South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
wsj.com
wsj.com
They wanted to differentiate between natural and lab-grown versions with the former being much more expensive. But that train has left the station since there's little to no difference in quality between the two. In fact, I once predicted there'd be huge scams where lab-grown ones would be repackaged and sold as natural ones and that would ruin customers' trust in natural diamonds.
But it now seems that isn't going to happen because customers are voting with their feet and leaving natural diamonds behind.
Lab grown can be way better quality. To me it was a no-brainer considering the ethical concerns, then add in the cost difference. The only argument I've heard for natural is "I like the imperfections". Sounds like brainwashing to me. They're chemically identical
The mining industry should die
I’d much rather wear a monument to our cleverness than a dinosaur mashed under a rock.
First, they form deep down in the mantle around 100 miles down. The only way they get up here is through rare and violent high velocity eruption events that bring mantle material up to the surface. Most are very old, too; greater than a billion years old.
I don't recall the source of the carbon they're made from, but it's certainly not any sort of organic material like coal or dinosaurs. ;)
Or I could be totally wrong. I really have no interest in these things beyond the geology behind them and it's possible the science has uncovered new stuff since I last studied them.
Likewise, I have no idea how these synthetic diamonds are being made nowadays, but I bet that's pretty cool, too.
In fairness, this is actually pretty cool
As to the mining industry, it is dying, again, China. Electric mining equipment is bieng introduced at a ferocios rate, and has contributed the largest share to Chinas astonishing 9% reduction in oil use so far this year, and an equaly astonishing reduction in CO2, in spite of an increase in overall energy use.Mad, fully fucking mad good news.
Here in Canada the copper mine in Sudbury just went all electric, and a significant amount of the steel in the electric mining equipment is carbon free through a Volvo subsidiary.
There is talk now that electrification/solar is pushing ahead so fast that we have actualy passed peak oil durring this episode in the oil wars and that oil will experience a demand collapse.
Win, win!
It's astonishing that it has taken this long to have this kind of impact.
Just like the luxury watches market ceased to exist when you could buy quartz watches for 10 bucks.
This may have been a nerd-snipe for Harry Potter fans, but I still struggle to interpolate an acccurate word there. "pivot to luxury"?
I'm not sure your analogy has teeth.
And the rest is just a matter of paying for luxury.
The main reason the analogy doesn't really help is that the mechanical watch market absolutely cratered, and it's only being propped up by enthusiasts of cool machines.
Diamonds can't really have that. They've already scammed the general population into using slave diamonds at monopoly prices for 30 years longer than they needed to, but no one is _passionate_ about slave diamonds.
Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
People from India, thailand, Myanmar etc have not and probably won’t for a very long time abandon a strong preference for natural diamonds, regardless of how much “better” the lab grown ones are.
This is a textbook case of “worse is better”.
Yes, that's his point. Quartz watches have eaten the market for "I need a cheap portable time piece", like artificial diamonds did for "I need diamonds for tooling".
Both mechanical watches and natural diamonds have therefore been pushed into a niche market of posers and the easily-influenced, who buy them for different reasons than the mass market.
> Lab diamonds and mined diamonds are literally identical products.
No, mined diamonds are inferior for any industrial task due to their flaws and weaknesses.
That analogy doesn't hold for natural diamonds and the comparison therefore falls flat on its face.
I would segment the "diamond ring" market into two: those who "feel obligated" to give/receive a diamond ring because of peer pressure, and those who genuinely find some meaning in the idea of an expensive engagement token.
Personally I thought I was in group 1 but turns out in my own life I am group two. So it never appealed to me to get a lab ring, and I know my wife would be put off by it. Meanwhile my best friend and his wife got the same size lab stone for somewhat cheaper and are happy with that. Group 1 and that's great.
So yes I agree with you the market will shrink because those who were never inherently interested in a high value stone will all go for lab - but perhaps the diminished supply of natural stones (this story) will keep the value of them higher for those who care.
de Beers is still around, and doing well, having taken care of every threat that's come along, including the Soviet diamond glut. Some of the publications that speculated on their imminent demise are no longer around.
Maybe. But the whole point was that diamonds were (marketed as) being special because they were rare and expensive, and so a status symbol. If they're so cheap as to put them in Kinder Eggs or Cracker Jack boxes, what's the point of having a diamond all?
Going forward people (or some class thereof) may move onto other gems that are still rare and cannot (yet?) be manufactured.
Otherwise, a perfect replica of the Mona Lisa would cost the same as the original.
So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?
“De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”
I'm sure there are enough hard-right wingers who will happily flaunt their wealth and disdain for other human beings.
https://www.freedomunited.org/news/botswana-diamonds-ugly-tr...
