noise."Story Notes: The Trouble with Unicorns IV · 12:16pm Feb 14th, 2018
As always, a big thanks to my pre-readers! AShadowOfCygnus, metallusionismagic, and MSPiper!
Bloomindales, Saks Fifth Avenue, Barneys, JC Penny, Lord & Taylor are all of course fashion houses (for some degree of fashion) in New York City. Now, I'm not much of a fashion guy; most of my clothing consists either of a work uniform (blue collar chic) or jeans and a t-shirt. Plus, work boots . . . and not of the hipster variety, either.
There are a lot of fashion houses around Fifth Avenue in New York City, it turns out. Heck, I thought about including dressbarn as well, although that's probably got less coutre than Rarity would desire.
Incidentally, Philip Lim hybrid lounge pants. Now, while I said just now that I'm not an expert in fashion, I honestly can't imagine why anybody would want to wear these.
Reichenbach Hall is of course a real restaurant. According to the little blurb on Google, they offer Hearty German eats & fine beers served in a casual, Bavarian publike setting. Just the thing for a pony, I'm sure.
There is a Starbucks in the infamous skyscraper right next to Tiffany and Company.
Karat is a canon pony, who we've seen selling jewelry to a smitten Big Mac.
From the ant-sized Wiki
Millgraine is also a canon pony, although her name on the wiki is S07E02 Unnamed Earth Mare #1.
From the ant-sized Wiki
Millgraine is the small pattern of raised beads alongside gems in jewelry. It supposedly gives a vintage feel, according to the internet . . . to be honest, I know about as much about jewelry as I do about fashion.
The diamond earrings Albert and Rarity looked at are actually available at Tiffany and Company, and the prices are accurate.
They're pretty, I guess. The 1.2 carat set is worth more than all my cars added together (although less than the probable cost of all the tools in my service cart [I've never added up the value of all the tools in my service cart].
While in a silly comedy, I don't always put in the research I'd put into a serious story, it did seem like I ought to get a sense of how many pounds of diamonds are mined per year. Of course, that's expressed in carats rather than some sensible unit like pounds or whatever all of you non-Americans use to measure weight.
Turns out it's less than I thought. Slightly over 50,000 pounds. Which means that you could presumably fit all of them in the back of one dump truck.
As for the value of diamonds . . . well, according to one source, that 50,000 pounds of diamonds sells for between 10 and 20 billion dollars once they're cut and polished (apparently, good raw diamonds sell for $134/carat and cost about $10/carat to finish [about half of the diamonds produced go for industrial use and presumably cost less (if nothing else, they're not cut and polished); the article said that 95% of the diamond profit is in gemstones]). I could probably do some more digging and find out exactly what the total diamond revenues are, but for the sake of simplicity, let's say that if you had a dumptruck full of them, cut and polished, you'd be rich.
How much are diamonds or other gems worth in Equestria? Putting aside the cartoon logic, if ponies can just dig gems the size of their hooves out of the ground, and they're already cut and polished and ready to go, they can't be worth all that much.
Besides, Rarity seems more interested in them to accent her work, rather than to sell and profit from.
Which is why I think this particular comic is apt:
Selling stocks short/put options. First, never take financial advice from a fanfic writer. Second, from what I understand, both of those are ways of betting that the value of a particular stock is going to fall, and making a tidy profit if it does.
The 'diamonds in water' trick wouldn't actually work. In order for the diamonds to be invisible, they'd have to have the same refractive index as water, and they don't. Now, it might be possible to change the refractive index of your 'water' (from some googling, a glycerin/water mix looks potentially promising); other liquids have different refractive indexes. I wasn't able to find any with some quick google searching, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.
If I'd had some diamonds, I would have experimented. Sadly, I haven't got any.
Happy Valentine's Day, y'all!
I have to ask—why'd you jump to IV? Or are you not using that as the Roman numeral for 4?
Also, Happy Singles' Awareness Day.
4796372
Because there's a TTWU II and III. They just haven't been published yet.
So why do the diamond dogs mine gems? Do they eat them like Dragons? Religious purposes?
Going the other way what could earth flood the Equestrian market with in revenge? Cherries? They seem proportionally quite expensive in Putting your hoof down, even before the salestallion was being a dick.
4796378 Because shiny?
Happy cheeselegs day!
4796372
Yeah, actually. I was just wondering if I'd missed I-III somewhere in the past.
4796375
Alrighty then. Guess I'll have to keep an eye out for them.
4796380
TTWU I was the football one.
Ahhhh, Rarity, what is sad is the artificial scarcity you saw just scratched the surface. And its clear that Twilight doesn't know the whole story either.
