the best things in life aren't things
Posts tagged wine
10 wacky tips for recession survival
3 years ago
in Writings
Here’s my list of 10 “commandments” you need to follow during these harsh times ahead. Make them your new year resolution, and please feel free to add more to the list.
1. If you can’t pay cash, you can’t afford it. Time to cut up those credit cards. Don’t be stupid, it’s not free money.
2. Invite friends to your house. You don’t have to spend the gas to drive, and you can get as drunk as you want, since you are already home. Play some card games, it’s great fun.
3. Have lots of sex. It’s free and it feels really good. Also, you won’t need the heat as high, afterwards.
4. Get rid of cable. It’s a rip-off, and there’s nothing on it worth a shit, anyways. I assume you have a computer if you are reading this, so why don’t you try some good old YouTube or Hulu instead?
5. Terra Romana, dry wine – 8 €/ bottle
6. Buy regular unleaded or diesel (not premium or super). Your car needs to make sacrifices too. I guarantee it will still run fine. If it needs service, try a smaller service shop and not expensive car dealer shops.
7. Time to be a coupon or a discount “weirdo”. 50% off is quite a catch.
8. Keep your sense of humor.
9. Shower together. (hubba hubba)
10. Don’t pout, make “survival” an adventure.
Pricing and the brain
The pricier the wine, the more we enjoy it!
The wines and alcoholic beverage industry as a whole is just a huge marketing contraption, capable of churning brand after brand. It has recently been shown that the pricier the bottle and the fancier the label, the more we end up enjoying it. We have been conditioned to believe that the more we pay for a bottle of wine, it will only have to taste better; of course this is our fault from the beginning, because we are not wine experts – the price we pay for the wine is our only proxy.
Dr Rangel came to this conclusion by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine. He used a trick called functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which can detect changes in the blood flow in parts of the brain that correspond to increased mental activity. He looked in particular at the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that previous experiments have shown is responsible for registering pleasant experiences.
Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were five different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. Except, of course, that he was fibbing. He actually used only three wines. He served up two of them twice at different prices.
What is the truth?The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. For example, when one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. Moreover, when the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.
via The Economist
By the way, wines are not the only things the marketing machine turned more expensive. We significantly overpay for bottled water, coffee, diamonds, weddings (etc). What else is there?