A Single Green Feather

Brody Atwell’s fascination with Carolina Parakeets began in the ninth grade. Mrs. Jenkins had shown them a painting of a bird he’d thought existed only in jungles or on pirate ships. They were here, in these mountains, she’d told the class. Scientists say they are extinct, but I hope they are wrong. Brody hoped so too.

Whenever outdoors, he was watchful. A flash of bright feather brought a moment of possibility, only to reveal a bunting or goldfinch. His interest in all birds grew. At NC State Brody majored in biology before returning to Enka to teach high school. His interest in the parakeet remained, evidenced by the Audubon print hung on his classroom’s wall.

Although there had been reported sightings as late as the 1920s, the last confirmed Carolina Parakeet died in 1916 at the St. Louis Zoo. Fifty-three years. Yet there was so much wilderness left in these mountains, miles and miles of national parkland and large individual holdings. Several students had relatives who swore they’d recently seen panthers, though biologists claimed the big cats had also been absent for decades. Brody wanted to believe, even as astronauts gazed down on earth, recently left their footprints on the moon, that the world yet concealed some secrets. However, science demands evidence, his professor, Dr. Willard, had said, declaring that the Ivorybill Woodpecker and the Carolina Parakeet were extinct until proven otherwise. Unlike Saint Paul, the professor had continued, we cannot believe in things unseen. Now, on a Thursday morning before homeroom, Brody remembered these words as he stared at the green feather laid on his desk.

“It looks like it could of come off one of them parakeets,” Lester said, nodding at the Audubon print.

With many students, Brody would have thought it no more than some high-school prank, a dyed feather pulled off a souvenir from a Cherokee or Boone tourist trap, but though Lester was more interested in hunting and fishing than schoolwork, he was a quiet, respectful boy. Brody picked up the feather. Holding it by the quill, he moistened his free hand’s thumb and forefinger, rubbed the inner vane. No dye smudged his skin.

“What do you think, Mr. Atwell?” Lester asked.

“It’s not a bunting,” Brody said, turning the feather slowly, inspecting it with a jeweler’s attentiveness. The tinge of yellow on the outer vane was significant. Lester’s family had lived in the county for generations, so it could be an heirloom passed down from an older relative, or perhaps detached from a grandmother’s once-fashionable hat. However, as Brody brushed a finger across the feather, he found it not brittle with age but soft and pliable.

by Ron Rash, Salvation South |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Studio Blackburn & Nirvana / Euro 24 – Cheers to the Beautiful Game / Packaging / 2024

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P-51 Mustang
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Hey, Celebrities - Shut Up!

I wish celebrities would learn the art of the French exit. But they can’t, which is why Eva Longoria has announced she no longer lives in America. “I get to escape and go somewhere,” she explained. “Most Americans aren’t so lucky – they’re going to be stuck in this dystopian country.” What’s brought this on, apart from the obvious? “Whether it’s the homelessness or the taxes … it just feels like this chapter in my life is done now.” Great to learn that Eva dislikes both homelessness and taxes. America’s loss of this major political thinker is some other country’s gain – and this highly called-for intervention reminds us why celebrities should speak their brains even more often. If only into a pillow, or an abyss.

As always in these moments of the silly voters making a silly mistake, many stars have pledged to follow her. We’ll see. Either way, celebrities seem totally unaware that these high-handed statements of first-class migration are not the admonishment to the lesser orders that they are meant to be, and may even encourage them.

But then, stars have always been totally unaware of how very little they bring to this particular party. The last few days of the Harris campaign were an increasingly excruciating riot of celebrity bandwagonning. Did the Kamala campaign ask man-born-in-Pennsylvania Richard Gere to make his video for her – or did the actor freelance one out of fear of not having “used his platform”? It was certainly Richard’s most critically misunderstood electoral outing since his address to the Palestinians before their 2005 elections. “Hi, I’m Richard Gere,” that one began, “and I’m speaking for the entire world …”

If anything good were to come out of the wreckage of the Harris campaign, let it be the final death of the idea that showbiz endorsements can help swing elections. They can’t. Not one bit. (...)

Meanwhile, it is easier to leave Twitter than America, as I think Marcus Aurelius once remarked. In the week the Guardian exited X – though not in the French style – you couldn’t move for people informing you they were herding with almost impossible dignity over to Bluesky.

And it does feel slightly hilarious that huge numbers of people who have spent the past decade-plus shrieking about the evils of social media – usually on social media – have been “liberated” from one platform, only to promptly rush and enslave themselves to another. Really? You can see it all stretching ahead of you – fun period, emergence of Blueskyocracy, the first Bluesky cancellation of someone, the exponentially intensifying purity spiral, followed by legacy titles or legacy humans announcing an exit from that one too. It’s all such a predictable timesuck. Bluesky might be the new email.

by Marina Hyde, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

[ed. Then there's this, about a Scientific American editor resigning because she'd voiced her true feelings when she wasn't clocked in at work (and then, denying those feelings). Which proved nothing and only provided gleeful fodder for the stupid hoards who rejoice in claiming another scalp.]

A Letter To Elon Musk

[ed. Advice from Francis Fukuyama (End of History) for Elon Musk, who was recently selected to lead a newly created Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E). Yes, DOGE. Because ruining people's lives and careers is funny.]

Dear Elon,

Congratulations on the resounding victory of your candidate, Donald Trump, a result to which you contributed significantly. I understand that you are tapped to become an efficiency Czar in the new administration, a post that will be very critical since the federal bureaucracy does indeed need fixing. However, I have some suggestions for things to keep in mind when embarking on this post.

As I’m sure you know, you will find working in government very different from working in the private sector. The chief difference is that people in government are hugely constrained by rules. For example, you cannot begin firing people on day one as you did at Twitter. Federal employees are covered by a host of job protections created by Congress. Trump has a plan to eliminate those protections by restoring an executive order from his first administration to create a “Schedule F” category that would permit the president to fire any worker at will. But such a move will be heavily contested, and it will likely be months before the legal barriers to action are eliminated.

In any event, firing government bureaucrats is not necessarily a path to greater efficiency. It is a widely believed myth that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and overstaffed. This is not the case: there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million. This is despite the fact that the government now disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then. In fact, you can argue that the government is understaffed, due to relentless pressure over the decades to keep headcounts down. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for example, oversees the spending of $1.4 trillion, or one fifth of the entire federal budget, with a staff of only 6,400 full-time employees. These workers have to check for Medicare fraud, evaluate and certify tens of thousands of health providers, and make sure that payments to tens of millions of Americans are made in a timely manner. If you cut this staff, the amount of fraud and waste in the Medicare system is likely to go up, not down. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which looks after the millions of refugees entering the country, has a staff of 150. By increasing the staff at the Internal Revenue Service, the government is expected to take in an additional $561 billion over the next decade.

