The orange light on the toothbrush comes on after three months to remind you to change it - it's only slightly annoying but this worked perfectly to reset it.
It’s better for your mouth/teeth to change the brush, it’s not really visible but there’s a difference in how effective an old brush is at plaque removal compared to a new one.
3M also knows that many of the claimants are full of it - but a court would still side in favor of veterans so it makes sense to settle the cases.
"Nearly a quarter of the plaintiffs with impairment under either AMA or WHO standards reported their condition in hearing tests before they ever used the Combat Arms earplugs"
"Under WHO and National Institute of Health standards, more than 85% of plaintiffs have normal hearing."
When I enlisted into the US Army in 2006, a hearing test was done for all of us as part of the initial entry stuff. Then we had hearing tests every so often since, maybe every year or two. In my case, and I suspect for most, any hearing loss while in service is likely to be documented. I did not have any, and I also didn't use the specific earplugs the lawsuits are about.
Although that does require the hearing tests to be done correctly. It was hard to tell sometimes if I heard the tone or imagined it.
It sounds like nearly 25% of people have a reference point to start with to prove that their new normal is sufficiently worse than what they started with:
"Nearly a quarter of the plaintiffs ... reported their condition in hearing tests before they ever used the Combat Arms earplugs."
That would seem to mean they have a "before" measurement, and can now test to get an "after" measurement.
Even with all that, almost everyone loses hearing as they age, so you'd really have to shnow not just loss, but loss beyond what'd be expected from a population being nearly 30 years older.
Were it not for the faulty design, they would not have been exposed to dangerous levels of noise.
But to your credit, there are plenty of arguments that could explain hearing loss at any degree, including voluntary consumption of ototoxic chemicals like alcohol and ibuprofen.
1. There are hearing disorders related to noise exposure that may come without detectable hearing loss, like hyperacusis and tinnitus. See "Hidden Hearing Loss".
Full of it, or had hearing issues like everyone does in the service, and then goes to a live fire exercise every few weeks or combat with 3M plugs and the issue goes from bad to deaf?
"Increased economic prosperity and all economic models supported by governments and global competitors are based on having more young people, workers, than older people," Chu said. "Two schemes come to mind. One is the pyramid scheme. The other is the Ponzi scheme. I’m not going to explain them both to you, you can look it up. But it’s based on growth, in various forms." - Steven Chu
Healthy young workers pay the health care costs for aging workers and retirees, the former energy secretary said, a scheme that requires increasing numbers of young workers.
