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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28989 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Stories like these really makes me want to start a recruiting company where I can just.. not send cvs of blacks to businesses.

I want a chunk of that 366m.

How’s that supposed to work? Sounds more likely that you’d be the one paying.

In the future companies will just have to outsource every aspect and sub-unit of their business to prevent this sort of legal risk.

It boggles my mind how a company like MMM can lose $60 billion in market cap because a tiny sub-unit made earplugs for soldiers which have been claimed to be defective (they weren't even defective).

The American torts system is a joke and is a threat to every company and government it interacts with. The solution would be to do all hiring through third-party companies which can be sacrificed when lawsuits arise. Much like a ship has compartments to prevent a flood in one area from sinking the entire thing.

Perhaps f3zinker's business could take the legal hit. Ideally, he'd be based outside the U.S.

”Each earplug had two ends: The green end was designed to block out all sound. The yellow end, signaling “whisper mode,” purported to block out loud sound — but allowed the user to hear quieter noises, like conversations.”

This is low-key hilarious. You’re right, they weren’t defective. They were instead specifically designed not to work.

Passive level dependent hearing protection is an actual thing, primarily to attenuate impulse rather than constant noise which is what NRR measures. There's an Army Research Lab study on several products and the supposedly defective 3M product still beats the rest.

Thanks.

Figure 9 has to be one of the most Army pictures I’ve ever seen. Shocked it hasn’t shown up on ad copy for Cyber Warfare or something.

I’m still trying to figure out how a high-impulse-only filter would work. It can’t just be frequency…

Here's an older paper from 3M that gets into some of how it works, contrasting their filter system with diaphragms and channel designs of other products.

After some discussion with a coworker, we settled on some sort of nonlinear response. Or maybe just a low-pass, but I didn’t think that would be enough. Let’s see.

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