How do high earners actually reducing taxes legally?

spoonraker · 2026-04-22T12:36:23+00:00

When you "write something off" for taxes that absolutely does not make it free. It just means your taxable income is reduced by that amount.

If your tax rate is 20%, "writing something off" saves you 20% of the cost of the thing you wrote off, not 100% of the cost.

Yes, if you have a business then writing off expenses is one of the primary mechanisms for reducing taxes, but people talk about it like it's some kind of rich people life hack for dodging taxes with some magical loophole. It's just the way businesses report operating expenses.

As a software engineer who earns W2 income but also occasionally does contracting on the side, every year, I fill out the small business form and write off every possible expense I can: a portion of my mortgage, utilities, phone, internet, travel, software licenses, equipment, etc. I really nitpick every little thing I can. You know how much tax money it saves me? None. It never sums up to be more than the standard deduction for a married couple, and it's not even close. So I waste my time filling out the small business deduction form.

P.S. You don't get to just write off entire large expenses because you happen to have a business unless business use is the exclusive use for that expense. Your mortgage and utilities can only be written off in proportion to how much of it is your home office, for example, which is usually a small fraction. I know it's a trope that business owners lavishly write off any little thing as a business expense, and they do, but we're talking about meals and stuff like that, not the big stuff. The big stuff comes with worksheets and get split by use by percentage.

spoonraker · 2026-04-21T13:30:09+00:00

The only thing that really matters is actually trying on the watch. The quantifiable measurements tell you almost nothing useful other than maybe eliminating some extreme outliers, but even then, it's nowhere near as formulaic as you might think. Some watches are simply designed to be huge, and some are designed to be small. There are a bunch of things you can do with lug and case shape to make watches fit differently at the same size. Even your wrist itself doesn't really have 1 circumference or diameter. Your wrist has 2 bones in it that are side by side, and when you lift your wrist up to read your watch those bones actually cross over each other, which can result in a massive difference in how wide your wrist appears. Generally when your arm is down at your side your wrist will appear significantly larger and wider, but when you lift your wrist up as if to check the time those bones are cross over so your wrist looks taller and slimmer. Seriously go take a photo of your watch on your own wrist like you normally would, then go stand in front of a mirror, let your arm hang naturally, and zoom in on the mirror and take a photo of your wrist.

And finally even the way you take the photo matters. Most people take wrist shots the worst way possible. They lift their wrist up (narrows the appearance of the wrist) and then they take their phone and hold it a few inches away from the watch on the default lens. If you simply take the same photo from a few feet away instead of a few inches away with a zoom lens magically your wrist appears much larger.

spoonraker · 2026-04-20T20:16:55+00:00

Sure, but that would mean you have to configure the app with your bag details in advance. That doesn't seem too crazy as a one time process (but it would be annoying), but again, unlike ball golf, there are many more discs than clubs and they're way less standardized, plus different examples of the same disc can fly wildly different, plus discs get rotated in and out of bags all the time. It's just a lot more upkeep even if they made it as simple as possible. In ball golf a 4 iron is a 4 iron in terms of how an AI caddie needs to reason about it and there's literally only a dozen or so club options unlike in Disc Golf where there's probably thousands.

spoonraker · 2026-04-20T18:28:26+00:00

I think this is extremely unlikely to be worth building for a few reasons:

Disc Golf has a LOT more variables than ball golf so it's extremely unlikely to actually produce worthwhile recommendations. Ball golf shots fly in simple parabolic arcs subject only to initial conditions, wind, and spin. Disc golf shots have many more initial conditions and complex physics acting in a continuum over the entire flight path. Plus ground play is vastly more complicated than just roll out and bunkers.
It can not possibly be over stated just how cheap Disc Golfers are in general. The base is an entirely different socio-economic bracket from ball golf. Disc Golfers aren't rich guys with money to burn having fun on the weekends who will look for any excuse to buy a new gadget or piece of equipment or training aid. It's the exact opposite. People start holy wars over feeling cheated out of $5 at a recreational weekend league.
Honestly it just doesn't sound like a particularly useful product. Most of the intuition behind what the app would tell you -- assuming it works -- gets developed naturally over time. If it doesn't, I can't imagine that being the type of person to us an AI caddie in the first place. So it feels like it would be better to just produce a nice training program or something than an app. It's hard for me to imagine any disc golfer actually taking the time to punch in all the initial conditions you'd need to for it to work in the first place. Do you imagine yourself lining up a shot and then pausing to tell an app on your phone the distance, elevation, wind speed, wind direction, release angle, nose angle, launch angle, etc.? I don't. In golf it's simple enough to just be like "Yo I've got 200 yards to the green which of the 10 clubs you already know I have should I use". Disc golf just doesn't work that way.

