Thieves, the goddamn lot of you! Thieves and leeches! Fucking vampires sucking the will from people whose only goddamn crimes were to be frightened and tired! And you don’t help them! You don’t listen to them! They get no truth from you! All you do is scare them with stories of something that doesn’t exist! And you bastards are winning! Hundreds more of you every day!
~ Spider Jerusalem; Transmetropolitan
Corporations. Many people look at the corporation as one of the greatest inventions of modern civilization. Others will tell you they are a pox on all our houses. Journalist Matt Taibbi, profiling the bank, Goldman Sachs for Rolling Stone magazine in 2009:
“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
Let’s review just a couple of things that look broken once you get past the basic erroneous premise that allowed them to exist today. That premise is they are necessary, they are providing a service and the market will bear what they do, no matter how they do it:
Corporate-run prisons: A prison system that works by insisting on a quota for the number of prisoners to be found within. Corporate prisons insist on an “occupancy rate” such that if the population drops below a certain number, the state must PAY THE PRISON for its lost revenue. This is an incentive for a state TO FIND SOMEONE TO ARREST, rather than putting fewer people in prison. America already has the highest rate of incarcerated individuals per capita than any place else in the world. Corporate prisons will NOT be reducing those numbers, only INCREASING them.
Corporate manufactured food: What if I told you all of the manufactured foods you ate were addictive. Whether it came in a can, was processed for a box or found its way into a fast food restaurant, they were designed by food scientists to BE addictive by taking manipulating your pleasure center and your body’s natural tendencies to seek out fat, sugar and salt. What if I told you, it was the very fact that foods have been over-saturated with these three ingredients which accounts for the current crop of debilitating diseases sweeping most modern countries today: Obesity, diabetes, and hypertension/stroke. Since China has embraced Western ideals, in the last ten years their number of diabetes cases has reached over 300 million people. (That number is almost the same in India.)
Are you surprised no corporations have chosen to pay attention to the rate of diabetes increase in those countries, in relationship to their fast food boom? NO? Neither am I.
“It is this very cognitive dissonance which should make you pay more attention to corporations when they tell you, they are concerned about the environment BUT not enough to do anything about it. If your kids die from starvation due to climate change, its not our problem. We are only worried about the next quarter.”
Would a bank launder money for a crime cartel? Would they poison entire ecosystems to save money on a part for a refinery? Would they pay into contingency fees, to settle, in case someone died rather than replacing a five cents part? YOU BETCHA.
Here are a few other things happening in your neck of the woods, wherever you live…
Does their product pollute groundwater which might be used for farming? YES. (hydraulic fracturing)
Does their product require millions of animals to live in poor conditions to lower their cost of production? YES. (Fast Food Industry)
Does their product contaminate plants downwind of where my product is used? YES. (Monsanto and other genetically engineered seeds companies)
Does their product produce coal ash, which is highly toxic and need specialized technologies for disposal? YES. (Big Coal)
Does their product have a chance for spills, causing catastrophic yet, never considered, damage to the environment? YES. (Big Oil)
Does their product have a list of side effects a mile long yet still advertise it on television, telling people they NEED IT? YES. (Big Pharmaceuticals)
Does their product cause unrest and wars in foreign countries by needing rare earths and special minerals? YES. (Any Tech corporation)
And the list goes on. I could do this all day. So why do I bring it up? For the simple reason that corporations are never going to tell you what they are doing is harmful to YOU or yours. They will list the stock exchange and its variables as if it were a way to judge how profitable Humanity has been that day.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Stock Exchange is an indicator of how much wealth is being made at your expense, how much of your environment is being destroyed, how much money is being made from the loss of lives in conflicts over raw materials in a foreign country. The Stock Exchange could just as easily be called the Murder and Mayhem Exchange because corporations have basically said they are willing to make profits OVER YOUR DEAD BODIES.
If they were being honest about it, they might make a video like this one:
So now you know. What can we do about it?
Get back to regulating these corporate fuckers. This video is a parody but the real corporations just haven’t been willing to say this as directly. But the harm they do to your environment is just as real and just as long lasting.
They don’t give a fuck about you. Don’t wait for them to say FUCK YOU in plain English. It’s only a matter of time.
In the confines of a London dinner party, comedian Tim Minchin argues with a hippy named Storm. While Storm herself may not be converted, audiences from London to LA have been won over by Tim’s wordplay and the timely message of the film in a society where science and reason are portrayed as the enemy of belief.
