Devil’s advocate:
Crystals - placebo effect can be a thing, and if they provide a sense of relief that’s a good thing. As long as they still take their actual medicne and don’t think putting a herring in a sock will cure cancer.
Cables - While there’s obviously a cut-off point. As an IT guy I have fixed a not-insignificant number of issues with sound/display/network quality/dropouts by replacing crap/damaged cables with slightly more expensive ones. Just don’t expect them to turn. a 360p stream into 4k
Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that’s fine I guess.
But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.
Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the “innocent” use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can’t.
More than placebo, I think it’s a god source for spiritualism.
I’m one of those “edgelords” that believe that organised religion doesn’t have a place in a civilised modern society, but I don’t think spiritualism in and of itself is bad.
Thus I’m all for crystals, horoscopes, praying and whatnot to fulfill one’s spiritual needs.
I’m pagan but I have issues with most modern use of crystals in spiritualism. Not on religious grounds (except the geotheistic ones), but because they’re almost never harvested ethically or in a way that isn’t extremely bad for the environment.
If you find some nice crystals in a walk through the forest or if you inherit some use them by all means, but more people need to consider the consequences of the materials they use in their spiritual practice.
Me on god
Gold-plating the connectors is actually one of the few things that does make sense. When new, they won’t sound better, but they corrode less, which can, sometime in the future, make a difference, albeit very slight: surface oxidation can form a tiny capacitor. That said, I think you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference to chrome-plated ones. But unlike lots of other esoteric “high-end” nonsense, this one has at least theoretical technical merit. And the micrometer-scale galvanic gold-plating isn’t expensive, either.
Gold is a better conductor than copper and gold also does not corrode. So they actually are better cables, since the thing the cable does is made significantly easier and less prone to failure when the wires and connectors are gold and not copper or some other metal that doesn’t conduct electricity as well.
Gold is a worse conductor than copper. The benefit is just protection from corrosion.
(Copper conductivity is 6 * 10^7 S/m, gold is 4*10^7 S/m. Silver is 6.3 * 10^7, but very prone to corrosion).
The conductivity doesn’t mean a damn thing when it’s plating some shit-tier alloy.
That corrosion resistance though… more than worth the price. I made that mistake on some monitors once. ONCE.
