> have you been to an indian wedding in India? Now that’s big big money

Are Indian families spending multiples of annual incomes on weddings? They're lavishly done. But the cost of labour, land and e.g. fresh flowers is also ridiculously cheaper in India than in the West.

> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?

To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.

It's still very irrational no matter who pays. The article is looking at a society-wide wealth here isn't it?

I mean a party? Thousands and thousands of dollars for just one day?

I did the irrational thing, paid a lot for my wedding and it was really special. My family is much closer to her family because of it. From me and my wife's rational self-interested perspective, it makes no sense: we would be in a better position financially had we not splurged a little for the wedding. Our house could be bigger. We could have more optimally allocated our capital.

However, the family bonds being strong outweighs all of that. When we zoom out a little bit and look at our extended family and friend group, it all makes sense. These are the people who will help raise our kids, take care of us when we are down on our luck, etc. The 50 people who attended can, because of our big expensive wedding, put faces to each others' names. It was a fun party for us, but it actually served a very important purpose. This value will not be registered in the GDP number.

I'm poking fun at the article. That first of all, we (the enlightened, modern, etc) spend an absolute metric fuckton ton of money on irrational meaningless shit, due to social pressure. I would point the author of the article to homeopathic medicine, which is a 10b market; just ten of these equals the GDP of Ghana. Do a ctrl-f for colonialism or imperialism or extraction and... yeah, sure. They must be poor because they do quirky things at funerals.

It's so funny you say that. Was literally just chatting to my wife the other day about how mediocre weddings are. You spend $20-$50k basically LARPing as landed British gentry, and end up having less fun than the average 21st, Christmas or New Year's. So much more stress in planning too.

Are you otherwise well off? How do you define "big?"

The good thing is you can have a big wedding without going into debt (assuming you’re rich or don’t mind public parks)

> to have a big wedding like how the article describes funerals in Zimbabwe.

I clicked through to the linked about Zimbabwe, and the article misrepresented the research (at best). The paper notes that when families have unexpected funeral expenses, they hold onto assets if they only have one in that asset class at the expense of temporary food insecurity, which would be like not selling your only car in the face of a shock medical bill and opting for cheaper groceries/ramen.

The paper notes that when Zimbabwean more than one item in an asset class, they are likely to sell one (or more). This reads a lot like generic loss-aversion and not specific to attitudes about death, which would require to be controlled against expense type (e.g. weddings, environmental disaster or unexpected loss of income).

Lab corundum is where it's at. Almost as hard as diamond (Mohs 9), but much less prone to cracking than diamond. It's available in tons of colors (most famous are blue and red -- sapphires and rubies). Lab-grown is so much better than natural that the way they identify natural is by looking for imperfections that lab versions don't have.

Oh, and diamonds burn while aluminum oxide does not.

There's no need to go broke when you can buy a superior product for less money.