The government has compensated for this understaffing by hiring legions of contractors (among which is your company, SpaceX). It is easier to fire a contractor than a regular federal employee, but then who is going to perform the services the contractor provides? You may actually save money by taking these functions back into the government because federal workers are paid less, but then you will need to hire more people and will likely get lower quality.

Deregulation has to be part of any plan to make government more efficient. There are clear targets for deregulation, particularly in the construction industry—something you already know given your experience building plants in the United States. We have way too many permitting rules that slow down or altogether prevent infrastructure projects, like the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) that requires environmental impact statements that run to thousands of pages and take years to write. Moreover, federal and state laws invite private litigation to enforce environmental laws, which is both expensive and time-consuming. This is why it takes nearly a decade to get approvals for offshore wind farms, and years to construct transmission lines to send electricity from Texas to California. So anything you can do to streamline this process will be welcome. This will be one of the easiest wins for a new administration, one that will have positive effects in areas from affordable housing to climate adaptation. (You should, however, recognize that a lot of over-regulation occurs at a state level, over which you will have no control. That is, of course, why you moved Tesla from California to Texas.)

There is another type of deregulation that needs to occur, however, if the government is to be made more efficient. People blame the bureaucracy for over-regulating the private sector, but the bureaucracy itself is over-regulated. Americans have never trusted the government, and over the decades have piled up a mountain of rules that bureaucrats must follow. An example of this are the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), which contains hundreds of pages of rules that government procurement officers must follow before they can acquire anything from an F-35 fighter to office furniture. Hiring new employees is also extremely difficult; my students often have to wait months before getting a job interview for an open position in the federal government. There are, moreover, a lot of DEI requirements that don’t necessarily reward merit, rules that I’m sure a Trump administration would be happy to torch.

Many conservatives believe that government bureaucrats have too much discretionary authority and use it to enact a liberal agenda, thereby eluding democratic control. This does occur in some instances. But the real truth is rather the opposite: bureaucrats spend way too much of their time complying with hundreds of rules mandated by Congress, rather than using their independent judgment to make decisions that lead to good results for citizens. They need to be liberated from these constraints, and have their performance judged by the outcomes they achieve rather than how risk-averse they are. This is, of course, how Silicon Valley and the private sector operate. (...)

So here’s the deal. You will never be able to run the government the way you run your companies. But you can do a lot to make it more efficient. The trick is to avoid simplistic moves like mass layoffs and the closing of entire agencies. Remember that Donald Trump’s appointee Rick Perry wanted to close the Department of Energy, not realizing that one of its most important functions was to run the system of national laboratories that were responsible for, among other things, research on nuclear weapons and energy. You will also run into the problem that Congress has a say in how the government operates. Even if that branch is controlled by Republicans, they will have equities in different parts of the American state, and may not allow you to violate statutes that they had earlier endorsed.

We need to cut back government regulation of many parts of the private sector. But we also need to deregulate the government itself, and allow those who work for it to actually do their jobs. If Donald Trump wants to help the American people, he needs to see the government not as an enemy to be dismantled, but as an effective and indeed necessary means of doing so.

Yours Sincerely,
Francis Fukuyama

via: Persuasion |  Read more:

[ed. Many people who rage against the government overlook the fact that it is simply implementing the various laws and regulations that politicians pass and legal rulings mandate. True, there's some discretion in interpreting those laws and rulings (mainly based on expertise) but bureaucrats aren't just making stuff up on their own (unless they're political appointees who come in with an agenda). Want better government? Elect better representatives. But don't blame folks for doing the best they can with what they're given, or because you don't like some program or other. Here's a good example of this kind of blame shifting.]

Epic Games' Unreal Engine

Epic Games is the maker of Unreal Engine, which is one of the biggest and most capable game engines. What is a game engine? Well, all games, no matter how diverse their play style or visual presentation, have certain functionality in common. Developers used to code all of that from scratch (and still can, if they so choose), but it makes sense to bundle all of those capabilities into one piece of software so that devs can work on the things that make their projects unique instead of continually re-inventing a thousand different kinds of wheels. This is what game engines do.

There’s a feedback loop that has now been running for decades between companies like Epic that make the engines, and developers who come up with new ways to use them. Engines become more capable as companies like Epic say “hey, a lot of devs are implementing Feature X, we should just add that to the next release.”

Meanwhile the hardware that people use to run games becomes much more powerful. Developers think up interesting ways to take advantage of all of these improvements.

Game engines are really a general infrastructure for immersive experiences—by which I mean, audiovisual productions that you can move around in and interact with. Many of the applications built on this foundation fit cleanly into established genres such as first-person shooter games, but increasingly people use these things to make art projects, movies, and commercial/industrial applications.

Nick Whiting, a former studio head and engineering director at Epic, has co-founded a company called Kumikai that, among other things, helps developers who are using Unreal Engine to create applications that are not games. Part of his inspiration came from this brain aneurysm surgery simulator. Nick generously provided me with a list of links to other non-game projects that I can’t fully do justice to here, so I’ll just drop them in:

• The “Guided Ureterovesical Anastomosis” section of this page on the Surgical Science site. Maybe a better and quicker view here though

• Tesla’s use of Unreal Engine to generate synthetic data for training AI. If you’re teaching an AI to deal with conditions that arise in three-dimensional space, you can get data much more easily and cheaply by simulating it photorealistically than by going out into the real world and shooting video.

• The inevitable NASA link. Label says it has been taken down but it seems to play.

• Helping architects design buildings

• A mining construction simulator. “By changing things like lighting and tunnel sizes to give a bit more "breathing room"…before they blast holes in the ground, they were able to save large amounts of money and have better safety for folks that are already in incredibly hazardous environments.”

Fortnite and the Metaverse

So if there’s going to be a Metaverse, game engines are going to run it. And game developers—the people who are proficient at using those engines and the toolchains that feed assets into them—are going to build it.

In 2017 Epic released Fortnite Battle Royale, which most people just refer to as Fortnite. It is an immensely successful game. In any given month, 70 - 80 million people play it. At peak it generated $5 - 6 billion a year in revenue.

This is relevant to the Metaverse because Fortnite is an online, multi-player game. 100 avatars parachute onto an island at about the same time and fight each other until only one team remains. The players can be anywhere on Earth. So in order for Epic’s engineers to make this game work, they had to solve a host of technical problems around synchronizing those 100 players’ perceptions and experiences of the same virtual space.

They’re not the first or the only engineers to have tackled such challenges. MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) are a genre unto themselves and have been around since long before Fortnite. More recently Minecraft and Roblox have achieved phenomenal success enabling users to craft experiences that can be experienced by multiple players at once.

