Again, you CAN’T, obviously. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep doing it. It’s a coping mechanism you found and now you got so used to it, any other method just doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s a dependence.
You can argue all you want that it’s a time issue, but we both know that’s not true.
Soooo, you can’t relax without alcohol.
That doesn’t sound odd to you?
Um, yes.
At least with a pretty high certainty, the “I can do without” is a lie. If you need alcohol that much to “de-stress”, then you are functionally unable to live without alcohol. And that is extremely problematic.
Yeah, that’s alcoholism.
If either outcome leads to alcohol, that’s problematic.
Sounds a lot like alcoholism.
https://youtu.be/f-QxLAxwxkM?si=N9ltCiSSxgGkkdTR
Glad you asked.
Yeah, I’ve seen the same pattern with knives. If you just want a decent kitchen knife, you’ll find tons of people who are absolutely certain, that it’s physically impossible to cut anything unless the blade has been sharpened by a Japanese virgin under moonlight.
I assume, the value for money curve is a sigmoidal, where at a certain, relatively low price you get almost all the value and afterwards it only gets more expensive, but not better. But you never know, when you’ve reached the plateau.
And that’s already a whole lot of money for next to no value for 99% of the people.
Let’s be honest, most people listen to Spotify in a room that’s not ideal for listening. And I’m also very very certain that most of the higher end stuff (and I’m counting everything over 200€) is esoteric. You can’t hear a difference in quality. Maybe a difference, but not objectively better or worse.
Problem is, where exactly is the line? It’s almost impossible to tell whether this one speaker is garbage with a markup or actually high quality.
And more fundamentally: I can buy a brand new smartphone, with absolute top notch technology for 200€, but speakers and amplifiers, technologies that existed for decades and should be out-scienced by now still cost that much without any guarantees for quality? Sound should be a solved problem.
I know this is meant as a joke, but I have to say, it’s incredibly hard to get proper audio equipment without paying idiot tax like crazy.
I want neither China crap, nor overengineered German CD shavers (those really exist, BTW), but just decent audio. If you look for reviews, everything under 2000€ is utter garbage, apparently, and you should be sterilized for even thinking about spending less than that. Or you go on Amazon and even a brick wall will have stellar reviews, because it sounds really awesome and even has Bluetooth!
Extremely frustrating. No middle ground.
Every system will get gamed by bad actors.
At least in my case, I can’t come up with a system that doesn’t suffer from these problems, but still keeps corruption in check.
For example, I was in a bidding process for my own software. Our contract has a legal time limit, afterwards it has to be renewed using the same bidding process as the first time. It makes perfect sense for us not to rewrite our software - it’s working just fine after all. But legally, we’re bidding on rebuilding the entire thing, have to compete with laughably low offers from all over Europe, and when we won the contract we decide, almost by accident, to keep using the old software, but on a very tight budget.
The pragmatic thing would have been, to just extend our contract, but that could mean endless contracts to extremely high prices for software that just happens to be embedded deep enough to be irreplaceable.
No good solution, really.
As a software engineer, this applies to my entire industry as well.
I’m forced to write subpar software, sometimes with atrocious security simply because some idiot set an unrealistic budget.
The worst part is, my current projects are all government funded. The German government implemented processes to prevent corruption, which force unhealthy competition and backhand corruption onto the bidders, which then churn out bad software, which causes gigantic costs down the line, because nothing works. Great job.
Yeah, but number go up!
That’s the point.
In Germany there was a battle between left and right back then. The economy boomed in the 20s and faltered in the 30s. Capitalists saw the threat of socialism looming just behind Poland and so they supported fascism.
The Nazis funneled billions into large businesses. It was unsustainable and morally multi-level wrong, but they skimmed a lot of profits from these agreements. They got rich, while the economy started to collapse - even before the war.
Even after the war, most of them got away. They kept much of their wealth.