RobK wrote
So, it did nothing for me, but I won't call someone an idiot or a fool because they own one and believe it's working. I say that even if it is just messing with your head, but it makes you feel better, then good for you and it's worth every cent.
For those who want one on the cheap, you can always cut the hologram from an old credit card and use a rubber band to strap it to your wrist.
This. Look. I'll flat out say I'm bewildered why people would spend the money when there's no plausible mechanism for its operation that is in any way congruent with anything actually known about the universe. At first I thought they cost R20 or something and I thought, whatever. When I found out how much they were my jaw dropped. Too much for an experiment, in my opinion, when there's no reason on earth why it
should work. Leave it up to a skeptical organisation to evaluate (the work has been done in a small double-blind experiment. Both Power balance and a fake boost performance on a balance test over the results from a pre-test. They both work, because they're both placebo.)
But I applaud you for evaluating it fairly objectively.
That last sentence of yours is what struck me about it immediately. It's R2 worth of materials. There is no mechanism. It
can't do anything unless everything that has ever been discovered about physics is fundamentally wrong.
In terms of it doing no harm - this is a pervasive argument. I don't buy it. If someone swindles an old lady out of half of her life savings, but she never finds out that the nice young man, so desperate, was conning her, she feels good to have sacrificed so much to give someone a future.
But it remains wrong whether she finds out or not. This company has conned people to the value of $35 million dollars a year. That's a lot of money spent on lies and false promises. Money that could have been spent on something else. Even something else that's self destructive, like cigarettes, is better because cigarettes actually do what you think they do.
Also, eventually everyone will work out it was a con. Once that happens, how will they feel - in 5 years - when a newspaper article says, "Are you one of the ones who was conned by power-balance?"
This will happen because, people will give up wearing these things precisely because they don't work. Eventually people will have stopped wearing them without even noticing. Then someone asks them: "Were you conned?" and you might easily feel bad about it, as well as being out R800 or whatever.
