[TeMPOraL]

> "You need to make a 10kUSD+ purchase on a totally arbitrary piece of jewelry that very well may have incited real human suffering and violence, even though I know that desire is irrational and poorly balanced."

That's a tricky topic to broach. Drop one zero from the price tag, and this definitely applies much more to your smartphone and computer than it does to gems. Drop one or two more zeroes, and this covers the clothes you wear just as much.

I'm not denying you have a point here. The suffering and violence are real. But my wife and I both went down the road of paying attention to that, and we've learned one has only so much attention to pay before you can hardly purchase anything at all. Nearly everyone has a cut-off point, past which they stop digging into those issues, otherwise it becomes debilitating.

Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.

Or, my point in short: cut people some slack.

[IanCal]

Part of the comparison here is that the alternatives are both cheaper and practically better. So it doesn't apply so much unless you chose to buy, say, clothes from brand A that were indistinguishable from brand B to normal people but cost more and involved more child labour. Or if apple made a special phone you could buy that looked the same but cost 10x as much because it also includes payments to warlords.

> Call this irrational, but the amount of personal responsibility one should feel for some injustice they benefit from, among with a billion or two other people, is an unsolved philosophical and ethical problem.

I don't think it's unsolved, it's just unsolved in a way that makes people feel ok. The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.

[TeMPOraL]

> Part of the comparison here is that the alternatives are both cheaper and practically better.

It's not the case here, because you're not buying gems for their practical value. If you were, then there would not be an issue - lab-grown diamonds for cutting things would be even cheaper than they are, and you wouldn't care about other gems unless you were playing with lasers or something.

As much a I hate it, the entire point of jewelry is that it's expensive and useless. It's the OG "proof of work" kind of thing - you prove your affection by burning significant resources on some piece of junk, and the recipient can use that piece of junk to prove their status to others ("look how much wealth I can burn on stupid shit", or "look how much wealth I can get someone else to burn on my behalf"). Layer a millennium of traditions and a century of De Beers marketing on top, and we get to where we are.

Being practical devalues jewelry; being cheap is opposite of its point; being alternative means being unauthentic, and makes the wearer a liar.

> The reality is that we regularly choose minor improvements to our lives or even just spend through laziness at a cost of other people's lives.

That's the unsolved part. For any given thing enjoyed by me and a billion other people, with hardly anyone talking it's wrong, I suddenly have to take some stranger's accusations and/or guilt-tripping at face value. The math goes like this:

- Surely my responsibility can't be more than one-billionth of the whole thing;

- It's not like I can actually make a difference without upending my whole life. That doesn't feel commensurate with one billionth of whatever the bad thing is;

("Voting with your wallet" is bullshit; boycotts don't work; you can't really make a dent without a large movement here, and good luck creating one over random consumer decision - you're competing with efforts to start a movement over ever other such decision, and people's attention is finite.)

- You came out of nowhere and started guilt-tripping me, it's not just inconvenient and makes me feel bad, but it's also a technique used by scammers and cultists and politicians - so why should I trust your math in the first place?

With a little hand-waving, the solution to above inequality is "I'm not going to change, and I don't like you anymore".

I'm not saying this is good - just that it is. That's the bit that's unsolved in practice.

[ako]

Jewelry is not unpractical, it's like an insurance for bad times. When shit hits the fan you still have your jewelry to sell.

[ben_w]

That used to be true, but now, and specifically with diamonds, not so much: https://www.brightonsavoy.com.au/why-does-a-diamond-have-no-....

[fsflover]

Which is why you should not buy diamonds.

[ben_w]

One reason why.

I've been tempted to try making them at home since about 2007, but for some reason all the different people I've lived with since then have objected to me running a lightly modified microwave oven continuously for a month at a time, with a few holes in the heating cavity so I can install an inverted pyrex bowl and pipes to connect it to a low-pressure methane supply system…

[coryfklein]

I mean, sort of? The median woman who wants the gorgeous diamond ring from her husband is NOT thinking “This will be great insurance in case we become destitute”. Because everyone knows the resell value is terrible! Worst return on an insurance policy ever.

They want them because they are pretty and because – like it or not – it’s what society has taught them to expect.

[ako]

Don't know, gold still seems to be wanted when financial times are uncertain.

[20after4]

Unfortunately, the diamond doesn't fetch much when you go to sell it.

You'll get the value of the gold in the ring but not much for the gemstone.

[meiraleal]

In this case the ex-poor wifes bought by rich men will have a jewelry to sell in the case of a breakup

[meiraleal]

> Or, my point in short: cut people some slack

That's what we are doing here! But in this case most people seems to be sympathetic to the people that suffered to get you and your wife a diamond? I don't think rich people with frivolous desires need any more "empathy"

[TeMPOraL]

Diamonds aren't rich people game, they're middle-class and above game. Hell, probably even below. That's what makes the arguments about being associated[0] with violence fall on deaf ears - approximately everyone in the west is participating. Not the Evil Bad No Good Rich One-Percenters. It's all the 90-percenters.

--

[0] - It's always "some of them", "could be". The industry has blood on its hand. The particular rock you might buy your wife? Unclear. It's not like with e.g. tantalum capacitors which, at some point, AFAIK were all made out of tantalum sourced from child slavery mines in Africa. I honestly don't know if "some" diamonds are more like 50% or 5% or 0.5%.

[meiraleal]

> The particular rock you might buy your wife? Unclear

Not unclear: as the not-blood diamond is more expensive, buying it is morally the same as buying the blood one. Now that is similar with many things that is produced and sold around the world, the problem with diamonds (and other luxury goods) is that we definitely could have a better society without it. It is not the same as giving up on iphones (which also shouldn't be produced by kids or starving people btw)

[yencabulator]

> with violence fall on deaf ears - approximately everyone in the west is participating

That's no excuse to continue.

[InSteady]

>...before you can hardly purchase anything at all.

In terms of living a more ethical life (on several different levels), this is a crude but generally effective way to go about it.