Tim Sweeney, however, has been openly stating for a long time that the goal is to develop all of this into something like the Metaverse. He’s been personally working on a new programming language called Verse that is tailored to the needs of Metaverse builders. After years of development Verse has recently broken the surface in UEFN, Unreal Editor for Fortnite, which is a system that Epic has released in order to make it possible for developers to extend the base Fortnite experience into games of their own design, and to make money doing so.

by Neal Stephenson, Graphomane |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Unreal Engine

[ed. If you find this topic interesting, spend some time on the Unreal Engine website (which provides the introductory video at the top of this post. Coupled with AI it's easy to see how the long imagined (and much hyped) 'metaverse' might evolve.]

Tianjin

FlyOverChina | A Fantastic aerial tour of Tianjin
via: Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism
[ed. The Chinese menace.]

A performance featuring traditional Dunhuang music and dance is staged during the 7th Silk Road (Dunhuang) International Cultural Expo in Dunhuang, northwest China's Gansu Province, Sept. 20, 2024. The three-day expo concluded here on Sunday. (Xinhua/Lang Bingbing)

Image: Xinhua News

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Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity

The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history.

Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is Scientologist. The United States is >99% Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo-Scientology that thinks L Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet.

This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and a cut-throat recruitment arm! At least they fight back when you persecute them! At least they seem to be in the game!

Rodney Stark was a sociologist of religion. He started off studying cults, and got his big break when the first missionaries of the Unification Church (“Moonies”) in the US let him tag along and observe their activities. After a long and successful career in academia, he turned his attention to the greatest cult of all and wrote The Rise Of Christianity. He spends much of it apologizing for not being a classical historian, but it’s fine - he’s obviously done his homework, and he hopes to bring a new, modern-religion-informed perspective to the ancient question.

So: how did early Christianity win?

Slowly But Steadily

Previous authorities assumed Christianity spread through giant mass conversions, maybe fueled by miracles. Partly they thought this because the Biblical Book of Acts describes some of these. But partly they thought it because - how else do you go from a thousand people to forty million people in less than 400 years?

Stark answers: steady exponential growth.

Suppose you start with 1,000 Christians in 40 AD. It’s hard to number the first few centuries’ worth of early Christians - they’re too small to leave much evidence - but by 300 AD (before Constantine!) they’re a sizeable enough fraction of the empire that some historians have tentatively suggested a 10% population share. That would be about 6 million people.

From 1,000 to 6,000,000 in 260 years implies a 40% growth rate per decade. Stark finds this plausible, because it’s the same growth rate as the Mormons, 1880 - 1980 (if you look at the Mormons’ entire history since 1830, they actually grew a little faster than the early Christians!)

Instead of being forced to attribute the Christians’ growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we think of this as each existing Christian having to convert 0.4 new people, on average, per decade, it starts to sound downright do-able.

Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over so many generations?

Through The Social Graph

This is another of Stark’s findings from his work with the Moonies.

The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Young Oon Kim, who arrived in 1959. Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the landlady’s friends. Then came the landlady’s friends’ husbands and the landlady’s friends’ husbands’ co-workers. That was when Stark showed up. “At the time . . . I arrived to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger.”

Stark theorized that “the only [people] who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to nonmembers.” I don’t think this can be literally correct - taken seriously, it implies that the second convert could have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further. But something like “your odds of converting are your number of Moonie friends, divided by your number of non-Moonie friends” seems to fit his evidence.

History confirms this story. Mohammed’s first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith’s first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers. Indeed, in spite of the Mormons’ celebrated door-knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door-knocks results in a conversion, but “when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, this results in conversion 50% of the time”. 1

This theory of social-graph-based-conversation was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they’ll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings. But Stark says:

I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd. I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about “some guy in Korea” . . . Then, one day, he got worked up about this guy too.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. There's much more, but I'd also suggest that Christianity benefited from an abundance of scribblers, editors and transcriptionists who, over successive generations, defined and redefined God in the Bible (and Christianity in general) to fit an evolving religion and events of the time. Jack Miles' God: A Biography covers this ground quite thoroughly. See also: this review of the book (Commentary); God: A Biography: Q&A (Jack Miles); and, Christian theology (Wikipedia).]

Utah Hair

Everyone's Talking About Utah Hair (WSJ)

Image: Disney

[ed. Not me, but apparently everyone else :]

“The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a new reality TV series, is full of juicy storylines involving fraying friendships, divorce and dating. But for all the drama the show’s eight young stars face, nothing is sparking more fan conversation than their hair.

“Utah curls,” as they’ve been dubbed on social media, have received outsize attention after being featured front and center in the Hulu show, which premiered in September. The hairstyle is a cascade of waist-length, thick locks, curled into beach waves with straight ends. In the show, where the characters juggle the demands of faith, family and relationships, fans have noticed that nearly every cast member wears their hair in an identical style. 

[ed. See also: The One Thing About TV Hairstyles You’ve Probably Never Noticed (Fashion).]

Fleetwood Mac

Amazon is a Ripoff

There's a cheat-code in US antitrust law, one that's been increasingly used since the Reagan administration, when the "consumer welfare" theory ("monopolies are fine, so long as they lower prices") shoved aside the long-established idea that antitrust law existed to prevent monopolies from forming at all.

The idea that a company can do anything to create or perpetuate a monopoly so long as its prices go down and/or its quality goes up is directly to blame for the rise of Big Tech. These companies burned through their investors' cash for years, selling goods and services below cost, or even giving stuff away for free. Think of Uber, who lost $0.41 on every dollar they brought in for their first 13 years of existence, a move that cost their investors (mostly Saudi royals) $31 billion.

The monopoly cheerleaders in the consumer welfare camp understood that these money-losing orgies could not go on forever, and that the investors who financed them weren't doing so for charitable purposes. But they dismissed the possibility that would-be monopolists could raise prices after attaining dominance, because these prices hikes would bring new competitors into the market, starting the process over again.

Well, Uber has doubled the price of a ride and halved the wages of its drivers (not that consumer welfare theorists care about workers' wages – they care about consumer welfare, not worker welfare). And not just Uber: companies that captured whole markets have jacked up prices and lowered quality across the board, a Great Enshittening whose playbook has been dubbed "venture predation":

Not only was this turn predictable – it was predicted. Back in 2017, Lina Khan – then a law student – published an earthshaking Yale Law Journal paper, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," laying out how monopolists would trap their customers and block new competitors as they raised prices and lowered quality:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is the chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that turns her legal theories into practice, backed by a cheering chorus of Amazon customers, workers, suppliers and competitors who've been cheated by the e-commerce giant:

Khan's case argues that Amazon is not the house of bargains that it's widely billed as. She points to the sky-high fees that Amazon extracts from its sellers (45-51% of every dollar!) and the company's use of "most favored nation" deals that force sellers who raise their Amazon prices to pay those rents to raise their prices everywhere else, too:

Now, a new Amazon Paradox has dropped, and it drills into another way that Amazon overcharges most of us by as much as 29% on nearly every purchase, disqualifying it from invoking that consumer welfare cheat code. The new paper is "Amazon's Pricing Paradox," from law professors Rory Van Loo and Nikita Aggarwal, for The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology:

The authors concede that while Amazon does have some great bargains, it goes to enormous lengths to make it nearly impossible to get those bargains. Drawing from the literature on behavioral economics, the authors make the reasonable (and experimentally verified) assumption that shoppers generally assume that the top results in an Amazon search are the best results, and click on those.

