Tag: markets

Against Diamonds

Stupid kills. In this case, being uneducated about the various states of carbon

Adding to the pot-stirring that De Beers and others incited, a single page ad appeared in Variety a few months ago, paid for by the Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana, who were driven from their land by the government to make way for diamond mining. Their ad directly addressed DiCaprio, asking for help which then came in the form of several Survival International advocacy efforts.

2008-02-20: Finally a situation where the diamondoid surfaces warning sign makes sense.

Designer Wong makes engagement rings that can kill you. The razor-sharp diamond point is set into the ring so it can’t get knocked out when you smash someone’s face in, and the edges of the ring are really soft so it won’t cut into your skin during the pounding. It’s romantic because it means, “Will you marry me” but it also means, “I can’t always be there to protect you so if some jerk won’t stop bothering you, puncture him with this.” The diamond sharp edge will also cut skin down to the bone (with a minimum 1 karat stone – but the larger the better). Or it may simply be used to tag hard surfaces, like cars and windows for S.O.S. messages or that last will and estimate when pen or paper (or lawyers) aren’t conveniently around.


2008-06-16: Extremely cheap diamonds will hopefully do away with the “diamonds are forever” crap this country’s brides are infatuated with.

“This is a virtual diamond mine. If we were in Africa, we’d have barbed wire, security guards and watch towers. We can’t do that in Massachusetts.”

2008-10-27: Can’t wait for those to be done in volume, and the retarded engagement ring industry to die.

The most exciting aspect of this new annealing process is the unlimited size of the crystals that can be treated. The breakthrough will allow kilocarat diamonds of high optical quality

2012-09-18: That’s a lot of engagement rings. Diamond rings are now even more broadcasting your status as an idiot to the world.

Russia has just declassified news that will shake world gem markets to their core: the discovery of a vast new diamond field containing “trillions of carats,” enough to supply global markets for another 3 ka.

2015-01-07: No more Diamonds, with the exception of the engagement ring nonsense, of course.

Even my own diamond-business owning, non-millennial father is turning away from jewelry when it comes to gift giving. Sure, he’s made my mom a handful of statement pieces over the years, but at the same price point, he’s more likely to gift something that has actual purpose, aside from aesthetic value. The last few birthdays and Christmases have yielded vacation getaways, iPhones of every generation, even a smart home thermostat. What hasn’t shown up under the Christmas tree in the last 5 years? Diamond anything.

2015-03-18: Diamond scams

We were called hip-pocketers, because we lived from one deal to the next: Your business could fit in the wallet in your pocket. You bought a used Rolex at a pawnshop for $1000 from the kid who’s just paid $500 for it, hurried it over to your watch guy to hit it on the wheel and make it look new, replaced the old worn buckle with a South American counterfeit for $50, and resold it to your friend who owned the jewelry store a few blocks over for $2200, $2275 if she wanted a counterfeit leather box. She could retail it the same day for $3500. We “worked the float” back then, in the ’80s and ’90s—that meant the few days you had between when you paid for something with a check and the check actually hit your bank account. If you flipped the gold you’d bought with a check the same day, you had a few days of free money. Of course, you tried to make money on every deal, but often you were moving so fast that you had to lose money here and there, waiting for the bigger score that ought to come if you just kept hustling fast enough.

On the icky details of this criminal hustle

I’ll tell you how it’s done. Let’s say you have a 14-karat gold ring that weighs 15 grams. First you weigh it and show the customer that it’s 15 grams. “Now we multiply that by 14 for 14 karat and divide it by 24 for 24 karat, which is what it would be if it were 100% gold,” you explain to the seller. “That gives us the price for your 14-karat gold. Multiply that by 15, for 15 grams. Now, 14 karat is 56% gold and 44% base metal, which burns off at the smelter, so we multiply that by 0.56. Finally, we deduct 10% for the smelter, and 15% for my profit. Most gold buyers will charge you 20 or 25%, which is a reasonable profit margin, but we do such high quantity of gold-buying here that we can afford very low margins. That gives us a final figure of…” You get the picture. The customer’s ring is worth $280 in real gold value. But you just offered $120, with a seemingly sound mathematical justification. And you’ve left yourself plenty of wiggle room if they want to haggle your profit down from 15% to 10% or even 7.5%. The real key to this scam is that you’ve deducted for the impurity of 14 karat not 1x but 2x: first, when you calculated the per-gram price and again when you “deduct for the base metal.”

2016-06-07: Time for a 1M carat synthetic diamond to end this silliness

Lesedi La Rona could, if skillfully cut, yield an even larger stone—the largest polished diamond in history. He described the Lesedi La Rona, a single piece of rough some 3 ga old, as “almost ungraspable.”

2023-05-06: It’s happening. Too slowly because people are dumb, but still.

33% of all engagement rings with center stones purchased last year were created in a lab. That’s 2x the number from 2020. As the technology to make lab-grown diamonds has improved, production has increased and retail prices are falling. Their growing popularity, especially among younger consumers, has caught the attention of jewelers and watchmakers — and is challenging traditional diamonds that are mined from the earth.

