In Canada the towing truck companies stealing cars are all part of the Mafia or gangs. It got so bad that sometime recently the government only certified a few tow truck companies. When you get into an accident you can't call a tow truck company. The police will call the reputable tow truck for you.
This happened to my next door neighbor. I saw them loading up his car at night, my dad went outside and yelled at them. They soon drove off.
It is pure genius though, people are conditioned to ignore a tow truck taking a car away, assuming it’s somehow legit in all cases. It is ridiculously easy to steal a car with a tow truck.
"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome" - Charlie Munger. Car companies don't need to care, if your car gets stolen the insurance company buys you a new one. You do lose some customers who won't buy your car if it's in the top ten most stolen list.
We could implement a law that fines car companies who are in the top ten list, and pays out to the car companies who are at the bottom.
There is no requirement for insurance companies to write policies or to sell them at reasonable rates. Try selling an uninsurable car, it’s really hard.
Or you require dealers to make a disclosure at the time of sale to the effect that the car does not meet modern security standards.
Incentives work both ways. Most new cars have the computer hardware to solve this problem with a firmware update.
Uninsurable cars sell pretty well from what I heard from UK... Where they had large number of issues with Land Rovers. People only notice they can't insure something after they buy it...
And as a result, Range Rover has now increased security on new vehicles, have invested 8 figure sums in retrofitting older vehicles and have now started to offer their own insurance product -almost certainly at a loss- for owners that can't find separate insurance, according to this article (https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-13024481/Ra...).
Sounds like the cars were made nearly uninsurable, and the manufacturer pulled it back from the brink, perfectly illustrating my point.
Fine car companies? Isn’t that just madness? Do we really need to think there criminals have superior rights over law-abiding citizens? What do we get at the end of leftist madness? I don’t know if it’s something those that are espousing such positions will actually want.
I'd argue there is so much good that the tradeoff of trees killing a few humans is worth it.
The biological diversity that returns - birds, carbon soil. The air quality. Less chance that the heat will kill our senior citizens. Trees prevent floods.
From NotJustBikes channel, trees and bushes can be used to obscure road visibility, which naturally forces drivers to slow down at a curve, which makes streets safer for pedestrians (43k deaths a year in USA from cars)
>From NotJustBikes channel, trees and bushes can be used to obscure road visibility, which naturally forces drivers to slow down at a curve, which makes streets safer for pedestrians
This is dumb. The same way wrapping cars in bubble wrap would be dumb but also make the cars safer. Most of the ideas in that channel are just insane emotional propaganda that make everyones lives worse because people don't understand geography or refuse to build properly.
Things that only reduce car fatalities and accidents. Not things that reduce something beneficial and have the benefit of removing instances of harm since the benefit came with risks.
> This is dumb. The same way wrapping cars in bubble wrap would be dumb but also make the cars safer.
I doubt that would work, but if it did, why exactly would it be "dumb"?
> Most of the ideas in that channel are just insane emotional propaganda
Nah, most the ideas in that channel are the output of decades of empirical research on road/street safety by Dutch government agencies.
This video [1] from another channel describes how Dutch legal reforms in the early 90's enabled this evidence-based planning by correcting incentives and dramatically simplifying the regulatory framework.
Could you have recovered without pain killers? Or maybe used a pain killer that is much weaker that doesn't kill all the pain but is much safer like marijuana?
Are there scientific studies that shows that opioids help patients recover quicker?
Why is this question important? The primary purpose of pain medication is not to facilitate recovery, but to reduce suffering and increase quality of life.
Exactly! Opioids increase suffering and ruin the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of Americans. 80k+ yearly overdose deaths, plus a percentage of those using opioids for recovery become addicted to it.
Is that a worthy tradeoff? I presume (could be wrong) but we did fine recovering with surgical operations 80 years ago without opioids.
One of the first complaints made by the postoperative patient on returning to consciousness is pain. This if due to the actual operative procedure should be at once relieved. William J. Mayo taught us long ago to give morphine during the first twenty-four hours for the pain which we make; viz., by cutting, retracting, suturing, etc. The discomfort caused by such procedures is relieved best by this drug and it is given by us if there be no contraindications for its use, regardless of the amount until full relief is experienced or its physiologic effects obtained.
