Hearing loss

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The Disease Control and Prevention Department has said that 40 million Americans have lost some hearing because of excessive noise, half of them, owing to leaf- blowers, machinery, generators, sirens, rock concerts, listening to music with headphones and the volume too loud. 25% of Americans aged 20 to 69 have some hearing loss, or have an inability to hear the softest sounds. The most surprising finding was that 53% of the 3,583 people studied said they had no regular exposure to loud noise in the workplace. So the problem comes in social environments or alone, listening to music blasting forth. Hearing loss is twice as common as diabetes and cancer (Lenny Bernstein, Washington Post)

My wife and I both have “musician earplugs”, which reduce the volume at, say, a concert, but do nothing to alter the quality of sound. We bought them because we were, at the time, writing music together, using the playback function of a music-writing program, which tends to encourage you to up the volume to hear particular passages. They were supplied after hearing tests at the local hospital, which had the earplugs made to suit our ears. But they were not hugely expensive and a good investment to protect one’s ears.

There are other, bigger issues than gender

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“I’m baffled by the present obsession with transgender issues. I appreciate that everyone’s different and am happy for individuals to arrange their physiology, desire and role in whatever permutation they fancy”.

But why should society be required to reform its language, its census forms and its lavatories around an “ever-growing taxonomy of genders” – “bi-gender”, “inter-gender” and so on? We’re told that the term “non-binary” describes any gender that transcends the “accepted system” of male and female, but feminism has already dismantled the rigid social stereotypes that reigned until the 1960s.

So what is any of this supposed to achieve? Just because someone feels strongly about something, it doesn’t follow that their beliefs have an automatic right to social recognition and endorsement. The arcane debate about transgender identities seems a ridiculous indulgence. There are many more issues in this country – not least the question of how best to help the millions of older people who live alone – that are far more deserving of our attention. (Nigel Biggar,The Times).

My comment: Especially for young people in college this issue must be fraught with difficulty, consuming a lot of time and liable to get you into a heap of trouble if you get preferred genders wrong. These young people are supposed to be learning important subjects at college, preparing them for careers and a lifetime of, yes,learning. Seems to me that everyone should be able to adopt whatever gender description they want, but, judging from comments I have heard, the preoccupation with transgender identity is immoderate. And Epicurus advocated moderation. Let’s use some common sense and judgment … and a sense of humour, too.

Zero tolerance?

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“Zero tolerance has been a huge mistake.

“Here’s a political slogan I’d get behind, “Zero tolerance for zero tolerance.”

“For decades, political leaders have embraced zero-tolerance policies “as a response to all social ills: crime, drugs, sexual violations – even misbehaving schoolchildren”. In every case, the indiscriminate rigidity of this “deeply misguided approach” has backfired. Thanks to zero-tolerance sentencing policies on crime and drugs, our prisons are filled with minor offenders and addicts, and 70 million Americans – a disproportionate number of them minorities – have a criminal record. In Texas, schools with zero-tolerance policies have suspended more than a thousand children for making “terroristic threats” – including using their fingers to pretend they’re shooting a gun. Sex-offender registries that were created to stop monstrous serial predators now contain as many as 900,000 people, including, for example, an 18-year-old who asked a 15-year-old for sex.

“More recently, of course, President Trump’s “zero-tolerance” crackdown on immigration left thousands of migrant children cruelly separated from their parents. Time after time, these attempts at “cleansing society” end up punishing “the harmless and the innocent”. Our leaders need to learn that “tolerance” isn’t a dirty word.” (Emily Yoffe, The New York Times).

My comment: For HeaVen’s sake – we were playing cops and robbers 75 years ago in the playground! Not a single one of my contemporaries went on to shoot others with handguns! It’s a game, stupid! Punishing kids for make-believe is more likely to turn them anti-social than just, yes, tolerating it, just as generations of intelligent adults have done for centuries. What has happened to “judgment”? As for separating children from their parents…… words fail me.

Robots don’t take people’s jobs – they make new ones

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Robots are the great bogeymen of the 21st century. With their superhuman strength and non-stop work ethic, many feel they are gunning for our jobs. But these fears may be overblown. The first comprehensive look at automation on the German economy suggests that robots created more jobs than they destroyed.

People’s fears have been stoked by headlines warning of the robot takeover. A 2013 study by the University of Oxford, for example, suggested robots are set to replace as much as 47 per cent of the US workforce and 35 per cent of the UK’s.

But far from this apocalyptic scenario, automation resulted in an overall increase in jobs of between 1.5 and 1.8 per cent in Germany between 2011 and 2016. While robots claimed 5 per cent of jobs, more new ones were created. What’s more, most of these tended to pay better than those that had gone before.

An industrial robot may replace 100 workers, but there are knock-on effects that can add jobs elsewhere. “Now the company can produce the same goods,  but more cheaply. Demand goes up and they need to hire more people to fill the new demand,” says Melanie Arntz at the Centre for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany. The same effect should be seen in other countries, including the UK and US, she says.

Previous studies also overestimated the rqelationship between jobs that can be automated and those that will, says Arntz. To come to this conclusion, Arntz and her colleagues surveyed 2000 senior managers at companies representing a broad swathe of the German economy. The researchers asked the managers to rate the level of automation at their companies in each year between 2011 and 2016. They then used data from the German Federal Employment Agency on around 300,000 workers to get the overall picture.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Robots aren’t coming for your job after all”.  (Sally Adee, New Scientist 14 April 2018)

The Olympics

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The nicest Olympics ever might not last beyond Tokyo. While Japan is a relatively uncontroversial host country (COVID-19 snafus notwithstanding), U.S. lawmakers have already started to call for moving the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics out of China in protest of the country’s treatment of its Uyghur minority population. Though it’s unlikely (but not unthinkable) that the U.S. will actually boycott the Games, there will almost certainly be ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China in the run-up, leading to extra attention, expectation, and weightiness whenever athletes from the opposing nations happen to meet on the slopes or in the rink.

Friendly Olympics probably don’t do as well as ones where Americans feellike their national honor is at stake — and while it’s too early to make any conclusions, the dismal viewership of the Games so far is likely at least in part due to the fact that camaraderie, not competition, seems to be the overriding theme.

But while Ledecky’s effusive sideline interview might not be a primetime producer’s cup of tea, there’s something refreshing about seeing athletes competing with such open appreciation and respect for each other. The niceties get at the heart of why we love the Games. Enjoy every hug while you can. (The Week, 28 July 2021)

My comment: Long live camaraderie! It’s good to see young people competing in a respectful and supportive way. Sport is all too often treated as an extension of international politics, and these Olympics seem to be about sport and individual, but friendly, rivalry. The incredible stress and expectations put upon the participants is another thing.