Written and performed by Tim Minchin @timminchin. Directed by DC Turner @dcturner. Produced by Tracy King @tkingdoll. http://www.stormmovie.net
Italian subtitles by http://www.comedysubs.org
English subtitles by Jason Livingston
Russian subtitles by Denis Olshin
Here is a video I watched today and fell out laughing.
Now the curious part of this story goes to the people in the comments on YouTube, who complain about how the writer treats the titular character, Storm, a hippie who basically discounts any aspect of knowledge being real, true, useful or even knowable. I personally disagreed with pretty much everything Storm said and found myself exactly in the same place as the author of this work and his viewpoint and mine are almost identical.
I have written about the human penchant for failing to accept reality and instead choosing a good fantasy to place on top of our world view (Freedom vs Society). In my perspective this is always the wrong thing for us to do. Denying reality never improves it, it only gives us a false sense of what is important in the overall scheme of things.
One of the major complaints was the cruelty of the author in regard to his need to demean Storm while trying to make his point. Storm had no problem disseminating her perspective, which was that scientific endeavor was little more than an opinion.
I don’t feel Minchin is attacking Storm. We should remember much of what he says is an internal dialog that no one but he and the watcher are privy to. He is a bit of a chauvinist but he is tempered by his wife who makes an effort to keep the evening charitable and friendly.
And even when he decides to go all out, he still does not attack her (as was suggested in the comments). I have no clear evidence of argumentum ad hominem being used. He does not dismiss her perspective but instead asks her to take a stand regarding her perspective.
A stand that required a commitment to learning things that may be uncomfortable for her, because her current perspective did just the opposite. It required no effort on her part. She heard a fact (as she understood it) and accepted it, without any further effort. Her desire to ignore her responsibility to learn new things is what the author is trying to upend.
But I think the real lesson we are to take away from this video is this: Talking to people, even when you are inclined to use logic, reason and well structured argument may not change their mind if their cognitive dissonance is stronger than anything that resembles reason you can bring to bear. There is a time when you simply have to walk away and agree to disagree, hopefully before you become disagreeable.
Lyrics: Storm by Tim Minchin
Inner North London, top floor flat
All white walls, white carpet, white cat,
Rice Paper partitions
Modern art and ambition
The host’s a physician,
Lovely bloke, has his own practice
His girlfriend’s an actress
An old mate from home
And they’re always great fun.
So to dinner we’ve come.
The 5th guest is an unknown,
The hosts have just thrown
Us together for a favour
because this girl’s just arrived from Australia
And has moved to North London
And she’s the sister of someone
Or has some connection.
As we make introductions
I’m struck by her beauty
She’s irrefutably fair
With dark eyes and dark hair
But as she sits
I admit I’m a little bit wary
because I notice the tip of the wing of a fairy
Tattooed on that popular area
Just above the derrière
And when she says I’m Sagittarien
I confess a pigeonhole starts to form
And is immediately filled with pigeon
When she says her name is Storm.
Chatter is initially bright and light-hearted
But it’s not long before Storm gets started:
You can’t know anything,
Knowledge is merely opinion
She opines, over her Cabernet Sauvignon
Vis a vis
Some unhippily
Empirical comment by me
Not a good start I think
We’re only on pre-dinner drinks
And across the room, my wife
Widens her eyes
Silently begs me, Be Nice
A matrimonial warning
Not worth ignoring
So I resist the urge to ask Storm
Whether knowledge is so loose-weave
Of a morning
When deciding whether to leave
Her apartment by the front door
Or a window on the second floor.
The food is delicious and Storm,
Whilst avoiding all meat
Happily sits and eats
While the good doctor, slightly pissedly
Holds court on some anachronistic aspect of medical history
When Storm suddenly she insists
But the human body is a mystery!
Science just falls in a hole
When it tries to explain the the nature of the soul.
My hostess throws me a glance
She, like my wife, knows there’s a chance
That I’ll be off on one of my rants
But my lips are sealed.
I just want to enjoy my meal
And although Storm is starting to get my goat
I have no intention of rocking the boat,
Although it’s becoming a bit of a wrestle
Because – like her meteorological namesake –
Storm has no such concerns for our vessel:
Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It’s time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives.
And try as hard as I like,
A small crack appears
In my diplomacy-dike.
By definition, I begin
Alternative Medicine, I continue
Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call alternative medicine
That’s been proved to work?
Medicine.
