Comments on: Boring Weekend Report

By: Twwly

Twwly — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:49:37 +0000

(And of course I agree).

;)

By: Twwly

Twwly — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:49:13 +0000

Bob has just told me we are supposed to go visit you in the summer.

He is VERY impressed that the picture of you with the helicopter was taken IN YOUR HOUSE! WOW! He says. That’s the neatest dollhouse EVER, says my 4 year old.

By: anselm

anselm — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:59:54 +0000

I’ve been watching the diamond thing with interest for a while. It looks like they perfected lab-grown diamonds (quality-wise) some time ago, and then just needed to get the size up. Recently, that happened, but they were still far more expensive than naturally occurring diamonds because it was so time-consuming.

SO then that got worked out with some sped-up deposition techniques, not so much that they were cheaper to make mid-size stones, so much as that it became possible to make unnaturally large ones, that quickly offset the cost of huge natural stones. This where, of course, “defects” became desirable “inclusions” that marked a stone as “real” instead of “fake.”

Naturally, they quickly figured out how to create those in labs too.

So last I heard, lab-grown stones are still more expensive than natural stones because they’re so slow to build, and the market for them is much less because DeBeers and other cartels have been badmouthing them as “fake” diamonds. It really is a house of cards at this point.

I’ll invest in my education, thank you.

By: peteD3

peteD3 — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:38:00 +0000

its not whining to me, buddy.

keep it up!

By: HJP

HJP — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:13:43 +0000

I dealt with diamond buying and selling in the late 90′s and it’s nothing but smoke and mirrors. I could buy a ‘series’ of diamonds (same features, size, color, etc) in a lot of say 20 and then turn them over in different ways. The biggest profit would be for a series that could be used for matching jewelry, like two matching earrings, braclet stones, etc. What I could buy for $20 I could sell for $100 if I was lucky, but finding someone to buy isn’t as easy as they make it sound. Unless you get good stones and larger sizes it’s not worth the hassle. If you have that kind of money to buy expensive stones you probably should invest it in something else (like gold) because finding that buyer for the stone is hard. If you want to buy for yourself, to enjoy having that stone, and pass it down in the family I think it’s great.
Also, 90% of colored sotnes are artificially enhanced with radiation or other treatments. They are more common in mining and instead of sending them off to industrial use they marketed the champane, chocolate, smoky, and other browns as rare and limited to jack the costs up. The only colores diamond worth anything are bright clear yellows and blues and such. I have even seem them marlet jet black diamonds at more than clear quality ones because htye are supposed to be rare, jet black – like polished coal?
I won’t even go into blood diamonds. I quit in 2001, selling stones makes used car saleman look like angels.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:37:03 +0000

Nice Maudite shirt. Now I want a beer, and it’s 8:30 am here.