You'd be surprised how few people even read a resume before turning to intimidation - legal, physical, political or otherwise. It's amazing how often managers think they can bully someone, and then find out that their opponent discovered kryptonite a long time ago.

Here's the story, from Wired, back in 2003.[1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

The blood detector.

I wonder where these diamonds are laundered. probably some country with a comparatively high gdp that is a big time diamond exporter despite having zero diamond mines I imagine.

China and Africa are destroying the DeBeers diamond cartel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7tGZzwe4mQ

PS Question : Who is stealing the content idea from whom? Is it possible that the article author saw this video and decided to write abou it?

I do the same thing with friends who use IP TV that gets it's from a friend of a friend of a friend.

All right on, but your comment reminded me that they are innovating in the marketing space, or at least trying — last spring, they ran a sizeable ad campaign on Reddit for https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/natural-diamond-types-and-al...

As someone who’s already cynical about the ”natural”(/extractive) diamond “industry”(/cartel), the points made on that site are hilarious and absurd — highly recommend a scroll for anyone interested in how desperate they are to attack the new tech. Just from that comparison page, my favorite argument is probably “lab grown diamonds are from (dirty, evil) India and China, whereas natural diamonds are from ~nature~”, although “lab grown diamonds are so perfect that they’re all the same grade, and therefore boring” is a close runner up.

The fact that they’re now publishing a magazine devoted entirely to this topic tells me they haven’t slowed down, just improved their ad spend so that it’s not wasted on me! Something tells me there’s quite a mountain of financial instruments secured by the warehouses of diamonds they have to keep supply tight, so I can only see this ramping up in the short term.

The death knell for the industry is the redefinition of the unit of American society.

The unit at the time of DaBeers smashing 1947 "Diamonds are Forever" campaign, in 1947, was the -family-. It wasn't too long after women's suffrage, and still women were expected to be barefoot and pregnant, after all, birth control wouldn't come for another 20 years. Families were the operative entity messaging targeted, and the campaign was successful because the diamond was a sort of foundation for the foundation of the family, the marriage, not dissimilar in spirit from long held human societal norms of dowries and such.

The sexual and hippie revolution of the 1960s shook the whole thing up. Women didn't need families, there was birth control, women could work, a revolution carrying forth to the 1980s shark killer business woman to today where in fact many universities have become female majority. The modern unit of american society is the individual, not the unit, making the diamond an anachronistic echo of a once proud culture, now seen as a bit dated, a bit weird, a bit unsettling and paternalistic, instilling the same feelings in a person that an old Playboy magazine might.

Like the parent comment says, there will still be demand for high-quality diamonds whether or not they're considered a luxury. It's more that the marginal utility of a diamond has plummeted, compared to cheaper and easily mass-produced iPhones or Labubu dolls. Hardly surprising that diamonds are unpopular to a generation of Americans who are overwhelmingly unlikely to ever own a house.

It's not the 1950s anymore, and blue-collar workers don't want to piss away 3 months salary to buy a depreciating asset. It's really only marketable if you lie to the customer.

Carter Clarke. See this article: https://www.wired.com/2003/09/diamond/

I don't know anything about the industry, but I thought it would be a good test for the state of AI. I put Animats' comment and your question into DeepSeek R1 and it said (I think correctly) that the company was Gemesis and the retiree was Carter Clarke Jr: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemesis.

How do you intend to obtain data?

Why hasn’t this been done already?

First, it is way harder to do.Every imperfection introduces secondary effects.

Second, the people that make those diamonds are not ashamed or hiding but believe on what they do. Leo Di Caprio for example invested millions in making synthetic diamonds that do not finance wars in Africa.

New generations are proud of people not dying for getting their beautiful stones.

lastly, diamonds, like gold, are very useful for science. In particular they are amazing semiconductors with incredible heat dissipation and small power loses. If we get better, less defects diamonds ,cheaper, power electronics will be revolutionised.

Your proposed engineered randomness goes against almost everything making lab grown diamonds popular -- pseudo mined diamonds would cost more than flawless ones and increasingly no one cares what DeBeer's exotic lab tests think. Your post didn't ring LLM to me, it just seemed disconnected from the article and market trends.

What I'd pay more for is an exotic color or multicolor diamond (a diamond built around a ruby?). Or one that changed color depending on the lighting -- picture moonlight turning it a brilliant blue or purple (basically I want it to come from Middle Earth). Or one that glowed red in the dark.

Actually, I wouldn't be the target for this, but I'd love it if they existed.

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