Open-source business infrastructure

commerce.net has set up a lab to explore decentralized electronic markets.

We propose developing an open-source toolkit for creating markets, called Zocalo, in order to catalyze broader adoption of markets in academia, industry, and throughout society. We are primarily interested in prediction markets, which allow traders to buy and sell securities that pay out based on the outcome of some future event, but Zocalo would also be useful for creating markets in other goods.

6 reasons from the linked paper why prediction markets are a good choice for decision support applications:

  1. They give continuously updated dynamic forecasts
  2. They aggregate information across traders
  3. These markets give unbiased, relatively accurate forecasts well in advance of outcomes
  4. They can outperform existing alternatives
  5. market dynamics overcome biases that individual traders may have, effectively eliminating [the biases] from forecasts
  6. They can be designed to forecast a variety of issues and provide a variety of types of information

with luck, efforts like this (or ubl) might make hacking on business problems sexy / interesting enough to foster new open source communities. ideally, all these efforts nudge corporate entities towards peer production (bye bye HR raffles, bye bye conference room campers)

Designing Trust

Trust between people engaging in economic transactions affects the economic growth of their community. Reputation management systems, such as the Feedback Forum of eBay Inc., can increase the trust level of the participants. We show in this paper that experimental economics can be used in a controlled laboratory environment to measure trust and trust enhancement. Specifically, we present an experimental study that quantifies the increase in trust produced by 2 versions of a reputation management system. We also discuss some emerging issues in the design of reputation management systems.

fodder for your next non-zero-sum game.

Pacification by trade

At a summit meeting of 7 regional leaders, including those of India and Pakistan, it was clear that the global economic environment was forcing change on South Asia. The 7 leaders spoke of their concern about how to cope with new trade arrangements, and the need to resolve differences to enable formation of a regional trade bloc. Pakistan agreed to join a regional free trade agreement the leaders signed Tuesday, which would lower tariffs over 10 years. Previously, Pakistan had resisted regional economic cooperation until its dispute with India was resolved.

another instance of the lexus changing the old ways of the olive tree (for better)?

Customs customs

All the Arab countries in general and the Gulf countries in particular do NOT want any business done between them. It is probably much easier doing business with even Israel (no we can’t) and Bahrain than Bahrain and Saudi.
…
It took 3 hours this morning to find the big boss who in turned called DHL to find out if this is true and if it was alright to use DHL’s declaration form numbers rather than the government’s! Finally, after a long struggle he gave his go ahead. It took the supervisor assigned to rubber stamp the documents more than 30 minutes just to produce the bloody rubber stamp, photocopy some papers, and fill in the spaces in that rubber stamp!
…
Bottom line. If you don’t know how to be a crook and stick by the book, don’t go into business and most certainly don’t even CONSIDER doing business with your neighboring countries who claim to want integration, customs union and single currency!

such are mahmood’s experiences with the new gulf customs union. this is very much in line with the fact that third world countries are much more protectionist amongst themselves than the supposedly evil west is towards them. if they were to abolish these trade barriers, they would leapfrog 10 years of development (granted, with big turmoil, but taking a collective leap of faith, and a suffering today for a better tomorrow may not be such a bad thing)

No bargains

When I checked the emails for my sister today, I learned to my surprise that she is an avid ebay user, with ebay toolbar installed and all. Then I learned that the recent ebay user conference drew 10K attendees. I never paid attention to ebay and its ilk, but these data points alerted me to the volume and the relevance of efficient auctions.

  • there are 400M transactions on the ebay backend per day
  • 69M users (11% of global internet users)
  • annualized sales at $21B

if ebay and its competitors manage to capture a larger share of the $1.8T global market for their kind of products, there will be enormous efficiency gains that should easily be detectable in the GDP. of course, with efficient markets, there are no bargains anymore:

We passed a booth with a beautiful, extensive assortment of fountain pens for sale when my son, Adam, 15, decided to take a look. So we stopped, and the gentleman who owned the pens started showing us his stock.
This one’s a Parker from 1972, he explained, and this one’s a Waterman … Then he started talking prices.
You can have this one for $250 US, and look, it sells for more than $300 on eBay.
He pulled out a Web screenshot showing an eBay sale for that particular model pen. For me, the nature of the antiques market suddenly changed. No longer was it a local fair on the streets of Sao Paulo, where Paulistas could haggle over a painting, table or kitchen set. Now it was just another cog in the global antiques marketplace, facilitated by eBay and the Web.

Plastics

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 80 kg man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 17 kg of oil, 3 kg of gas, and 3 kg of minerals, as well as 56 kg of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil”.

Just as we are hitting the hubbert peak, we get a technology that may make oil rigs obsolete:

Andreassen and others anticipate that a large chunk of the world’s agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just converting all the US agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4B barrels of oil annually. In 2001 the United States imported 4.2B barrels of oil. “This technology offers a beginning of a way away from this.”

