You made money and you've been wearing rolex all the time.

Being paid €500 per year for wearing rolex vs. speding money for wearing casio easy choice if you can afford it ... btw. I do wear casio too and I love it - because yeah to keep time you buy casio.

It's fine to wear it for the purpose of being a status symbol, but I just don't buy that its anything but.

Some reasons I've been told why people buy luxury watches, outside of the status symbol ones:

1. As discussed, good watches tend to hold / increase their price as time goes on. This leads to the second point: people who can afford to buy a fancy watch likely have a lot of money in mutual funds/other financial instruments anyway, so a Rolex becomes "diversification" for less-rich people and a curio for the more-rich

2. People want an heirloom to give to pass on to the next generations. I've seen watches three-four generations old. In some circles, the older the watch, the more prized it is; a favorite grandchild might get your best watch. It represents the family's continued success

3. "If you are attacked on the street, you want to be able to give something to the robber so he can leave you unharmed" (never mind the fact that you probably got robbed _because_ you wore the Rolex)

Personally speaking I find many of the justifications hilarious, but this kind of thinking regarding luxury has been going on for centuries, so what do I know.

Now if I have to choose a watch and I can make a choice between a losing item and likely winning item I'll take the likely wionning one. Perhaps it's like crypto or mutual funds but I'd rather buy crypto than flush money down the toilet.

So no you don't buy a watch for investment, there are better investments. No you don't buy it a fashion item to get time - I already have precise time on my phone. Not into wathches - all good. You don't like to dress nice, perhaps you live in a big city where nobody cares - no problem.

But let's not argue I'm not wise for not buying "precise time" Casio over Rolex because I have 8k on my wrist I paid 4.5k for and I've been wearing beautiful watch for 7 years now :) And yes there are better investments and million better things to buy - I could drive $2k car, I could make best investments and so on and end up like this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/10ec45k/i_think_i_r...

It's all simply a point of view + making the best out of your money. At the end of the day it's just paper.

As a side note, my cheap, but very well calibrated, mechanical Seiko keeps time as well as a couple of cheap quartz (100% original) Casios I have. It's running at 13 seconds of error accumulated over the last 125 days (almost to the hour), which gives 104 ms of drift per day. The two Casios have ~85 ms and ~120 ms of error per day.

So you're not even paying for insane accuracy or anything like that — thanks to modern engineering, it is available in a mechanical that costs tiny fractions of a Rolex.

So if you look at the participants in the study, it's 40,000 people between 40 to 60.

The only thing we know about them is some of them drink some artificially sweetened drinks. We don't know anything else about their diet or their lifestyle age 20-40.

So first, people who don't have a problem with sugar or their health, they don't drink artificially sweetened drinks.

People who are 40 years old and they drink diet soda, a great deal of them, not all, do it because they already have a problem.

Nobody drinks artificially sweetened soda unless they have a problem because it just tastes bad. A healthy person would just pick soda sweetened by sugar.

And health councious people don't even drink soda because they've never built an addiction to that type of drink in first place - mind that this study is not in the US.

So the fact that this group is more likely to end up with diabetes, there might be a million factors that lead to that result.

Maybe because drinking diet soda already makes a chunk of them preselected to be more likely to develop some kind of metabolic disease.

Again, I don't generalize this study returns some kibd of arithmetic average. You only need 10% of participants to be off limits and you get very different result vs. general population. Because if you look at diabetes 2 rates, out of 40k people maybe 4k max gets it (edit. 1.7k in the study) that's a sample that can show wild variation.

Edit. people seem to have problem with the verbiage. "Nobody drinks artific..." ok that's a way to make a point what I wanted to say "you're more likely to pick diet soda if you already habe a problem" especially for 40-60 demographic who probably includes 100% of people ordered to drink diet soda by their doctor. Also yes people drink soda outside the US. But not people 40-60 where a chunk of them comes from generation that weren't subject to heavy advertising by american sugar soda companies. This is Europe New Zeland and just do a wuick search on the demographics of diet soda consumers in the Europe - it's 25-44 age group.

What a bizarre statement. I have no health problems and will always pick the 'zero' variant of any soda, because to me it tastes exactly the same, but minus all the calories.

Exactly, I don't have diabetes and I always choose the sugar-free ones because of their reduced calories.

