Yes, Diamonds are Bullshit

Not to mention that these days, gem quality diamonds can be made artificially. And rather cheaply.

De Beers has since convinced people that natural diamonds are better. Because they are more expensive. It’s circular reasoning.

I always thought Axe body spray made you utterly irresistible to a certain sort of murderer…so that isn’t true either??

Also, the price of diamonds was artificially inflated for much of the 20th century. And changing styles meant that existing diamonds were not worth much. A total racket.

Slightly OT

I remember in the movie “Crazy People” the protagonist is an advertising designer who has a mental breakdown and starts being blunt in his ideas. Like in writing ad for a horror movie he says, “Not only is this movie scary it will fuck you up for life!” which makes the movie is a hit. Later on he talks about how sports cars are for men who want hand jobs. “This {points to car} is for this {points to groin}.” and the company makes flyers with “YES, I want a hand job.” printed on them.

That seems to be the underlying message of American society: everything, be it health care, housing, food, education, and in this case, affection, must be bought and if you can’t afford it, you don,t deserve it.

“There are a number of mechanical devices which increase sexual arousal, particularly in women. Chief among these is the Mercedes-Benz 380SL.” -Lynn Lavner

“Buying the right kind of toothpaste or makeup will not fix your problems.”

What if your problem is hygiene???

But opening a Budweiser will still attract a bevy of bikini-clad blondes anxious to play with your beach balls, right?

This diamond story brings to mind another marketing campaign that’s had a profound and lasting impact on American culture, the women’s razor. It started in 1915 with an ad in Harper’s Bazaar, promoting smooth underarms. Before that the idea of women shaving wasn’t even on the radar. Also, radar hadn’t been invented, but that’s another story. From underarms the trend broadened to legs around WW2. And today we see pubic lice headed toward becoming an endangered species as their habitat has been decimated. Okay, so it’s not all bad. But it’s a fascinating story for anyone looking for a light research project.

I have never understood the fascination with diamonds. I do not think they are attractive as a large stone, only as very small accent ones. I much prefer emeralds.

buying a sports car will not get you laid.

I know its not data, but I’ve met multiple examples to the contrary. Along with “working out and shaving your head”, “throwing money around”, “playing ice hockey” and “wearing smart suits”. But then I’d place these tactics alongside “getting pissed-up-drunk and having no boundaries around other pissed-drunk people”. Saying people who display higher socio-economic status have an easier time getting laid is nothing so startlingly new and surprising.

But it depends if you value “getting laid at any cost” and definitely doesn’t mean “get’s you laid with whomever you want” or “have an exciting sex life”, “enjoy lots of romance” or “relationships become easy peasy”.

The “more expensive is always better” meme is probably the principal reason for Linux not taking over the desktop. It crashes less often than Windows, its system-resource footprint is smaller, it’s more resistant to malware, but it doesn’t cost anything, so how good can it really be?

I disagree, diamonds are essential. How can you mine obsidian without a diamond pickaxe? All the mob-grinders in the world will never get you to the Nether!!

The only people I’ve ever met who like the smell of anything made by “Axe” are young heterosexual men.

Which raises the question: why do so many young heterosexual men want to smell attractive to each other? My own theory is that many of them aren’t quite as vibrantly and exclusively hetero as they’d like, and are desperately trying to signal to other young men that they’d much rather have a cuddle and a kiss than a drink and a fight.

Which is why so many of them get confused by the small smile I wear whenever I encounter someone wearing the beastly stuff. They don’t know they’ve just become shounen slash fiction material in my head.

And I don’t even read slash.

My position on shounen remains my own private business.

I don’t even like rings. Especially expensive ones. They get tarnished. They clack on anything hard they happen to bump against. They make imprints on clay, silly putty, bread dough, or anything else mushy and/or malleable. They fall off….into the toilet.

And speaking of hand jobs, they’re not good for those either.

No thanks.

The “more expensive is always better” meme is probably the principal reason for Linux not taking over the desktop. It crashes less often than Windows, its system-resource footprint is smaller, it’s more resistant to malware, but it doesn’t cost anything, so how good can it really be?

Yeah…probably not. For one, a Linux kernel was a lot harder to choose, set up, and use than Windows/OS up until very recently. For another, Linux doesn’t generally come pre-installed on computers you’ll see down at the Best Buy or Fry’s. For yet another, there’s a lot less you can do on Linux.

