South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

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• Hacker News
• Hope to see these headlines some day for the meat industry
  by reid-rigo
• There are a number of efforts to grow vat grown protein. That's producing food without plants even.
  by Gibbon1
• So many industries to replace. Like maternity wards. Or farms in general. Some people seem to be against replacing wood industry however weirdly.
  by Ekaros
• the demand for diamonds is artificial, the demand for meat is very much organic. the only thing stopping most people from consuming more of it is the cost -- driven by demand.
  by vlyan
• A better target would be the oil and gas industry. When you look at this diamond situation it looks like in approximately one generation, demand for natural diamonds dropped low enough that the effort to mine new diamonds became uneconomical.

  This happened because the ease of obtaining lab-grown diamonds that could be much higher quality, made lab-grown diamonds more attractive because buyers, who may already have been squeezed by other unfavorable economic realities found no reason to purchase natural diamonds at a higher price point.

  If we could see a shift like that in energy source preference from one generation then perhaps we could destroy the incentive to produce more oil and gas or make it so uneconomical for use a motor vehicle fuel that it became a specialty product that was produced only to supply a niche product line.

  We have a similar opportunity now with electric vehicles, solar panels, battery storage, etc that we can make a large dent in the volume of crude oil and natural gas required to power our economies. Developing nations have an advantage in a way because they have less legacy infrastructure to support that requires oil and gas. They can adopt the new big thing and just roll with that saving their citizens lots of money and environmental consequences associated with use of hydrocarbons fuels.

  More than 35 years in the oil and gas industry. This is what I learned.

  We should invest in developing nations to bring them up to speed with best available technologies. If we waste too much time we will see continents like Africa with 56 (?) nations become a flash-point for the next round of resource wars (oil and gas conflicts) that will be pushed on them by foreign operators attempting to make as much of the O&G money as possible before the world gets the message and abandons their destructive products permanently. We are already seeing some of this today. Millions of lives are in the crossfire. We have an opportunity to make a difference and we should take it. Old and young in developed nations should adopt next-gen tech ASAP so that kill these dino-corps before they kill too many more of us.

  by doodlebugging
• If we can replace the taste, appearance, and texture of a medium-rare rib eye with lab grown meat at a substantially cheaper price, we will.
  by SoftTalker
• Cool. I never thought I’d see the day.
  by tempodox
• What isn’t mentioned here is that the reason De Beers isn’t able to sustain a monopoly anymore is because of a US anti-monopoly ruling from the 90s AND because they’re unable to monopolise the huge synthetic diamond industry that has grown in China.
  by pythonic_hell
• Shorter:

  "South African diamond mines are closing due to lab-grown stones"

  by wewewedxfgdf
• I heard once that even if DeBeers stopped all diamond mining activity, their existing stockpile would last for a 100 years or more.
  by mlmonkey
• That’s not even close to being true.
  by senorrib
• It would probably last 1,000 years, now.

  Since nobody wants to buy them anymore.

  by johnnyApplePRNG
• Oh shame. The poor devils.
  by davidhyde
• https://www.wsj.com/business/diamond-mines-are-closing-and-s...
  by bookofjoe
• I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.
  by thijson
• Interesting video on the topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=NLmd5vL0zmk
  by 1e1a
• This has been researched for decades, but progress is very slow.

  Other wide bandgap semiconductors, i.e. silicon carbide (a.k.a. "moissanite" in jewelry) and gallium nitride are well on their way to make silicon completely obsolete for power semiconductor devices, but they are still many years away from reaching their full potential, in good part because their crystals have still too many defects in comparison with the crystals that can be grown from silicon. Because of too many crystal defects, for now the only commercial SiC devices are MOSFETs and Schottky diodes, despite the fact that SiC thyristors have exceptional properties for working with very high voltages, but bipolar semiconductor devices are much more sensitive to crystal defects, so their mass production is waiting for improvements in crystal growing.

  Besides SiC and GaN, there are a few other semiconductors that have greater chances than diamond to become useful for semiconductor devices, e.g. gallium oxide or the sulfides of molybdenum and tungsten.

  In diamond, there is not only the problem of crystal defects, but also the currently known dopants have various undesirable properties, like becoming active only at high temperatures, so some diamond electronic devices could be made to work in an oven or on the Venus surface, but not at room temperature.

  While the use of diamond as a semiconductor is far in the future and there is no certainty that it will ever become able to replace silicon carbide, if artificial diamonds become cheap enough they might be used much more frequently for heatsinks, including in computers, as the material with the best thermal conductivity.

  Diamond heatsinks are already in use, but only in niche applications where price is irrelevant.

  by adrian_b
• Brutal news for Botswana which was really breaking new ground in raising Sub Saharan living standards. 30% of their GDP and a huge portion of government revenues are diamond exports. And they had gotten to 100% formalized and child labor free supply lines
  by missedthecue
• Hopefully, the have foreseen this and they have diversified adequately. Relying on a single source for most of your income is never good. Whether that is diamonds or oil. Hopefully they got their own sovereign fund up and running/
  by bossyTeacher
• Botswana's diamond mining industry is exactly one company: Debswana, a 50/50 joint venture between the government of Botswana and De Beers.

  Which means, when you think about it, that half of one subsidiary of De Beers is effectively producing ~one third of Botswana's GDP. Really puts into perspective how exploitative De Beers is.

  by bastawhiz
• The did away with child slavery in the mines, but severely exploited female adults instead:

  https://www.freedomunited.org/news/botswana-diamonds-ugly-tr...

  Things like marital rape are still legal there.

  by hedora
• This took way longer than I hoped & expected... the DeBeers cartel in full damage control has really squeezed everything they could from it.
  by MobileVet
• Honestly it seems like they knew this would happen, but they managed to really make the most of it. If anything it is an example of how important marketing is in influencing culture and choices
  by newyankee
• Well, they have at least one way to extend their market's lifespan at this point. They can double down on the provenance and openly claim the flag "product of artisanal slavery".

  I'm sure there are enough hard-right wingers who will happily flaunt their wealth and disdain for other human beings.

  by bostik
• so DeBeers just buys up all the labs that grow them and still have a monopoly. Lower the price competition appears and raise the price when competition goes bankrupt. Sort of like Amazon.
  by fhn
• Debeers has been trying to sell their mines for years now unsuccessfully the public might not have known but the financial people did.
  by xbmcuser
• > Demand for engagement rings gave thousands of South Africans steady work at De Beers. Now, weak sales and lab-grown stones are taking it away.

  So wait, on this Labor Day weekend, it sounds like the WSJ is pro-worker, but only if they're in South Africa?

  by tedchs
• WSJ’s journalism is center-left and trustworthy. Their editorials are written by right-wing sycophants and lunatics.
  by smt88
• At least they aren't blaming millennials still.
  by delfinom
• Given the infamous conditions of diamond mining, to me that reads like “won’t someone think of the jobless slaves?” Someone no longer being forced to slave away in the mines is not exactly a great loss to workers rights.

  “De Beers: Because the tears of children make it sparkle!”

  by kstrauser