But Amazon's search-ordering is enshittified: it shifts value from sellers and shoppers (you!) to the company. A combination of self-preferencing (upranking Amazon's own knock-offs), pay-for-placement (Amazon ads), other forms of payola (whether a merchant is paying for Prime), and "junk ads" (that don't match your search) turn Amazon's search-ordering into a rigged casino game.

The ability to manipulate customers and sellers and get more money from both is why Amazon has so many incentives to use Amazon's internal search tool, rather than, say, searching Amazon via Google, which can yield far superior results. (...)

In their new paper, the authors extract and analyze a large dataset of common items you might buy on Amazon, determining which result is best – the lowest price at the highest rating – and then calculating how much more you'll pay for that item if you click the first relevant (non-ad) item on the search results.

If you trust Amazon search to find you the best product and click that first link, you will pay a 29% premium for that item. If you expand your selection to the "headline" – the first four items, which are often all that's visible without scrolling – you'll pay an average of 25% more. That top row accounts for 64% of Amazon's clicks.

On average, the best deal on Amazon is found in the seventeenth slot in the search results. Seventeen!

Amazon argues that none of this matters, because it allows users to refine their searches to get the best bargains, but Amazon's search won't let you factor in "unit pricing" – that is, the price per unit. So if you order your search by price, the seller who's offering a single pencil for $10 will show up above a seller who's offering ten pencils for $10.01.

Here is an iron law of cons: any time someone adds complexity to a proposition bet, the complexity exists solely to make it hard for you to figure out if you're getting a good deal. Whether that's the payout lines on a craps table, the complex interplay of deductibles and co-pays on your health insurance, the menu of fees your bank charges, or the add-ons for your cell-phone plan, the complexity exists to confound your intuition and overwhelm your reason:

And Amazon certainly knows how to pile on the complexity! First, there's the irrelevant results – AAA batteries that show up in a search for AA batteries, or dog accessories that show up in a search for cat accessories:

Then there's the "drip pricing": extra charges that get tacked on at checkout, like shipping fees. I once found an item on Amazon that advertised "free shipping" – but at checkout, that "free shipping" came with a delivery date that was three months in the future. Upgrading to shipping in the current quarter doubled the price.

Drip pricing makes it hard to figure out if Prime is a good deal, too. Recall that Amazon already comps shipping on orders over $25, so a potential Prime purchaser has to evaluate whether they'll place enough sub-$25 orders in the coming year to justify the price – and also factor in the fact that Prime items are often more expensive on a per-unit basis than their non-Prime equivalents. Yes, Prime comes with other perks – music and videos – but valuing these just adds complexity to your calculations about whether Prime is a good buy for you, and requires that you factor in the possibility that Amazon will enshittify those services and reduce their value in the coming year, say, by taking away the ability to turn off shuffle when listening to music (...)

Or stuffing ads into your videos (...)

The authors conclude that getting the best price on Amazon requires that you "first spend considerable time searching through pages of results and then utilize, at a minimum, spreadsheet algebraic capabilities to determine the product’s full price…[and] somehow de-bias from the psychological effects of anchoring, and labels such as 'limited time deal' and 'Best Seller,' as well as many other subtle psychological influences."

Amazon says it's entitled to use the consumer welfare cheat-code to get out of antitrust enforcement because it has so many bargains. But to get those bargains, you have to pay such minutely detailed attention – literally spreadsheeting your options and hand-coding mathematical formulas to compare them – that you'll almost certainly fail. The price of failure is incredibly high – a 25-29% overcharge on every purchase.

Amazon's burying of this vital information will be familiar to Douglas Adams readers, as the "Beware of the Leopard" tactic. It's not even the first time Amazon's deployed it:

Another group of scholars recently coined a useful term to describe this ripoff: in a paper published last week, Tim O'Reilly, Mariana Mazzucato and Ilan Strauss dubbed the costs of all this complexity "attention rents":

It's fascinating to see these two different groups of scholars, coming at this problem from multiple disciplines, all converging on the same analysis! When technologists, trad economists, behavioral economists, and antitrust lawyers all study Amazon and come away pointing at the same sleazy tactic as being at the heart of the scam, it feels like maybe we're having A Moment. What's more, all of this is so thoroughly presaged by Khan's 2017 paper that it suggests that she's a bona fide prophet.

The authors of this new paper are pretty confident that this gimmick violates antitrust law. They point out that it doesn't matter if Amazon customers feel like they're getting a good deal – just as it doesn't matter if don't know that you got charged a higher rate for your mortgage because you're Black, that's still illegal.

What's more, consumer protection law doesn't require that the merchant intends to rip you off. There's plenty of laws requiring supermarkets to post unit prices on their shelves. These laws don't start from the assumption that supermarkets who don't use unit pricing are trying to scam you! Rather, they start from the assumption that you will make better-informed purchases if you have that information, and so you should get it.

Regulating the presentation of prices is firmly in the purview of antitrust law, especially consumer welfare antitrust, which fetishizes low prices above all else. The less competitive a market is, the less pressure a company will feel to offer clear price information to customers, because those customers will have fewer places to go if they don't like the company's business practices.

by Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic |  Read more:

Image: Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0, modified
[ed. More relevant than ever. Expect Lina Khan FTC Chair (Federal Trade Commission) and Rohit Chopra at CFPB (Consumer Finance Protection Bureau) to be gone a few micro-seconds after the next inauguration and the agencies they head crippled (Project 2025). For everyone who voted for Big Daddy to make their lives better, prepare to be screwed cross-eyed. Unfortunately, the other half of the nation is going to be screwed just as bad. See also: Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever (Pluralistic); and, A Presidency of, By, and For the Rich (Jacobin).]

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

[ed. Eventually. Hopefully.]

Predator or Prey

1.

An old boyfriend, let’s call him K, used to tease me, saying I wouldn’t make a very good meal—“not enough fat.” He might have been talking about himself, though. He was mostly tendons and veins.

There was something sensual about killing animals with him. We trapped and hunted together in the winter, commercial fished in the summer. During those long July days, we hammered salmon heads until their bodies stiffened into the pose that preceded death. Fish slime made its way from my cotton gloves up my plastic arm guards, onto my neck, my chin, my hair. All day, my fingers worked fast to yank fish off the net, then pull a gill to bleed them. If we didn’t pick fish fast enough, seagulls would pluck out their eyeballs, seals would tear through their flesh. Most days, we caught hundreds. Some days, we caught more than a thousand.

