The Love Below

I just wanted to point out, in the spirit of the "holiday," that diamonds are so plentiful that they're practically worthless; and the linking of diamonds with romantic love is one of the greatest unqualified advertising successes in human history.

The DeBeers company, which fled South Africa after the fall of apartheid, has managed to collude the diamond market for over a hundred years to keep prices rising, in spite of the fact that several tons of diamonds are extracted from mines each year.

Here's an article to that effect.