24 hours post operation is fine. But giving them for weeks after an operation seems unnecessary. I've also heard that oxycontin in the USA is given to pregnant women to deal with pain.
Most countries do without them now and have always done without them except in special cases such as palliative cures. You get opioids during recovery in the hospital, but not once you're discharged. You might get codeine rarely, but that's it.
I would disagree with the leech characterization. In an interview I watched, she talked about how she chose the property based on astrological alignment and her feelings when she was on this plot. She may be irrational but I think that's a perfectly valid reason to want to keep your own plot of land.
Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out. Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out (my favorite are the ikea bags, they are big and great for groceries - vs many grocery store offerings which are garbage).
Nutshell, it they may not be a net plus for the environment when so many poor quality bags which are more energy/resource intensive to make end up being single-use anyway.
> Its not all great, these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag. Then at home the bags pile up and get thrown out.
Your comment is a textbook argument of perfect being the enemy of good.
Sure, some bags are thrown out. Sure, people use more than one. Sure, people can buy them if they feel they need them.
That's perfectly fine, as that's completely besides the point.
What you're failing to mention is that thanks to this push to adopt reusable bags the use of single-use plastic bags plummeted. You no longer see over a dozen single-use bags being thrown out at each and every single shopping trip. These bags aren't recyclable and disintegrate very easily, making it extremely hard to pull them out of the environment once they get there.
You're also somehow leaving out is the fact that some major supermarkets chains are making available reusable shopping bags made of natural fiber. It's not a given that you're replacing large volumes of single-use plastic with small volumes of reusable plastic, as you're also seeing small volumes of natural fabric being used.
You're also leaving out the fact that this push is taking single-use plastic out of the market but nothing forces customers to adopt the store's own offerings. Anyone is able to buy whatever type of shopping bag suits their fancy.
So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic. You're seeing drastic reductions in plastic use by eliminating perverse incentives to consume single-use plastic containers, and the adoption of substitute goods that have a far preferable environmental footprint.
I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.
So, when you say
> So no, you're not seeing plastic being replaced with plastic.
I think immediately of NJ's attempt to wrangle this problem.
> While the state’s ban — which, unlike those of other states, also prohibited single-use paper bags — led to a more than 60 percent decline in total bag volumes, it also had an unintended consequence: a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags.
> How this happened is no mystery.
> The massive increase in plastic consumption was driven by the popularity of heavy-duty polypropylene bags, which use about fifteen times more plastic than polyethylene plastic bags.
> “Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials,” the study explains. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”
I'm supportive of the goal, but I really do think that making laws that are simple solutions to complex problems really can backfire and be a net negative, so we need to think several steps ahead.
> I think your response is overly optimistic; what you're saying is _possible_, but actual deployment of the policy leaves quite a bit to be desired.
Again: textbook example of perfect being the enemy of good.
I completely disagree with your take. I've seen whole supermarket chains switch from single-use plastic bags to multi-use cardboard crates in their delivery services, and also to paper bags/containers. That's pretty much the definition of the ideal outcome.
So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.
> So you're seeing some plastic being thrown out. That's besides the point. The point is how many volume of plastic is being dumped onto the environment after supermarkets switched away from cheap single-use plastic bags.
I'm not seeing anything myself, and I cited no anecdotes. I cited a study that found plastic use went up after the ban.
Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.
I've heard this argument before and totally agree that single use plastics are a tiny fraction of the total problem. But as a Canadian I like that the law forced me to think about my consumption habits, as well as it helped create conversation topics with other people.
That's exactly the outcome they wanted. Are those discussions leading to action on topics to reduce automobile dependence (the actual source of micro-plastic contamination)? If not, then you're part of the problem.
Well a lot of discussions due lead to some actions that I wouldn't have done on my own like reducing animal proteins, or shopping local for everything.
I don't see why caring about plastic bags is mutual exclusive from caring about automobile free cities. I'm 40 and have never owned a car. I'm a big NotJustBikes and StrongTowns proponent. We can for sure debate car dependence and what policies we should advocate for. But this was an article about biodegradable plastics.
Montreal is shutting down a ton of streets every summer to make them walkable, and we've built out an extensive bike infrastructure. All great things! We could make public transportation free.
