Oh, man, you got us!

Wait. I’m being told that the US is the largest exporter of agricultural goods in the world, exporting 20% of its agricultural production.

Do you say kilometers per litre or miles per gallon?

Edit: re-read. The UK still uses mpg, I believe

Not to mention that every single food product has metric measurements on the label as well.

I believe Canada and the UK do similarly.

Same for 5.56 and .223.

Not really a US thing, most carriers here offer unlimited data. More of a Canadian and European issue.

IP67 in reality won’t last 30 minutes submerged in most cases. I’ve had flagship level IP67 devices get damaged by water ingress by being splashed or dunked a couple inches into a pool for less than a second. My Pixel 8 Pro goes into the shower, bath, pool, hot tub, and rain with me and it’s never skipped a beat.

Thanks for the anecdotal evidence, but in general those buds ended up in the trash in months, if not weeks. Out of all the people I know, pretty sure my wife is the only one that likes the wired buds that came with phones, but she went through a pair every few months. She switched to Pixel Buds a while back and only uses the wired ones when she runs, but still has to buy new ones twice a year.

The limitation is not tech, it’s the cost to include those features in an IP68+ device. The XR21 is a $650USD phone, that’s near flagship prices, and very far from a budget phone.

Is it possible to create a device that has a jack, SD slot, and removable battery that’s also IP68+ certified? Absolutely, but doing that is quite a bit more expensive than the same features on an IP67 or lower device.

It’s not that it’s impossible, but the device will be both more expensive, and considerably thicker. Most people do not care about a headphone jack anymore, and even less so SD card slots and removable batteries. They want thinner, cheaper, waterproof phones. These features aren’t in high demand, and aren’t profitable for companies to produce.

Yet lasted 1/10th as long.

Oh, sorry. Did you enjoy fishing them out of your pocket only to have everything else you happened to have in your pocket fall to the ground. Then once you picked up all your stuff, you still had to spend a couple minutes untangling and removing all the random knots that had appeared in your headphone cords since you put them in.

It was IP67 not IP68, which is what I stated. While it’s possible to have a headphone jack and IP68 resistance, it’s not cheap and you likely won’t find it on anything but niche flagship phones like the Asus Zenphone.

IP67 and IP68 are considerably different. It’s basically the difference between water-resistant and water proof. IP67 could handle splashes of water and, at least on paper, brief submersion. In reality, most. IP67 phones did not handle any level of immersion well.

IP68 on the other hand allows phones to be submerged deeper in water and for much longer. You can have IP67 with those features, but IP68 is a different beast.

Do you really consider the $5 wired earbuds that came with the phone, the ones most people used, were repairable? Nah, they were way more disposable than even cheap wireless buds are these days.

I used to feel this way until I realized that a large percentage of phone users rarely used earbuds or headphones, including myself. Wired earbuds were a pain in the ass, nobody wanted to carry a coiled up cable in their pocket all day. But a little clamshell with a couple small buds in it fits pretty well into a jeans pocket. Once wireless earbuds hit the market, everyone started using them for a reason.

The only real argument for an analog headphone jack at this point is audio fidelity, and if you care about that you’re 1, not using your phone with a cheap DAC to do it and 2, your headphones probably use a 1/4" jack not a 3.5mm one. Wireless protocols are also catching up to analog as far as audio quality as well, and most people expect IP68 from a good phone these days, and you’re not getting that with a 3.5mm audio jack or removable battery.

The consumers who care about an audio jack on phones these days are a very vocal minority.

Imagine you’re breathing through a big straw, and at the other end of the straw is a device that pumps air faster whenever you’re breathing faster, say when you’re running fast. If you turn off power to the pump, you can’t breathe through the straw anymore because the pump isn’t spinning, so you’d need a second straw that opens up only when the pump is off.

You are the engine, and the pump is the supercharger. When the engine doesn’t need to breathe fast, turning off the supercharger would conserve energy use at the expense of power output. But the design of the pump doesn’t let air bypass it when it’s off, so you’d need to engineer something (overly complex) to do it.

With a Roots style supercharger like the 8-71 on Mad Max’s, if the supercharger isn’t spinning then there’s no path for air to enter the engine. You’d have to implement another full-size throttle body as a bypass to allow enough airflow into the engine when the supercharger isn’t rotating. SCs are very parasitic, hence their use mostly being limited to larger displacement engines that have sufficient low-end torque offset the draw. You could definitely resolve this with a clutched pulley and a bypass throttle-body, the complexity, space requirements, and engineering needed to make it work isn’t worth it. Multi-sized sequential triple turbos are clearly the superior solution to boost at any RPM.

I definitely haven’t spent countless hours thinking about how you could have a mechanically activated clutch on a supercharger pulley. Nope. Not at all.

I mean, even without watching Top Gun the retractable wings were the coolest thing ever for a kid. It was the aviation equivalent of Mad Max flipping on the supercharger on the V8 Interceptor.

(I know, I know. You can’t actually spin up a supercharger like that, but it’s still fuckin cool.)

The spelling of whisky/whiskey is not tied to the speaker’s dialect, it’s actually tied to the whisk(e)y’s origin.

Scotch, Canadian, and Japanese whiskies are spelled “whisky.”

American and Irish whiskeys are spelled “whiskey.”

So “bourbon whisky” would be incorrect in any English dialect, as would “Canadian whiskey.”