So you don’t believe
In ANY Natural remedies?
On the contrary actually:
Before we came to tea,
I took a natural remedy
Derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller that’s virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name,
Darling, what was it again?
Masprin?
Basprin?
Aspirin!
Which I paid about a buck for
Down at my local drugstore.
The debate briefly abates
As our hosts collects plates
but as they return with desserts
Storm pertly asserts,
Shakespeare said it first:
There are more things in heaven and earth
Than exist in your philosophy
Science is just how we’re trained to look at reality,
It can’t explain love or spirituality.
How does science explain psychics?
Auras; the afterlife; the power of prayer?
I’m becoming aware
That I’m staring,
I’m like a rabbit suddenly trapped
In the blinding headlights of vacuous crap.
Maybe it’s the Hamlet she just misquoted
Or the eighth glass of wine I just quaffed
But my diplomacy dike groans
And the arsehole held back by its stones
Can be held back no more:
Look , Storm, I don’t mean to bore you
But there’s no such thing as an aura!
Reading Auras is like reading minds
Or star-signs or tea-leaves or meridian lines
These people aren’t plying a skill,
They are either lying or mentally ill.
Same goes for those who claim to hear God’s demands
And Spiritual healers who think they have magic hands.
By the way,
Why is it OK
For people to pretend they can talk to the dead?
Is it not totally fucked in the head
Lying to some crying woman whose child has died
And telling her you’re in touch with the other side?
That’s just fundamentally sick
Do we need to clarify that there’s no such thing as a psychic?
What, are we fucking 2?
Do we actually think that Horton Heard a Who?
Do we still think that Santa brings us gifts?
That Michael Jackson hasn’t had face-lifts?
Are we still so stunned by circus tricks
That we think that the dead would
Wanna talk to pricks
Like John Edwards?
Storm to her credit despite my derision
Keeps firing off clichés with startling precision
Like a sniper using bollocks for ammunition
You’re so sure of your position
But you’re just closed-minded
I think you’ll find
Your faith in Science and Tests
Is just as blind
As the faith of any fundamentalist
Hmm, that’s a good point, let me think for a bit
Oh wait, my mistake, it’s absolute bullshit.
Science adjusts it’s beliefs based on what’s observed
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved.
If you show me
That, say, homeopathy works,
Then I will change my mind
I’ll spin on a fucking dime
I’ll be embarrassed as hell,
But I will run through the streets yelling
It’s a miracle! Take physics and bin it!
Water has memory!
And while it’s memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is Infinite
It somehow forgets all the poo it’s had in it!
You show me that it works and how it works
And when I’ve recovered from the shock
I will take a compass and carve Fancy That on the side of my cock.
Everyones just staring at me now,
But I’m pretty pissed and I’ve dug this far down,
So I figure, in for penny, in for a pound:
Life is full of mystery, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won’t be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying isn’t life mysterious?
Let’s sit here and hope
Let’s call up the fucking Pope
Let’s go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra
If you’re going to watch tele, you should watch Scooby-Doo.
That show was so cool
because every time there’s a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who runs the water-slide.
Throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not Magic.
Does the idea that there might be truth
Frighten you?
Does the idea that one afternoon
On Wiki-fucking-pedia might enlighten you
Frighten you?
Does the notion that there may not be a supernatural
So blow your hippy noodle
That you would rather just stand in the fog
Of your inability to Google?
Isn’t this enough?
Just this world?
Just this beautiful, complex
Wonderfully unfathomable, NATURAL world?
How does it so fail to hold our attention
That we have to diminish it with the invention
Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters?
If you’re so into Shakespeare
Lend me your ear:
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet is just fucking silly
Or something like that.
Or what about Satchmo?! I see trees of Green, Red roses too,
And fine, if you wish to
Glorify Krishna and Vishnu
In a post-colonial, condescending
Bottled-up and labeled kind of way
Then whatever, that’s ok.
But here’s what gives me a hard-on:
I am a tiny, insignificant, ignorant lump of carbon.
I have one life, and it is short
And unimportant
But thanks to recent scientific advances
I get to live twice as long
As my great great great great uncleses and auntses.
Twice as long to live this life of mine
Twice as long to love this wife of mine
Twice as many years of friends and wine
Of sharing curries and getting shitty
With good-looking hippies
With fairies on their spines
And butterflies on their titties.
And if perchance I have offended
Think but this and all is mended:
We’d as well be 10 minutes back in time,
For all the chance you’ll change your mind.
