So, in this series they manage to avoid the hanging crime

[conuly]

of having starships jolt to a halt whenever acceleration is cut.

Instead, they commit a different writing crime which is just as bad, namely, using diamonds as hard currency backup in case there's trouble with the banks.

Carbon's only the fourth most common element in the entire universe! And even if it weren't, I feel certain that any place humans can live is simply brimming with the stuff. More carbon = more diamonds. They're just not that rare. The books don't even bother to handwave that diamonds are intrinsically valuable for some technobabble reason, which has caused the price to shoot up beyond the wildest expectations of de Beers.

Diamonds are a scam, and sometime in the future people are going to realize that.

***************

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Comments

[duskpeterson]

Well, golly. I didn't know that about diamonds. (I always preferred rubies, anyway.)

[cactuswatcher]

Diamonds are indeed a scam, and a massive conspiracy. When the Russians started dumping diamonds on the market a couple decades ago, it should have brought it all to a crashing halt, but obviously the Russians and de Beers have made an agreement to keep the price of premium diamonds high, letting the low end market suck up diamonds that were considered unsalable not so long ago, like the brownish "chocolate" diamonds you see vigorously advertised these days.

Diamonds for industrial use can be and are mass produced without ever seeing a diamond mine. Prices for industrial diamonds vary from $200 a carat down to $.30 a carat and can be as pure as the mined chips. No one wants to ramp up to make gem-sized diamonds because De Beers has enough stock to run anyone out of the business of making them.

[moon_custafer]

Given that at least two classic SF movies (The Day the Earth Stood Still and Men in Black) contain extraterrestrials who consider diamonds to be small change, or children’s toys; with the implication that only humans make a big deal of them—you’d think the author would have given this more thought.

[coyotegoth]

You know, I've had similar thoughts concerning the Harry Potter universe: what's the point of a metal based currency like gold Gallons, when any witch or wizard worth their salt could just Transfigurate stuff into gold and start minting coins?

[conuly]

Mmm, except we're told way back in book 1 that only one person ever has successfully been able to transmute base materials into gold.

[mindstalk]

One of the Vorkosigan ancestors invested heavily in firegems or some other gems, and got blown away by the end of Isolation, "we can make those like trash".

[captainsblog]

Supe: "I love you, Lois, and I have made you the world's largest diamond that makes the Cullinan diamond look like something out of a Cracker Jack box!"

Lois: "Oh fuck you, Clark, with your parlor tricks. Make me a nice one out of red kryptonite and then we'll talk about caterers!"

[bitterlawngnome]

I had a dream once where we "solved" the CO2 problem by making diamonds on a massive scale, like to the point where they were used as inert fill in asphalt paving and concrete. I'm still waiting, people ...

[thewayne]

While I read this post yesterday, I just remembered the early John Carpenter movie Dark Star, and whenever the ship came out of hyperspace, it came to a dead stop above the planet.

But it was a comedy, so that's allowed IMO.

And I did that once in a role-playing game. We were playing Toon, and I was playing a Japanese anime character with a giant mech, so it was absolutely in character and would have been out of character if I had done otherwise. I was in an uncontrolled fall, accelerating to a horrifying crash, so I pulled out the fuse block and stopped mere feet from the ground, the mech just hovering there. Said "Phew!", wiped my brow, and plugged the fuse block back in.

And immediately accelerated at full speed into the ground. Which I expected and wanted, I just wanted the silly scene. It's a cartoon game full of cartoon physics.

[adafrog]

I've heard about the crazy ass markup in all jewelry before, and the things people have done to each other over diamonds is horrible. But they are really sparkly. lol I'v
I've never heard about some of those other gems before.