"Wait, you mean to tell me that wars, tyranny and corruption are funded by so called blood diamonds, whoses mines are the site of multiple blood baths....and the profit you make from diamonds remains the only reason you are trying to control....not eliminate, control these blood diamonds."
I cannot imagine a quicker way to maker the Element of Generosity more enraged then explain bloid diamonds to her. Its the closest thing to the exact opposite there is.
Infamous building in Manehatten, Huh? I didn't know there was a building named Hillary or Clinton there!
4796436
Oh!
Can you link me that?
4796447
Eeyup!
It used to be named Turnip Tower or something, but were legally forced to change their name to something less offensive.
4796454
It's on this story, but sure, here.
4796458
Oh *derp*
That's actually on my RiL list. Must've forgotten it.
Thanks!
4796461
No prob. It happens.
Enjoy!
4796462
Back!
It was great! Good for a fic about football.
4796456
more offensive more like it
I thought there was an actual way to track diamonds objectively, but after a half-hour trawling the articles online about 'the Kimberly Process', it sounds like it's still just the old provenance game given more institutional heft and the pretense of glorified laser-etched barcoding. My impression is that Rarity's wholesale customers would probably get accused of being pass-throughs for the conflict diamond underground trade once De Beers et al failed to absorb the additional stock in their cartel operations.
They definitely would have tracked down Rarity in short order - the diamond trade is the very definition of shark-filled waters, because of the dubious nature of many of the producers of diamonds in Africa, both inside and outside of the Kimberly Process scheme.
Speaking as someone with a finance major, you technically buy put options, but otherwise yes, you can do both of these things to make a profit if a stock goes down. A stock short is when you borrow a stock so you can sell it, if the price goes down you can buy it back cheap and return the borrowed stock and make a profit. A put option is when you pay someone for the "option" to sell someone a stock at a particular price at a later date. If the price doesn't go down, you don't use the option and you lose the money you paid for the option. If the price does go down, then you buy a stock at the market price and then sell it at the option's price and make a profit.
4796508
Perhaps Rarity's trick was the sheer volume of diamonds produced in such a short time?
Literally flooding the market
4796378
With a name like Diamond Dogs, what else are they going to do? Commit rock and roll genocide?
Edit:
Diamonds in mineral oil.
That Rarity-wired-on-coffee pic is one of my favorite pony artworks.
Forgot to mention earlier: while they're not as apropos as the Rarity comic in the blog, this story did also make me think of a few entries from Freefall. If only we could open portals to fictional worlds....
4796378
I have no idea. Maybe they're too dumb to dig for bones? I don't think that there's any canon reason (at least, none that I'm aware of/can remember).
That's a good question. Technology and porn, most likely.
4796380
4796445
It's probably just as well she didn't find out, or else she might have crashed all the gem markets, just as a precaution. And probably also gotten her hooves on that spellbook again, and turned a couple of mountains into solid gold so people would stop fighting over that, too.
4796447
Well, there's the Clinton apartments on 48th street, and Avalon Clinton on 52nd.
4796508
There isn't as far as I'm aware, although I don't really know much about the gem market. It's possible that some/all of them could be traced through various chemical signatures (I've heard that can be done with nuclear material; something about the isotopes it's got in it or something).
Yeah, there would certainly be some questions about where all those diamonds came from.
How I envisioned it going--because Rarity hasn't got the contacts on Earth to move diamonds by the ton--is that she unloaded them to some or many criminal/immoral people (the mafia, really shady stockbrokers, etc.). Hence the mention of her losing a large part of her supply to theft. Depending on how good she is at disguise, whether she was ever there in person, etc., would make it difficult for them to figure out who'd done it--or for that matter, how it had been done. Potentially couple that with news releases of how many diamonds are available in Equestria, thus further depressing the market--especially if she managed to work out an export contract with a competing firm (like Rio Tinto), and it could theoretically work and leave her mostly out of the picture.
Then again, like many comedies, if you think on the details too much, there's a number of rather large flaws or improbabilities.
4796512
I'd be willing to bet she's his mother, as well.
4796541
i.ytimg.com/vi/GD6qtc2_AQA/maxresdefault.jpg
4796565
That was a big part of it. Dumping a massive amount of them on the market all at once.
4796672
That's not a real diamond.
Although that is the general principle of what she did.
(mineral oil refractive index is 1.46, so that wouldn't quite work with real diamonds [although I bet they'd be really hard to see]).
4796902
Rarijack Daily is a great tumblr.
4796983
That's one web comic I need to get back into one of these days . . . I read it up until I started seriously writing ponyfic, and then I just didn't have the same amount of free time I once did.
4797025
Well, the good news is that you can binge-read the whole archive in a day or two if you're dedicated enough, so it should be easy to catch up! Even working around your, uh, work and that upcoming story you mentioned, I bet you could be up-to-date by the weekend's close. (Always nice to find something where speaking with the voice of experience doesn't require having lived through something nasty.)