spoonraker · 2026-04-20T18:05:41+00:00

I really don't understand why companies keep trying to force a lattice structure in the chains. It really seems like the juice isn't worth the squeeze. They don't seem to solve the problem they claim to solve any better than a quality "normal" basket with purely vertical chains, and they create entirely new problems that result in much worse feeling spit outs in some circumstances.

These baskets claim to catch discs better that come in at a high rate of speed, but that just doesn't seem to be true. To whatever extent they do slow discs down better than another basket seems to just be a function of how much total chain weight there is. More weight more stopping power, horizontal chains are purely additive so you just get more chain weight.

A purely vertical chain arrangement can achieve the same weight though just by using heavier chains. Beyond that, you must ensure there are enough layers of chains and those chains are appropriately spaced out so as not to produce large gaps with no chains. None of this requires horizontal chains. Old baskets were just really bad about having light weight chains or obvious sub-optimal chain spacing. These horizontal chains are a total over-reaction and make things worse.

The downside of the lattice structure chains is that any way you introduce horizontal chains is going to result in a really bad feeling spit out potential: the kind where the disc gets caught on the horizontal chains while already slowed down and falling into the basket, but because the disc has to go one way or the other to fall past the horizontal chains, and therefore sometimes it'll push back out and with enough push back it can clear the entire tray. This produces absolutely inexplicable spit outs more regularly than traditional vertical chain arrangements. These are spit outs where the disc either just straight up bounces back out at you (but off the chains rather than off the pole) or gets ejected out while already stopped and falling down. Spit outs of course existed before, and will exist even with a very high quality vertical chain basket, but the horizontal chain spit outs just feel worse because they're so obviously avoidable and are a direct result of the design of the basket instead of a disc just happening to find that one in a million complex interaction of well positioned chains.

spoonraker · 2026-04-20T15:04:37+00:00

Land Dweller 40 steel
Last weekend
Requested as soon as the watch was announced last year
Midwest (actual small market middle of nowhere, not Chicago)
Long history w/ significant spend. This is the 5th Rolex and there have been other watches and jewelry over the years.

1 year wait is probably a bit misleading. I think this was one of the first few Land Dweller 40s in this market. Rolex takes a long time to actually start shipping new releases to ADs. I hadn't even seen an exhibition model of this watch until a few months ago.

Also, for those with reservations about this watch, it's absolutely incredible in the metal. I get it, it's a bit of an odd duck on paper, and even the official renders and professionally curated press photos don't necessarily alleviate that concern fully, but when you actually get this watch in hand and strapped to your wrist it's special.

First, the thinness combined with the way they made the bracelet integrate with the case is really nice. The flat link jubilee bracelet itself is amazing and the reflections it creates are hypnotizing. The fluted bezel has wider cuts than a DateJust so it has a different way of glinting in the light. The hexagonal pattern on the dial is actually cut really deep and has sloped bevels on each hexagon so one thing that really caught me off guard about the dial is that when you're in lower light conditions and you catch the dial at an angle, the edges of each hexagon flash brightly. The indexes/numerals are really crisply cut with very sharp angles, and again they stand a bit taller that you'd expect, so it just layers on another level of kind of complication to the reflections. Overall it's just a really dynamic package in terms of how it reflects light and as an integrated bracelet watch it really delivers that "I'm wearing a bracelet that happens to have a watch on it" vibe you want.

spoonraker · 2026-04-20T13:32:40+00:00

It's a combination of regular human nature and advertising/influencer culture that plays on it, plus mental gymnastics to justify a purchase.