I'm not implying that artificial sweeteners are completely safe as I simply don't know—and that's the real problem.

What's damn annoying about these studies is that there are many artificial sweeteners with vastly different chemical structures but generally they're all lumped together. If the gut microbiome is affected and it increases diabetes risk then it's hard to believe that these vastly different chemistries would all have the same effect.

On the other hand, if the body responds badly to the sensation of sweetness then that could explain the result—all other factors being equal.

It seems obvious to me the first job is to determine whether sweetness itself is a factor before anything else.

The 'debate' over artificial sweeteners has been raging for many decades and it's high time it was resolved to avoid confusion. For example where I am the star rating system gives artificially sweetened drinks typically 3.5/5 versus a worse figure of 1–2/5 for those sweetened with sugar.

We need to have faith in officially sanctioned government health warnings.

Mimi: "If you close your eyes."

This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola. Many many healthy people with no health problems have the diet version!

You need not be a connoisseur to notice that they're not _exactly_ the same.

> This thread is not about the differences in the taste between the real cola and diet cola.

Yea, my message, it's a quote from the musical "Rent." Was this whimsy worth your rudeness?

However despite my strong objection to this point in the post I'm still very sympathetic to the idea that this study is bullshit.

(AND I also think drinking sweetened drinks every day is likely a bad idea. I just think this is very hard to prove. I think almost all nutritional claims finer-grained than "eating lots of vegetables seems to be good for you" are probably poorly founded and we are mostly forced to operate on vibes).

I don't necessarily disagree with you in general, but you're also pulling ideas out of the air. Better to point out the problems with the study than claim that people only drink diet soda for XYZ reason because I think you'd need a whole study to figure out the edges of who drinks what and why.

Claiming such a large study is bogus requires a more statistically founded argument than "I think people who drink diet soda are unhealthy to begin with".

It turns out it's not the "obvious" better choice they wanted it to be. So looking into it is definitely interesting.

Where are you pulling these stats from? Do you have any references or do you just keep misrepresenting your personal observations as facts?

I sure do see my 40-60 age group friends and acquaintances going for more diet soda than regular soda. So I find it hard to believe that diet soda is not a common thing in the 40-60 age group.

It is frustrating that for someone who posted strong criticism against a research paper, you keep making bold claims without presenting any references or evidence!

DIY at least you'll know I'm not referencing selectively.

For example, when I did search, I came across this source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d.... However, I'm not convinced it supports your point that this trend is 'common' but not in the 40–60 age group. The data show that 5% of people aged 40–60 use it, compared to 12% in the under-40 group. That doesn't strike me as a large enough gap to justify saying it's common in one group but not in the other.

I mean I just don't agree? I'm young-ish (approaching 30), don't have a problem with excessive sugar in my diet, I don't have medical conditions which make sugar a problem, but most of the time when I drink soda I pick one without sugar. I find it tastes fine and I don't exactly want more sugar in my diet.

I'm not saying that your comments about bias introduced by the selection criteria is wrong, I haven't read the study so I don't know if they corrected for it or designed the study in a way which makes it a non-issue. But you seem to have some very strong personal preferences regarding soda, and you've assumed that those personal preferences are universal. They're not.

What a bogus claim! Plenty of people drink artificially sweetened drinks because they don't want to enjoy a soda but not add calories to their daily consumption! Which world do you live in? Have you even been to cinema lately? I bet every other person orders a diet soda before entering the theatre. I know because I see it happen all the time all around me!

Yes, we don't! And that's perfectly acceptable.

When you're studying a cohort aged 40 to 60, you don't try to reconstruct their exact diet or lifestyle from two decades earlier. You don't rely on their memories from age 20 and treat that as reliable data. It simply isn't.

It's okay not to know what cannot be known, and still move forward with meaningful research. If scientific studies were only allowed to proceed after accounting for every possible confounding variable, then no health research would ever be conducted. None. Zero. Because it's impossible to identify and control for every unknown factor.

What researchers do is control for the known variables, publish their findings, and invite scrutiny. Other researchers then explore new confounding factors, conduct follow-up studies, and expand or refine the conclusions. That's the essence of scientific progress. That's how human knowledge evolves.

It is, frankly, lazy and armchair critiquing to dismiss a study simply because it didn't account for your favorite confounding variable. You know what's not lazy and armchair? Actually conducting research that investigates that variable. And that's when you come to appreciate just how difficult or outright infeasible some of these variables are to measure or control for.