With their main (only?) source of income in danger, what will the middle east kleptocracies do?
because

The only thing this process can’t handle is nuclear waste. If it contains carbon, we can do it.” and Thermal depolymerization has proved to be 85% energy efficient for complex feedstocks, and even higher for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics

it will be possible to jump start the distributed power infrastructure worldwide.
2007-07-11: Ocean of Garbage

Held together by a slowly rotating system of currents northeast of Hawaii, the Eastern Garbage Patch is more than just a few floating plastic bottles washed out to sea; the Patch is a giant mass of trash-laden water 2x the size of Texas.

2008-01-11: Why not in the US?

Declaring war on the “white pollution” choking its cities, farms and waterways, China is banning free plastic shopping bags and calling for a return to the cloth bags of old

2013-12-05: Depolymerization was hailed as the solution ~10 years ago: turning plastic back into more versatile compounds. I weirdly haven’t heard much about it since. Probably because no one cares about trash?

2015-06-22: Recycling doesn’t work

almost every facility like it in the country is running in the red. More than 2K municipalities are paying to dispose of their recyclables instead of the other way around.

Anything that requires constant vigilance (sorting) combined with subsidies isn’t going to work even medium-term. looks like recycling needs a big reboot.
2017-04-26: Plastic-eating worms. This sounds like one of those “obvious solutions”, like releasing rabbits in Australia to deal with a forgotten problem. Fear our future where the wax worm is up there with rust as a mortal enemy of civilization.

While other organisms can take weeks or months to break down even the smallest amount of plastic, the wax worm can get through more—in a far shorter period of time. The researchers let 100 wax worms chow down on a plastic grocery bag, and after just 12 hours they’d eaten 4% of the bag. That may not sound like much, but that’s a vast improvement over fungi, which weren’t able to break down a noticeable amount of polyethylene after 6 months.

2019-02-07: Hydrothermal liquefaction

Hydrothermal liquefaction could change the world’s polyolefin waste, a form of plastic, into useful products, such as clean fuels and other items. Once the plastic is converted into naphtha, it can be used as a feedstock for other chemicals or further separated into specialty solvents or other products. There is 1B tons of polyolefin waste in landfills.

2019-03-13: Plastic recycling never worked, and was a greenwashing effort by the industry, and dum-dums fell for it.

Even before China’s ban, only 9% of discarded plastic was being recycled, while 12% was burned. The rest was buried in landfills or simply dumped and left to wash into rivers and oceans. Without China to process plastic bottles, packaging, and food containers—not to mention industrial and other plastic waste—the already massive waste problem posed by our throwaway culture will be exacerbated, experts say. The planet’s load of nearly indestructible plastics—more than 8B tons have been produced worldwide over the past 60 years—continues to grow.

2020-01-10: Thai Hacks

As Plastic bag ban hits Thailand, consumers adapt with variety of household carrying items


2020-01-20: Plastic Surge

Companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco are ramping up output of plastic to hedge against the possibility that a serious global response to climate change might reduce demand for their fuels. Petrochemicals now account for 14% of oil use, and are expected to drive 50% of oil demand growth between now and 2050. The World Economic Forum predicts plastic production will double in the next 20 years.

2020-03-03: Microplastics

Every human on Earth is ingesting 2000 particles of plastic a week

2020-04-11: 90% breakdown of PET in under 10 hours. Process is still expensive and needs to scale further.
2020-07-08: Apples are the most contaminated fruit while carrots are the vegetables most affected. This is a much bigger problem than the performative efforts to clean up the great pacific garbage patch.

THROW A POLYESTER sweater in the washing machine and it’ll come out nice and clean, but also not quite its whole self. As it rinses, millions of synthetic fibers will shake loose and wash out with the waste water, which then flows to a treatment plant. Each year, a single facility might pump 21B of these microfibers out to sea, where they swirl in currents, settle in sediments, and end up as fish food, with untold ecological consequences.

2021-10-14: There’s now a startup using PET breakdown technology.

The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor 20x larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025. Manufacturing PET from enzymatic recycling could reduce greenhouse gas emissions between 17% and 43% compared to making virgin PET.

2022-03-04: Meanwhile, stop it with the performative cleaning:

Last month, a group of marine biologists noticed something fishy in a video by a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup. “This is likely a staged video. I call bullshit.” In the 25-second clip, a large net appears to dump 4000 kg of plastic waste, including crates, buckets, and fishing gear, onto the deck of a ship. The Ocean Cleanup, which has raised more than $100m on the promise to rid plastic from the seas, said the trash in the video was just pulled from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “It’s like mopping up the spill when the spigot is still on. We can’t clean up our way out of plastic pollution.”

2023-09-29: Big if true

78% of ocean microplastics are synthetic tire rubber

Confused revolutionaries

the economist is reviewing naomi klein, and the verdict isn’t in favor of her at all. naomi became well known for railing against the “evils of globalization”. she fails to offer any perspective beyond that though:

What is the superior alternative to capitalist development that Ms Klein proposes? She feels under no obligation to say. It is not her job to dictate to the movement. The most she can do, in all modesty, is to offer indications and observations; the people, thus empowered, must do the rest.

she is of course not alone with having no recipe against the ills she perceives in the world. it is fashionable to throw some rocks and participate in riots, but using mental capacity to think about solutions isn’t en vogue at all. an observer might conclude that this capacity is not present in these people.