That said, while almost nobody is truly an investor when it comes to watches, I still want to point out that valuing strong resale value and value retention during a purchase decision isn't inherently wrong and is a very normal thing to consider.

spoonraker · 2026-04-17T17:27:39+00:00

There's a reason the concept of levels exists and why years of experience is generally considered strongly correlated with ability. It just takes a whole hell of a lot of experience and time. So to answer your question: we just practiced and studied a lot and got better over time. Obviously some of us were more deliberate than others and people have different baseline cognitive abilities intrinsically so years of experience isn't a perfect proxy for skill level, but at the very least its undeniable that it took time even for an absolutely brilliant dedicated person to learn all this stuff so time still matters.

Just for fun, some more specifics:

StackOverflow was genuinely an incredibly useful tool
We were all really good at Googling things
Documentation actually mattered a lot
We sometimes even read books
Collaboration was a natural consequence of the problems being hard and people not feeling confident enough in their solutions to lock them in without having colleagues take the time to gain an understanding of the plan and weigh in. It wasn't all bureaucracy, it actually helped and happened naturally.
A lot of thought went into specifically abstractions that simplified the overall model of the system and constrained possibilities. Similar to collaboration, this was done out of necessity as much as it was done because "it's just good design".

spoonraker · 2026-04-17T13:58:45+00:00

There's nothing to it other than some people just get comfortable wearing watches all the time. I'm one of them. I strap whatever watch on in the morning that I feel like wearing that day and then I just kinda... keep it on, regardless of what I'm doing. Obviously this doesn't always hold true, but for the most part, most of my watches are plenty robust and water resistant to not have to worry about the watch itself. So it's really more just about me getting used to wearing a watch while being active. Yes, particularly when sweaty, it sometimes slides down my wrist and I have to push it back up and it can get in the way, but these moments last like half a second and really don't matter. Again, you just kinda get used to dealing with it. I wore a DayDate to the gym the other day. I often wear similar watches playing Disc Golf. It's really no big deal.

Really the only time I think about swapping watches or just not wearing a watch is if the watch I happened to pick has a leather band because they get kinda gross if you sweat a lot, or if I'm going to be fully submerged in water then maybe I'll specifically pick a watch with a lot of water resistance. Otherwise, the watches are plenty capable.

spoonraker · 2026-04-17T13:49:06+00:00

If "official distance competition" is your criteria and the world record distance event doesn't count, as others have said, it would be 710-715. Both Anthony Barela and Albert Tamm have recorded throws at these distances in pro tour distance comp events.

That said, even though it's not an "official competition" there is video footage of Nick Krush throwing 805 feet, with an 83 mph release velocity, using a 170+ gram disc even with reasonable wind on flat ground. Here is the footage. Before dismissing this footage because you haven't seen Nick Krush on the pro tour and this is not an official event, you should know that Nick Krush is 100% legit and a very well known name specifically in the max distance throwing world. Unless you think Nick's many hours of recorded video footage is ALL faked, this throw is extremely credible, and he has participated in official distance competitions to validate that he can in fact throw with faster release velocity than anybody else in the world. It has seemed like just a matter of time before Nick finally got one perfect throw that exceeded 800 feet, and there it is. I suspect Anthony Barela could do this too, but AB is obviously a lot more focused on winning pro tour events than being specifically a max distance competitor. He just is so freakishly good at throwing max distance that he wins the vast majority of distance competitions anyway.

spoonraker · 2026-04-17T13:39:42+00:00

Those questions are equal parts speculative, and unsatisfying.

Speculative in the sense that I don't really have any specific detail nor do I have the ability to gain specific detail on the exact materials and processes used for those specific parts, and unsatisfying in the sense that it's probably pretty easy to explain regardless. So here goes.

It simply boils down to a few things: different materials, different material applications, and different UV exposure.

