what ends up in your bank account.
Which is why economics define the term value as what the seller keeps after selling something because if the seller thinks it’s worth more than that they wouldn’t do the transaction.
> You’re implying who created the thing is more importantly than what the thing is.
No I am arguing what maintains the thing is important. People argue about who created the first iconic foods lie Philly Cheese Stake or Deep Dish Pizza etc, but they don’t need to actively maintain its cultural inertia.
Diamond engagement rings on the other hand only exist with active effort on the part of Diamond Merchants. Which is why they keep being advertised as such.
It’s trivial to make an idea like an advertising slogan catch on when you’re blasting it over the airwaves regularly, but people very quickly forget about them without regular reinforcement. Here’s some of the most famous US slogans from the 20th century fill in the brand: "All the News That's Fit to Print", "Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes you don't.", "Where's the beef?" "The pause that refreshes"
If you’re old enough you might even remember them or the equivalent from where you live, but they aren’t going to roll off the tongue the way more recent examples like “_ eat Fresh”, “Just do it”, “The Best a Man Can Get”, “Like a good neighbor, _ is there.” etc do. Those slogans aren’t better, the difference is just recent advertising budgets.
Christmas today looks nothing like Christmas in 1900, across the world.
Most of the foods today (and I'm not talking about fast food) were invented in the same period. At least their modern incarnations, sometimes they have really old names but the old versions had very little in common with the current food.
Documentation isn’t that great, but back in the 1450’s people decorated fir trees with apples alongside other ornaments which is the origin of modern round ornaments. By the 1530 there where rules limiting people to one tree in their homes. Massachusetts outlawed Christmas celebrations back in 1659 outside of Church attendance.
The tradition had spread well outside of Germany even back in 1841 Winser Castle had a Christmas Tree.
Christmas in Eastern Europe and most other places looked nothing like that. Heck, Seychelles and Hawaii decorate their local trees like they're fir trees in Scandinavia.
> Yes the tradition spread, but people don’t live in the same place our ancestors did 600 years ago either.
Yes, they do :-)
The vast majority of people, especially in underdeveloped or developing countries, DO live in the general area where their ancestors moved during the last migration, which for some was thousands of years ago. People really don't move away unless it's easy or they're forced to.
And my comment also included stuff like food. Most current food is modern.
Even just within Africa there’s been a huge amount of migration recently.
Not all of this was even voluntarily. I have ancestors that trace back to Spanish Armada in 1588 getting stuck in England.
> Most current food is modern.
Only by the strictest interpretation of recipes. Most food is remixes of ancient staples like bread and cheese, or like tomatoes local plants that spread hundreds of years ago.
You could get a cheeseburger, as in ground beef topped with cheese served on a bun, going back to antiquity. Thomas Jefferson had "potatoes served in the French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802. Thin sliced potatoes boiled in oil may have first entered the western diet all the way back in 1623, but we don’t know what "papas fritas" means.
Staples like rice are obviously ancient and still make up a large part of peoples diets.
Meat was super expensive for most people, it was hardly a mass market thing to be eaten every day.
I could go on and on :-)
Thomas Jefferson was an American elite. Americans have had it much better, or at least richer, than most of the rest of the world, for far longer.
That said meat was more common than generally portrayed. Fish has been a staple food in much of the world for a long time. Dramatically lower human population until recently means overfishing has largely been a more recent concern.
But we also look at the ethics of most diamonds. And aside custom lab grown, child exploitation and murder are the norm.
I ethically refuse to pay any money into that system of child exploitation, child murder, and mass violence.
It’s ok to be picky.
Buying a lottery ticket when the jackpot hits a billion dollars and blowing 100k in Las Vegas are both gambling, but the first is essentially harmless fun while the second is a sign of deeper issues.
A line should be drawn when the irrationality of one causes inarguable and debilitating friction in the relationships of that person.
In other words : It's okay to be the person who loves pink, dresses in pink, bathes in pink -- until it disallows that person to find meaningful work/friends/mates/whatever; then it's more than just human irrationality, it's the inability to cope with others and the world at large.
It’s also not particularly uncommon for divorcing couples to still have sex and even care for each other deeply. Based on one study something like ~6% of divorces result in the couple remarrying each other and of those marriages only 30% or so end in a second divorce.
Positional goods have real effects, mediated by other people, in a way that astrology doesn't directly.
Reducing the role of such things is often good life advice, and pushing back on mined diamonds in particular is morally motivated as well, but I don't think it's right to consider it the same as astrology.
How about spirituality or religion?
From poor people destroying their lives in Congo open pit mines to deBeers laughing in your face when selling you small rock which is not that rare for as much money as you are willing to accept. And if you got any form of certificate from then that your specific diamond is not blood diamond, well that paper has less value than used toilet paper, nobody could ever check or enforce that. So people here mentioning how their wives glow when looking at diamonds, well they are looking at shiny human suffering. And if future wife doesn't care enough about that, well you just learned a very interesting personality trait of her, without the need to go through years of relationship.