Acceptance

Seeing all things here
Within the doorposts of hell
Refreshment here too

Biggest Marketing Scam Ever. Diamonds Not Rare, Overpriced, Mainly Used For Industrial Purposes

Just another example of how clever marketing can inflate the worth of a product because of misinformation, dishonesty, and greed.

We can't talk about diamonds without talking about De Beers, the company that single-handedly made the diamond industry what it is today. De Beers was founded by Cecil Rhodes, who also founded the state of Rhodesia which later became Zambia and Zimbabwe. The Rhodes Scholarship is also named after him, and funded by his estate. Rhodes started by renting water pumps to miners during a diamond rush in 1867 at Kimberley, South Africa. He expanded into mines and about twenty years later became the sole owner of all diamond mining operations in the country. Rhodes built De Beers into a diamond cartel (well, they prefer "single-channel marketing" and since they're one company, they're technically a monopoly). De Beers mines diamonds, then handle their sales and distribution through various entities (in London, it's known as the innocuously named Diamond Trading Company; in Israel, it's simply called "the syndicate"; in Belgium, it's called the CSO or Central Selling Organization.) If you want to buy diamonds from De Beers, you've got to play by their rules: diamond are sold in events known as "sights." There are 10 sights held each year, and to buy, you have to be a sightholder (these are usually diamond dealers whose business is to have the stones cut and polished and then resold at diamond clearing centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv). The diamonds are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. A sightholder is given a small box of uncut diamonds priced between $1 and $25 million. De Beers set the price - there is no haggling and no re-selling of diamonds in uncut form. It is rare for sightholders to refuse a diamond package offered to them, for fear of not being invited back. And those who dare to purchase diamonds from other sources than De Beers will have their sightholder privilege revoked. In the early days, De Beers controlled about 90% of the world's diamond supply. Today, its monopoly on diamonds has been significantly reduced. It is estimated that the cartel now controls about 60 to 75% of the world's diamond trade

De Beers and Beyond: The History of the International Diamond Cartel [View PDF Online - No Download]

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New Occupation... Digital Avatar Hitman? Hardcore Gamers Rejoice

The man, named by the Kotako East blog as Mr Feng, was concerned about the amount of time his 23-year-old unemployed son was spending online.


He hoped his actions would deter his son from playing the games, he is reported to have said.


His son eventually asked one of the gamers why they kept targeting him.


"It's not going to do much for family relations," Prof Mark Griffiths, a gambling and addictions expert at Nottingham Trent University told the BBC.


"I've never heard of that kind of intervention before, but I don't think these top-down approaches work. Most excessive game playing is usually a symptom of an underlying problem."

Full Story at BBC

Over at Kotaku.com they had a bit more personal story to tell about this epic parenting win.

Feng's 23 year-old son, "Xiao Feng" (小冯) started playing video games in high school. Through his years of playing various online games, he supposedly thought himself a master of Chinese online role playing games. According to his father, Xiao Feng had terrible grades in school because of his gaming habit; he couldn't even land a job. He, however, says he simply couldn't find any work that he liked. Feng was annoyed that his son couldn't even tough it out for three months at a software development company.


Unhappy with his son not finding a job, Feng decided to hire players in his son's favorite online games to hunt down Xiao Feng. It is unknown where or how Feng found the in-game assassins—every one of the players he hired were stronger and higher leveled than Xiao Feng. Feng's idea was that his son would get bored of playing games if he was killed every time he logged on, and that he would start putting more effort into getting a job.

Full Story at Kotaku.com

Jayou - Blue Magic

http://youtu.be/vFGWhO7vgpI

Photek - Signals

http://youtu.be/TnnfmQGDrs8

Business Insider - The IMF Has Admitted Their Economists Were Wrong

This debate is over whether or not adding government spending during a downturn helps an economy turn up again into growth and surpluses, or whether it instead mainly just adds to the government debt that (according to conservative economists) was the result of too much spending, and that (also according to conservative economists) largely caused the existing “recession.”


Keynes said that the “multiplier” effect of increased government spending is sufficiently large to more-than-counteract the negative economic effect of adding to the government’s debt during an economic downturn. Conservative economists assume instead that the multiplier is too small to counteract that negative effect.

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Now although this seems like a fresh breath of honesty from the IMF about the state of the economy, it appears thinkprogress.org has been talking about the wealth disparity caused by these tax cuts for the rich since September of last year.

Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the 1970s; today it is 15%. The real GDP growth rate averaged 4.2% and real per capita GDP increased annually by 2.4% in the 1950s. In the 2000s, the average real GDP growth rate was 1.7% and real per capita GDP increased annually by less than 1%. There is not conclusive evidence, however, to substantiate a clear relationship between the 65-year steady reduction in the top tax rates and economic growth. Analysis of such data suggests the reduction in the top tax rates have had little association with saving, investment, or productivity growth. However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be associated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution.

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While Im On The Topic Of Piracy