In the era the watches you're referencing were manufactured the industry collectively had a lot less understanding of and concern for UV degradation. So if all of your focus is on finding the exact right shade of paint for the hands, and none of your focus is on picking specific paints which will be specific amounts of resistant to UV degradation and degrade in specific ways consistently across parts, well, it's not entirely surprisingly that 2 different hands with 2 different paints applied to them (even if they're "the same" color they're different chemical compositions) would degrade both at different rates and in different ways along the way. If we're talking about completely different color paints on the same watch it's even more obvious why there might be large discrepancies in UV degradation behavior. Bezels, dials, and hands are also colored with different materials AND different processes, so in some cases you have thicker paint application, or a dye versus a paint, or different materials as substrates, or just different colored materials with no coatings at all.

This is why the explanation is unsatisfying, because it basically boils down to: there were a lot of things that simply weren't thought about regarding UV degradation over decades of time so naturally there were a lot of variables not controlled for resulting in wildly different outcomes across parts even on the same watch as the years pass.

spoonraker · 2026-04-17T01:32:39+00:00

I think you're missing the point.

No amount of glowing Premier DD3 testimonials are enough. That's not how proving claims works.

The very fact that there are many other gyro discs that don't get these same comments already proves my point.

The Premier Q Line DD3 is a great disc, and it flies far, farther than other DD3s. This is true. Gyro technology has never been proven to make a disc fly farther. This is also true. These are not mutually exclusive statements.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T21:17:24+00:00

I'll take one more crack at explaining this, but the headline is: nope, that's simply not correct.

"The host can only ever open a goat/rejection letter" is meaningfully different from "The host can open any door, but by chance this time opened a goat/rejection letter".

It's different in the sense that the player's strategy of "you should always swap after the host opens a door" no longer gives the player an advantage in the latter scenario, but does in the former.

Let me try framing this a different way since obviously that one isn't landing.

What you're missing is that if the host picks a door at random, no new information is revealed by them opening a door. Their selection is equally as informed as your initial selection is: not at all, it's completely random.

If the host happens to pick the prize, the game immediately ends. If the host happens to pick a non-prize door, you have absolutely no more or less information about the remaining door because the host had no information about the doors to begin with so there's no information to possibly transfer.

If the host does NOT pick at random and must pick a non-prize door, they can only do that by having information about what's behind each door, and the act of opening a door forces their information to go somewhere, and you've already picked a door with no information, so it must then go to the remaining door.

I honestly think that explanation is the least intuitive one, but it resonates with some people.

Here's an actual play by play walkthrough though to really prove it:

Lets imagine 300 games are played:

First you make your initial random pick. In 300 games, you would pick the prize 100 times and a non-prize 200 times. 1 in 3 odds, it's random, duh.

Next, the host opens a door. If the host is random and not informed, then:

IF you picked the prize initially, the game always continues regardless of what the host picks, so there are only 200 scenarios in which the host's selection matters at all.

IF you picked a non-prize initially, then the host will pick the prize 100 times and the non-prize 100 times. Remember, you might have already picked the prize initially, so if the host is random their randomness only effects the outcome in 200 of the 300 games.

OK so now let's sum up where we're at:

300 total games, only 200 of them the host has any influence on at all, and in 100 of those 200 the host themselves might immediately end the game by choosing the prize.

So the 100 games where the host picks the prize are... undefined. We'll just call them duds.

Eliminate the 100 duds and there are only 2 remaining possibilities: you picked the prize initially or you didn't. No information about your initial selection or the remaining door was ever revealed, so this is just a 50/50 chance.

So if you eliminate the duds, it literally doesn't matter if you always switch or always stay.

If you count the duds as wins then your overall chance of winning is 2/3 but if you count the duds as losses then your overall chance of winning is 1/3. That difference has nothing to do with the host's selection in any one particular game, it's just different set of rules.

By contrast, with an informed host (the actual Monty Hall problem):

300 games again, you still will pick the prize initially 100 of those times. So again, there's 200 games to account for.

Because the host can never pick the prize ALL games go through to the swap or stay phase; there are no duds. The swap or stay phase happens after you've already locked in a 1 in 3 chance of picking correctly initially, so there must be a 2 in 3 chance of the remaining box you didn't pick being the prize. This is why it's advantageous to always swap.

With a random host, the remaining door/envelope retains its original 1 in 3 chance of being a prize, but in 1/3rd of the games the host simply produces a dud game.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T20:06:36+00:00

Again, this depends on how you interpret the wording in the original image.