Things like marital rape are still legal there.
For example, exploitation is bad, but child exploitation is worse. So moving from just child exploitation to adult exploitation is a positive move that still results in an abhorrent status quo. On the other hand I can't think of an example where we went from child exploitation --> no exploitation of any kind...
Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.
The venture began in 1969 and as difficult as the economic situation there is now, subsaharan africa was an even worse place then. So I think your counterfactual needs put into perspective. Additionally in 2013, the state created the 100% owned Okavango Diamond Company to export diamonds using the institutional knowledge they'd gathered over the decades.
False. The sixties were one of the better decades (economically) in sub Saharan Africa. The region was richer than much of Asia, with the exception of a few places like Congo and Ghana.
> the assumption that Botswana could have had similar results sans De Beers.
De Beers was created by Cecil Rhodes, who essentially guided the British to establish the Bechuanaland Protectorate. The British economically ravaged the area and left it one of the poorest places on the planet. It's wild to say they wouldn't have done it without De Beers when they were essentially guaranteed they couldn't do it without De Beers by the guy who founded De Beers, literally less than a century before Debswana was created.
Anything in the 21st century doesn't change the fact that one private entity has extracted more value from a desperate country than they deserve for decades. Had the British, I don't know, left Botswana with such luxuries as "paved roads" maybe they would have had more economic leverage in 1969.
Or is the theory here that De Beers somehow keeps the part of the Botswanian economy they don't participate in poor/unproductive?
Another reading is that Botswana has a small economy.
It has been growing fast for a while, but has a heavy reliance on mining gemstones.
Other wide bandgap semiconductors, i.e. silicon carbide (a.k.a. "moissanite" in jewelry) and gallium nitride are well on their way to make silicon completely obsolete for power semiconductor devices, but they are still many years away from reaching their full potential, in good part because their crystals have still too many defects in comparison with the crystals that can be grown from silicon. Because of too many crystal defects, for now the only commercial SiC devices are MOSFETs and Schottky diodes, despite the fact that SiC thyristors have exceptional properties for working with very high voltages, but bipolar semiconductor devices are much more sensitive to crystal defects, so their mass production is waiting for improvements in crystal growing.
Besides SiC and GaN, there are a few other semiconductors that have greater chances than diamond to become useful for semiconductor devices, e.g. gallium oxide or the sulfides of molybdenum and tungsten.
In diamond, there is not only the problem of crystal defects, but also the currently known dopants have various undesirable properties, like becoming active only at high temperatures, so some diamond electronic devices could be made to work in an oven or on the Venus surface, but not at room temperature.
While the use of diamond as a semiconductor is far in the future and there is no certainty that it will ever become able to replace silicon carbide, if artificial diamonds become cheap enough they might be used much more frequently for heatsinks, including in computers, as the material with the best thermal conductivity.
Diamond heatsinks are already in use, but only in niche applications where price is irrelevant.
Since nobody wants to buy them anymore.
In a similar vein it has been said (by me, just now) that DeBeers is actually already out of diamonds and manufactures then de novo from the compressed ashes of orphans.
De Beers currently has about 2 billion worth of diamond stock in its holds. This equates to about... 5-6 months of sales volume. It used to be worth more but lab-grown and other re-valuing initiatives have dropped the worth of their hoard.
It’s the same reason men buy Rolexes.
Also don’t even question it since economic inequality going up means most of the good high end bags or watches out pace inflation!!!
So... instead of spending $5k on that blood diamond, spend that much on a larger, prettier, flashier, objectively better lab diamond. Now you or your lady friend can enjoy a bigger, nicer, even more luxurious diamond for the same price. You can still spend $5k if you wish, but end up with something more mind-blowing.
"South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"
I mean, you're right, just ask them to set a lab-grown rock. You're not bringing in ingots of gold for the ring, after all.
Then again, even synthetic diamonds can get expensive so maybe any savings is good savings.
I do not eat cheeseburgers to feel manly or dominant. I eat them because they are delicious. If I could have a plant-based or otherwise non-meat burger that tastes as good as the real thing, I’d eat it. Impossible burgers are getting close and I’ve had my fair share of them, but they’re not there yet. They’re near enough that I’m confident we’ll get there soon.
The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.
No wonder it did not work.
A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.
I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.
These days all I can find in groceries stores is various “plant protein” meat-wannabes.
I do make tempeh from time to time, but the flavor just isn’t quite right for me. It’s good, but not my preferred option.
Fortunately a black bean burger is not hard to make at home.
There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...
Impossible/Beyond barely exists in comparison
>That’s a weird comparaison between one or two brand and "an industry".