> Why care if they get thrown out? If you are the median American, you burnt (aka "disposed of in the atmosphere") far more petroleum driving to the store than a hundred single-use bags. I bet a single bag is of comparable volume to tire wear. Get off your high horse and start focusing on real problems. Automobiles are responsible for more micro-plastics than single-use items, plus 6PPD poisoning us. Single-use plastics are just a useful tool to distract from the real sources of pollution.
I don't understand why you insist that we need to solve the "real" problems of pollution before we dare think about other smaller, easier to solve problems. It's not like we're playing a video game where society only has a finite amount of elbow grease to apply to this set of issues. We can reduce plastic bag pollution while also working toward reducing the pollution from automobiles, tire wear, and whatever else you on your own high horse have deigned to be "real problems".
"We" are not working on solving those other actual sources of pollution. We're just making people's lives worse. People think they've "done their part" by not using bags, when they haven't done shit.
There are ways to get around the "oh crap, I forgot the bags" depending on how the store does things. For example, the Aldi stores I shop at in the US have a couple of cages with empty boxes in them. The boxes on the shelves get emptied and then the employees round them up and drop them in accessible cages/crates. This allows a person to choose to either buy a paper bag, buy a reusable bag, or make due with a couple of free boxes that were going to be disposed of anyways.
The Aldi I usually go to has staff that are so ridiculously efficient that there are nearly zero empty boxes on the shelves, and the rolling "box cage" is nearly always tucked away somewhere unseen unless they're actively using it.
This isn't a complaint. It's a nice place to shop, and the stock is always very orderly compared to some other locations.
But GFS? They've got boxes at the checkout. I think the expectation is that the customer is supposed to box their own stuff, but they always do it for me if there isn't a line.
My love of Aldi comes from the fact that my attention isn't being accosted as soon as I walk in the door. It's the stuff I need, without advertisements, screens, music, etc.
The price doesn't hurt either. Before I began shopping there, I was exclusively at The Fresh Market, so when I switched, my grocery bill was cut by 2/3.
Their hardgoods tend to be tremendously high-quality for the price, too: Stuff is frequently ~half what I'd expect to pay elsewhere for something similar. Their buyers must be stellar.
Where I live, Aldi does not provide boxes or bags of any sort. You have to bring your own bags and, barring that, take the cart to your car and unload there directly. A bit time consuming, but not a disaster. It has been this way for at least a decade (as long as I've lived here) and people have long been used to it.
It meant that when all other supermarkets stopped offering free plastic bags, most of the shopping populace was already used to keeping reusable bags in their cars or purses, so it was a pretty easy transition.
My local groceries store used to do this and it was great, using the boxes they were going to throw out anyway for bringing groceries home worked well. We used to also go there to get boxes if just needed boxes for something. The problem is they just stopped doing it. They no longer put those boxes out for customers to use.
The killer is grocery delivery services. They got wrapped up in the legislation, so they must deliver groceries in reusable bags. It's totally impractical to come an collect the bags again (collect, clean, sort), so instead our small office, for instance, goes through about a dozen of them a month.
Over here in the UK, our grocery delivery service (Sainsburys) just comes to your door with flat crates full of unbagged shopping. You meet them at the door and transfer the shopping into your own bags. It's a lot slower than just grabbing bagged shopping out of the crates, and I have no idea how it works for folks in flats/apartments (do the delivery folks have to walk each crate up four flights of stairs individually?) but it is nice that it doesn't cause as much direct waste. Albeit that it might cause indirect waste due to now needing more vans on the road to service the same number of users, hm.
Look at VDA's KLT system for example to see something that works readily for the reusable crate task.
Just hand over your empty crate into the empty hands/van-shelf-space of the delivery driver after taking the crate with your fresh goods out of their hands.
Bonus: the KLT system easily offers enough assistance to automated/mechanized handling that the box delivery task doesn't require humans.
Could probably easily have a portal crane style 4-wheel robot to drive the new box from the van to your door, drop it, and bring back an empty box you put out for it.
Well, something about curbs, but the stair dolly (big wheel made of 3 smaller wheels) style drive can probably cope with most.