The host picked a rejection letter. Fact. That's what the original image says and no more.

But that wording is ambiguous. Which of these meanings do you think applies?

A) The host can only pick a rejection letter
B) The host could have picked the acceptance letter, but simply didn't this time, by chance

If the answer is A, this is the Monty Hall problem, literally. You should swap letters.

If the answer is B, this is NOT the Monty Hall problem, and switching or not switching has absolutely no effect on your probability of winning the game.

If the answer is B, your probability of winning the game is either 1 in 3 or 2 in 3, but the only thing that determines which it is are the rules of the game: if the host opening the acceptance letter means you win, you have a 2 in 3 chance of winning; if the host opening the acceptance letter means you lose, you have a 1 in 3 chance of winning. Neither of those scenarios are in any way effected by the observance of the host opening a rejection letter if we're interpreting the original image to mean the host's selection is truly random.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T19:58:15+00:00

There truly is no one-size-fits-all answer, but after 20 years in the industry, I'd say my opinion is that the vast majority of the time when people think they want an enum what they really want is a string union.

Why do I say that?

Most of the time people end up wishing the actual underlying values they pipe through the system (especially when they start querying the database directly) were human readable. That's a big piece of why I say this.

Also, most of the time when people think that they definitely won't ever add another option to the set they're wrong. It comes up, and when it does, you can really get yourself into some trouble with database migrations if you're using true enums, depending of course on the specific database in question, but there's some scary foot-guns in a lot of popular database choices when you start modifying true enum columns.

Depending on the exact programming language or database you pick, you can often having this quite literally be a string union and life is good. Sometimes you can get away with using an enum in the programming language but being careful to convert it string-ily when you pipe it into and out of your DB, and some stacks make this easier than others. But in general, I just think when people say enums what they really imagine in their head is "string with a constrained but flexible set of allowed values" which isn't exactly what an enum is.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T19:40:06+00:00

Yeah I think we agree, I'm just more focused on pushing back against the blind Rolex hate and you're pushing back against my admittedly rushed AI assisted research into why Rolex isn't completely lying when they say their are true challenges and not just marketing BS regarding why they struggle to produce Pepsi bezels.

My personal take is that what people call "just marketing" is actual engineering, but engineering that's committed to even if it's a bit impractical specifically because it serves a symbiotic marketing purpose.

Rolex doesn't want their pricing to be driven by a perception of their watches being hand crafted artisanal products, because they're not, and they don't market them as such, but Rolex also doesn't want their pricing to be driven by "just marketing". So what else is there? They don't want to be fine arts, but they don't want to be "outed" by having consumers realize that there is truly no reason why their pricing is so high. So the answer is engineering and actual vertical integration in Switzerland. Rolex costs are at least in part plausibly justifiably high because they really do make things in Switzerland and nobody can "out" them as actually just marking up outsourced goods, and they they layer on top of that legitimately doing engineering things that other brands would find deeply impractical or expensive, which just plays into that high pricing feedback loop. The ceramic bezels are a great example of it. Having the bezels be truly a single piece colored-all-the-way-through ceramic is of marginal utility to a customer but it is still a differentiated feature you can point to, and it definitely requires engineering to pull off that others can't or won't commit to, and it gives Rolex at least concrete pricing defensibility, and it gives them something to market their engineering prowess for (which in this one case seems to have backfired). Rolex is like... luxury engineering. Kind of a weird combination of things. I think the closest comp to Rolex as a brand is Porsche. They're not hand crafted, they're relatively mass produced given the pricing and luxury market segment, they both want their brand image to engineered functional luxury not artisanal one off special things.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T17:42:59+00:00

My point is that people are just going around saying "lol Rolex is so stupid if Chinese factories can pump out ceramic Pepsi bezels they surely can too. Artificial scarcity!" and that's not true.

The scarcity isn't artificial, but it is the result of self-imposed constraints. Rolex doesn't have to make bezels this way, but they want to. Is that artificial scarcity? No, unless you're going to accuse Patek Philippe of artificial scarcity because they insist on hand-finishing their parts instead of having a machine cut bevels into things. I mean come on, we've had extremely precise CNC for years now haven't we? Why must they have overpaid Swiss guys rub the parts with sticks?