A bit of consistency is best for a muse and her subject. So I try to start my day at the same time, as early as she can kick me out of bed. If time permits, something to break the fast of the night’s repose, healthy if possible, fruit, cereal or dare I admit to it, the candy of meats, bacon. If I am really lucky, my wife makes one of those banana/fruit/flaxseed/protein powder drinks she loves. When I am unlucky, the recipe includes kale (ugh).
A brisk regimen of blood flowing cardiovascular activity to increase the muse’s serotonin levels boosting creativity. For exercise to truly benefit a muse, it need be a regular thing, a long term gift to both you and your muse. A healthy muse is a wealthy muse. My muse admits to not enjoying regular exercise.
I admit my muse did once have a caffeine habit as the wicked drug can force open the doors of creativity, but the cost was a nervous eye twitch that was quite unbecoming to everyone who knew us. We have now dropped to one cup, in the morning after our exercise and breakfast.
But for a muse to truly be creatively inspiring more than just exercise is needed. A muse thrives on experiences, the more diverse, the better. A muse does not thrive sitting at home watching the telly. No, if anything the telly saps a muse of creativity, exposing it to the idea the blandishments of modern media are to be the accepted form all creativity must take; be safe, be friendly, be predictable, be violent, be dangerous, ensure a happy ending when all is said and done.
As if life were so predictable.
Go outside, meet your neighbors, ride mass transit, yes, mass transit, for a wealth of stories await you if you can simply look, listen, imagine and believe. Driving is a solitary prison disconnecting you from stories not introducing you to them. Jump from a plane, ride a cross continental train, ride a ship, do all of these things, so you might experience the world from a perspective different than yours.
See the night sky at sea. Be amazed at all the stars you didn’t know were there. Introduce yourself to the Milky Way. It will speak back to you. Plummet to the ground at 32 feet per second, per second, feel you heart rise into your mouth, know fear. Makes your writing about it more real. Go to a play. Feel language in a way you don’t normally use. Let it roll over you, through you. This feeds your muse like nothing else.
A muse secretly craves facts, despite their artistic bent. My muse reads over my shoulder marveling at the same things I do, often finding ways of using things I read in a fashion I hadn’t thought of. Technically, that’s her job. Reading the news, reading the tabloids (not too often) reading the crackpots (so many interesting theories its hard sometimes to remember they are crackpots).
Most of all, read the classics. Yes, some are SO dull. My muse falls asleep when I read some of them. But they are not for her anyway. They are for me. Jack London reminds me to connect to nature. HP Lovecraft connects me to fear. Edgar Allen Poe connects me to the monstrosity of the human condition. Machiavelli connects me to the intellectual craft of human manipulation. You may never use any of these. But it helps as a writer, to know how far human beings have come, will go, and have gone if you want to write about characters you or anyone else will give a damn about.
Most of all, engage your muse in fun. This mean getting away from writing and having a good time. Muses need fun to unleash their creativity by connecting ideas from all of your experiences, your reading, your writing, your life, your loves, your beliefs and most importantly your connection to the Universe where ideas abound, awaiting you and your muse to reach into that realm of Logos, that place of perfection and find your stories aborning.
Your muse and you are one, inseparable; to follow your muse, you must first lead her to your inspirations.
A study suggests that increased usage of portable music players and earbuds has led to significant hearing loss in today’s youth. Many contend that hearing loss is being exaggerated and people are not going deaf any faster than they have in the past. I will make a case for the idea that not only are we going deaf faster than we have in the past, but that our technology has a direct effect on that loss even if you are not a regular user of personal music devices. The simple answer is yes, Personal Music Devices such as the iPod or Zune do contribute to hearing loss and will continue to do so in the future until people understand the nature of hearing. Yes, we use them more than we did in the past, their sales are skyrocketing and there is no end in sight. This is a problem because the earbuds direct sound right into the ear canal effectively destroying hearing at the source. As to what I would do about it, I do not own one. My hearing is safe…
Lets get a bit deeper into the subject, shall we?
Is the use of Personal Music Devices such as the Zune or iPod a cultural trend that will pass or is it something that will continue growing greater with each year?
Why the need to play music all the time–are such music listeners avoiding personal growth issues by simply drowning out the need to listen to internal dialogue that might be beneficial for personal development?
Why are so many young people unaware of the damage they are doing to their hearing listening to music at 120 to 140 decibels directly into their ear canal?