 

I was recently reading an online essay about salmon and stumbled on a photo of myself from one of those summers. I’m wearing ripped jeans, a gray tank top, blue earrings, no shoes. A turquoise headband holds my hair and my skin is as tan as I’ve ever seen it. I look good. Blood cakes my knuckles as I work my knife along a salmon spine. In the corner of the photo, the salmon’s decapitated head sits open-mouthed and unblinking; its eyes stare back at me as I stare into the screen.

2.

I didn’t grow up killing animals, but there was a period in my mid-20s, the period that overlapped with my relationship with K, when I killed a lot. There was the beaver I retrieved by swimming naked through a half-frozen lake. The duck wings I hung like prayer flags from the porch. The organs we liberated from the belly of the caribou.

I had qualms. I’d stopped eating meat in high school, citing animal cruelty and climate change. In my 20s, I let my vegetarianism slip when I moved to rural Alaska. Eating caribou roast and moose tacos and salmon burgers seemed different than ordering a steak whose origins as an animal were concealed; these wild creatures led uninhibited lives in vast landscapes. Choosing to eat the calories from their flesh meant not eating something that had flown thousands of miles to reach me. It’s a painful inevitability: the calories have to come from somewhere.

Still, my enjoyment in what was a kind of murder troubled me. When I was killing hundreds and at times thousands of salmon a day, I was often having a ball. Sun on my skin, slime in my hair. I was viscerally, unabashedly alive. On land, too, I found stalking entrancing: following a grouse through the forest, slithering on my elbows to sneak up on a goose, watching a beaver lodge for hours. Desire sharpened my senses, made the rest of the world recede. Desire cut through other parts of my life then, too—it was a time of wanting, wanting, wanting.

I was becoming a hunter.

I tried to pay homage to the lives I took. I learned how to use as much of each carcass as I could—baking trout liver, tanning beaver hides, boiling salmon roe. I made up rituals of thanksgiving, trying with words to honor the bodies I ate. I pushed myself to remember that the food I ate came from someone’s life. I wasn’t always sure it was enough, though. While I’d had a few close calls with other animals stalking me, my main associations with the word “predator” weren’t with carnivores of the tundra. Occasionally, I wondered: did every man who ever turned me into a piece of meat justify it by saying he was grateful?

At the time, I didn’t think of my relationship with K in such terms. If he was the hunter, that would mean I wasn’t one—it would mean I was his catch. I didn’t want to see myself that way. I wanted to live up to my namesake: Diana, goddess of the moon, the hunt, the wild.

Still, when K wrapped his arm around me, he named my body parts the way he did with a caribou: brisket, backstrap, hindquarter. Still, when we got together, I was 25. He was 51.

3.

The killing-animals phase eventually faded. I moved from rural to urban Alaska; K and I broke up; I married my husband, David, who’s never owned a gun. David and I still catch salmon every summer to fill our freezer. We don’t hunt, but we eat meat from moose and caribou and deer that our friends kill. I’m less in touch with my animal self than I once was. The wildness I lived around in my 20s, and the wildness I found within, at some point started to scare me. I got charged by bears on a few occasions. Wolves killed my dog. I thought, for a brief moment, I might end up with K. The danger—the life and death of it all—became too much. Too much hunting, too much killing, too much wanting.

4.

K used to comment on my body a lot: my curved lip, my crooked toes, my veiny forearms, my toothy smile—like none of a kind, he’d say. He teased when he praised my looks, saying he didn’t want to tell me I was beautiful too often, for fear I’d think he only liked me for my appearance. And yet, he kept telling me how beautiful I was, again and again and again.

Our romance was unsteady, unmoored; as all of my friends put it, unhealthy. As a few brave friends put it, emotionally abusive. Toward the end, there was a prolonged off-and-on period, which happened to overlap with a particularly intense salmon season. There were moody hours picking fish in silence, staring into the ocean in a rage, wanting to be back on land, wanting to push him in the water. At one point, he told me I’d gained weight when things were too good between us, let myself get soft reading The New Yorker by the fire. He made clear he preferred the version of me whittled down by stress. The ugly thing? I preferred that version of me, too: the sculpted arms, the visible collarbones, the sharp awareness of what was happening around me. I was more active, attuned, alive. Few people are as alert as a hungry hunter.

When things were back on between us, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Sometimes, when waiting for the fishing period to open, or the net to fill with salmon, we’d peel off our Helly Hansens and hide in the sole of the boat just below the bow. The plywood floor was coated in salmon scales and dried blood.

5.

A big part of my attraction to K was how much he talked about being attracted to me. It scares me, how much I’ve focused over the years, on being desired. It might be why it was such a revelation to briefly identify as a hunter in my mid-20s.

I was the one doing the desiring. I was the one in control.

I remember the first time I noticed a truck honk—I must have been 11 or 12. There was a thrill to it, a mix of terror and lust: I was wanted, yet a threat of violence threaded those exchanges. Later, when the honks and whistles grew commonplace, I used to fantasize about pushing back, staring these men straight in the eye and saying don’t fuck with me. I never did, too meek, too scared of what might happen next. Even once I identified as a hunter, it was only in the most marginal of ways. Yes, I could sight in a rifle, identify lynx, wolf, and wolverine tracks, skin a fox, dismantle a ptarmigan. But what happened when a man came onto me and I didn’t want him to? So much of the time, I still tried to be nice.

About a year after my first boyfriend and I broke up, he messaged me to tell me he’d changed: as he put it, he was less of a predator now. There have been so many times when I thought I’d changed, too, was over and done with scummy men, over and done with being prey, and yet when I was with K, he often joked that I was like an animal he wanted to trap, or an old nasty fish head a fox wants to bury for winter and keep for himself, or a beautiful hummingbird he wanted to cage. At the time, I didn’t think of myself as his prey. I found it exciting, all this talk of how much he wanted me. Exciting, of course, until I started feeling like an animal with a leg clenched in the jaws of a steel trap, eyes wild with rage. Exciting until I started wondering which of us had put me there.

by Diana Saverin, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Getty Images

Imelda May

[ed. See also: It's Good to Be Alive (Halloween version, 2024).]

The Crash of the Hammer

The first step in establishing a neo-Nazi compound is to clear and level the land. These sites tend to pop up in rural America, which means that there’s brush to hack down, tree stumps to pull up, and piles of debris to burn. All this work is done to make room for the barracks, kitchens, and meeting halls where modern-day devotees of Adolf Hitler will live, work, and train together.

When Christopher Pohlhaus moved to the forested lot where, like other neo-Nazis on other forested lots before him, he planned to start a fascist revolution, he brought two RVs with him. That meant he had somewhere to bunk down at night. But he didn’t have running water. I can’t say how he bathed when he first arrived; as for other matters of hygiene, perhaps he used the woods.

