Same. I like the whole engagement ring ritual but I’ll be damned if our marriage is going to hinge on my “proving my love” with some overpriced trinket that costs a couple months’ salary and loses 95% of its value when it leaves the store. If that’s what it takes for us to get married it’s not the type of relationship I want in my life.

Moissanite is by far a better buy. It has more fire for 1/100th the price than a natural diamond.

But I feel like the people saying clear stones like diamond and moissanite aren’t pretty have never seen a clear, well cut, multi karat, example in the sun. The rainbow colors and brilliance from a clear high refraction stone like a diamond is frankly insane. You can see the rainbow colors shooting off of it from like 100 yards away if the lighting is right. No colored stone has quite the same wow factor as a good diamond or moissanite in the right light. That’s why diamonds have historically been in such high demand.

Opal, Alexandrite, and many other stones are equally beautiful in their own way. But it’s weird to make that point by putting down clear stones that are absolutely spectacular.

I agree diamonds are dumb and overpriced when you can get a better result from moissanite or lab grown.

That said, I’m curious why you assume it’s a blood diamond? Conflict diamonds only account for ~5% of all diamonds in the trade. Russia and Canada combined account for >50% of all rough diamonds in the industry.

Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.

It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.

That’s why I dig up my lawn every year and bury it underground inside sealed plastic bags

I’m doing my part!

The onion did a bit about ten years ago on the Palestine-Israel conflict, reporting:

“Israeli and Palestine leaders have shown they see eye to eye in nearly every facet of the proposed solution, including such provisions as: seizing all territory, watching the opposition burn in righteous fire, and building a unified nation on the corpses of their enemy. Yet, they still haven’t come any closer to putting a stop to the conflict”

Kind of sums it up.

Because you might find it’s really fun if you kept at it and learned the new skill?

Many rewarding hobbies take years of work to develop any significant level of skill in. Golf, racing cars, skiing, etc

That’s really a modern thing. It used to be that you’d buy a nice PC and 3-4 years later it can’t play new games at an acceptable frame rate and resolution.

Honestly, modern phones are pretty durable and screen replacements are pretty cheap.

My complaint is that the glass backs are slippery as fuck. My iPhone was constantly sliding off of tables and shit until I bit the bullet and got a case for it.

A number of clinical trials have shown improved academic and occupational cognitive performance using psychostimulants in therapeutic doses. This includes improved inhibitory control, memory recall, and awakefulness. Some studies have even shown a measurable (4-5 points) increase in performance when taking an IQ test.

I mean, you can Google it and find countless sources, if you really care they are readily available within seconds.

The Tl;dr is that his methods are based in dominance theory. Dominance theory has been widely debunked and the methods that arose from it are widely considered to exacerbate fear and aggression related issues in dogs. Caesar’s celebrity status has contributed to its persistence in the popular imagination.

Cesar Milan is considered a hack by almost every reputable dog trainer, and his methods conflict with every modern study I have seen on how to effectively train a dog.

If you believe this than you are woefully uninformed about American food culture.

You can get good authentic food from every region of the world here, but we also have a culture that deeply loves to create new and incredible things inspired by that foreign influence.

Look at American third wave coffee, for example. American coffee culture was inspired by the Italians, but has seen a renaissance of experimentation that makes it uniquely American. It’s now among the best in the world.

Bigoted speech is itself free speech. It’s fundamentally important that the law doesn’t make subjective judgement calls like this on what views are good or bad precisely because it protects the minority.

Spanish cuisine is great

But French is every bit as good

Outside of Europe? Nobody can compete with America in depth and breadth in terms of incredible food options.

If you are considering two modes of transportation for a airplane-suitable trip, the per-trip stat is effectively irrelevant. If we consider a 1,000 mile trip and want to choose the safest manner of travel to the destination aircraft will statistically be the safest transportation method.

Why? What’s wrong with selling a gun you have made at home? It’s still subject to applicable law on private party transfers just like any other firearm.

I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don’t use off the shelf parts, you really don’t have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand.

I mean. Ya kinda do. A broken receiver isn’t going to make the gun explode in your hand, it’s just going to cease being functional.

Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material?

More importantly, the issue with small defects is sidestepped by good engineering and process control. Your statement applies to almost every sort of manufacturing. All materials have internal defects and a range of potential material properties. You account for this by applying a safety factor so that the design stresses are well below the nominal material properties. For a material with higher uncertainty on the properties you simply apply a higher safety factor

That’s why many 3d printed guns look like bricks when an injection molded receiver would be much more sleek in comparison.

A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That’s a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).

Home built cars have been a thing pretty much since the start of the automobile. People who home-build cars don’t typically build their own drivetrain. It’s just not worth the effort when donor engines from wrecked cars can be had cheaply and easily.

Usually the DIY fabrication work involves building the chassis, suspension components, body panels, etc. As I pointed out, you wouldn’t just print the chassis. You’d use printed parts as jigs to align the welds, build mold for composite pieces, etc.

Nobody is going to be printing a complete car in the conceivable future, but 3d printing can absolutely help you build a good and reliable car from conventional materials with greatly reduced effort and tooling costs.

The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.

For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs

The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts

The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.

You can sell homemade firearms you made for personal use and later decided to get rid of.

You cannot manufacture them for the purpose of sale, however.