alt Hacker NewsSouth African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones
Comments
> Demand for engagement rings gave thousands of South Africans steady work at De Beers. Now, weak sales and lab-grown stones are taking it away.
So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?
Shorter:
"South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"
Oh shame. The poor devils.
Brutal news for Botswana which was really breaking new ground in raising Sub Saharan living standards. 30% of their GDP and a huge portion of government revenues are diamond exports. And they had gotten to 100% formalized and child labor free supply lines
I heard once that even if DeBeers stopped all diamond mining activity, their existing stockpile would last for a 100 years or more.
How will we survive without the safe and wholesome diamond mines? I guess we'll all have to be okay with the much superior and cheaper lab diamonds...
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.
So lab grown diamonds are good and cheap enough I can finally buy my wife of 21 years a diamond ring?
"Millennials are killing diamond mines!"
Good.
uplifting news of the day right there
"The death of the diamond" Edward Jay Epstein (1983)
[dead]
similar to the lab-grown intelligence impact
Hope to see these headlines some day for the meat industry
The market for natural diamonds will cease to exist when you can buy lab-grown versions for a couple bucks.
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.