Huh, interesting. I've lived in the bay area for 22 years (first 6 of them in various places from SJ up the peninsula, remainder in SF), and I've never experienced damage to anything due to a power surge.
Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.
Probably. I'm from the US, and I know a few Dutch people, and I find their approach to direct negative feedback off-putting to the point of feeling rude, even when knowing what to expect from them. (I'm sure they find my communication style long-winded, frustrating, and a waste of their time.)
It's a cultural thing, to be sure, and what you grew up with and are used to tends to dominate how you feel about things.
I'd love to say that I value directness, but I frankly just kinda don't, for the most part. I don't want people to overly obfuscate what they are saying or beat around the bush, but... I have feelings. Often my feelings aren't rational. Often I have feelings about things when I should be more detached. But that's just how I am.
I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
I'm not a dispassionate, disinterested observer. I do have some attachment to the code I write. I know -- and admire -- people who don't, but I'm just not one of them. I like it when someone is polite when they point out my mistakes.
> I don't want someone to come up to me and say, "Your code is wrong; you should have done ABC". I want them to say "Hey, I ran into a problem with your code. I think here on line 123 you meant to do ABC but you did XYZ by accident. What do you think?"
It's also a sign of good faith and tentative analysis since while that example sounds cut and dry sometimes context/details can be overlooked even those familiar with something.
Even in the article while the headline and main text suggest they'd be happy with bluntness to the point of rudeness the actual full examples at the end show the language used is merely succinct while still being helpful, with the second example also substituting the more direct 'you' for the diffused 'we'.
It's weird, because I absolutely agree in principle, but 90% of my headphone use is wireless now.
And I hate it: latency, glitches, randomly just deciding not to connect anymore, deciding to connect in the lower-quality headset mode when I want to listen to music, and refusing to switch to the high-quality mode, battery running out at inconvenient times, the cat knocking them off my nightstand and under the bed where I cant reach them. So many reasons to be annoyed by them!
But I hardly ever take out my wired headphones anymore, and I'm not sure why. Back when I got my first phone without a 3.5mm jack, I just kept a little USB-C adapter in the little pouch/case that held my wired IEMs, and it was fine. But at some point I bought a new phone, and there was a deal on cheap (or free?) wireless earbuds with it, and I really just stopped using wired headphones for the most part since then, even though the wireless ones really annoy me for so many reasons.
Similar story here, I love wired headphones but have to admit that, after being gifted my first set of AirPods, my actual use of any sort of personal speaker device went up like 20x or more. It’s exactly that factor of being able to get up and walk around without a thought that does it. That’s the reason I’ll often not put wired headphones on in the first place, but no such concern with wireless.
(I actually don’t like 3.5mm jacks as much as some people do, though, as my experience has been the ports get janky over time if they’re under any strain at all, which they will be on a mobile device and which is always a back-of-my-mind source of stress when using them, but quarter-inch jacks are awesome)
Anything from Etymotic never failed me. The current ER3 SE has been going for 7 years, and the cable is replaceable (when/if it fails — they're still on the original cable).
All Etys have a peculiar love/hate neutral sound profile, so you should try them before committing to them. I exclusively listen to podcasts, so they're a perfect match.
I also have a pair of Shure IEMs, some 15-16 years old. They still work great, but I've been through at least 2 cables with them, plus an additional 3rd party Lightning cable. I've then switched to BT and couldn't be happier.
Yeah, paying a tad bit more for earphones with replaceable cables pays dividends. A cable doesn't cost much, and you also get much better sound quality (which has to count, right? Since BT sound quality often comes as an argument).
I also have a pair of these and they sound really good. Then I received a pair of the Shure Aonic 4s for Christmas one year and those sound amazing. As an added bonus, the passive noise isolation with proper fitting eartips beats any noise cancellation I've ever seen.
Adjusting an age-ratings system doesn't take liberty away from anyone. Parents can still allow their kids to play whatever games the parent deems is ok.
I agree with some of your other points, though: we should have legally mandated return periods for this sort of thing. Not sure how you'd enshrine price limits into law, though; that seems impractical.
Which, frankly, is fine. Regulations like this are great to help guide parents, but ultimately it is the parent's responsibility to decide what is fine and not fine for their child. I wouldn't agree with a parent that gets their kid into loot boxes, but that's their choice.
And if a parent is blindly skipping an age verification screen for their kid without figuring out why that age verification is there in the first place, then they're a bad parent. You can't really fix that, unfortunately, outside of extreme cases.
It’s in the companies interest to make the age verification screen as annoying as companies make cookie pop ups - to just get the parents to click “yes whatever” all the time.
This is a bit of a silly argument, given all the precedent in real life for this sort of thing.
Can a 16 year old magically drive a car properly, but a 15 year old can't? Is an 18 year old magically much more capable doing their electoral civic duty than a 17 year old? Is a 21 year old magically able to consume alcohol responsibly, but a 20 year old isn't?
(Or whatever age cutoffs are appropriate for your jurisdiction.)
We define these cutoffs not because they are magical or apply equally to everyone, but because we have to draw the line somewhere, in cases where we aren't going to do a blanket all-ages ban. Sometimes the cutoff is chosen poorly, certainly, but that's a problem with the implementation, not the idea itself.
You implicitly assume that age is a proxy for ability, but that's not the reason for these laws. Age is a proxy for membership in a social class where discrimination is permitted. Otherwise we would prevent people from voting, which Americans did with Literacy/IQ tests and Blacks.
The actual reasons is that they hope to have captured the childs' reward system by then. Laura Cress must write articles for the BBC if she stopped she would lose her purpose in life and be forced into rehab, she would experience ego death and ostracization until she builds another system approved skill. Current society is heading off a demographic collapse due to this built up debt.
The real problem is that we have invented a society that is less rewarding than a slot machine, not that humans are somehow built wrong. A slot machine or hard drug can only effectively hack ones physiology, a social system can hack the whole stack at once (Physiology, Emotions, Ego, Social belonging). You can give bad actors the pains of withdrawal, peril, existential crisis and social suicide all in one. There are examples throughout very recent history of each layer being captured more perfectly. Even physiology more perfectly than any drug, think enclosure act, 14 hour workdays in industrial England.
Fine, ban lootboxes, but don't pretend it's to protect youths, it's to utilize "children". society is a massively harmful and evil tool, we must acknowledge that it's pure unadulterated evil that wouldn't blink at killing all youths. This is a fact, not an opinion, morals are just an API for humans that the system uses.
Not saying you're lying, but I do wonder if your experience is typical.
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