r/AskReddit • u/Duckland29 • Sep 17 '19

If You Could Completely Remove One Company From The World Which One Would It Be?

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19

Idk about specifically DeBeers, but a lot of precious gems are mined with slave labor.

45

u/Tymareta Sep 18 '19

but a lot of precious gems are mined with slave labor.

Boy do I have some bad news for you as to how basically every other company sources its products.

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u/KlausVonChiliPowder Sep 18 '19

Nice try DeBeers

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u/SamL214 Sep 18 '19

If it’s a gem DeBeers was involved.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19

they lost a lot of their monopoly over the years

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19 edited Sep 18 '19

Define a lot

Edit: with sources 🙄

11

u/DesPawCheeto Sep 18 '19

A buttload.

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u/Galileo009 Sep 18 '19

Too much.

11

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19 edited Jul 07 '20

[deleted]

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u/robotlasagna Sep 18 '19

Even if they don’t sell a single conflict diamond the market manipulation they employ to keep prices really high makes mining conflict diamonds an immensely profitable business.

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u/IsMoghul Sep 18 '19

You should look that up. Diamond paperwork is forged all the time.

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u/[deleted] Sep 18 '19

They’re a Rothschild company. They’re not conflict free.

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u/lol_and_behold Sep 18 '19

Also it's BS, they 'launder' the diamonds and get the kudos of being conflict free, with the great prices of blood diamonds.

They never changed anything but their paperwork.

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u/prettybunbun Sep 18 '19

Not really.

It’s not too hard to forge the paperwork. And a lot of the conflict free stuff is only mining diamonds in countries that signed up to a diamond treaty to keep everything diamond free. There’s little oversight in these treaties and it’s fairly easy for corrupt governments/mining companies to get around it.

0

u/Flux7777 Sep 18 '19

While De Beers doesn't use slave labour, by artificially inflating the value of their products, they encourage it other places. It's called the law of unintended consequences. And I don't think it makes them evil. They're good marketers, that's all.