Originally the KLT boxes were made to elide re-packing and manual box handling in the many-small-supplier-companies car industry of Germany. They differ from the more widely seen euro boxes by having molded features to allow a robot gripper to "plug" into any of the 6 sides of the cuboid and get a solid grasp of the box suitable for (re-)stacking them as long as their nominal load rating is adhered to. Also at least one, if space a short and a long side though, have a slot to hold a DIN A-series piece of (tick/heavy) paper describing the box contents, such that the box won't be contaminated with sticky tape residue.
When they're eventually broken from old age or abuse, they can be recycled cleanly because they are normed to be a pretty specific plastic and to (for interchange at least) be one of that colors (grey and a dark blue).
I have seen a local service, picnic, using a small urban-only electric truck (if not even a tricycle) who's back is just a 120 cm (plus tolerances plus door thing) wide shelf to be used with 40x60 cm euro boxes. If they were KLTs you could just put the box as-is in your pantry instead of doing the "dump onto kitchen table" tactic, I guess.
I don't think so. This is largely dependant on each grocery delivery service, but of you look at it the worst cases are actually just continuing business as usual,which is hardly a regression. In the meantime, some services managed to completely eliminate the use of plastic bags.
As an example, for the past year or so I had a groceries delivery service use their old plastic bags, but they also implemented a charge-back service where they pay you back when/if you return them in the following delivery. This is clearly an improvement. In the meantime I had competing supermarket chains completely switch away from single-use bags to alternatives such as reusable plastic crates and even reusable cardboard crates. Behemoths such as Amazon Fresh completely switched to a mix of paper bags, for example.
everyone I know has a bag of "bag for life" bags, and yes sometimes you forget to bring them and you end up buying more. but they're definitely a net good. the amount of bags sold to people who forgot theirs is orders of magnitude than the number of bags that would be handed out when they were free.
I was shocked recently when I visited a shop in another european country and they had regular non-reusable bags, it seemed so primitive!
> Many are barely 'reusable', the are crap and don't get used again an get thrown out
there are thinner plastic ones, but even the lightest "reusable" bags we have last for months if not years. unless you're buying pineapples and throwing stars every time you shop they should last you a while.
> these reusable bags are starting to fill up in landfills. People forget to bring them, or make an unplanned stop to the grocery store to pick up a few things and buy a new bag
Put a tax on them that funds an environmental initiative, whether that be decarbonisation, trash clean-up or better landfill management.
I've seen several studies that dispute the efficacy of reusable plastic items (bags, cups, etc). The energy costs of producing the "sturdy" alternative are often high enough to offset the gain in reuse.
IIRC, one study showed that reusing the single-use grocery bag one time (as a trash bin liner) was enough to put it back ahead of the typical $1 reusable bags available at the check-out counter at most grocers.
Since reusable bags have so little mass, I am not so concerned about the energy use to produce. More about the amount of bags and micro-plastics that escape into the environment.
That's fair. And I'm definitely in favor of doing whatever's best for the environment. Just pointing out that it's not as simple as "reusable is better" - depending on the set of metrics being measured, it might not be.
I never claimed they're filling up landfills, that was somebody else. I was just providing some more context, which as you note, indicates it's not as simple as "reusable good, one-use bad".
you should shop around. I see the heavy plastic bags in the US$2-5 range. Check out Trader Joe's if you have them. I've been using the same couple of TJ bags for years.
Comparing a Hermes appointment to clicking "buy" on an NFT is hilarious. Nonetheless, I've gotten three appointments, have spent around 150k EUR on bags. So far I've made $30k after VAT and US duty. No idea why Paris original Hermes bags go for so much more in the states. If I have an appointment, I'll fly round trip to Paris, buy the bags, and hold them until I go to the states. Great experience, very high class!
You've spent half of your highest salary on bags? Feels like a lot but I'm just some guy. What was the biggest bag balance you've had on the books? Or are you buying and flipping at most one or two at any time? When you make these trips, do you have a US buyer lined up beforehand or do you find them once you're in the US?
With 20% ROI collected in a few months, after all duties, it's a good deal, even if you pay with a credit card. (You can certainly get a cheaper loan if you're the kind of person to be invited to a bag-dispensing event.)
Loan? I certainly hope no one is taking out a loan to do this.