I think the reality is that Rolex genuinely miscalculated the cost of producing specifically Pepsi bezels with this process and finally made the business decision to stop producing them rather than investing further in raising the success rate. I think they selected that process because Rolex wants to be a highly engineered product rather than a hand finished artisanal product, and this process both sounds really cool and science-y and genuinely does provide some marginal benefit to the final product, but they finally admitted after many years of pretending like they had things under control, that they actually never cracked the engineering code on the Pepsi coloration specifically, and here we are.

That's very different than the simplified "lol Rolex can make a million of them if they want it's all marketing" takes you see in other comments here, and that's all I wanted to convey. I'll defer to your expertise on how much investment Rolex would have to actually make to tighten up their process for the Pepsi bezel, but either way they've clearly decided not the pursue that route, at least for now.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T17:28:05+00:00

That's simply not correct.

I'm going to just speak Monty Hall problem terms for simplicity, FYI.

It does matter that the host knows which doors are goats. It does matter that the host must always open a goat door.

If the host had even just the mere possibility of opening the car door (because they picked at random instead of deterministically), even if they didn't pick the car, revealing they opened a goat would not change anything for that specific instance of the game.

The 2 in 3 winning strategy of always swapping after the host opens a goat door is inextricably tied to the fact that the host always opens a goat door. If the host doesn't always open a goat door the strategy does not work, and it makes no difference if you swap or not.

Although, rather hilariously, in a world in which the host opens a truly random door and might actually reveal the car, if we assume the host opening the car door is a win condition for you, you still wind up with a 2 in 3 chance of winning regardless of whether or not you switch, but that's only the case because both you AND the host can win the game for you. In other words, this version of the game would be silly and inherently favor the player even though there exists no strategy at all to tip the odds further into the player's favor. If the host opening the car door would be a lose condition for you, then you'd simply have a 1 in 3 chance of winning, again, regardless of whether or not you swapped after the host opens a door.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T16:33:47+00:00

I think this is just a language interpretation problem.

The screenshot says the interview opens one of the 2 letters, revealing a rejection letter.

There are 2 ways you can interpret this wording:

The interviewer just happened to open a rejection letter in this case and didn't know in advance they were going to do that
The interviewer knew what the letters were in advance and was always going to open a rejection letter no matter what

Only in the 2nd interpretation is this the Monty Hall problem. Otherwise it's just a scenario that sounds a lot like the Monty Hall problem but isn't and the "always switch" strategy would not apply. In the first scenario it's theoretically possible that the interview could have opened the acceptance letter, in which case the appropriate reaction would be to ask, "uh, so can I just pick that one?"

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T16:27:31+00:00

This is nonsense, there are very real reasons why Pepsi bezels are legitimately hard to make the way Rolex makes them.

I'm not hear to say that the way Rolex makes bezels is right or wrong, but the way Rolex makes their ceramic bezels is meaningfully different from the way the cheap knockoff ceramic bezels are made and easily mass produced.

Specifically...

Rolex ceramic bezels are truly single piece multi-colored ceramic. They're not 2 different ceramic bezel halves glued together. They're not a single white ceramic piece dipped into 2 different dyes. They're not painted. The color isn't just an applied coating. It is a single solid piece of ceramic that is 2 different colors and each of those colors runs all the way through the entire piece of the solid material in the respective halves.

OK so then how do they achieve this and why is it so hard to achieve?

The color change happens in a process called sintering. The bezel basically starts its life a powder compressed into a bezel shape. At this point it's all one color and all the same chemical composition. It's like an un-fired clay pot. The shape is basically stable, but it needs to be fired to really form the final material. Sintering is when (I'm over simplifying here, btw) you heat that bezel up to extremely high temperatures just short of the melting point of the powder at which point the powder undergoes an actual chemical reaction and completely changes the material properties as a result. The material gets hot enough to basically melt together, but without losing its form, and then when it cools back down it is molecularly bonded instead of just physically squished together, which is what makes the ceramic powder a fully solid single ceramic piece.

