On 10/9/07, Paul G. Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sun, 2007-10-07 at 22:29 -0700, Robert Donovan wrote: > > > > > One way to make diamond prices go down is simply for all diamond > > miners to refuse to sell to DeBeers. Daimonds are not actually that > > rare a stone. DeBeers just buys every last one it can get their hands > > on to withhold them from the market. Of course, convincing the likes > > of the RUF to do that is a pipe dream. > > > > I once saw a program on diamonds. There was an interview with DeBeers. > They flatly stated that diamonds are not rare. The said the reason that > diamond prices are kept high is so that they will not lose their the > sentimental/romantic/whatever value they have enjoyed for so long.
And DeBeers buys up the vast majority of them before they ever get to market. Most of them never make it out of the DeBeers vaults. They always seem to leave that last bit out, must thing it goes without saying. > Imagine what a blow it would be if suddenly a 1ct diamond could be > purchased for a few bucks. (Note: It takes about 4 hours to polish a > diamond until it is the shape you'd find in a piece of jewelry - Ref. > "How It's Made"). Given that, it would still cost a bit of money even if > they were not rare due to the overhead of having to pay the diamond > cutter to make the thing.) Certainly, but since using natural diamonds for heat sinks, assuming a 1ct diamond was cheap enough to do so, doesn't require as much intricate polishing. The cutting is not as labor intensive, probably even less so fo a diamond heat sink since the cutting is done primarily for beauty, which a heat sink wouldn't be -- well mabe for a mod case sold in Sharper Image on Rodeo drive. Thus, the cost would be made more competitive with synthetic diamonds. If they got close enough for the substitution effect to occur, the prices could really come down then. Again, this is all airy conjecture since the premise, a cheap 1ct natural diamond, isn't going to happen any time soon unless the folks like Gemesis succeed in making a synthetic diamond that is entirely indistiguishable from the natural type. RD -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