4797023
Nope. I'm 90-95% sure that real diamonds are made out of polycarbonate and the size of a small woman's hand.
I actually have *two* upcoming stories where this disparity has some incidental plot weight. My Equestrians stranded on Earth fic:
“Sorry.” Spike thumped his chest with one clenched fish to get one last burst of smoke out. “Ow. Well, at least Twilight sent me a snack along with the mail. Good thing, since I missed breakfast.” He picked up a bag full of sparkling rocks and popped one into his mouth with a deafening crunch.
“Are those… gemstones?” asked Jon, opening up the neck of the bag and running his fingers through several red and green stones that looked a little like… no, that was quite impossible.
“Rubies, emeralds, a few opals, some peridot, and citrines,” said Spike, grabbing one chubby handful and popping them into his mouth with a noise like an industrial gravel grinder destroying a boulder. “Fresh, too. Rarity must have just dug them up today.”
And Sweetie Belle - Hogwarts Exchange Student:
“My sister sent some gems with me for expenses,” explained Sweetie while reaching for her backpack that Professor McGonagall had transformed. “I hope it’s enough.” She dumped the backpack contents over the bed’s dusty cover and gave a brief squeak of surprise at the flashing book in the middle of the scattered gemstones. “My book! I was supposed to write right back to Apple Bloom and Scootaloo when I got here! Do you have a quill and some ink?”
Donna Selkirk did not take her eyes off the pile of gems, but just reached into her blouse and removed a pen, handing it over while a small muscle under one eye began to twitch.
“Some gems?” she managed to say. Miss Selkirk ran her fingers through the collection, separating the rubies and emeralds by color away from several large sapphires the size of her thumb. “That’s… um… Yes, this should cover your expenses. Were you planning on purchasing any small countries during your visit?”
Another interesting bit to remember, is DeBeers was a major cartel back in the late 1800s to today, even if bad business plans have severely damaged their hold on the market. They held a monopoly over nearly 60% of the Rough Diamond Output. A famous example of an advert:
"A months' salary showed the future Mrs Smith what the future would be like." This would become 2 months in 80s advertising.
DeBeers is known for raising costs, or cutting costs in the market so that they can undersell competitors, bankrupt them, then purchase their company + stock. A perfect example of crony capitalism, where an international series of combined corporations are able to set shields over each sub corp. to defend themselves from major lawsuits.
An example is a company in Australia that released gems with brilliant colors. DeBeers opened their personal vaults and launched their own colored gems, destroying the Australian market and purchasing them.
Heck during WW2 when diamonds were needed for material and development as well as supporting the expensive war effort. DeBeers was reported to have purposely closed off their doors to their warehouses, severely hampering allied needs.
To think before the 1930s, engagement rings were common and 10% or less of them actually had any diamonds. Course it wasn't till 2011 that a more open market and the truth of "Blood Diamonds" came about, which severely hurt DeBeers dropping their shares down to 30% and also ending the Oppenheimer Dynasty.
Sides, I'd say, moissanite is prettier, though rarer.
4797062
Well, it's got the word 'carbon' in there, so maybe you're right.
4797114
I think Sweetie Belle should buy a small country. I think she'd be a good ruler, ultimately.
orig00.deviantart.net/4657/f/2012/306/3/5/princess_sweetie_belle_by_tinakatdark-d5jsic3.jpg
4797466
I think it was closer to 80-90%, at least for a while. Although to be fair, that might not be counting total world market; without doing serious digging, it's possible that places like the USSR would be considered part of the market. But yeah, they were the cartel, and even now they're very influential in the market, at least as far as I know.
To be fair, though, that's not unique to them. Not that that makes it right or ethical, mind you, but it's certainly how business is often done.
Wasn't that what spurred some of the research into synthetic diamonds?
I honestly can't see the difference, at least on the internet.
If I was looking at an actual stone, I might.
My favorite is iolite, and I don't know if that even counts as a proper gemstone.
I always suspected that if there was a portal to Equestria, De Beers would be he'll bent on not having anything come through, at least as long as they couldn't control it.
And if they couldn't then I'm pretty sure they would try to convince people that earth diamonds are the real deal. "If nobody died for it, how can she tell you really love her?"
I'm now also imagining that there is a portal to Equestria, but it's locked in a vault from some gold/gem cartel, with a very boring, fake landscape around it as to discourage ponies to explore.
4805570
It wouldn't just be them . . . from what we've seen in the show, there's a good chance that the ponies could corner every gemstone market, as well as the gold market. Less certain on silver; that could be unicorn-resistant.
Which they could counter with "I had to fight a dragon to get these diamonds."
There is a fic where Twilight winds up going through a portal to Antarctica. I can't remember the title, though.
