Sometimes I hear people complaining about how De Beers or someone has a world monopoly on diamonds and how horrible it is. "Diamonds are actually quite common," they say, "if the price wasn't artificially inflated they would be so cheap!"

Maybe that's true, but here's my point: who cares?

So pretend someone breaks up the De Beers cartel and floods the country with cheap diamonds. Kids are getting free diamonds in their cereal boxes and now all those fake rolexes are coming with real diamonds instead of fake plastic ones. So what are you going to do? Now that diamonds are cheap you're going to buy up a bunch and diamond stud your tennis shoes?

The reason I don't care about how much diamonds are is because they're stupid and useless. It's like if someone had a world monopoly on dog crap. The fact that they have a monopoly doesn't make me suddenly care about the availability of canine excrement.

The only reason I will ever ever buy a diamond is if (heaven forbid) I marry someone someday. But why do we give women diamonds when we get engaged? It's to show that we're willing to spend a bunch of money on useless crap for them. "Hey look how much I love you, I just spent two grand on the most worthless thing ever! But I did it for YOU!" Dog crap could have the same effect except it doesn't look pretty and you wouldn't want to put it on your finger unless you're some kind of sicko (in which case congratulations finding someone willing to marry you.)

So if the price of diamonds suddenly came down, the only effect it would have is making girls think you're cheap if you buy them one. They would just want some other stupid pointless crap instead. So you've solved the problem of diamonds being so expensive, but you've really just created a new problem - not to mention the fact that there was never really a problem to begin with so really you just reacted to nothing and ended up getting yourself in a mess.

Not as if you could single handedly control the price of diamonds, but I think you get my point.

So the fact that diamonds are pointless and stupid AND expensive is fine. If a girl wants some pointless expensive crap that's fine - I'm sure she'll have to endure lots of stupid pointless crap that a guy wants to (big screen TVs and big trucks and whatnot). The point is "show me how much you love me by how much money you're willing to flush down the toilet while simultaneously giving me a pointless thing that is shiny and I can show off my friends." Fine. A diamond serves thats purpose perfectly and it wouldn't be able to if it cost what it was actually worth.