In other words, Impossible and Beyond are not the only companies in meat replacement space. They are probably the largest, but comparing them to the whole industry makes no sense.
Their combined market cap seems to be around 600M.
Hit me up with some citations please, mine are below.
https://notice.co/c/impossiblefoods https://robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/BYND/
Define "inferior" I guess? If the goal is "ingest as much usable protein as your body needs" plants can do it at levels beyond whatever you're going for. Is this a cost value analysis situation? Is it about taste/texture/enjoyment?
*Lazy source: https://www.greatveganathletes.com/
why substantially cheaper? Break-even would be fine too, no? And as a plus, lab-grown meat is much more ethical.
I also think that replacing 'cheap' meat like ground beef would already be sufficient and would make a huge impact, there is really no need make it difficult for ourselves and try to replace rib-eye.
I'd rather not be testing/tasting experimental lab stuff. And mass production bringing down the price with economies of scale is the real proof that the technology is ready.
i'm no vegan, but if identical lab-grown alternatives are available at near same cost without the hormones, antibiotics, emissions, I'll take it
The test of 'identical' to me is going to be mass production with economies of scale. I surely don't have the equipment to test whether it's identical, nor would I trust the marketing.
I don't see artificial meat being the first exception to this. I'd see 'same price as meat' being an indication of something going wrong here.
I'm sure there are a dozen other reasons I didn't immediately think of.
In Europe they managed to get words like burger, nugget and sausage to only be legally applicable to meat. They'll definitely do the same for words for actual meat.
[1] Relax, I'm joking.
But burger, sausage and nugget are just about the shape. Restricting that only to meat is silly. Veggie burgers have been around for multiple decades. There's absolutely nothing misleading about that.
Also consider the many products that are something-flavoured (often fruit, but also other things) without containing the actual thing, yet clearly marketed with the thing they don't contain. Or fake chocolate. Pizza containing mostly fake cheese. Is that not far more misleading?
By which you mean US style grain finished short cycle beef I guess?
The world's bigger than that.
Look how big the industrial cow (bovoid according to international labeling standards) has become. Bow before it until your heart explodes!
By that definition, places like Europe and New Zealand don't produce modern beef.
I really miss the days of $2/lb grass-fed New Zealand ground beef.
Surprisingly enough, they hold most beef processing plants to higher standards than the rest of the industry (they're still buying cheap trimmings, don't get me wrong), because they do so much volume, basic probability tells us that most food poisoning outbreaks would hit them otherwise.
Sure, you could find a farmer that raises cows and butchers them on site, but that's rare, and the easiest way to actually achieve that is to buy a whole or half cow at a time.
Most small farms don't bother with that: they raise it from calf to adult on grazing land, then send it to a feed lot where the miracles of modern science significantly increase the cow's weight before slaughter. Cows that are still producing calves get retained to grow the herd next year.
If you want to pay extra for this, look for "grass-fed, grain-finished" beef. Most unlabeled stuff in the US goes through that funnel though.
So they developed standards and demanded that all their hamburgers be formed, frozen, and packaged by the processor and kept frozen until cooking. It's really the safest way to handle that volume of ground beef through the distribution chain.
Apparently their 1/4 lb burgers now use fresh beef, not frozen. Not sure how that's handled but it sounds more risky.
Perhaps you're anticipating this:
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/sep/4/trump-allows...
There are farmers everywhere who will sell you a cow. There are small butcher shops that will process it.
This is a solution in search of a problem, in my opinion. It will only benefit already massive corporation farms.
I'm all for breaking the stranglehold of those big 4 meatpacking companies, but make it an actual law, not something that won't hold up in court.
This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.
If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.
We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.
More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.
We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.
Im into gem cutting as a hobby so its been great for me to find stuff like these cheap ruby roughs[1] but yea, its gonna fuck up anyone selling the natural stuff.
[1]https://www.etsy.com/listing/4443524661/lab-grown-red-ruby-s...
Not ridiculously cheap, but probably within the realm of most people on this forums budget if they want to get into it.
Another plus side of the lab grown gems is that they are usually uniform in quality. Natural stones can have a lot of variance in hardness and cracks that make them need a more nuanced hand on.
If anyone running across this comment thread gets interested, the material you are looking for is "lab grown ${gemstone you care about} rough"
And then if she says “yeah I want you to donate to the Enslave African Children to Plunder the Earth For Frivolous Baubles Foundation,” you know, hopefully that’s a fucking bullet the guy just dodged.
The picture subtitle says everything that needs to be said about this: "Miners like De Beers have positioned diamonds as synonymous with love and devotion."
Scumbags.
The transmutations are possible, it’s just that the energy currently required is worth more than the gold would be. Colder fusion -> cheaper lab-origin gold.