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To: manalagi who wrote (119642)	3/7/2001 11:38:52 PM
From: Glenn D. Rudolph	Respond to of 164684

Looking back, bezo was named Man of the Year for being able to Fool Some of the People All the Time (and it appears that some of them are on this thread) and All the People Some of the Time, but now He got caught for not being able to Fool All the People All the Time. I thought it might be approprate to put the Time Man of the Year in perspective. I believe Adolf Hitler was Time Man of the year in 1938 or 1937. That is not to imply that bezos is Hitler but just to indicate what that great honor means. You seems to infer that it is OK to do business being immoral or unethical as long as as it is not illegal. This was surely implied here. It is an interesting concept because there are a lot of immoral business concepts in use that in my mind are unethical. A good example in my industry was the laser drilling of diamond. This is a process of using a laser to drill out tiny carbon spots in diamonds to make their clarity to appear better than what it really was. This process did not need to be disclosed to the consumer unless the hole that was left was filled with some material to prevent soil to gather in the hole. The definition by the FTC was that any process used on a diamond that was permanent and did not add any material that was artificial left the diamond to be the sames as found in nature excluding the cutting and polishing. Therefore, all drilled diamond without filler need not be disclosed to the consumer. This process was available as early as 1980. The problem is the consumer would not know to look for micrscopic drill holes and after wearing the diamond, these holes would gather debre and this would reduce the sparkle of the diamond. Yes the debre could be cleaned out by a jeweler. In either case, the drilled diamonds had no where near the value of a diamond that was not drilled. Many jewelers sold diamonds that were drilled at the same price as those that were not. It was difficult for the consumer to compare and it was perfectly legal to never mention it to the consumer. Down the road the consumer would see spots within their diamond from soil but if they complained to the jeweler, the jeweler would only need say that was natural for that diamond. My point is this practice was legal but I considered it as did many jewelers unethical. In 1998, the FTC changed the ruling and now all drilling must be disclosed. I suppose that if Olu had bought a drilled diamond prior to 1998 and paid top dollar, he would not be upset to find out later it was drilled because no law was broken. It would matter not to Olu that the diamond may be worth half what he paid or that its appearance would continue to deteriorate until high unltrasonic cleaning processes were used to remove the soil. That may be fine with Olu but it is not with me and I never sold a drilled diamond. If for some reason the consumer wanted a drilled diamond to keep price down, I would have definitly disclosed the drilling. That apparently makes me a bad businessman. Glenn