cross-posted from: https://futurology.today/post/5004513
Diamond prices are down 60% since a 2011 high, and they are still falling. It’s not all down to lab-grown diamonds, demand is down too, especially in China.
No one can lab-grow gold yet, so its rarity and scarcity protect its value, but that will end too. It’s just a question of when. China launched an asteroid touch-down mission this week, which will make it the 4th country/region to do so, after Europe, the US & Japan.
How soon will it be feasible to mine asteroids? Who knows, but a breakthrough in space propulsion might mean the prospect happens quickly when it does. It’s possible gold has twenty years or less of being high value left.
The $80 Billion Diamond Market Crash Leaves De Beers Reeling
We shit on capitalism a lot but we rarely acknowledge the true greats of the game.
I can’t think of a more evil corp than De Beers aside from Bayer pharma and maaaaaybe Monsanto and Nestle.
This a momentous occasion for gravedancers
Bayer owns Monsanto, or at least its old assets. Monsanto as a company doesn’t exist anymore.
Incredible. Bayer really looked at Monsanto and said ‘that’s a culture fit’ out loud
For as much smoke Marx had for Capitalism, he also was awed by it. In the manifesto, he wrote:
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Capitalism, undoubtedly, is a system of production that no other previous mode of production could even imagine. No other previous social relation could have produced this amount of abundance and technological progress. It is the unevenness of the capitalist system, and its fundamental laws, which bar the vast majority of people from ever benefiting from the productive forces of Capitalism.
This is just another example of the “[constant] revolutionising the instruments of production”. The De Beers are becoming a relic, attempting to hold on to old modes of production. Their practice will, inevitably, be regulated to the dust bin of history.
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It is more true imo that the abundance and technological progress that occured in the last few centuries created the conditions for capitalism to exist. Rather than capitalism creating the conditions for that progress.
Well said, tovarshi
It’s a feedback loop, actually.
It’s a feedback loop, actually.
Heh. You’re not wrong on that part. I suppose that’s the dialectical part of it.
The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa,
The means — unconditional development of the productive forces of society — comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production.
Corps actually compete for most evil Corp title. What you have described ain’t even the surface
EETC is like: hold my gin
Me when the von Neumann refiners get the destination coordinates wrong and my house gets vaporized by a 50 kilo slug of pure gold:
Me after checking the price of the gold:
Diamonds are rare on the surface of the earth, and their discovery therefore costs on the average much labour-time. Consequently, they represent much labour in a small volume of space. Jacob doubts that gold has ever paid its complete value. This holds true even more for diamonds. According to Eschwege, by 1823 the complete yield of the eight-year old Brazilian diamond-diggings had not yet amounted to the value of the 1½ year average product of the Brazilian sugar or coffee plantations. Given more richly laden diggings the same quantum of labour would be represented by more diamonds and their value would sink. If one succeeds in converting coal into diamonds with little labour, then the value of diamonds would sink beneath that of paving stones.
hmm sounds like someone has a theory of where value comes from
This reminds me of how someone I used to know once literally pointed at diamonds to “disprove” the labor of value and is like “Marx never considered diamonds” and I’m just like
at that exact paragraph.
I honestly think we’ll be melting the crown jewels for circuitry before asteroid mining will be economically viable
Electronics and science are the only real material uses for gold, everything else is vanity or an investment
The price of getting anything to the orbit won’t be able to compete with the amount of gold in people’s attics let alone the current mining production unless the demand for it explodes
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I think we will see old landfills and wate disposal sites being literally mined for the old circuit boards we threw away over the past 50 years eventually. Theres so much useful stuff raw materials wise in old trash heaps. We just have to find better ways to process it. Which while not free to do is much cheaper than space mining lol.
exactly, its the same argument as with terraforming Mars
if we could make Mars habitable, we also could reverse climate change on Earth literally millions of years
We’re going to be making gold by blasting tungsten with alpha particles before we’ll ever get asteroid mining. And before doing radiation stuff corporations will be ripping the gold out of people’s teeth. We’ve got a few dozen crises to go before capitalism would ever do something cool like space mining.
Would that be viable energy wise?
Absolutely not, but nuclear transmutation is at least a thing that already exists unlike asteroid mining. One of the problems is that gold has exactly one stable isotope, Au-197. So there are a lot of means to induce nuclear fusion to make other elements into gold, but I think only one method so far (the large hadron collider) has made stable isotopes.
Maybe China can do something cool once they finish building their 100km electron/positron collider.
The naked rapacious greed of the diamond industry was an important thing to encounter on my journey to anti-capitalism
While various adults had various answers to most of my questions when it came to the diamond industry it was all shrugs.
de boers btfo
China doesn’t need an asteroid. They recently learned of the existence a goldmine of gold in Hunan province
while it is a very large deposit, at current consumption rates it won’t last all that long
I dream of the day where we can use gold for its anti corrosion capabilities in industries
gold plated everything not because we’re being fancy but because shit is as cheap as aluminium
My diamond collection doesn’t make sense anymore
how do we know the space miners will a) get gold from space and b) not do the thing de boers did… and realistically how much material can we get from space anytime soon anyway
How?
