マックス@マスター

#ナツキ・スバル生誕祭2026 #リゼロ

Apple accidentally built the world's largest hearing aid company. AirPods Pro 2 got FDA clearance as a clinical-grade over-the-counter hearing aid in September 2024. The average American pays $4,700 for a pair of prescription hearing aids. AirPods Pro cost $249. That's a 95% price reduction for mild to moderate hearing loss, which covers roughly 30 million American adults. But the price gap isn't even the real story. The real story is the stigma math. Nearly 1 in 5 adults over 40 believe society judges people who wear hearing aids. The average person waits 4 years after noticing hearing loss before doing anything about it. A 78-year-old man threw away his hearing aids, popped in AirPods, and his niece didn't even register it as a medical device. That's the product working exactly as designed. The hearing aid industry spent decades engineering smaller, more invisible devices to reduce stigma. Apple solved the problem from the opposite direction: make everyone wear something in their ears first, then add the medical function later. By the time the FDA cleared the software update, a billion people were already wearing the hardware. The clinical study that earned the clearance enrolled 118 people. Self-fitted AirPods matched professionally fitted devices on perceived benefit, amplification, and speech comprehension scores. The audiologist appointment, the $200 fitting fee, the three follow-up visits bundled into that $4,700 price tag: optional. Every hearing aid company spent the last century trying to make their product disappear. Apple made theirs a status symbol and added hearing restoration as a software update.

English countryside today

「日本人がクトゥルフを怖がらない」なる話に対して「海産物として見ているから」なる茶化しがよく入るわけだが。 子供が宗教教育からではなく「昔話や寓話」「模範的な創作」から倫理道徳や社会性を学び。 その中に登場する神様や仏様、地獄の閻魔大王に獄卒、鬼や龍や狐狸に妖怪変化その他諸々。ある意味「異形の神々」「神の眷属たる聖獣」「災いや疫病をもたらす悪神」等多彩な神様達が大変身近にあり。 「クトゥルフの邪神？疫神や災害を起こす大ナマズみたいなモンなんです？」と、多神教や道端のお稲荷さんお地蔵さんに手を合わせるような偶像崇拝から来る極めてガバガバな宗教観念から。「災いを招く風変わりな来訪神の一種」として特に怖がらずにすんなり受け入れてたりして？＞RT