GreenStrong

DeBeers was a monopoly that inflated diamond prices (it has broken up), this is a fact; you may read a case study on it by Harvard Business School students.

But one often hears the idea that "diamonds are actually common". That is logically inconsistent with a monopoly. Diamonds are durable, so they survive in river gravel for eons, and they are dense enough to concentrate with gold panning equipment, then they are super-hydrophobic, so the dense fraction of the gravel can simply be exposed to grease and blasted with a hose, the diamonds are attracted to the grease. This isn't done because diamonds aren't common. If you found a diamond, you could learn to cut it in an afternoon; the standard round brilliant is often a student's second cut.

People often complain about the price they get for a used diamond, but they don't consider the economics of the situation. A jeweler buys it, based on an inexact estimate, since few jewelers have a professional diamond grader. The jeweler can get any stone he wants in 48 hours, so he isn't going to have the diamond grader send it back. Instead, the jeweler sells it to his supplier. Naturally, the wholesaler pays less than wholesale, and the jeweler pays the consumer less than that.

The kamikazes had a fairly low chance of hitting their targets, the Japanese didn't have the resources to properly train them at the desperate point when they began using them. They were extremely effective overall, but each individual pilot's odds of success were low.

There are multiple non- antibody immune responses, and the memory for those immune responses is longer lasting. But that's only moderately reassuring; only antibodies prevent infection completely. People with only T-cell immunity will get less sick and be contagious for fewer days, but that's far from ideal.

If your friend produced antibodies in the first place, memory B cells will crank up production rapidly upon reinfection. Some people seem to beat the virus without ever developing antibodies.

Is a "professional tiger trainer" a person who trains tigers, or are you a tiger who trains professionals? If it is the latter, are you concerned about coronavirus?

Did it hurt? Was it expensive? I have a rather long uvula, although I certainly can't clench it in my teeth.

An acquaintance of mine had his uvula removed, he said it was fairly painless, but I'm not sure the procedure he had was the complete one. He was a medical corpsman in the Navy, while at sea the entire medical staff removed each other's uvulas out of boredom. Naturally, drugs were necessary during the procedure and recovery...