True story (knowing that anecdote is not data): I installed a Linux partition on my last desktop and then never proceeded to use it. Why? Because I could never get it to talk to my video card. Since I mostly wanted to use that particular desktop to play video games I didn’t have any incentive to get around to fixing the problem, since none of the games I played were ported to Linux, anyway. I’ve never found any compelling reason to revisit Linux since, even though I think about doing it from time to time. I might revisit that if Win9 goes farther in the direction that Win8 has pointed, but that’s about it.

Which raises the question: why do so many young heterosexual men want to smell attractive to each other? My own theory is that many of them aren’t quite as vibrantly and exclusively hetero as they’d like, and are desperately trying to signal to other young men that they’d much rather have a cuddle and a kiss than a drink and a fight.

I’d say it’s probably not. Axe is advertised as “wear this, you’ll have hot women chasing you around.” Speaking as a heterosexual man, the only way I even notice what another guy smells like is if he smells really awful.

Axe is generally within the spectrum of “acceptable guy smells,” which would be things in the deodorant aisle with names like “Cool Breeze” and “Arctic Blast.” That is to say, it’s not things named after flowers or that contain the word “lavender.” That’s because Axe has to walk that line of smelling like men expect to smell, which is not actually what women want men to smell like, but the sort of man who would buy Axe body spray doesn’t actually care, since the advertising covers the gap by telling him that if he smells like Axe women will throw themselves at him with wild abandon and he doesn’t actually know what women want men to smell like because he’s never actually asked a real woman for her honest opinion on the matter. I’d say it’s less “self-loathing homosexuality” than “frat boy obtuseness.”

if I do [get married] I will not be buying a diamond

Heh, I’m tempted to take that bet. Everything you say about diamonds is true, and yet, people throw money away on lots of stupider things. IMO one of the hurdles to a successful relationship is not getting hung up on the things your partner wants but which you think are an utter waste of money. Within reason, of course, but its when you find yourself wanting to buy something for them because they’ll treasure it even though you see no sense in the purchase that you have something. Caring more about how it makes them feel vs. the objective value of the item.

What will likely save you is that I imagine you’d generally be attracted to someone who feels similarly about jewelry in general, and is not likely to want one. But if you think your opinion of your partner’s taste in trinkets, doodads, and collectibles is going to win the day (or even should win the day)…think again. 🙂

My engagement ring came from my husband’s family, and has the date 1861 and a name engraved inside. Since there was no woman with that name in the family, we think that the wedding ring might have been used to pay for a uniform, since his family owned a factory that made uniforms for the Union army during the civil war.

We had it evaluated by a jeweler, who told us that the “diamond” was really a very high-quality cut glass stone, probably from the turn of the last century. We assume that my hubby’s grandmother probably had the stone added.

I’m more proud of this ring and its history than I would be of any ring that my husband could have bought in a jewelry store. We managed to buy gold wedding bands that perfectly matched the band of my ring. At that time (1976), gold wasn’t as expensive as it is now. Mine was $35 and my husband’s was $45.

barbarienne, not all diamonds oxidize at that temperature: the rate of oxidation depends on the perfection of the surface of the diamond. If the surface is relatively free of defects, oxidation will be very slow and much higher temperatures are needed to see it decay.

Diamonds are one of the most abundant of gems, even among semi-precious stones. Diamonds are not rare, they’re immensely inflated in price by buying up the market and holding them, etc., as was mentioned above.

Synthesis of diamond and other gemstones produces gems that are equal in quality to any natural ones, but DeBoers claims that “synthetic diamond” is different, and that they can tell the difference by some kind of spectroscopy. So you get less by buying a “synthetic”.

No, they can’t. A “synthetic” diamond is exactly the same as a natural one. As was said, it may only be too perfect than is usually seen. There is no method that can scan a diamond and determine its origin.

Making diamonds isn’t even that hard, I’ve made them (poor-quality ones) without special equipment. Back in the sixties, General Electric made them from peanut butter. A nice party trick.

Wow… misfired, unedited comment.

Oh well… still curious.

I would have been annoyed if my now-husband had gotten me an engagement ring. We’d been together nearly a decade and owned a house together. I needed a fancy ring like I needed ebola. It would have been money taken out of our joint accounts to buy me something I’d most likely lose. No thanks. If we had, whatever, two months salary burning a hole in our bank accounts, we would have used it to take a nice trip, do improvements on the house or, more likely, invested it so we aren’t surviving on cat food when we’re old.

Of course, we only married so we’d have all the legal rights that come with it (joint ownership of property, visitation rights at hospitals, blah blah) so it wasn’t about some grand gesture of our undying love, just a legal contract to make things official. ROMANCE!