Not much of interest to blog about today… Nefarious and I headed out to the bookstore today to get some new stuff to read, having just finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s book Gifts, which started out as a sort of dark coming-of-age story of a boy in a medeival backwater community where people have generally dark and destructive supernatural powers, and him coming to terms with his own, but has a few surprising plot twists at the end that gave us a lot to think about. As well as getting Nefarious a couple more graphic novels — right now she’s reading an adaptation of the Jungle Book — I grabbed Tunnels by Gordon and Williams, and The Cabinet of Wonders (The Kronos Chronicles) which we started tonight. On the radio there was a show (I suspect a paid advertisement) that was talking about diamonds, hosted by some diamond wholesaler. He was talking about what a good investment diamonds are, specifically coloured diamonds. His claim was that diamonds are one of the best long term investments a person can make and that any diamond you bought should be expected to climb dramatically in value. Holy deception! Given that the technology of making artificial diamonds is getting better and better, and it’s pretty safe to assume that it won’t be long before “fake” diamonds are indestinguishable from the “real” thing, and that making the artificial ones will get cheaper and cheaper. After that, the only thing about a diamond that has value is the paper trail of where it was found, and I can’t imagine that scam will last for long. So to me it seems like diamonds one of the worst ways to invest your money. It’s not like diamonds are a precious metal like gold — they’re just a particular arrangement of carbon molecules, and carbon is far from valuable. I wonder how many people will foolishly invest in the $100,000+ stones he was peddling that will, soon enough, be worth no more than any other common pebble.
I didn’t end up working on my paint shelf but I did do a little sculpting. This is the new light switch faceplate, for a double switch, that I’m working on. Below that is “Tippy Pig”, which is Nefarious’s creation that I touched up for her after she sculpted it.
He is of course called “Tippy Pig” because his head is so large that he tends to tip forward onto his face. I gave him a bigger belly to offset his forward CG, but Nefarious got mad at me for messing with her character too much and made me grind his potbelly off again. The only thing that sucks is that it’s so incredibly hot in this studio that the clay can be a little difficult to work with because of how soft it gets.
We also did lots of helicopter flying this weekend.
Not sure what my plans are this week, although two days are committed to hospital visits. I think I may add another appointment though to get my knees xrayed because it feels to me like they’re getting worse quickly, and I don’t have any reason to have joint failure so I’m confused. While I’m whining, it’s getting to be not so fun to do carving with my Dremel, because if I do it for too long, I lose the use of my hand for a couple days as the muscles heal. Wah wah wah.
6 Comments
Nice Maudite shirt. Now I want a beer, and it’s 8:30 am here.
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.
its not whining to me, buddy.
keep it up!
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.
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.
(And of course I agree).
;)
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