In Canada, the New Rush Is for Diamonds
Article about the new diamond mines in Canada that are supplying a much more ethical diamond trade than Africa can provide. If you’re buying a diamond now, until artificial ones are more available, buy Canadian.
A piece on Slashdot today says that a company called Adia Diamonds is finally getting some lab-grown diamonds out and into people’s hands. My hope is that in a few years you’ll be able to get man-made diamonds much more easily than you can today and we don’t have to depend on DeBeers’s monopoly for our shiny stuff. I’ll spare the lecture on why DeBeers is one of the most evil companies in the world, profiting from the slaughter of lots and lots of people, especially in Africa, to sell a gem that isn’t even all that rare.
Some good reading on the topic:
Wired is running an excellent article about manufactured diamonds. There are two labs, one in Florida and one in Boston, that can now make diamonds that are indistinguishable from nature-made ones. And they can make them perfect, every time, for under a hundred dollars. These aren’t artificial - they’re real diamonds - they’re just made in a lab in a few days instead of underground in thousands of years.
This is an amazing thing for me because I’ve come to learn how evil the diamond trade is. De Beers has the definition of an evil monopoly over the market. They intentionally keep the prices high on a gem that isn’t very rare at the expense of many African lives a year. I think I’m actually morally opposed to buying a diamond from how much I’ve learned about this terribly industry. Now it seems that these labs can make them, and do it for cheap.
And even more important than the potential for cheap jewelry is the prospect of using diamonds for scientific purposes. Computers are getting to the point where they’ll eventually run hot enough to melt silicon. Diamond-based semiconductors will open up an increase in computer speed in orders of magnitude.
According to the article, this is a prospect that has De Beers scared. So dangerous to them is the upcoming availability of cheap diamonds that Apollo Diamond president Bryant Linares was once told that his “father’s research was a good way to get a bullet in the head.”