Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickburns | Hacker News Reader

on sale now! for the low, low price of ~$80k USD.

https://www.moregems.com/collections/morganite/products/294c...

Rough math, $1,000 for the raw stone, $5,000 of travel and time to source... $80k sale price with 250 hours of cutting work, $300/hour for master gemcutter, seems very fair.

Where did you get 250 hours from? I don't think it took him anywhere near that long based on the times mentioned in the video.

If it really did people would use CNC for this.

Yeah from the video I believe it was a few days of work.

You think this guy acquired a 740 carat raw stone for $1000?

Yes, here's an online site where you can see, for someone direct sourcing totally.

https://www.gemrockauctions.com/search?query=morganite&weigh...

1505 ct for $3999 asking https://www.gemrockauctions.com/products/1505cts-morganite-c...

It was appraised at $2150 USD. I'm not sure how that translates to the listing price but a 40x markup seems a bit extreme.

The video (very end) and the website both say 192k. Where did you see 2150?

The appraisal at the end of the video says "$2,375" according to the transcript (was watching without audio) and the sample appraisal (which I guess as your sibling pointed out was just meant as a sample of what an appraisal would look like, in which case I think it would have been better form not to include actual numbers) lists $2150 which is close to that value so I assumed that's the actual appraisal.

Given that the sample actually shows a ring and refers to it in the full text, that's obviously not referring to the object but now I'm wondering about the $2,375 figure in the transcript. Is that just a really bad auto-transcription error?

cut morganite retails for ~$300 USD/ct. this finished gem is a smidge over 297 carats.

That explains the listed price, it doesn't explain the disparity to the transcript. Given the comments, I presume he said a different figure in the audio track than the transcript (and therefore subtitles) says?

Yes, he said $192 375

How much was the stone he started with?

700 carats

I meant in $

ohhh. never mentioned.

I’m guessing that uncut stone was around $40,000, but he never says because he clearly doesn’t want to reveal his margins.

I'd have thought that the bigger the gem, the larger the markup.

Yes seems like audio transcript error. The audio says 192375 instead of 2375 . Same number just the first few digits got cut off.

Trusting AI to get anything right is still a huge problem.

Seems like a good reason to double check your auto-subtitles. That's a massive difference and the appraisal was meant to be a big reveal at the end so this isn't just a minor detail.

Watched with subtitles and audio, and there are lots of errors in the transcript.

The funniest error was [Music] every time it was just a grinding noise.

Yeah my wife and I were chuckling at that too.

The “dot” for “dop” mistakes were curious, not because they existed, but that the transcription engine got it right a few times.

I think you're reading the "SAMPLE LEGAL APPRAISAL" which is an appraisal for a different item. I think it's just to give you an idea of the form of appraisal they'd provide for insurance purposes.

this is correct. i found it odd to include that sample appraisal form with the listing at first glance, too.

Wikipedia article on morganite says something like ~$300/carat depending on overall quality.

It’s it a bell curve, so stuff that’s 4 or 5 std devs out is (potentially) worth much much much more than bull stones.

Now I'm chuckling at the image of extremely expensive, perfectly cut, nanometer-scale stones.

They’re actually very cheap, but you can literally get diamond sandpaper

I'm picturing something more like this. https://researchnews.cc/imagenes/2021/03/19/Selffolding-2.jp...

Micrometer-scale, not nanometer-scale.

Nobody would waste 250 hours grinding a stone that cheap. It was obvious that there was error in audio transcript.

Without any gemstone knowledge whatsoever, I guessed at least $40K.

That was my guess too - around $40k.

Oh, absolutely. I wasn't questioning whether it would be sold for the price discussed here. I was wondering why the appraisal was that low (turns out: because the appraisal on the website is an unrelated sample and the appraisal in the video was mistranscribed by missing out several digits so the subtitles were off by orders of magnitude).

There are a lot of areas where the label price is based on some underlying much lower value with somewhat standardized factors being applied so I was wondering if there's some implicit "everyone knows this" translation from the "appraisal" to the sale price I wasn't aware of. Hence me pointing out that that would be quite the markup so there is probably more to it than just profit.

in first-year 'Contracts,' 1L's study that the 'fair market value' of any good or service is defined by Black's Law Dictionary, amongst elsewhere, as "[t]he price that a seller is willing to accept and a buyer is willing to pay on the open market and in an arm's-length transaction [ . . . ]"

this definition captures the actual sale price of almost any transaction imaginable quite comprehensively—which is what most people are really asking when curious about the 'value' of a good, like a precious gemstone, or a service.

NB: 'value' is defined by the same as "1. The significance, desirability, or utility of something" or "2. The monetary worth or price of something; the amount of goods, services, or money that something commands in exchange." 'markup' as "[a]n amount added to an item's cost to determine its selling price."

I'm not sure who you're explaining this to and why because it's largely orthogonal to what I said.

The cut gem's label price is based on an appraisal. The appraisal is based on the market rate (a real-world approximation of the theoretical "fair market value" you explained) of comparable gems.

Because based on both the mistranscribed video and the sample appraisal the appraisal seemed to be much lower than the asking price on the website, I assumed this might be because the appraisal is incomplete and doesn't take into account some factor that might be well-known in the industry to not warrant any mention in the video but still contribute significantly to the final price. Notably, just because the appraisal was specified as a dollar amount that does not eliminate the possibility it might refer to something other than a USD sale price.

Given that a lot of luxury goods and collector's items are auctioned off at vastly inflated prices (often as speculative investment or simply money laundering and complex tax write-off schemes), I would have found this surprising but not implausible. Another example would be insurance where "value" might either be the cost to replace something or the depreciated value of the same item, which can be a very different amount (again by orders of magnitude).

  it's largely orthogonal to what I said

disagree. we're just exchanging thought-provoking ideas here, man. wasn't coming at you or thinking i hold some kind of edification authority over anyone here even in the slightest.

appreciate the back-and-forth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com