Well, I guess if the resell is pretty certain, then a loan is a smart business move. But really no one should be going into debt for an item like this.
I think the biggest balance I had was ~$65k at one time. I'm buying one, maybe two per trip depending on what kinds of bags collectors are looking for in the US. I don't have a buyer setup before hand, but I'm in a couple of private facebook groups that I can usually find one a few weeks before I fly to the US.
Yep! It's very similar - albeit much smaller - market to watches, collectable vinyl records, trading cards, etc. Just easier to rely on trust and word of mouth sometimes.
Do you know if Hermes is OK with people purchasing with intent to immediately resell?
I think I remember reading that people have "gotten in trouble" (i.e. block-listed from future sales) for being suspected of this, but I might be confusing it with some other company.
That seems like an idle threat. Hermes needs a "black market" to keep the brand in circulation. Making the item feel risky acquire can add to the thrill of the chase.
Maybe if you try to buy a truckload at once, they would step in, but I doubt any consumer-level flipping is hitting their radar.
Personally, I haven't heard of it happening. Most of the market is off resale websites anyways. Now if you started a boutique trying to resell Hermes bags, then you might have an issue.
No? It's a fun luxury item to flip, that can make some decent money. Rolex's used to be good to flip if you had a good rep with an AD, but now the resale market is down.
A friend of mine is a true petrolhead. Loves cars. When he was in his early twenties he bought a second hand Ferrari. Drove it around for years. He sold it, for the exact same price he bought it, back the person who’d sold it him in the first place.
I wouldn’t call a Ferrari an investment, but if you love them they hold their value pretty well.
Yes, but maintenance costs are very high. You can expect >$5k and typically another few $k for tires. That is true even if nothing breaks and milage is low (eg <5k mi/yr). Costs quickly go up once cars are past 20 years old due to the lack of parts. You definitely need $10-15k in an emergency fund if anything significant goes wrong (or you got sold a lemon).
So that $40-50k car price is about half of 5 years of ownership.
One reason they hold their value well is because they have low mileage. They’re not practical cars to use on a daily basis, not to mention maintenance costs which are quite high if you use the car often.
I also wedged my skateboard in the back window when it was open, causing it to completely shatter when the owner tried to close it. Didn't appreciate what a bone-headed move that was at the time, but you've enlightened me.
> Ferraris have to be serviced by licensed mechanics.
"Have to"? Says who? "Licensed"? By who?
As someone who is very close to both the "factory authorized" and "non-authorized" sides of the Ferrari service industry, this is incorrect or at best a gross oversimplification of things like warranty service or the Ferrari Classiche process.
There are a lot of misunderstandings and myths circulating about Ferrari ownership, but this is a new one to me.
Not that car. A '93 NSX today will be bought by a new-money millionaire in his 40s as a nostalgia piece, his dream car from when he was a teenager in the 90s. It will be kept as stock as reasonable. Even the photographs are designed for such a buyer. An NSX on a crisp Chicago day is the definition of 90s cool.
> Ferraris have to be serviced by licensed mechanics.
If you’re talking about special ones like La Ferrari or some others, i can tell you that there are lots of 458 italia and California and Cali T that have been in no-name shops and still being sold without any problem.
>> not to mention maintenance costs which are quite high.
I remember watching Gas Monkey Garage where they bought a smashed Ferrari F40 for $400K. One of the funniest scenes was Richard Rawlings on the phone with the Ferrari parts dealer telling him how expensive the parts were he needed to rebuild the car with. The funniest was the juxtaposition of Richard, a guy who's used to haggling with people to get a good price on everything, and here he was being reminded that these were OEM Ferrari parts with the quip, "How much for a quarter panel? Yeah, I KNOW its a real Ferrari quarter panel!" with the standard eye roll that the cost of this was killing him.
The whole show gave a glimpse into owning one of these cars. IF something does happen to it, in order for it to be "certified" as a legit Ferrari, you have use all OEM parts and have a person from Ferrari oversee the repairs. The whole show was a lesson in the amount of time and money needed to own one of these - even if you don't drive it very much.
The cost of a Ferrari isn't in the car. It's in the insurance, maintenance, and stress of anything happening to the car. I for one would hate to have a luxury vehicle even if I could afford it and even if you guaranteed to buy it back from me for the same amount I'd get investing in the stock market.
