I have a visceral hatred for the diamond industry, and its based on nothing except my shock at how expensive a shiny rock is and the effectiveness of the advertising campaign around them. I remember going to buy my wife an engagement ring and just being incredulous at the price. I completely understand supply and demand but a lot of the supply limitation is artificial. Its one of the few things I am emotional about, I simply loath the diamond industry and the entire sham that you have to spend x number of months salary on a rock to prove to the world that you love someone. They built such an incredible narrative where people would judge each other based on the size of a rock or that it had to be of X clarity or you had to spend so much to prove whatever.

To this day I change the channel when I hear a commercial for a diamond store on the radio and its been 20+ years. I am so excited about lab grown diamonds.

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Liftyee 5 days ago | parent [-]

Personally felt this too, though I think I hate dishonest marketers and adversarial business-customer relations more broadly.

For some reason my ideal vision of capitalism is where a company simply makes a product that solves customers' problem and makes them happy, receiving a fair amount of money in return for their efforts. No corporate propaganda campaigns or anti-consumer shenanigans needed, just a solid [thing] for people who need [thing].

Interested to hear potential problems with this approach in the replies.

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wonderwonder 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think that what you have described for the most part is just basic capitalism which I agree with as generally competitors drive prices down. The diamond industry has some how been allowed to conspire to artificially limit supply and raise prices to a level even the oil industry has not been able to achieve.

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Liftyee 4 days ago | parent [-]

Curious as I'm not too familiar - if what I've described is basic capitalism, then what is today's system like in the US?

Need to look into the differences so I can be precise when debating these things.

New metaphors: "What trim level of capitalism have we got?" "`class ImperfectCapitalism implements Capitalism`" "RNG capitalism modifiers"

	▲	wonderwonder 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s an interesting question one im probably not the most qualified to answer. US capitalism was always based on prevention of monopolies and cartels (which the diamond industry is) and then a generally hands off approach by the government. Which I generally agree with although someone like Thomas Sowell would argue that even monopolies take care of themselves eventually. Unfortunately it’s been somewhat weakened due to lobbying and subsidies such as for ethanol. US probably has the closest to pure capitalism in the world though, again in my opinion. I do recommend Sowell’s book basic economics. Its a trudge but its very educational and written in an easy to understand way