Weirdly, earplugs can make it easier to hear certain detail, despite the reduction in volume. I wear earplugs at concerts and I can hear all the instruments, despite them somehow reducing the intensity of crowd noises. It’s also a lot easier to hear people talking to you, as long as they’re speaking in the direction of your ears.
Not sure whether it was the removal of best before dates or Brexit, but fresh food and veg in Britain is often already rotting in supermarkets. So now instead of the store throwing out loads of produce past its best, I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.
The UK hasn't banned them, though some supermarkets did voluntarily remove them. Brexit's a relatively likely culprit for imported stuff; the extra paperwork really disincentivises JIT delivery (and in particular _really_ disincentivises mixed contents containers).
Though it'll get worse. The regime for imported fruit and veg is still in transition, with a lot of stuff that the UK was supposed to bring in in 2021 recently delayed til 2025.
> I have to do it when I get home and realise that yet again one in each pack of 3 onions is rotted.
I have always been under the impression that the entire point of pre-packaging produce like avocados, apples, and garlic is to mix items that are bad which no one would buy in with some good items so you can still sell the bad ones.
This seems to have always been the case in California - where you can generally get good produce.
In the UK the NHS recommends “pacing” for ME/CFS, which is a very slow, gradual increase in activity without triggering over-exertion - same as what you found effective. I believe there are some materials and support groups available to people who qualify for them, it’s definitely one of the recognised treatments. [1]
Changing a lifestyle in support of recovery is of course much harder than taking medication. Can people’s jobs adapt? Can the benefits / social security systems? Do people have support networks which they can rely on? So I agree that maintaining health is super complex, and there are additional social/economic challenges here.
Some features are “missing” or don’t work in a similar way. For example, Affinity Designer doesn’t have shape replication tools like Illustrator, manual copy paste is required. You also can’t trace an image to turn it into vector outlines. Just two things off the top of my head that I noticed because I used them extensively in Adobe Illustrator. So if you’re only using a subset of features you’re probably fine, but without testing Affinity’s products for yourself it might be hard to tell if they’re a like for like replacement for you.
It's been a while now but I got Inkscape (free but clunky Illustrator alternative) to do shape replication across a path for me once, and then I copied the result into Affinity Designer. Obviously if you need to do that frequently, it's not gonna work well but I've only had to do that a few times since ditching Adobe.
Or perhaps you are describing something else I am unfamiliar with the terminology.
I've been going back to several tutorials on youtube for doing things affinity - as it seems to have the capabilities I am used to with the old photoimpact, it's just finding where / how is not the same.
I get that we associate focus and attention with not having anything in our ears. But consider that many people, myself included, will wear AirPods in noisy environments, because the Conversation Boost feature makes it possible to hear speech more clearly.
In understand that, and it's a valid reason but likely the minority of uses. It bothers me quite a lot that the is such a stigma around hearing aids. Those fake Bluetooth earpiece things were the start of it. That is a social problem where we see hearing aids and associate old abd weak with it. I'm not saying that why you use it, by I do personally know others who use those devices so they look more "youthful".
I think anyone who's going to wear them needs to have extra focus on those around who might be trying to communicate. Or maybe they need an "I'm not listening" light so we know who not to talk to.
Agreed that the stigma is unnecessary and likely stops many people from getting the support they might find helpful.
In my case the hearing damage is not sufficient to warrant a hearing aid, but it’s also enough to make it hard to understand conversation when there’s background noise. I don’t have the numbers on this but I’d assume there are a lot more people like me, who benefit from added clarity in specific situations, who would not need or even qualify for an actual hearing aid. In those cases a device you already have and use in other context hands down wins over a specialised medical device.
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