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Lucara Diamond Corp. has sold the 1,109-carat "Lesedi La Rona" diamond for $53 million, roughly $47,790 a carat:
The Lesedi La Rona, or "our light" in the Tswana language spoken in Botswana, went unsold at a Sotheby's auction in London last year. It had been expected to sell for about $86 million.
The Vancouver-based company, known for producing some of the world's biggest and best stones, unearthed the diamond at its Karowe mine in Botswana. In May 2016, Lucara sold the smaller 813-carat The Constellation diamond for a record $63 million, or about $77,500 a carat, to Dubai-based rough-diamond trading company Nemesis International DMCC.
The Lesedi La Rona is the third largest rough diamond ever found.
Previous coverage:
Three Huge Diamonds Found in Botswana
Huge Diamond to be Sold at Auction.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @04:53AM (6 children)
Turns out this wasn't dug up by by poor people in the jungle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesedi_La_Rona#Technology [wikipedia.org]
"The diamond was recovered by a TOMRA large diamond recovery (LDR) machine utilizing X-ray transmission sensors.[6] In May 2015, the operation at the Karowe Diamond Mine replaced their Dense Media Separation (DMS) technology with six TOMRA XRT sorters for sorting material in the -60+8 mm size range. The X-ray transmission (XRT) sorting technology was selected following a suite of tests. Each sorter can sort up to 150 metric tons (330,000 lb) of material per hour, after that the concentrate goes directly to hand sorting.[27] Karowe Diamond Mine is the first mine using this automated diamond sorting solution.[28]"
Now the people employed doing hand sorting phase might meet your description, but people are far to expensive to do the digging and inital sorting for an operation of this scale (A quick image search indicates its a large open pit mine, they have a lot of volume to go through)
Interesting note: that Wikipedia page cites a price estimate of 40-60 million dollars, which it right on for what it sold for, so this wasn't a surprise.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @06:06AM (5 children)
It's sad to see all the ingenuity and resources put into collecting shiny for the whims of billionaires :(
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 27 2017, @06:32AM
Sorting. Not collecting. It was still dug up by a dirty native.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday September 27 2017, @07:22PM
The whims of ancient billionaires are now the monuments of our civilizations.
They will clearly outlast our shacks, and amaze the cockroaches, long after we've exterminated ourselves.
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Thursday September 28 2017, @02:54PM (2 children)
Carnegie Hall? The Getty Museum? The marvel of engineering that that machine surely is, whose technology may result in greater archeaological or geological analytics equipment?
It is a wholly uncritical sort of thought that capitalism produces nothing but death and evil.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 29 2017, @10:22PM (1 child)
The (Socialist) Mondragon worker-owned cooperative designs and produces goods/services that compete with those of Capitalist operations.
They've been doing this successfully since 1956, and are now operating in 40 countries on 5 continents.
...and much of what "Capitalism" produces, is done on gov't contracts.
There's no reason that those contracts couldn't be given to (Socialist) outfits similar to Mondragon.
...unless the goal of that gov't is to crush anything that challenges the Oligarchical Capitalist model. [counterpunch.org]
(It's kinda long, but it gets -really- good when he starts talking about Noam Chomsky.) [google.com]
In short, what -you- have come to think of as "Capitalism" is actually just "business".
Their everything-good-is-due-to-Capitalism is having the desired effect on your weak mind.
Look up "Stockholm syndrome".
In some places (e.g. Italy) they have thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of businesses that don't follow the Capitalist model.
In those places, the worker-owners don't experience mass layoff; don't get their jobs exported; don't have cuts to pay rates/benefits; don't have their air, water, soil, and bodies poisoned as happens with Capitalist-owned companies whose goal is to maximize profits for the (non-productive) Ownership Class.
N.B. The largest worker-owned co-op in UK has a pay structure that you wish the Capitalist-owned company you work for had. [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 29 2017, @10:27PM
Their everything-good-is-due-to-Capitalism propaganda
is having the desired effect on your weak mind.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]