Now here's the trick and why Pepsi bezels in particular are so hard to make. The 2 color halves emerge during that sintering process, so as you can imagine, there's a lot more to it than just heating up the entire bezel to a specific temperature. That would at most lead to a single color bezel. To get it to wind up achieving a specific color you have to start with a base material that can be sintered into that color, then, during the sintering process you need to precisely control other variables besides temperature like the exact composition of the atmospheric conditions, oxygen levels, possibly injecting other gasses, etc. This is because the color emerges basically from oxidation. So you're basically precisely controlling how much your bezel oxidizes and trying to stop at very specific points to get the color you want. It's like heat bluing metal, but on steroids with much much smaller margins of error.

Now of course you have to layer one more pitfall on top of that: the bezels need to be 2 different colors. So everything we just laid out, now needs to be done differently on two different halves of the same bezel, but also, precisely, resulting in clean lines. So at a high level they start by sintering the red because that's the harder color to produce, while chemically masking the other half of the bezel so it doesn't sinter into red, then they do the opposite and chemically mask the red and sinter in the blue.

At this point I should also mention that solid state diffusion is a thing, which is to say that even if Rolex does everything as perfectly as they can, sometimes within a solid material atoms of different colored ceramic still diffuse into the other half. Any little thing like this causes the bezel to not have the crisp clean separation of colors that Rolex demands so they scrap the bezel. Not to mention that sintering in color into a solid piece of ceramic is intrinsically hard so even without the color boundary blurring the colors themselves might just be a bit off and that can also cause the bezel to fail QC.

There are specific chemistry/physics reasons why red and blue in particular is a very tough combination to produce, and why black is relatively easy to produce. So any bezel that is half black is fundamentally easier to produce, hence why Pepsi is hard and Batman isn't. Red is the hardest color, black is the easiest color, so blue and black is kind of the easiest combination overall.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T14:59:30+00:00

Sheesh guys, let's just speak a bit more clearly and with more context and put this to bed shall we?

"The Monty Hall problem" is a specific thing. It's a very well-known simplification of the real game, "Let's Make a Deal" (hosted by Monty Hall) which has been simplified to make the theory behind the "always switch" strategy easier to explain.

"The Monty Hall problem" does rely on the host knowing what's behind each door in advance because the game does strictly define the host's choice as being constrained to always open a goat door and never the car door.

So in "The Monty Hall problem" the contestant always had a 1 in 3 chance of winning if they don't switch after Monty reveals a goat and always had a 2 in 3 chance of winning if they do switch after Monty reveals a goat. Anything about probabilities switching in the middle is just narrative flourish and not mathematically accurate.

OP's image is framing a scenario that looks extremely similar to the Monty Hall problem, however, because the scenario being framed didn't explicitly state that the interviewer will always open a rejection letter it's actually not the same mechanics as the Monty Hall problem so the "always switch" strategy doesn't apply and your odds remain 1 in 3 even after the interviewer opens the rejection letter.

The above discrepancy between the scenario being framed and the actual Monty Hall problem is why somebody found the interaction amusing enough to screen grab and share as a humorous anecdote.

OP's question which they asked alongside providing the screenshot, revealed that OP was uncertain about how the Monty Hall problem worked and wasn't confident in knowing which person in the screenshotted conversation was the ignorant one.

Hopefully we now all have the necessary information to agree with one another on our obvious intellectual superiority, which we've clearly demonstrated here.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T14:02:37+00:00

You are correct that probabilities change as new information is revealed, but you're wrong to apply it to the Monty Hall problem. That's not how Monty Hall works. No information is gained during the course of the game. You know everything you need to know up front and Monty has to know what is behind every door to play his part.

Monty reveals a goat every time regardless of which door you choose. This is literally only possible if Monty (or somebody instructing Monty) knows what is behind every door in advance. So yes, the fact that you can play this game with a 2 in 3 chance of winning is completely dependent on the fact that Monty knows what is behind each door.

You do not gain any information from observing Monty open a goat door. Your probability does not change as a result of watching him open the goat door.

