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

  • Lussy [any, hy/hym]@hexbear.netEnglish
    41·
    7 days ago

    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

    • RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      19·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        9·
        7 days ago

        I don’t think it has anything to do with capitalism frankly. It’s technology. The soviets grew faster than most capitalist countries, monarchies that still exist compete quite well with capitalist nations. Think the Saudis. Capitalism is simply the private ownership of capital. The organizational structure behind the econonomy. The thing that really did all this amazing stuff was the technology itself. As we get more advanced our ability to advance increases. Exponential progress. That could happen under any system. 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.

        • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          7 days ago

          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

            • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              6·
              7 days ago

              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.