There you go. Price of diamonds must have come down or less diamonds or more tax
Thanks
DON
Curious the saffette that is giving me so much grief as I am doing it myself has 8 daimonds. When it was sold to me I was told they were safires, but as I have written elswhere on the forums after the trip to the museum one of the older collectors told me my stones were diamond.
There is a lot of mythos about carbon crystals. The develompent of lab stones in the late 1960s probably did a lot to devalue them. The whole buisness is an artificial commodity. One just had to walk into the diamond sales rooms at Basel Fair or in Amsterdam so see that there are plenty to be had. There is also the stuff that shall not be mentioned here, about the raw material sources.
Then there was the 1990 Oakland Hills firestorm. A whole upscale community east of San Francisco, Hundreds of homes burned. Turns out diamonds also burn (and are not forever.) There reports of looter stealing diamonds (but leaving puddles of gold behind.) It is also said that the Parisian Whores who were paid in diamonds, would throw them into the fireplace to see if they were real. Could be an urban myth, but any stone on the Titanic has long dissolved in the seawater as have the stones on the Antikythera wreck.
Perhaps in the days before the undersea cable diamonds things could be used to shift wealth before crypto. Perhaps they still do at a certain level.
Personally I think gold is also a joke. I have grown up as a third gen california, and while my GGparents did not come in 49 they did come in the 1850s and settled down in the 1870s. There is so much gold in the Seirras and the Andies, it would crash the world markets if it were mined. Before the pandemic, one could actually make more from toursim in the gold country than from ore extraction.
When I worked retail after college in the early 1980s one of my best clients was Homestake mining. In 2016 I got to visit Deadwood as part of the AMICA (player piano- pipe organ collecting society.) I was shoked in a way to find out that the mine had been closed for some years. They still keep the tipple operational as it is now used for physics experiments. Turns out all the mineral rights have been purchaced by multinational shell corps, which answer to no government. Their total function is to shut down stuff so that the prices rise.
Silver on the other hand ....
-j (who really should go to bed.)
