a hearing doc won’t be much help with anything aside from hearing

Irrelevant to my argument. All I mean is because they go to visit someone for one problem can mean they visit other people for other problems they have - rather than ignoring things and staying at home. And I am not claiming what I said to be the actual cause - at least no more than what the study can claim. There could be many other factors at play here as well. My only point is to not confuse causation for correlation and that these types of studies are almost useless in what they tell us.

Hell, even spurious correlations happen all the time. You cannot use two graphs looking similar to prove any point without a lot of control for all the other variables that might be at play and not go looking at large amounts of data for anything that might seem interesting.

“We found that adults with hearing loss who regularly used hearing aids had a 24% lower risk of mortality than those who never wore them,” said Janet Choi, MD, MPH, an otolaryngologist with Keck Medicine and lead researcher of the study. “These results are exciting because they suggest that hearing aids may play a protective role in people’s health and prevent early death.”

While the study did not examine why hearing aids may help those who need them live longer, Choi points to recent research linking hearing aid use with lowered levels of depression and dementia. She speculates that the improvements in mental health and cognition that come with improved hearing can promote better overall health, which may improve life span.

This is the classic causation vs correlation problem with these studies. I can also speculate: Did the hearing aid actually do anything at all - or do the people that go to the doctors for a hearing aid also go to the doctors for other problems they might have and so get more treatment for other conditions? That seems far more likely to have a bigger effect IMO.

We spent much of the year fighting these dangerous “child safety” bills, while also pointing out to legislators that comprehensive data privacy legislation would be more likely to pass constitutional muster and address many of the issues that these child safety bills focus on.

Because they don’t actually care about child safety. massive online censorship and surveillance is the goal here - kids are the excuse they are using to try and get it to pass as it has no hope in hell without some sort of mask on it. The only things they ever do for children is banning abortions and erode privacy. Never anything that would actually help, like feeding them in school, or better prenatal support and leave at work, or medical insurance for everyone. Instead they fight against these measures and for things that won’t help children in the slightest.

I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control

I disagree with this point. If there was say a server about github content - news, posts about projects, questions and help for github related things would it matter if the server was ran by a independent community or github itself? I think a server ran like that would be a positive thing overall.

That said, facebook/meta/threads is out for there profiteering off the community, squeezing anyone for what anything they can get out of you and have a huge history of doing the wrong thing in the goal of profit. A company like that should not be allowed in.