Actually show me a 10+ year study that found no surprising result.

If the fact that bunch of foundational Alzheimer's studies were found to be faked recently by a guy who profited from them for 20 years and many such cases doesn't make you more realistic then well ... you must have an exceptionally good heart :)

There used to be an iconic club Fabric it was called. Nearby Farringdon is my favourite place in London. Most underrated area.

Once I validate and start getting traction only then I start automating cold email, ads etc. Do not validate with automated cold email agency. You can't automate something well what aren't doing with success already manually. Nothing beats manually researching your prospects and writing up personalized email - only when you understand this process and you know how, where and when to find your ICP and what to look for and what to tell them only then you can automate this process.

You want to automate processes that work already. Not the other way around.

Built a few businesses with this approach and still works today in 2025.

Most people, about 95% making these first calls never make it higher. Either they quickly gather this job is a BS scam or they're too stupid to realize that and that stupidity often prevents them from going higher up. A few cynical ones like the manipulative aspects of it.

The job of a firm is to create illusion of excessive wealth and rockstar lifestyle of these "brokers" (strippers, cocaine, etc.) to attract some kind of talent. Most of the directors are faking the size of their wealth. E.g. coming to job on rented Bentley. They also lie about the nature of the job to hire people for "canvassing" as it doesn't matter how long you stay, if you only deliver 20 leads per first day and quit that's still a win. A bulk of the leads come from people who were tricked into the job and quit asap.

Most people who make it through are the ones cynical enough to stay around, then they harvest work of the ones who quit earlier. E.g. you collect leads, small clients etc. I have a friend who made it far, his lifestyle was just like Wolf of Wallstreet but more excessive. That movie btw. it's watered down - which is hard to believe for most as you'd expect Hollywood to overblow things.

Ever read Straight to Hell? That seems less watered down at the very least.

Isn't this what SDRs do?

AEs are the sales people. They’re the ones who close the deals.

SDRs pretty much do nothing but qualify. If they close a deal, great, but sometimes that’s not even a good thing because it possibly could have been a bigger deal, if they had the AE script/training. But if they do well at qualifying as an SDR, they can often move up to AE, and so on.

But yes, SDRs are generally folks straight out of college or switching careers. It requires no prior knowledge, just the audacity and ability to cold call someone and be charismatic and personable enough to get them past the qualifying questions and hopefully schedule a follow up call.

You may be thinking of ISRs (Inside Sales Representatives) which are effectively SDRs who are authorized (and trained) to close very small deals, as compared to the AEs.

This actually requires a different set of skills, as AEs are often speaking to people in a “board room,” literally or figuratively, and sales cycles are long, meaning the contracts have to be huge to make it worth it (plus good AEs are expensive).

ISR sales can’t be long, as volume matters more than absolute price for inside sales, since that absolute price is orders of magnitude lower than an enterprise sale. As a result, the amount of time spent on each candidate customer has to be an order of magnitude lower as well, so qualifying a customer out of the top of the funnel is more important than almost anything else. The biggest waste of time is spending hours or weeks with a customer who was never going to buy in the first place, and novice sales people make that mistake all the time.

So yeah, I’m not sure what distinction you were trying to make between “telesales” and “telemarketing,” but that distinction really doesn’t exist.

Aside: literally every single startup hires bad sales people early on. Every single one. I have never seen one that doesn’t. It is, in my estimation, impossible to know what to look for in the right sales person until you’ve made a bunch of sales, which is why it’s so important for founders to make the first bunch of sales. But founders are a wholly different breed from sales people, and reading sales people is exceptionally hard.

For ISRs and SDRs, the solution is easy: hire them, train them, see if they perform, and fire them if they don’t and reward them if they do. Because SDRs and ISRs are so cheap, relatively speaking, as it’s an entry-level role, it’s a fairly low risk as long as you’re actually willing to put in the effort to train them and cut your losses when they’re not working out.

AEs are harder because their base is generally much higher, but they should come with a prepped “Rolodex”, ready to close deals quickly. If you don’t have a pipeline, solve that problem first.

Sorry for the rant, but seemed important.

Source: I’m a serial founder, have run sales teams, some successful and others not. I’m an engineer who happens to be good at sales, but finding good sales people is still a dark art.