For someone who’s into skiing (either that, or you’re Polish), you don’t know much about sunglasses. 
Sure, there’s madness in every category, but my $150 Ray Ban shades are the best pair of sunglasses I ever had. They’re so incredibly good, I often forget to take them off when the sun starts to set. Excellent for driving, riding, skiing. Very soothing to the eyes - whereas cheaper shades are often a lot more “tiring” on the eyes.
http://www.picciones.com/welcome.htm
Bottom right: click on Platinum Tellurium.
Someday when I’m very rich, I will own this watch! And I don’t care that it’s staggeringly expensive!
I have to stop in to stand up for well water. The only good tap water I’ve ever had in my life is well water. City water is invariably crap in my experience. I’ve heard NYC has good city water but I can’t recall ever trying it.
When I lived in Scottsdale and I was out of store-bought water and didn’t feel like going out I would put a paper towel over a glass and filter it that way. That’s how disgusting their city-water is; you can actually SEE the gross little particles floating around in it and make it taste noticably better by pouring it through a freaking paper-towel.
Let me clarify – you will have to click on the Ulysse-Nardin link at the top, and then the Platinum Tellurium.
I love thes watch because it’s beautiful. If you can’t tell the difference between a $10 Timex and this gorgeous timepiece, well, I guess you wouldn’t tell the difference between a $50 and a $5000 stereo either.
Check out the other watches on that page. How could you possibly chose a nasty plastic Timex over these beauties?
…brings up a very good point. I wear glasses, and I am always amazed by how expensive the FRAMES are! The last pair I bought, the frames were $200! They do not seem all that different from those used on $25 sunglasses at the mall.
Finally,those comments about bottled water. My brother bought a bottle of sedish water (Ramlosa)…it is just about the most evil tasting swill you can imagine…and $2.00 a bottle.
Yes, the more expensive ones have much, much better optics. I wear sunglasses all the time (I live at very high altitude) and I can definitely tell the difference. I hate cheap sunglasses. And yes, they are also more durable.
Sorta hard to be into skiing while living in The Sunshine State .
JoeSki is my full name, Joseph Sweredoski, cut down into a neat little 6 letter name that sounds like it should be used to describe a hoagie.
I’ve been driving around with my $12 pair for a while now, and my eyes feel fine. Maybe yours are a bit more sensitive than mine.
And just how durable are we talking here?
Well, you could have been a weekend skier. 
My current Ray Bans are about 5 years old. Maybe 6, I honestly don’t know for certain. Seeing how much I wear them (pretty much all the time while driving, skiing, (motor)bike riding, I’d say that’s good mileage. Not a scratch on them, and the frame is still as good as when it was new. And yeah, my eyes are perhaps a tad sensitive, but that’s the point of it all: to me, there IS a vast difference between cheapos and Ray Bans.
Do not endlessly reuse plastic water bottles! Plastic is surprisingly porous and is a breeding ground for mold and bacteria! If you must reuse, them sterilize them after every use.
As for “Designer Clothing,” that phrase always gives me pause. All clothing is designer clothing—it doesn’t just occur naturally, like fungus.
I’ll give up my grubs when they pry them form my cold, dead hands…
I like to be able to just glance at my watch (mechanical or digital) and be able to tell the time. What time is it on the watch in that picture? 
(But I guess it is pretty.)
Anyhoo…
I refill my water bottles throughout the day, but wash them out each evening with hot soapy water. I saw a piece on the news a few months ago that talked about how nasty re-used water bottles get, so yeah, I wash them every day.
I don’t generally buy bottled water for the reasons the OP gave. I do, however, get commercially delivered water in my home. As a transplant patient I am immunosuppressed, and when our local water supply was found to have coliform bacteria in it not twenty blocks from my apartment, I didn’t have many choices: stop cooking and washing dishes and drinking water, or obtain a fresh supply.
And all you people buying expensive stereo equipment are doing it all wrong. I’m way ahead of the curve on this one: buy a piano and learn to play the music you like.
The rest of the OP I pretty much agree with also, with a nod toward the idea that we are sold expensive lawn treatments only because we were sold the idea that a short swath of single-plant garden was even a necessary thing. If I’m going to have property that isn’t living space, an alpine meadow or a wooded lot would work just fine for me. Why do we have lawns, anyway?
I draw the line at Ray-Bans. I had a pair of them once and wore them everywhere for years. I vow to buy another, and my eyes will thank me for it.
I have never felt bad paying for bottled water. It tastes better, period. I lived in NYC for many years, and I constantly heard on the news how we had the best water in the world.
You know what? That’s pure crap.
