Ladies And Your Prospective Husbands, Have You Considered Buying A Synthetic Diamond Instead?

"Diamonds are a girl’s best friend." This song, performed by Carol Channing in the 1949 production of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and made popular by Marilyn Monroe in 1953, has become a de facto motto for companies selling diamonds and for the ladies who desire them. DeBeers, the world’s largest diamond mining company, invented the phrase "Diamonds are forever." Diamond rings first became popular in the 1930s and exploded in popularity after these memes began to spread. However, diamonds - or, more explicitly, diamond mining operations - are not friends of the working class and they are certainly not popular with Mother Nature.

Diamond Mines are Dangerous for Workers

Natural diamonds are typically mined from countries where workers are exploited - paid low wages for their work, and worked to death in deadly work environments. Child labor is rampant in the diamond industry.

Conflict Diamonds

The diamond trade is also often used to fund wars. These are called blood diamonds or conflict diamonds.

Diamonds mined for war funding and with the use of exploited labor typically occurs in Africa, an area which is responsible for 2/3 of all mined diamonds in the world today.

The Environment

Even in countries where diamonds aren’t mined to fund wars or by child labor, mining is severely damaging to the environment. The carbon footprint for diamond mines is very high as they use a lot of fuel to extract diamonds from the earth, and animal habitats are also threatened in order to make and run the mines. Hazardous chemicals also leech into nearby water supplies from diamond minds, and water is used in large amounts during the extraction process. Deforestation is another occasional consequence of diamond mining.

Artificial Diamonds

Enter, synthetic or artificial diamonds. These diamonds, first invented by companies like General Electric for industrial purposes, are made by machines in a laboratory, use relatively fewer natural resources, and generate less pollution. In all, they cost around 15 percent less than mining diamonds from the earth, and offer an invaluable benefit when it comes to reducing the need for diamond mines. Synthetic diamonds are scarcely different from natural diamonds when observed by the naked eye, and thus they can be as beautiful as naturally mined diamonds.

Where to Get Synthetic Diamonds

If you have decided to make the decision to buy a diamond engagement ring that shows your love of human rights and Mother Nature as well as your love for your spouse or future spouse, there are certain hurdles to consider. For one, there aren’t a lot of companies that make synthetic diamonds for public sale as of 2013. Traditional diamond mining companies have a lock on the industry and pressure retailers into not selling these types of diamonds. Second, the technology for making synthetic diamonds is still maturing, and synthetic diamonds over a carat in size are almost never colorless. Public perception of synthetic diamonds also depresses sales, because people see them as not being as romantic as diamonds that are mined from the Earth. 

That said, there are certain companies that you can buy synthetic diamonds from. Here is a short list. Other companies include Diamond Nexus, Sona Diamond Jewelry Store, Nue Diamonds, and others.

Economic cognitive dissonance, summed up nice and easy.

The cost of living has gone up more than 100% since 1970, and corporate profits have gone up by more than 500%, while wages have stagnated, and nobody bats and eyelash, but if you start talking about wages going up to match everything else, half the country loses its fracking minds about it.

In short - everything must naturally go up except workers' wages?

Are you really willing to accept this?

Doctors are penalizing the poor in their war against Medicare... does society really need these kinds of "doctors"?

Fewer American doctors are treating patients enrolled in the Medicare health program for seniors, reflecting frustration with its payment rates and pushback against mounting rules, according to health experts.

The number of doctors who opted out of Medicare last year, while a small proportion of the nation’s health professionals, nearly tripled from three years earlier, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the government agency that administers the program. Other doctors are limiting the number of Medicare patients they treat even if they don’t formally opt out of the system.

Even fewer doctors say they won’t accept new Medicaid patients, and the number who don’t participate in private insurance contracts, while smaller, is growing—just as millions of Americans are poised to gain access to such coverage under the new health law next year. All told, health experts say the number of doctors going “off-grid" isn’t enough to undermine the Affordable Care Act, but they say some Americans may have difficulty finding doctors who will take their new benefits or face long waits for appointments with those who do.

Meanwhile, the proportion of family doctors who accepted new Medicare patients last year, 81%, was down from 83% in 2010, according to a survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians of 800 members. The same study found that 4% of family physicians are now in cash-only or concierge practices, where patients pay a monthly or yearly fee for special access to doctors, up from 3% in 2010.

A study in the journal Health Affairs this month found that 33% of primary-care physicians didn’t accept new Medicaid patients in 2010-2011.

If you’re rich, then this system benefits you. If you’re poor or elderly, well, you’re screwed.

Do we really need doctors who create this kind of environment?

Any Effort To Reduce Inequality Would Make Us All Poorer? Nonsense.

CEO pay has gone up more than 14 fold from 1970 to now, and not because of their compensation equals their marginal output.

It's more because of rent-seeking.

The Pay of Corporate Executives and Financial Professionals as Evidence of Rents in Top 1 Percent Incomes | Economic Policy Institute

Furthermore, the claim that cutting CEO compensation (and thus rent-seeking) would make the world poorer, is nonsense. For instance Harvard ivory tower-dweller Greg Mankiw states:

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/man..._percent_0.pdf

Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies...

There's one fatal mistake in this theory. JK Rowling chose to stay in England despite their high taxes because she had a moral obligation to their welfare system.