Yeah, I feel like I could (should?) get around town faster in a beat up Corolla, and getting around faster on a highway in a supercar would require taking a lot of physical + legal risk.
Thats true for most cars with a bit of a cult interest past a certain age, not just ferrari. An old civic in one of the nicer engine trims would also hold value at this point, even appreciate.
So...no fun allowed? You can buy the car exclusively for the purpose of being seen in said car. I am definitively not a car guy, but what's the point if you do not red-line it for some quick thrills?
Whatever makes people happy, I guess. I will continue to drive my ~zero maintenance Honda without regrets.
I've ridden in two Ferraris, and they were very much "red-lined for quick thrills". The "Ferrari rules" may build a mystique, but there's also some juice in breaking rules.
...to get an allocation for the latest and greatest model. Pretty sure you can walk into most Ferrari dealers today and order a Roma, for example, without previous ownership history.
Not the whole sneaker market, a weird premium collectable subset of the sneaker market is like this. You can buy sneakers at Costco (as long as you like the one option they stock).
Not the whole market at the high end either, I have very little trouble getting any pair of Balmain, Versace, and Rick Owens sneaker I want - I have several dozen pairs of all three brands
Strategy at the high end is to price correctly but astronomically so almost no one can afford them, then offer seasonal sales to sell the less popular colorways or styles off to the aspirational upper poor.
Nike/Adidas is like the polar opposite, intentionally underprice so demand is frantic and there is a lot of action for middle men, then over the years try to steal back as much of the middle men profit as possible
There's a whole ecosystem for used nike shoes. https://www.youtube.com/@Ramitheicon gets over 500k each video and he's got a physical storefront where he trades cash to kids for their used nike shoes. There's so much hype for these shoes from NBA players, tik tok, instagram, and youtube.
The unique part here is that in order to even have the chance to buy a bag you need to develop a relationship with a sales rep and buy a bunch of other stuff. The more other stuff you buy the higher on whatever list they'll put you and when they get a bag in stock they'll give the chance to buy to whoever they have a positive relationship with and who has spent a lot of money.
This is always how Rolex has worked. Supply is limited, and prices are fixed, so they have to pick and choose who gets the rarer and more desirable watches, and who better to offer them to than the people who are your best customers (or have enough clout to be free advertising?).
Definitely not always how Rolex worked. Just 10-15 years ago you could walk in and purchase a stainless steel sport Rolex watch for a good discount brand new at authorized distributors.
And so they should be, there is absolutely no reason to pay more a mined diamond than lab-grown, it's synthetically produced but it's not a synthetic product if you see what I mean, it's not like say cotton vs polyester.
It only makes sense to mine diamonds if it's cheaper to do so than to manufacture one of equivalent quality.
There's a great documentary about this called Nothing Lasts Forever which I think I caught on Netflix.
The outfits with big skin in the natural/mined diamond sector have told a story about something that's been in the ground for eons and being pulled out and turned into something special as a symbol of love, and hoping that turns people away from synthetics. It's just story telling. You can see the romance in it, but the price differential is huge.
There are various attempts to keep the synthetics out, and/or identifiable, but even the main players are admitting that a significant percentage of synthetics are now in the naturals market, nobody knows how many, and that they're undetectable. That means the naturals market has to come back to actual costs plus some markup over what they've been for 100+ years: costs plus insane markups.
> something special as a symbol of love, and hoping that turns people away from synthetics. It's just story telling. You can see the romance in it, but the price differential is huge.
It's just BS, my wife's engagement ring stone is a size we picked, and then a quality (colour, lack of occlusions etc.) that I did some research on and picked to be a level for each that basically you needed to be trained & have equipment in order to determine the defects, i.e. I can't ever give her another one (natural or not) that looks better (it could be bigger but not more brilliant) to the naked eye. (And it's for her to wear, not an investment or whatever, so I figured really no reason to care beyond the naked eye.) If I'd added an additional requirement that it be formed over millennia in the earth, either it would have cost us a lot more, or more likely she'd have an objectively worse ring. Nothing romantic about that IMO!
This happened to my next door neighbor. I saw them loading up his car at night, my dad went outside and yelled at them. They soon drove off.