5 Common Status Symbols That No Longer Make Sense

Plus, it's mostly the bottle that makes you feel fancy anyway. It's made of glass, rendering it needlessly fragile and also needlessly heavy, which raises freight costs. Then there's the cork, which some insist is a miracle material, but was actually just the first thing we tried after we got sick of stuffing bottlenecks with oily rags. Also, corks can leave a bunch of shit in your drunk-y grape juice, which means that a cardboard box of wine is a better container than any elegantly corked bottle.

So the next time someone makes a comment about you buying three boxes of wine at the local grocery store, know that you're the classy one.

One group tried to rank the professors of all colleges. They used ratings students submit online, which isn't perfect data, but does seem to correlate with formal evaluations and teaching awards, so it's the best we have. Welp, no Ivy university professors appeared in the top 100. And when it comes to job recruiters looking for the best hires, Ivy schools don't even make the top five. But Arizona State does. Go Sun Devils, I guess.

Still, Ivy League graduates end up with good jobs. Ten years out of college, an Ivy grad can expect to make twice as much as other college grads in general. But when two researchers followed students across several decades to determine if Ivy grads earn more due to the advantages of an Ivy League education, the conclusion was ... no. They don't. These students benefit mostly from the networking opportunities that the Ivies provide (while more privileged students could have gotten those even without an Ivy degree). So the real reward from an Ivy League education is truly the friends you make along the way.

Except diamonds aren't finite. We can make those things, and we've been able to for decades. And while "artificial diamonds" used to mean substitutes like cubic zirconia, which sorta looks like a cartoon's idea of what a diamond is supposed to be, nowadays labs are able to create jewels that are nearly indistinguishable from ones mined by magical dwarves. And last year, the FTC straight-up eliminated the label separating "natural" diamonds from synthetic ones, because the two are now totally identical.

And now stores are now selling these homegrown diamonds for 30 percent less than mined ones. But what's stopping someone else from selling new diamonds for even less, making anyone who jumps on the 30 percent discount today feel stupid? Nothing, which is why retailers are about to do exactly that. De Beers, an international corporation that specializes in diamonds and has a laundry list of, umm, legal "problems," long campaigned against any kind of synthetic diamond, but now they're cooking their own synthetics, and they're making theirs cheaper than regular ones too.

And why should it end there? Diamonds have only stayed at one price traditionally because the De Beers cartel controlled every diamond in the world. Now anyone can make even cheaper diamonds until supply and demand meet and the price for a new stone settles at, I don't know, $4? And so the only people who get screwed are those who invested in diamonds thinking "This will forever impress strangers with my wealth!" Sorry, buddy. You should've gone with something that had a better resale value, like Beanie Babies or cans of old farts.

Yet Apple recently had to tearfully inform investors that buyers don't seem to be replacing their phones every year like they used to. And the reason for this, they said, wasn't anything so fixable as pricing or marketing or people being poor. Instead, it seems the phones that people already have are just fine, rendering upgrades and standing outside a store for six hours in the morning meaningless.

It's just a case of diminishing returns. The speed of a computer chip used to double every two years, but after four decades, that finally became kind of impossible. And yet now, even though our CPUs aren't quite as fast as they would have been if they'd stayed on that exponential curve, we're not suffering. Unless you're building an impeccable gaming PC, you probably don't know or care exactly how fast your computer is. Netflix loads the latest season of GLOW just fine and the Washington Post website doesn't collapse into a dying heap when you scroll, so it's doing its job.

And I'm not saying phones will never get better, but the improvements we've been taking for granted can't be pushed much further. Screen resolution is already insane (a 27-inch monitor is arguably too small to show a 4k image properly, so a 4k phone is pointless). Storage and speed will become less relevant as we turn even more toward the cloud. And really, cameras are so good that the only thing holding them back is you being unable to understand a proper Dutch angle, Steve.

So that raises a question: Can people tell how expensive your perfume is just by smelling it? There's an annual perfume awards show, so someone must be appreciating this stuff. But when pollsters have tried getting volunteers to distinguish between an expensive perfume and a knockoff, most couldn't identify the famous brand.

And the brand had better be detectable, because the liquid itself costs little to make (a couple of bucks, if that). Some perfumes are extra expensive because they contain natural ingredients, but natural doesn't necessarily mean better, and natural perfumes break down more quickly. Then there are companies that have put out a few stupidly pricey bottles just to attract consumers to the regular stuff, only to have people see the stupidly pricey bottles and buy them all. Because that's what happens when you say a product is the best and no one bothers to research literally anything.

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