Exactly! It’s choosing not to do so which makes some companies special!

Not a guitar player, but I’ve done my fair share of climbing, which is quite punishing to the skin on your fingertips.

My immediate answer is a clear no. The skin on your fingertips adapts very quickly, and hardens within a week or two of being worn down regularly. If anything, you want to make sure that you keep your skin well cleaned (helps it heal faster). Some people have good experience using moisturiser, and say that helps their skin recover more quickly. I’ve also known people who will carefully sand down the skin on their fingertips if it starts getting too hard, or if they haven’t climbed for a while and it starts peeling (usually starts happening after 1-2 weeks of low/no exposure).

Regardless, the rawness of the fingertips is a quickly passing issue for people who have not worn down their fingertips sufficiently in recent time.

You can check out some of these skin products which are designed for climbers. Some are meant to improve skin healing time, and some are supposed to help harden your skin. If you want to use anything, I suggest something like that instead of glue.

I see where you’re coming from, but would like to add some nuance (not everywhere is like the US).

As a general rule, I think penalising malicious fraud (i.e. fraud not committed out of dire necessity, but in order to scrape an extra buck) is worth it on a societal level, even if the economic benefits aren’t a net positive. It’s about sending the message that we live in a society where people need to treat each other fairly, and where we can trust the system to protect us. Even if society as a whole loses money going after some of this fraud, it can mean an enormous amount to the individuals that have been exposed to fraud to know that society has their back.

On the second level, there’s welfare fraud. First of all, we definitely have a more generous welfare system where I’m from than what’s found in the US, and I think that’s a good thing. We also have some issues with people that are capable of working, or who do work under the table, who still claim benefits they aren’t qualified for. The major issue I see with it is this: By gaming the system, these people in the long term threaten to make the system unsustainable, thus stealing resources and putting pressure on the people the system is actually designed to help.

In a way I see actual welfare fraud (i.e. people with more than enough resources gaming the system to pull government money they don’t need) as worse, because they’re violating the trust of a system society has put in place to help the most exposed among us. This kind of fraud indirectly impacts the least resourceful (possibly a poor translation) people in our society.

In either case, I think the social element of fighting fraud is worth it, even if it is a net negative economically. Fraud in general is a severe violation of the social contract we live under, and “letting it slide” contributes to eroding peoples trust in both each other, and the social system as a whole. It’s worth spending some money to prevent that.

Completely unrelated to the meme: Whenever I see this picture I just can’t help thinking about how it must have felt to be literally Elvis in that moment. It’s honestly an awesome photo in the way you can tell that this guy feels like the king of the world right there.