Why? Because, perhaps, yes, the drinking water in the mains is fantastic and clean and delicious. But I don’t know a single person who actually has access to those water mains. Everyone has to get their water through some hideous, rusting, gunk-encrusted pipes installed 100 years ago and patched by a string of unskilled, unlicensed landlords over the decades. I can’t even begin to tell you the colors of water I’ve seen coming out of pipes in NYC. At my old office, located right in the snooty heart of midtown, no one dared to drink the hideous stuff that came out of our taps. We actually got the water for our water cooler from a company that bottled it literally 2 blocks away–they drew it straight from the mains, without any rusty, crusty pipes in between.
So, bottled water = good.
I believe the difference is the optician sitting behind the desk, as well as the large floor space and equipment necessary to run the shop. The receipt doesn’t list “frame” and “labor” separately; it’s all included in the price of the frame.
I don’t buy $20 Timexes. I buy the $12 models. They last at least 10 years. (They get rought treatment since I don’t wear watches on my wrist and keep them in my pocket. A “nice” pocket watch last 1-2 years.) It’s inconceivable that anyone with any Math ability would think that even $200 watches are “worth it”. Plus I never worry about anything bad happening to my watch.
Diamonds: Umm, for several years now there have been fake diamonds that a jeweler can tell from a real one only by using a special electrical detector. They cannot tell the fakes from the real ones optically using their loupes. So, unless your friends carry around such detectors and are forward enough to insist on testing your engagement ring, you’ll be 100% pleased with your fake. Plus you’ll save a ton of dough. (There’s an even newer type that fools the tester!) Diamonds for jewelry are indeed one of the all time most amazing marketing hypes.
Designer clothes and thrift stores. Just buy your designer clothes at the thrift stores. I know lots of women who do that. (Guys rarely care.)
Bottled water. It really is needed in areas where the tap water is foul. I quickly get addicted to the stuff when I stay in such area. But I revert once I get back home since it tastes worse than the 2nd rate tap water I have here. The amazing stuff is the cost. Water is immensely abundant, it’s not something rare like oil. What is going on with this?
I reuse plastic bottles, too, but I don’t think hot soapy water is good enough, and it surely doesn’t “sterilize”. I know, because I fill my plastic bottles with iced tea, not water - and after about 5 uses, they are a brownish color even after being soaked overnight with very hot soapy water. I’ve found something that works better, and only takes an hour (and the bottles dry much faster, which I think is an important clue to how clean they are): Oxi-Clean. Just 1/8 of a scoop does it.
(Sorry for the hijack, but if it saves just one person from getting ill…)
I remember back in the late 70s when they first started marketing bottled water. Before that you could only get distilled water at the store. They always made it sound so exotic, “from a mountain spring, hidden in the French Alps. It’s purer than regular water, it’s waterier than regular water”. And everybody fell for it!
ftg said:
Unless you need chronograph functions, waterproof cases, and reliable operation. $12 watches break easily, the buttons can stick, they’ll fail if they go under water, etc.
And also, you’re completely neglecting the aesthetic factor, which is just plain silly. We apply it to everything we buy. If we didn’t care about aesthetics, we’d all be eating off of cheap white plates, using paper cups. Our cars would be the cheapest of nondescript boxes, and we’d all live in houses that had no decorative trim and consisted of space-efficient square boxes for rooms and nothing else. We wouldn’t use carpet, and everything would be painted in primer.
So let’s not get selective about where we apply our rules. Look around you - most of the things you use cost more than they had to for aesthetic reasons. It’s important to us. If you don’t think so, go look at the old Soviet Union for an example of how people lived when everthing was about pure efficiency. Shapeless clothes, cement-block apartments. Yech.
That said, the trick to ‘smart’ buying is to decide what is important to you, then to analyze the prices of the options looking for the point where the price/performance curve starts to go up exponentially. The law of diminishing returns, or the 80% rule. Find the point where you get 80% of the ‘best’, and you’ll generally find the point optimum value. For instance, if you want a good, functional watch and don’t care much about aesthetics, I’d say that point is somewhere around $30-$40. If you want a ‘designer’ watch like a Tag-Hueur or a Brietling or something, you’re probably in the $1000 range. For cars, I’d say it’s somewhere around $25,000, or for sports cars $35,000.
You can find similar points for almost every product. After that, increased quality comes at an exponential price increase. To get another 10% in quality, you might have to spend 100% more money. to get the next 10%, 200% more money, etc. The increments get increasinly expensive.
But below the 80% line, the relationship is pretty linear. A $25,000 car will be much better than a $12,000 car, etc.
Another word about cheap watches: I have never had a cheap watch that didn’t make my arm break out. I have never had a watch that cost more than $100 make my arm break out. I’ll pay the damn $80+ to not have to put up with itching, weeping sores on my wrist!