This reminds me of a joke I heard a (scarily) long time ago: "You bring De Beers, let's have apartheid."<p>Apart from their unparalleled success in protecting an artificially scarce market for so many years, did you know that De Beers were the early geniuses in product placement? Diamonds didn't use to be such a big deal. The romantic association of diamonds with love and commitment (primarily for women) was a marketing invention of De Beers. One way they did it was by paying to insert scenes involving diamonds into Hollywood movies (in the 1940s, IIRC), such as the heroine's friends telling her: "He gave you a ring without a diamond? The cad!" Diamonds started popping up in climactic scenes of reconciliation and inevitable marriage proposals.<p>I can't remember how I know this... it might have been in an old episode of This American Life. The other thing that surprised me was that they were a British company, not a South African one.
Can't feel too badly for these guys, they've been capitalizing on market inefficiency (the bad kind, anti-competitive actions) for decades. For anyone interested in the diamond industry, this Wired story from 2003 provides some great insight into the cartel: <a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html</a>
Wow, selling rocks with no actual value is no longer profitable? Who would have thunk it! (This is like the Web 1.0 version of those "things" you can buy your friends on Facebook. No actual value, they're just a row in the database, but marketing and artificial scarcity makes people want to buy them. It doesn't last, though, once people realize that your worthless shit is worthless.)
I first read that as 'Beer profits fall 92%' and was slightly worried.<p>(I know you're picky about houmorous comments here, but please don't vote me down to -8)