Have you heard about Bluetooth it's legal now

yeah it's real fucking convenient to use a bluetooth headphone and have it die on me hour 8 of hiking up a mountain during my job. You know what's 1 less device I have to charge and has never died on me during a hike due to lack of charge? A headphone I just plug directly into my device.

Maybe it's a boomer take but I want the option of headphones that plug in

There's no reason to remove a headphone jack

One of the most infuriating excuses I ever heard was from Fairphone, who decided not to add a headphone jack to their newest model, despite having been told by their userbase to add it back in.

If you don't know, Fairphone is a company that is centered around repairability. They also use recycled materials whenever possible, and less unethical virgin materials when they can't use recycled. Their phones are modular, so if there's a problem, you can just replace the part yourself instead of throwing out the whole phone. They are also designed to be moisture resistant and generally robust - I bought mine in 2020 and the only parts I've had to buy so far were new batteries.

Six years ago, my model (Fairphone 3) was already old and decidedly mid-range; now, it's definitely low-range and has some problems that can't be fixed by replacing parts. So out of curiosity, I decided to poke at the newest model (6) to see if a) I could afford it (I can't), and b) they had added the headphone jack back in after removing it from the 5 and dealing with the backlash (they hadn't).

My friends, when I tell you what a crock of shit their excuse was.

What it boiled down to was 'we're trying to be competitive with other smartphone brands and because the jack makes the phone a little thicker, we had to leave it out.'

Now, here's the thing. Their phones do have to be a little bigger than average, because they're modular; they use screws rather than glue and have be easy to remove, because otherwise our big meaty human fingers would damage the replacement parts. Adding a jack (that would also need to be modular) would, indeed, make the phone a few millimeters bigger.

But it doesn't fucking matter, because regardless of the phone's size, it's not going to be competitive with other smartphone brands! It's a Fairphone, for fuck's sake! The people buying iphones aren't doing so because of the quality of the thing, they're doing it either because apple products are a status symbol or because it's too much mental energy to switch to a different OS. The people buying more mid-range brands, like huawei, are mostly doing so because those phones are comparatively cheaper than apple or samsung... or fairphone. The people buying fairphones are doing so because they care about repairability, the environment, and worker health and safety. They (we) are willing to buy a mediocre phone at a premium pricepoint (600 euros for the newest model) because that's what those values are worth to us.

And it just grinds my fucking gears so much that this company -- a company built on the right to repair and fighting against planned obsolescence -- would be so far up their own ass chasing a pipe dream that they would listen to the only people buying their products complaining and say 'yeah, we hear you... but we're trying to appeal to a different market so fuck you guys.' And then decide to build phones that require additional consumption in order to use them fully.

This turned into a rant about fairphone, but I think my point is that the whole 'no more headphone jacks' thing is so unbelievable insidious that it's a genuine propaganda problem. Even companies that should be standing their ground against more technological waste have bought into the idea that it's favorable or, at the very least, no big deal.

I got told by a -medical geneticist- that it was extremely unlikely for someone to have both celiac and EDS because both were so uncommon so therefore I probably didn't have both, despite clear physical evidence to the contrary. I pointed out that there's enough people out there that even with low incidence of both, even assuming there was no link, statistically there were going to be people with both just by basic probability and that 'rare' didn't mean 'doesn't happen. I also pointed out I had 2 younger half-sibs with celiac and a cousin with celiac, T1D, and EDS-h, so odds are that no it wasn't as unlikely as she thought especially given that kind of family history.....She did not in fact care for my attitude. I didn't care for her lack of understanding of her own job, so the feeling was mutual.

Lol I definitely have both.

I think many medical professionals are very narrow-focused on their specialty, forget the rest of the body exists, and don't think of it all as an entire system.

I recall reading the book A Slow Death: 83 Days of Radiation Sickness. It's about a nuclear worker who received a lethal dose of radiation due to a prompt-critical accident while making nuclear fuel. As the title implies, he died over the course of 83 days.

What struck me about the book was, it's pretty clear his DNA was just shredded and nothing was really replacing itself effectively. His organs and systems failed at a rate consistent with their typical cellular lives. At each step of this, they brought in specialists to manage the problem: he wasn't producing erethrocytes, they brought in hematologists. His stomach lining was breaking down, they brought in gastroenterologists, &c. Each one had this faith that if they kept him going past this crisis, his body's natural healing would take over and he would get better. But looking at his body as a whole, it was obvious from very early that was Just Not Happening. Each specialist was looking at it as "Oh no, my one part is failing, I need to get him through this and the rest of his otherwise healthy body can pull him along!" except the whole damned body was going because that's what a lethal neutron flux does. And somewhere around day 30 or so they should have said "I'm sorry, this is not going to work, we are switching to palliative care" and he could have died a week or two later, but that's not how specialists think.

The body doesn't know we've divided it up into organs and systems and specific types of cells. It's just a body and each part affects everything else.