So the going theory that reducing wealth inequality will make the world poorer because we'll have fewer Steve Jobs and JK Rowlings, is nonsense.

I've got another example to refute that, too: Linus Torvalds, the maker of GNU/Linux. If Steve Jobns and Bill Gates were to just up and quit because they couldn't become a multi billionaire then we'd have those resources going to Linux instead. Which is distributed for free. So much for marginal compensation.

Then there's the final problem of the theory of marginal compensation and its attempts to justify income inequality: if income inequality keeps rising indefinitely, then the 1% will find that nobody else can buy their products or services anymore. Then who will compensate them at all?

Let Me Be Straight Up About This... What Is And What Is NOT Liberalism

If you believe that summary executions by bombings or drone strikes is acceptable, despite the innocent lives that such acts snuff out of existence, you are not a liberal. Liberals oppose the taking of innocent human lives. Anything else is convenient moral expediency - aka warmongering. Supporting these things is a luxury only enjoyed by those who do not live under the threat of being bombarded. Supporting the use of air strikes and bombardments to take out enemy targets with no regard to civilian casualties is what you do when you are a privileged American or Northern Hemisphere Western world citizen who, by right of technological dominance, will never be the target of such acts of mass murder. If you support summary executions and drone strikes, you do so because your child will never die for the simple crime of being an innocent bystander. You live under the safety of the protection of due process: before you or anyone you know can be put to death there must be a trial and the discovery of evidence, and a jury that convicts you and sentences you to die. For you to say that people in the rest of the world don't deserve the same exact thing, makes you no better than the so-called terrorists. You are not a liberal if you believe in summary executions or drone strikes. Period.

If you believe that America should in any way be involved in the Middle East, you are not a liberal. What we are doing out there is nothing short of the naked mass exploitation of natural resources in the name of protecting an outdated energy industry that is killing us all. So you say we need the oil? Do you also say we need the pollution and the global warming that comes with the burning of these fossil fuels? Do you believe the fossil fuel industry propaganda about how alternative fuels and energy aren't practical? Then you most certainly aren't a liberal, because you are clinging to outdated concepts that are going to lead to disaster for human civilization. Do you deny that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming and is causing the costly, outright disastrous droughts and floods that we are seeing today? Is your counter argument "but things will cost more if we don't stick with oil"? Then you are in fact a conservative, not a liberal, and moreover, you have a nasty surprise coming to you: global warming is already making things cost more... like food.

Do you say we also need to maintain a military presence in the Middle East to fight with people in the area who don't want us there? Do you argue that we have a right to be there because their governments - largely un-elected dictatorships that they are - invited us to be there? Such naked Imperialism is not liberalism - in fact it is the exact opposite, it is conservatism. You have the privilege of adopting this conservative warmongering mindset because you live in a safe Western nation where foreign troops don't routinely drive through your streets, shooting at your neighbors. If you were a liberal you would be fighting for the right of Middle Easterners to enjoy the same privileges. Oh but they're terrorists, you argue? Another bigoted conservative belief. Try having unwanted foreign troops in your city and see how fast your neighbors start taking up arms against them. If you were a liberal you'd understand the hypocrisy of this so-called "war on terror".

Does this sound like ideological purity? You betcha it does. The alternative is that liberalism will be re-defined as blind loyalty to old outdated industries with reckless disregard to the damage being done to our environment. The alternative is signing onto an ideology that saddles our children with an even more polluted world, for the sake of immediate economic gain for our generation. The alternative to the dreaded concept of ideological purity is to accept that liberalism has evolved into naked imperialism, racism and mass-murderous savagery repackaged as "bringing democracy and civilization to the East". 

If you support drone strikes, Middle East intervention and resource exploitation, and the war on terror, you are not a liberal. There is already a home for your beliefs, and it is called conservatism.

If You Want to Shut Up a Tea Partier, Ask Them 2 Basic Questions

1) Why didn't they rise up in protest when Bush proposed to bail out the banks in 2008?

2) Why didn't the Tea Party rise up in protest when the USAPATRIOT Act was passed?

"This Country In Its Present Form Is Beyond Redemption" - Quote from a Democratic Underground user who once screamed that this was not the case.

 http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2863072

we're endlessly at war and we do terrible things in the name of national security. We have a bloated secretive Defense and National Security Network that is hand in glove with the defense industry. In short, we do more harm than good on the world stage and we damage ourselves in the process. Our wars are driven, to a significant degree, by the relationship between government and industry. 

The gap between the rich and everyone else is growing at an exponential rate. 

Corporations own the government. No, they don't own each individual elected or appointed official but they own enough of them, or like Penny Pritzker, they are them. 

Electing democrats rather than republicans may stave off some horrors, but it makes little difference when it comes to corporate power, who is in the White House or who is in Congress. Maybe it's become some weird form of institutional behavior- the institutions are so mired in the corpocracy that individuals have little chance of effecting real change. 

I used to scoff at people who claimed that we're living under fascism. If not there yet, we're well on our way. 

I wonder if that poster will remember this thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=882068

In short:
TO HELL with "small, incremental solutions". WE NEED MAJOR, RADICAL CHANGES to save this country! We have Stage-4 societal CANCER and we need CHEMOTHERAPY.

Welcome aboard, Cali. The first step is to realize that America is beyond redemption in its present form. The next step is to realize that you need MAJOR, RADICAL SOLUTIONS in order to save the country.