Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode in which thieves steal $1 million of gold. Then to avoid capture, they enter suspended animation capsules and sleep for 100 years. Only to awake in a world where gold can be manufactured and has no value.
It's already there. I've been trying, and failing, to convince my wife that we don't need a $7,000 "real" diamond for a ring she wants, and that a <$1000 lab-created diamond is better. Not only is it cheaper, but it's likely less flawed and doesn't support a company with unethical practices.
She is convinced that she nonetheless needs the $7,000 one or at least a used "real" diamond for reasons I cannot comprehend.
Natural diamonds are not especially rare. The entire reason they are overvalued in society is due to an extremely successful and ongoing marketing campaign combined with a monopoly that allows for extreme market manipulation.
Your wife is concerned with that social value. The actual physical qualities of the stones aren't really that important. Social status is.
The value of real diamonds is in signalling how much money you're able and willing to burn. That's why their pricing makes no sense, and why the more expensive it is, the better.
Think of it like this: what's the surest, simplest, and most reliable way of proving to people that you're wealthy? It's taking a good chunk of your cash - like, in the order of monthly living expenses of people around you - and setting it on fire. Or spending it on something just as useless - like a diamond ring, or that romantic trip across Europe.
That's why jewelry with obvious resale value doesn't work as well, nor does anything that can be seen as investment or an utility purchase: the signal only works if you're wasting money on a vanity purchase - one large enough to show that you either have more money than you know what to do with, or at least that you care so much about recipient that you're willing to sacrifice a meaningful chunk of your wealth on a gesture.
Of course few will say this out loud, or even think about this explicitly. Diamonds, engagement rings, and all the other staples of romance are in big part a status game that people learn to play from childhood, so to most, those things feel like something natural to do.
There really is no ethical or moral defense for natural diamond mining. When presented with the human and environmental impact, one’s response is pretty informative of their character and motivations.
A big part of diamonds is marketing. That if you are not putting one month’s salary away for that special stone then you are not strongly committed to marriage.
My wife was pragmatic. I said we could put $5k on a stone that has no intrinsic value or $5k on FNILX at time of marriage and take a blast of vacation one year later when it’s turned into ~$5500.
She chose vacation and we had a blast in Europe. Good vibes per dollar spent is where it’s at.
DIY-ing one of these has been on my to-do list since I learned about CVD in, oh, 2009 or so.
For entirely predicable reasons, everyone I've lived with has said "NO!" to the idea of me leaving a hacked microwave oven running continuously for a month while filled with a mixture of methane and hydrogen.
The reason that ChatGPT and other LLMs use such language is because they often find it in the corpus of text they’ve ingested. It’s a frequent pattern in writing.
So, I don’t necessarily think that’s an immediate red flag. To be sure, I guess you’d need to go back and look at the author’s previous stories and compare writing styles.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41492001