Pohlhaus’s parcel of 10.6 acres does not have an address. Technically, it’s in Springfield, Maine, a hamlet of fewer than 300 people. The closest city, about an hour’s drive away, is Bangor. That’s where Pohlhaus, a gym rat, eventually joined Planet Fitness. To get home after a session of lifting, showering, and doing whatever else he needed to do, Pohlhaus would take Route 2 north, then turn eastward on Route 6. He would drive to Bottle Lake Road, take a right, and drive about two miles before taking another right on a gravel lane called Moores Road. Eventually, among scattered hunting camps, Trump banners, and “Support the Blue” signs, he would come to a metal gate situated on a dirt road. Behind the gate sat the land of Pohlhaus’s dreams.

Pohlhaus, 37, is a former U.S. marine, an itinerant tattoo artist, and a hardcore white-supremacist influencer. He is loud and hostile, and proud to be both. His voice is pitched surprisingly high, and he has a slight Southern drawl. He has a large body and small bald head; a blue-black tattoo crawls up the right side of his face, from his chin to his forehead. Over the years, Pohlhaus has collected thousands of social media followers, who know him by his nickname: Hammer.

Hammer had been living in Texas for a few years when, in March 2022, he bought the land in Maine. He told his followers that he was going to use it to build a haven, operational center, and training ground for white supremacists. He invited them to join him. Together, he said, they would plant the seed of a white ethnostate, and they would engage in violence, if necessary, to nurture it. “An unarmed man sacrifices his family to the unpredictably [sic] of chaos,” Hammer wrote online in 2021.

Hammer packed his bags and headed north, meeting with various white supremacists along the way. He solicited donations for his new compound in the form of cryptocurrency, and later set up a page on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding site. He raised close to $10,000 before the campaign was shut down earlier this year.

Once he’d settled in Maine, Hammer kept his followers abreast of his progress breaking ground, frequently posting photos and uploading videos to Telegram. There was Hammer standing next to a pile of freshly chopped wood, snowshoeing through the forest, holding a beer in front of a bonfire. Followers saw him cradling an AK-47 in his arms. (Caption: “All this Slavic war training in the Maine woods has me exhausted!”) Hammer posted footage from a celebration he held with about eight of his followers, where he claimed they sacrificed a goat. Another clip showed Hammer helping a man in a balaclava slice the palm of his hand as part of an initiation ritual.

Hammer appeared excited, optimistic. He was careful—or thought that he was careful—not to reveal his exact location, lest it attract unwanted attention from his enemies, including the media and the FBI. If people wanted to join him at the compound, they could get in touch directly.

But unbeknownst to Hammer, he was being followed. A longtime Mainer was determined to wipe the smirk off the neo-Nazi’s face. Indeed, he hoped to run Hammer out of the state for good.

***

Maine has fewer than two million residents, most of whom live on a mainland about the size of Ireland. Others, myself included, live on one of the state’s 4,000-plus islands flecking the Atlantic Ocean. Maine is a place of independence and modesty, of irreligious Catholics and liberal conservatives, where the unofficial slogan is “The Way Life Should Be.” It is the country’s number one supplier of blueberries and lobsters, and home to the world’s leading provider of genetically engineered mice. The state’s rocky, rolling landscape is a point of pride—billboards are banned, lest they sully the views from Maine’s roads.

Maine is also the grayest state in America, with a median age of 45. It tends to attract retirees and to retain older residents. One of those residents is Crash Barry. Crash, 56, is a lot of things: a homesteader, a lumberjack, a rabble-rouser. In past lives, he was a McDonald’s grill cook, a clerk at a health-food store, an alpaca herdsman, and a janitor. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with soft eyes and hair the color of rain clouds. In the summer he wears paisley Crocs, size 12, when he isn’t barefoot, which he prefers to be. He is gritty and clever, and speaks in sweeping, unfiltered paragraphs.

Above all Crash is a storyteller. Years ago, for a magazine called The Bollard, he wrote “One Maniac’s Meat,” a series of essays in which he waxed with affection and dark humor about his quest to live more closely with nature. He has authored several books, including the novel Sex, Drugs & Blueberries. (Amazon synopsis: “Failed Portland rocker Ben Franklin moves Down East with his poet wife to start a new life. Desperate for cash, Ben signs on for the Maine blueberry harvest where he’s lured into a seamy world of sex and drugs that could lead to his downfall.”) Crash has also published a memoir, Tough Island, which recounts the years he spent 20 miles out to sea on Matinicus, Maine’s most remote inhabited island, working as a sternman on a lobster boat with “resourceful individuals and scoundrels.”

I first met Crash about a decade ago, when we were both invited to compete in a live storytelling event in Portland called Literary Death Match. He arrived with a large wicker basket filled with cannabis, which he’d cultivated himself. This wasn’t to bribe the judges. Crash just wanted to share his harvest, spread the love. He handed the basket to a person in the front row and invited everyone to take a bud and pass the rest along. He was a force on stage, both in stature and in performance—he has the physicality you’d expect of someone who works in the woods, and he has a background in improv comedy. By the time Crash finished presenting the story he’d prepared for the event, the basket of weed was empty.

These days, Crash still spends a lot of time around cannabis—his wife grows it near their homestead in the western hills of Maine. When Crash isn’t outdoors tending to his land, he’s often researching people he calls the “sewer-dwelling monsters of New England.” People like Hammer.

For years, Crash has been doing the dirty work for the rest of us, documenting pockets of hate in America. He first started tracking fascists as a journalist in 2003, going undercover to report on the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist cult that promoted “racial holy war.” (The WCOTC collapsed in 2004, after its leader was convicted of solicitation of murder—he asked someone who turned out to be a government informant to kill a federal judge.) Crash got back on the beat in earnest in 2017, amid a surge of far-right recruiting and organizing after Donald Trump was elected president.

Crash isn’t an armchair reporter. He isn’t content to merely gather information online—though he does plenty of that, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. When he can he tails people, sometimes in disguise, and reports what he learns in his newsletter, The Crash Report; on social media; and on his podcast, The Crash Program. He focuses his energies on bad guys in his own backyard. “If I didn’t limit myself to Maine, I would never get anything done,” Crash told me. “There are just so many of them.” (...)

Hammer is different from Crash’s other subjects: He is a virulent white supremacist in the vein of onetime WCOTC acolytes. In 2020, while living in San Antonio, Hammer burst onto the right-wing scene when he created an Instagram account that mainly shared hateful memes; it was eventually banned. He created another Instagram account, which was also banned, then another, and so on. Eventually he pivoted to Telegram, then Odysee, BitChute, Gab, and other dark corners of the internet that tolerate neo-Nazi chatter. He launched a Web-based talk show, Hammerstream, in which he exhorted the dominance of whiteness and the importance of physical fitness. He summoned white people to a “last stand, a righteous war” against those who “call for the destruction of their birthright and posterity.” He also peddled propaganda and swag: books by or about Hitler, swastika flags and fitted caps, and “Hammer Shades”—Oakley knockoffs available for $25.95 a pop.