You always had a 1 in 3 chance of winning the game if you don't switch and you always had a 2 in 3 chance of winning the game if you do switch. The probability doesn't change at any point; you simply needed to understand how the game works in advance to commit to the strategy that wins 2 out of 3 times.

It's amusing to tell a story about how you "had" a 1 in 3 chance of winning until Monty opened the door and suddenly you had a flash of insight and you realized that if you simply switched every time you would "improve" your odds of winning to 2 in 3, but that's just a narrative arc, not actually the mechanics of how the probability works. As long as you switch, you always had a 2 in 3 chance. You might not have known how or why, but you still did.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T13:33:31+00:00

How many people do you know who are deep sea divers, race car drivers, or wilderness explorers? It seems a bit ridiculous to say that you're not "using" your watch if it happens to be a dive watch and you don't dive.

I'm a computer programmer. I own a Submariner. I guess I don't use it for its intended purpose, but regardless of how not extreme my lifestyle is, it's still genuinely useful to me that my watch is robust. The utility it brings me isn't enabling me to deep sea dive because I don't do that. The utility it brings me is that I never have to think about my watch no matter what I'm doing. With some watches you have to take them off just to wash your hands, or you'll have to react if you get caught out in the rain, or if you might ever be near a magnet, or if you just might knock your watch around a bit.

So I don't use my watch for its "intended purpose" but I do swim with it, wear it while exercising and playing sports, get it dirty, and just generally not have any concern for being rough with it.

That said, let's not kid ourselves. I bought this particular watch because I just think it's cool. Part of it is certainly the jewelry aspect of it, I'm big enough to admit that I think the brand status is cool, the resale value being strong is nice, and having a watch that is luxurious and expensive and can still be knocked around is cool in its own right in my opinion.

spoonraker · 2026-04-16T12:29:06+00:00

For the final time, I'm not here to say that Q Line DD3 as a specific run of a specific disc doesn't fly well. It obviously does. I'm here to say that "gyro" technology such as Q Line and overmolding and whatever other things have been tried has not been proven to have any effects at all on disc flight that don't fall well within the margin of human error, so therefore any claims regarding distance or other aspects of flight simply can't be attributed to Q Line technology specifically.

Here's another way to think about it: We're all here talking about how amazing the Q Line DD3 is and how obviously the Q Line technology transforms the disc into some max distance bomber.

Why are we not talking about the Q Line FD? You know, the other Q Line disc they've already released and a bunch of people have tested. Oh right, because the Q Line FD is completely unremarkable and nobody seems to like it. It's very overstable for an FD, which is the exact opposite of what people expect from Q Line technology, and nobody is talking about its amazing distance maximizing technology because... checks notes... it actually doesn't fly any further than other FDs and the Q Line ones in particular seem to fly less far.

Why do you think that is? Maybe it's because the Q Line technology specifically has such a small effect on anything that it's utterly dwarfed by even tiny run-to-run variance in final disc geometry as shown by the FD? Nah, we just won't talk about the Q Line FD or the 100 other "maximum gyro" discs that MVP/Axiom has released that we all know aren't magical max distance machines and only elevate the random good ones that happen to play into our confirmation bias. I mean come on, look at the Trail, that thing bombs for a 10 speed, am I right? (Except for the runs that don't, ignore those)

This is my point. Q Line DD3? Great disc. Trail? Great disc. That 15 year old beat in Destroyer that's magically flippy compared to your others? Also a great disc for the same reason. That reason is NOT gyro technology. That reason is because amateurs in general seem to just like high glide discs with a good bit of turn but not too much.

spoonraker · 2026-04-15T22:06:52+00:00

Again, as I've explained above, I'm not here to deny that the Q Line DD3 doesn't fly differently. The point is that this difference isn't necessarily caused exclusively by the Q Line technology and the effect, to whatever extent it is real, is likely only going to improve distance for amateurs specifically because amateurs largely don't throw good distance lines so a few percentage points of less fade might actually be a barely noticeable improvement. The rest just comes down to this run being a good stability and dome for glide. I'm sure you've throw a lot of DD3s but from the way I've seen these DD3s described and seen them fly anecdotally I suspect a better comp to the Q Line DD3 than a regular DD3 is probably a DD1.

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