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Is it envy, or disgust? If someone tells me they live in a castle, my initial instinct isn't "wow I wish in a castle too", but "wow what a wasteful needless thing to brag about".

Be cautious, the word "envy" is typically thrown around by folks that want to justify "greed". OC, there are reasonable scales between the two but equating success to having nicer material things is really a subjective value judgement.

In all honesty the salient points in the OP about judging instead of thinking, is a commonly attributed aphorism to Carl Jung yet there is no reference to it. The point about tardiness and drawbacks this apparently has on socialising and career progression comes across as utilitarian to the point of sounding sociopathic.

Last time the lowest-end Rolex was $2k was probably 30 years ago. :-)

I'm going to make the assertion that personal clocks were basically never with that much. They were as functionally useful as a gold bracelet for the best majority of owners.

> In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.

You're saying that wealthy people in France and Spain don't show it, and if they do they are commonly robbed?

> In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you

Or maybe not. You mileage may vary.

This would depend a lot on how do you earned it.

Technically a Rolex, however expensive, will always be much worse as a watch than a 20$ Casio. But recently there's another aspect to this: there are now watches that are technically (mechanically) identical to rolexes. Same design, same mechanics, virtually impossible to tell the difference when you tear it apart. Rolex has always been more about marketing (artificial scarcity, waiting list etc) than mechanics, but now it's pretty much exclusively about marketing, since you can get the same engineering orders of magnitude cheaper. It's like DeBeers' diamonds.

What’s an example of a watch that’s mechanically identical to a Rolex?

It's pretty common now to find "Super Fakes" of designer brands, that are very difficult to tell apart from the real thing. They'll be expensive but not as expensive as the real thing.

A Seiko SKX (or a spiritual successor) with a regulated NH35 will fall into the same “100m water resistance, accurate to within 10 seconds per day” category as a Rolex for about a 10th of the price.

>...accurate to within 10 seconds per day

That is hilarious to me. A quick search is showing one can expect a POS Casio to be +/- 15 seconds per month.

But then you don't get as many excuses to display your watch from needing to adjust the time

Tudor, but it is a different division of Rolex

Correct, a G-shock would get the job done better.

I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

And regardless of which model, generally no more expensive than a woman's engagement or wedding ring, and actually usually cheaper.

Plus it does something other than look pretty - tells time & date!

Watches, pens, pocket knives, flashlights, seem to be a cluster of male jewelry. Fidget spinners too, at one time.

Prestige cars, mega yachts, private jets, and corporations that make rockets and satellites are also male jewellery.

But the article: it's repetitive and slightly rambling and reads like it was written by some variant of GPT.

The point is fair, but it's also well known to class watchers. In the UK nouveau means a gigantic new build mansion full of chrome and glass, a private gym, and plastic and dental surgery. Old means a small country estate, a Georgian pied-à-terre somewhere near the City, tweedy clothing, and perhaps some pedigree dogs. And horses.

Old money tends to underdress - sometimes sloppily - and on casual acquaintance is indistinguishable from the merely middle class.

It's not until you get an invite to the manor house that you discover the ridiculously impractical and expensive Aga stove, the collection of wildly expensive antiques whose prices are never mentioned [1], the relaxed air of charming quizzical bafflement. (Very few of these people are unusually bright or talented. But socially polished - yes.)

The visuals are not the point. Anyone can tweed, but not everyone can tweed like they've been doing it their entire lives and really mean it.

[1] A 17th century silver spoon for £5000? How fascinating!

> Prestige cars, mega yachts, private jets, and corporations that make rockets and satellites are also male jewellery.

If we're going down this line, why stop here? You forgot the 'trophy wife' which is definitely more prevalent than the dig at Musk/Bezos.

> I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

Now we have iDweebs, those Apple ear things.

> I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

Cufflinks are a big deal, in certain circles.

Where can one get those similar Rolex’s? For science

The search term you want is just "Replica." RWI, RWG, RepTime on Reddit, and other private forums will analyze the quality and details of these clones in ridiculous detail. They also have reviews of each reseller and each factory.

I don't even own any fake watches at this point and I've found these forums highly addictive/interesting - honestly, the average skill/knowledge level is quite high compared to most "watch enthusiast" forums.

Thanks for the hints. About the replicas: Yes but usually you’ll find a few challenges with those. First, pure replicas are illegal, so what you can find legally are called hommages with another logo. That doesn’t make them worst by itself, but here are the drawbacks:

First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years? I own a watch that’s more than 50 years and wear it regularly because it is still maintained by the company who made it.

Second the value holding. Sure you can sink your money in any gear. The special value of great mechanical watches is that they maintain their used value well on the second hand market for decades. An hommage will have little reputation of its own to maintain.

Of course this is all subject to special cases, but, etc because the watch world is very complex. For example many brands copy each other, some replica brand make great quality, and some great brands barely hold their value (which is a good thing for passionate collectors).

No doubt there is a great skilled and passionate community around reproduction, like in music or art. To build a replica you need way more skill than the average watch enthusiast. They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.

