The relativity of values causes us to use money irrationally. I go to the supermarket to buy a $15 pen, and the clerk smiles and says, “You can buy this pen for $7 if you walk 5 minutes from here.” Then, most people walk five minutes and buy a $15 pen for $7. But if you want to buy a $1,000 jacket and the clerk smiles and says, “You can get a $992 jacket in five minutes from here,” most people simply buy the $1,000 jacket. Reasonably, walking for 5 minutes equals the effort, and the profit of $8 is the same. However, people might go to a store that sells pens cheaper, but not for the jacket, because the discount rate is too low. In other words, the relativity of comparing values makes us act irrationally. The pen’s discount rate is 55%, and the jacket’s is only 0.8%. Yet, the total amount is the same for all $8, and the effort to gain that profit is identical. Attitudes and misconceptions about consumption influence how we build wealth. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”
The "normal human body temperature = 37°C" standard was established in 1851 by the German medical doctor "Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich", who took millions of temperature readings from about 25,000 people and reported "36.2°C to 37.5°C". However, surveys in the United States in 1992 and the United Kingdom in 2017 found 36.8°C and 36.6°C, respectively. So in the past people deemed that the discrepancy was due to errors in old measuring equipment or methods. But Julie Parsonnet and her colleagues at Stanford University's School of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found a common thread in the temperature databases: People are cooler now than they were then. It wasn't just a measurement error. They speculated that medical advances had reduced inflammation and lowered the average temperature. We don't question the obvious. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”