4805196
It does. It's also a good candidate for inclusion in a story at some point, since I believe it's one of the various minerals whose optical properties allow it to be used as a navigation aid. (Of course, using it like on Earth does assume that the sun gets moved on a regular-enough path for knowing its location to be helpful, so perhaps they'd use it in a slightly different way. Maybe variations in the local magical field as one travels change the way light behaves passing through it or something?)
4807499
Would the story you were thinking of be Twilight Sparkle Discovers Earth?
4807782
Well, I've often said that one of the reasons that they need to keep the sun on a regular schedule is for navigation, so that's a good reason why Celestia has to do her duty.
And I have been sort of itching to write another sea story. . . .
Yes! That's exactly it!
4810154
Actually, one possibility that might be interesting is if you run with the idea that they can move the sun and moon but not the distant stars, and compare and contrast the more-likely-to-be-accurate star observation methods with the more-usable-when-it's-cloudy sun observation methods (and note that one of the benefits of sunstones is that they still work while it's overcast). And if you wanted to consider the racial division route in-story, the ability to just bypass clouds might incline flyers towards the more accurate techniques, while the ground-bound races would be more likely to see the value in techniques that work in any weather.
4810414
The OPP-verse already has the stars being fixed, and IIRC Twilight explains that to Lyra somewhere in CSI.
I'm not entirely sure how sunstones worked (I'm betting the polarization was involved) . . . I'd have to get up to speed on them (and, for that matter, any type of pre-GPS navigation: I know some of the basic idea, 'cause I had to summarize it for CSI-V, but I'm not terribly familiar with it).
I'm not at all opposed to the pegasi using different navigational techniques than other ponies do. Although, it's probably worth considering if they have some sort of inherent navigational sense via magnetism or magic. For that matter, unicorns might be able to magically navigate, too.
I think I mentioned in Silver Glow's Journal that a lot of ships had a peagsus or two on board for lookout duties and weather patrol, and they could probably also navigate if needed.
Thinking on it, I wonder who would be the most likely to want to invent reliable navigation first? If the pegasi can do it instinctively, I'd imagine that it was the earth ponies who did. They seem to me to be the tribe most likely to come up with clever gadgets.
4810821
See, this is why I need you to update AGFC first.
Yep. I think there might also be a way to use them that just relies on relative brightness, but all the stuff I remember about it relies on polarization in some fashion.
Some might, especially if pegasi did end up with a built-in sense for navigators to try to copy, but I imagine a lot if not most would still need or just prefer tools. That said, that does allow for unicorns to use magic-based tools that aren't practical for the other tribes, whether tools that actually rely on some form of spellwork or just ones that are too unwieldy to use without telekinesis. Note that general "good enough for the masses" tools should be within the ability of just about any unicorn, so while tools that require minor spells might be acceptable, the best ones would either just game their telekinesis/light abilities alone (which can be done, depending on the details of the setting) or simply use their magic as a power source.
I'd imagine the pegasi would be the first to have reliable navigation whether or not they have any inbuilt abilities – but no guarantees any non-pegasi would actually be able to use their methods. After that, it could be either earth ponies or unicorns or, more likely, both, depending on who did the most wandering (which, again, would vary with the setting), but the earth ponies are probably more likely to be the first ones to come up with methods that anyone could use.
4811007
But then I'll be the one running from an angry mob. With torches.
It could depend on how accurate their internal measurement was, too. For instance if all magical leylines came from the North Pole, and all unicorns who could cast could feel them, then there would be little need for a compass. If it was a more specialized knowledge/feeling/whatever, though, you're probably right that most unicorns would prefer some sort of device. It could potentially be horn-powered or even an accessory that goes on the horn.
Also, to your second point, I think that most unicorns can just dump unspecified magical energy at a target, and that there are almost certainly things that are powered that way. I think that the control circuitry (so to speak) would have to be built to account for varying amounts of unicorn power (TM), but that would be the most universally useful device, and anypony who could make a light with her horn could probably power it.
I see the peagsi's having a rudimentary navigational sense, but I think that in the early days especially, they'd just base lots of their navigation on sight. After all, if you fly up you can see further. Navigating light aircraft by water towers is a legit method, and I think that's basically what the pegasi would generally do. It's probably what most of them still do, and any advanced navigational technique was probably invented by somepony else (sextants, etc.).
I'd put the Earth ponies as the explorers, myself. I don't see unicorns being totally opposed to it, but I see them generally taking more of a cautious approach, whereas the earth ponies would just go out and see what was there. Plus, they'd be the ones to invent tools that could be used by anypony.
Miss Rarity looks like she is about to tribade Tom.
4825205
She does later on in that episode, doesn't she?
4827055
Yes indeed.