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.

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

Spot on. the placebo effect is powerful and very likely plays a role in both scenarios.

Often I have supposed really expensive cables improve things just because it was time to replace cables already, or the connection was janky to begin with because the budding audiophile is upgrading from, say, bare wire connectors to banana plugs.

Oh no what have I done.

Gold/Nickel plating is standard for most connectors nowadays except for the cheapest of contacts, which uses tin plating.

Gold plating can still wear off, because pure gold plating is "soft" and "hard" gold plating is usually done with some kind of mixture with other metals for hardness. And the cost of gold plating depends greatly on the thickness, since most of the cost won't be in materials but in process time.

That being said, if you truly want the absolute best uncorrodible and toughest plating for a connector, look for rhodium plating, but that is VERY expensive.

I think the meme makes more since for any digital connection, where it's literally impossible for the cable to make a difference to the sound quality. I have seen some wacky shit online, like claims of gold plated optical audio cables.

You could be right, but I present you evidence for even more stupidity…

Gold plated toslink cables

My favorite part about every power cable photo like this, is knowing that right inside the wall it's just normal cheap romex wiring all the way to the breaker box, and then cheap aluminum wiring all the way down the power lines.

What am I seing in this picture?

With some cables sometimes quality is higher with price though. I prefer a good 5 USD usb cable than a shitty one that breaks at the joint after a few days of use.

Same with audio cables for guitars, sound is probably not going to suffer (although really long cables can have some issues), but wear damage is definitely noticeable for the very cheap ones.

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.

i know that people don't like rgb, but i absolutely adore when everything in my room sparkles and shines like a christmas tree

I painted my pc black so the thing runs faster :)

I personally think the fastest way to game is in a gaming chair with RGB lights built in. Even moreso if your RGB mic protrudes slightly into the shot so everyone knows what an important and dedicated streamer you are. Even faster gaming points if the mic makes it into your profile pic on social media, that way when people from high school see it, they think, "Wow, look at Brian. He must be a very important streamer now."

It's gotta be like a 1% improvement or something, nothing ever worth the price

Wood is a worse conductor than copper, so a copper cable is better than a wooden one.

I expect aluminum, copper, and gold wires would have similar performance over a short range.