By 2021, Hammer’s popularity had grown to the point that he was able to launch a membership-based organization called Blood Tribe, or Blutstamm; Hammer is fond of German terminology. Blood Tribe joined a bewildering array of neo-Nazi groups active in the U.S. today: the Goyim Defense League, Werewolf 88, Aryan Freedom Network, and the Nationalist Social Club (often styled as NSC-113), to name a few. While these bands of fascists hold the same core beliefs about racial superiority and the pressing need to protect Western civilization, some venture into more obscure territory. Blood Tribe subscribes to Odinism, a neo-pagan faith that honors ancient Norse gods. Some neo-Nazis appropriate the religion to celebrate the white race, which they contend originated in Northern Europe. Ron McVan, one of the most prominent ideologues of this bigoted variant, which is sometimes called Wotanism, has described it as “an ancestral faith that puts race first” and “the inner voice of the Aryan soul.”

Hammer frequently refers to himself as a “son of Wotan,” and the tattoo emblazoned on his face is runic text that spells “Wotan.” He also flirts with esoteric Hitlerism, a fringe belief system holding that Hitler was a deity. “I believe he was an incarnation of Wotan,” Hammer once said on Telegram.

Hammer insists that Blood Tribe is more hardcore than other white-supremacist groups. (This is a claim many fascist organizations make in relation to one another: We’re better neo-Nazis than you are.) To prove his group’s preeminence, Hammer established a vetting system for aspiring members to weed out those he called “snakes” and “fragile people.” In Telegram chats that the group calls the Camps, hopefuls haze one another—think hypermasculine taunting and verbal abuse. “Expect confrontation,” a Telegram announcement about the Camps reads. Wannabe members who are deemed worthy receive an invitation to join Blood Nation, a private chat group. Participants may then be approved to attend Blood Tribe events in real life.

Reportedly, only a select few members become part of the organization’s inner circle, a privilege commemorated by rubbing one’s blood on a spear shaft. According to Hammer, this unites an initiate with the “bros of the past and bros of the future.” Should any of his lieutenants be so brazen as to challenge him for the group’s top job—Hammer calls himself Blood King, or Blutkönig in German—they may do so in a duel with weapons of Hammer’s choosing. “The likelihood of that being legal in this country, I don’t know,” Hammer admitted during a live-streamed meeting to discuss the group’s constitution. “Maybe you could go to, like, some international waters.” (Presumably, this has yet to occur.)

Women are not permitted to join Blood Tribe. Like a hastily scribbled sign on a boys’ treehouse, an invitation to the Camps declares, “No girls allowed.” Hammer doesn’t trust women. It’s fair to say that he doesn’t even like them, especially if they’re white and liberal. “I do find them to be enemies to us,” Hammer has said. “They should be treated as such.” Hammer promotes claiming women as “war brides,” which involves taking away the “rights and control of how their reproductive system is to be utilized.” To his mind, stripping women of their bodily autonomy, and deciding when and how they have children, is a masculine imperative and an urgent matter of racial survival.

What made Hammer this way? It’s hard to say. Radicalization can be a circuitous process. He was born and raised in a middle-class Pentecostal household in Baltimore. As a teen he was devout, a youth group leader. At some point his family moved to Mississippi, after which his parents split up. He went to boarding school for a year, then dropped out and joined the Marines, serving two years stationed in Japan and another two in California. After that he scraped together a living by tattooing, mostly swastikas and other racist symbols. He considers this “a unique niche that I’ve got cornered.” (...)

Crash Barry refers to Hammer and his Blood Tribe brood as “chuds,” from the acronym “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” The term is from a 1984 sci-fi horror movie, the plot of which revolves around several New Yorkers, including a cop and a homeless-shelter manager who team up to investigate a slew of disappearances, people who it turns out were killed by sewer-dwelling CHUDs. That’s how Crash sees Hammer—a lowlife, a bottom-feeder. “I’ve been following assholes like him for years. And when you dig down deep into these guys, their most core belief is misogyny. They’re like roided-out orcs,” Crash told me. “They look back at this ‘idealistic’ time when women were essentially property. Perhaps Hammer expected things to be easy, and that’s why he is so full of hate.”

Crash and his wife, Shana, are madly in love. When I met her, she wore gardening clothes and a brimmed hat, still dressed from her job at a nursery. She knows everything there is to know about medicinal plants. She also writes, sings, and records music. Crash sent me one of her tracks—she sounds a little like Edie Brickell—about a pink whale that doesn’t want to be hurt by humans. Crash and Shana have a production booth in their home where she records her songs and he produces his podcast.

Crash has been following Hammer for nearly two years. He has pored over Hammer’s videos and photos to determine where they were shot. He has examined public records and genealogical information. (Crash told me that, based on some sleuthing he did with a volunteer genealogical researcher, he thinks Pohlhaus’s great-great uncle once removed might have been Jewish and sent to a concentration camp.) And he has tracked Hammer’s movements carefully, hoping to understand the one that to Crash mattered most: his relocation to Maine.

by Mira Ptacin, The Atavist | Read more:
Image: Ed Johnson; Greta Rybus

via:
[ed. The media must be going crazy. I don't know anybody who has or wants to read anything more about this election, especially opinions about it going forward. As Thomas Pynchon once wrote (so I've heard), “What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove’s difference and the universe can be on into a whole ‘nother song.” Let's just leave it with this: Milestones (N+1):]

***

"The shape of the night was so similar, the outcome so similarly foreordained in retrospect. I wonder if the past eight years have been so disillusioning, so hardening, that the intensity of that earlier shock is simply no longer available.

This is the emotional-political paradox I’ve been thinking about today: on one hand, the feeling of soberness and cold clarity. On the other, the reality that in every respect, what happened last night is far worse than what happened in 2016. This time it isn’t an aberration. Trump is now the ultimate Republican insider. The Republicans control the Senate and almost certainly the House, and nowhere has the US’s still-unfolding right-wing coup paid more dividends than on the Supreme Court. The people in Trump’s orbit are meaningfully more sadistic than the people who were there last time—and those who have stuck around are more empowered."

Lab Grown Diamonds - A Comprehensive Overview

A diamond – from the Greek ἀδάμας (adámas), meaning unconquerable – is a three-dimensional cubic or hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms. As its bonds are strong and its atoms packed closely together, diamond is the hardest natural material and the least compressible. Diamonds have high thermal conductivity and high electrical resistivity, but can be combined with small amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus, and boron and made into semiconductors. A diamond’s surface does not easily stick to other materials, but moves smoothly against them. Diamonds are chemically inert and not toxic to living tissue. In their pure form, diamonds are colorless and have a high dispersion of light, but the presence of certain impurities can add magnificent color to diamond gemstones.