>First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years

Extremely high, given that they tend to run on clones of incredibly popular movements like the ETA2824.

> They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.

Sure, that's why you have to find the ones that do. The forums linked make this a trivial task.

Have a look at this guy's AliExpress watch reviews: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustOneMoreWatch/videos You should be able to get a reasonable Rolex hommage well under $500.

(Not a Rolex immitation, but I'm wearing a JDM Casio Oceanus S100 which is all the watch that anyone would ever need.)

Invicta has made some watches that are pretty similar for a long time. They aren't "high quality" replicas or counterfeits, but if you just like the look of a Submariner they seem to have similar watches for well under $100.

I have a more obscure watch, but one that those that care recognize. It has signaled me as part of the 'correct' crowd more than once and definitely done it's purpose.

What purpose is this? What happens when your watch signals that you belong to the correct crowd?

People with money and power respect you more and are more likely to drop their guard in some ways. This applies to in-group signaling generally. In this case the in-group is the rich and powerful.

Somewhere I read that a Rolex has a very practical purpose - a real one is a commodity that can fairly easily be turned into cash or a bribe in an emergency, but as a watch, it's not susceptible to being seized by authorities in many circumstances where cash or gold might be.

I don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story.

Applies to jewelry in general, however Rolex tends to hold its value better than most jewelry (vs price paid)

Along this vein, I've heard somewhere that pimps wear lots of jewelry because they can pawn it for bail money. Apparently cash can be seized on arrest, but jewelry is classified as some sort of personal property and thus won't be taken.

That is the reason women used to own jewelry and you were supposed to give them expensive wedding rings. They couldn’t have bank accounts!

I bought a fake "Rolex" in Thailand, for $10.

It actually didn't work very well. I guess there's a hierarchy even among the fake.

I bought a $400 fake rolex. Aside from the glass not being sapphire you cannot tell the difference visually

From whereabouts?

I got some fakes from a big warehouse in Shanghai. They had all levels of prices/quality. Our corporate guide found the shop for us. They had a whole wall of fake watches of different brands. My ex-wife got purses. I much preferred my real watches, but the fakes were for fancy dinners downtown in the big city in case I got mugged.

Look for fake watch forums and their trusted vendor list. That’s how I found the seller I bought from.

Took 4 weeks to arrive direct from China

Is the escapement running at the same rate? A big part of the "rolex" appearance that is very hard to copy is the 8 ticks per second that the second hand goes through. I have seen very high quality Rolex copies before that don't do that, and are instantly recognizable as a fake to people who know a little bit about watches.

Is the escapement running at the same rate?

Absolutely. Modern fake Rolexes can only be told apart from a real one by an expert examining it with a loupe. And 8 tick pr second isn't that hard to replicate. Several ETA and Sellita calibers do it as well.

Back in the 1990s my dad's oldest brother went to the outskirts of NYC and was really impressed with the fake "Rolex" he bought. My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.

Two weeks later the watch stopped running.

Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.

>Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.

I don't get what this has too do with the fake rolex.

The outskirts of NYC were pretty rough back in the day. I don't think the guy got shot because he was involved in a fake Rolex gang though...

Run on sentence makes you wonder.

7/10 meme

> My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.

Gomorrah opens with a description of Italian clothing manufacturing. As described there, the difference between a fake shirt and a real shirt is that they were made to the same specifications under one and the same contract, by different factories, and the real one got delivered faster than the fake one did. Only the first guy to deliver gets paid.

It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/

That's Italy!

> It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/

They also made a movie of it [0], I lived in Italy during the financial crisis and it had become commonplace to see large migrating Chinese coming from the North (likely illegal migrants in Milan's clothing factories) come to the central part of Italy looking for work on farms and restaurants. It was hard times as this was taking place as the large migration from N. Africa was happening and they were living in the parks and making the locals irate.

It all came to light when our resident cheese maker, who used to work in the fashion Industry, had to tell them in broken Mandarin that we were fully staffed and couldn't accommodate them, but to try elsewhere further South--a typical way to brush-off a problem as is the running theme with Gomorrah.

I soon realized how dirty the Fashion Industry was as the Zara scandal was ettin into full swing and the workers were taking to writing messages about not being paid for the garments they made [1] as the factories were in sweatshops in Xinjiang or Brazil.

I wouldn't all it interesting so much as it is sobering and eye opening to the perils of offshore manufacturing practices and Italy's fashion Industry was just one of many of these horrors; Foxxcon's electronic manufacturing reliant on African rare earth mine exploitation make all of this pale in comparison.

> That's Italy!

It's anywhere you want to see where manufacturing costs get pushed to be the smallest possible line-item/expense in a value chain; the US is notorious for using forced labour in prisons for these kind of things, too. It's sad because it is a common practice in the worst labour camps/prisons in Russia (Siberia). It's where Britney Griner was going to serve her sentence, which incidentally is also where the Nadya of Pussy Riot spent several years in and was very candid about what was awaiting for her there.

0: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929425/

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNvPSD8H1k