Things I Dislike Intensely #1: Diamonds

There's nothing I hate more than being played for a sucker. If I ever shell out an obscene amount of money for a piece of diamond-encrusted jewelry, I'll be doing just that. For years, I've told anybody who'd listen what a rip-off the artificially inflated diamond market has always been. If you can read this article (written in 1982) and still be willingly fleeced by those admittedly ingenious snake-oil salesmen, then I'm really at a loss. To sum up Edward Epstein's enlightening and infuriating article: De Beers controls the supply of diamonds which are by no means rare and actually quite abundant; they employ one of the longest running and effective global marketing campaigns of all-time which dates back many decades; diamonds have no intrinsic value as demonstrated by their severe depreciation in the after-market. It's a long article, but it's very much worth reading. There is never a reason to do things simply for the fact that it's always how they've been done.

Now the hard part is convincing an American woman that buying a diamond engagement ring is completely unecessary. Good thing I still have that catalog from the Phiippines.