In nature, it takes billions of years to form a diamond. Most of the diamonds nature produces are too impure for jewelry or high-tech industry, and extracting them is costly and dirty. In the lab, diamonds can be made faster, purer, and cheaper, overcoming these problems and making possible new uses for diamonds that were previously unattainable.

Scientists first manufactured diamonds in laboratories in the 1950s, imitating the conditions under which diamonds were produced in nature. The diamonds produced were initially small and impure and so useful only in low-tech industrial products such as abrasives and lubricants. Since then, diamond manufacturing technology has progressed: the generation process has become more controlled, new methods have been invented, and better catalysts have been discovered. Diamonds grown in the lab are now cheaper than mined diamonds and have superior physical, optical, chemical, and electrical properties. Consequently, they dominate the industrial market. In the past decade, diamond manufacturing technology progressed so much that it is now possible to mass-produce jewelry-quality diamonds in the lab. These lab diamonds are cheaper and more beautiful than mined diamonds. A perfectly cut, flawless lab diamond costs a fraction of the price of a mined diamond of lesser quality. (...)

The Future of Jewelry

The tradition that diamonds are an integral part of an engagement proposal is the result of a highly successful advertising campaign by the De Beers cartel. During the Great Depression, diamond sales slumped. De Beers responded by enlisting Hollywood actors and socialites in a campaign to associate diamond rings with marriage proposals, commissioning portraits of them showing off their new engagement rings, and by running ads showing happy young couples honeymooning above the now-famous slogan ‘A Diamond Is Forever’. In time, it also tried to persuade men that they would need to spend a fixed proportion of their income on a stone to win at love. One later advert, from the 1980s, was captioned ‘2 months’ salary showed the future Mrs Smith what the future would be like’.

De Beers’s campaign worked because people desire signifiers of commitment that are credible and socially sanctioned. Diamond engagement rings suit this purpose because they are beautiful and practical and their symbolism is well-known. While the mine owners benefited most from this arrangement, the high price was a costly – and therefore credible – signal of wealth and commitment and, in an era where this mattered, insurance against breach of promise to marry. Peer pressure and status anxiety reinforced this norm.

Lab diamonds have destroyed this equilibrium. Competition among diamond manufacturers and technological progress in diamond making mean that lab diamonds are indistinguishable from mined diamonds, but cost much, much less – and the price is falling. In 2016, a one-carat near-colorless and very slightly included round brilliant lab-grown diamond cost $5,440, according to diamond analyst Paul Zimnisky; in 2024, the same stone cost $1,325. (The price of an equivalent mined diamond decreased from $6,538 to $5,035.) In the past few years, sales of lab diamonds have started to overtake mined diamonds. A survey by The Knot of nearly 10,000 couples married in 2023 revealed that lab diamonds accounted for 46 percent of engagement rings (compared with 39 percent who opted for a mined diamond), up from 12 percent in 2019.

Diamonds will continue to symbolize engagement – the tradition is now well established – but on its own, the raw material will cease to be a symbol of wealth or sacrifice. Lab diamonds can already be made to be clearer and more colorless than mined diamonds – or, if the wearer desires it, to have a more magnificent color. To complement this, consumers are demanding better workmanship in the cutting and polishing of the stone and in the design and manufacturing of its setting.

The ‘hearts and arrows’ optical pattern, which is present only in round brilliant diamonds that are perfectly cut, is a good example of this trend. Previously, perfectly cut diamonds were extremely rare, and too expensive for most customers. Now, because of strong demand, the International Gemological Institute has begun to note the presence of the hearts and arrows pattern on their diamond grading certificates.

As lab diamonds can be engineered to be more beautiful than mined diamonds, we should expect them to be used more often in fine jewelry. Lab diamonds won’t end conspicuous consumption, but it will be the consumer and not the mine owners who enjoy most of the benefits. (...)

Diamonds in Industry (...)

As an optical material, diamonds have tremendous potential, because they are transparent, dissipate heat quickly, and do not expand much at high temperatures. In particular, diamonds are useful in high-powered lasers, which are used in cutting, welding, sensing, ignition, and medical surgery. A major problem with existing high-powered lasers is that their components are damaged by or deteriorate under high heat, limiting their output. An example of this is the thermal lensing effect, where high and uneven temperatures change how the optical window of the laser bends light. This degrades the focus and alignment of the laser beam. Diamond, however, is an excellent window material, being a good conductor of heat and transmitter of light and having a refractive index that does not vary much with temperature. Diamonds can also be used as heat spreaders to cool down other components in lasers, increasing the maximum power that can be generated.

An ongoing area of research is the use of diamonds as the active laser medium: the component that optically amplifies light. To do this will require diamonds that are larger, purer, and more structurally perfect than what nature can provide and so will depend on advances in diamond-manufacturing technology.

Even more promising, diamond has the potential to be an excellent semiconductor. Diamond has excellent thermal conductivity, because the regularity of its lattice and the strength of its bonds enable heat to be transferred quickly and efficiently. It has a wide band gap – in other words, it requires a high (but not insurmountable) amount of energy to promote one of its electrons into the conduction band. This means diamond can handle higher temperatures and voltages than conventional semiconductors, making it useful not only in devices that operate in extreme conditions (such as engines, radio towers, drilling equipment, spacecrafts, solar panels, and the electricity grid) but also for increasing microchip performance more generally.

Most microchips today are made from silicon, a metalloid that sits one row below carbon on the periodic table and has a thermal conductivity of 1.5 watts per centimeter-kelvin. Diamond, by contrast, has a thermal conductivity of 22 watts per centimeter-kelvin. Over the past five decades, the number of transistors on a microchip has increased at an exponential rate, while the microchips themselves have become smaller. Chip designers have therefore had to contend with the ever-increasing problem of dissipating the heat that is generated. Heat degrades the performance of microchips and limits how tightly transistors can be packed together.

To overcome this problem, manufacturers have lowered the voltage and devoted a large amount of space and energy to cooling and ventilating systems. Because diamond dissipates heat much faster than silicon, diamond-based microchips can be made smaller and operate in more extreme temperatures. On existing silicon-based microchips, diamonds are already being used as heat spreaders.

Diamond also has a wider band gap than silicon (5.45 electron volts vs. 1.1 electron volts) and consequently diamond microchips can operate at higher voltages than silicon microchips. Semiconductors are engineered to precisely control the flow of electricity, but above a certain voltage their electrical resistance breaks down, resulting in an uncontrolled flow of current. Diamond undergoes electrical breakdown at ten millivolts per centimeter, compared to 0.3 for silicon, making it more suitable for high-voltage applications such as power generation and distribution. Furthermore, for a given voltage, less material is needed and so diamond microchips can be made to be smaller.

by Javid Lakha, Works in Progress | Read more:

Image: French chemist Henri Moissan attempting to synthesize diamonds by quenching hot carbon in water. Credit: Alarmy