Whatever the actual reason the problem is only going to get worse and the results of that problem are able to be described in a few paragraph for all of you suffering from short attentions spans.
When you lose your hearing (notice when, not if), you will lose an entire world of abilities that you currently take for granted:
You will lose your music, the thing you loved so well, you played your iPod or Zune or (insert brand name here) until it deafened you. You will never hear those sounds again. You may feel the vibrations if you get close enough to a loud speaker, but subtlety of sound is lost to you. Gone will be one of the greatest artistic expressions of the human species, second only to speaking; music.
You will never hear a Gregorian chant, a symphony in D minor, the acappella sounds of African tribes who sing like angels, the sonorous majesty of a bagpipe on the moors, the roar of an African lion on a veldt that you won’t get to see for another two decades from now, long after your last hearing has vanished completely.
You will never hear your child’s voice or your grandchildren asking you to pick them up or run with them. No sound so sweet will ever grace your ears. You will lose the ability to drive, because you cannot hear the sounds of emergency vehicles, or the sound of horns warning you of impending danger.
You will never receive a phone call without the use of some form of teletype or close captioning technology. You may not consider that much of a burden with the advances of technology and the prevalence of texting, but your hands (and your thumbs) will not be young forever, repetitive stress WILL catch up to you…
You will never hear the sounds of running water. If you haven’t stopped to appreciate it, get out to a water fountain in a park and sit and listen to it. I know you are busy, but slow down and just sit there for a half an hour. Feel the calm that washes over you. That will be gone as well. You will never hear the sound of your lover’s voice, or their breath in your ear. If you know what I am talking about, (and sooner or later you will) nothing will ever replace THAT sound.
The sounds of your friends voices will be gone, the sounds of your television will be gone, the sounds of your movies will be gone. If you doubt those sounds are important, you can get a set of sound cancellation headphones and wear them for a week. Wear them everywhere. Notice how empty your world will appear. Everything is still there, but you simply won’t be participating at the same level.
Don’t forget to learn to read lips (if you are a spy, you are already ahead of the curve), because most people will not know sign language; oh, I forgot to mention, you might want to learn to sign, since you are now considered disabled and might need an interpreter for legal documents, or medical procedures, or to even speak to anyone with any speed.
And many of you will say, SO WHAT! I hate my life anyway, that is why I listen to ThrashPunkSoulDestroyer at 150 db (decibels) in the first place! It is to you I say, you may not always hate life. And what a terrible price it would be to discover that you love life only to realize that you will never hear it again.
For those who have gotten this far, I wanted to say, thanks for reading on. I believe that such noise generating technology only adds to the overwhelming amount of noise pollution already being generated by our world at large. If you live in an industrial or urban area, just walking the street exposes you to approximately 80-90 decibels of sound before you do anything else. Most people will put on their ear-buds (which channel the music directly into the ear canal) and turn it up loud enough to drown out the external noises. This means you are getting a full dose of sound, powerful enough to damage the ear drum at 100 decibels. That is the equivalent of a railroad train passing you at 5 feet!
It is a proven fact, the longer you listen to high intensity sound, the more damage you do to your eardrum. Human ears were designed (use that word loosely, I don’t want arguments over WHO designed the human ear) to listen to the sound level of a human voice or human voices in limited numbers. Most of our technology exceeds the threshold of the human voice with almost no effort. This includes lawnmowers, motorcycles, airplanes, and my personal nemesis (for which I see almost no utility whatsoever,) the Sunday morning, I am trying to sleep in, god-dammit I am hung over, sleep destroying from 100 meters, leaf-blower!
Okay, lets get to some facts.
Once hearing is lost, it can never be recovered.
The human ear can hear a range of sounds.
As the ear takes damage, the range of sound is diminished.
A condition called tinnitus (also known as ringing in the ears) is the ear’s way of letting you know that you are losing access to a range of sounds.
When sufficient ranges are lost, hearing loss is said to be occurring.
Hearing loss is natural in humans, even those that live in rural settings due to the lessening of effectiveness of the ear’s sound generating mechanism, but this process should take many years and would normally not be an issue until the early 60’s.
With the preponderance of high intensity, steady-state noise most people are subjected to, we have seen a loss of hearing ability, earlier and earlier even in people who do not use personal music devices.Within the PMD crowd, we are expecting to see catastrophic numbers of people losing some range or possibly nearly all range of conversational hearing capabilities, due to their listening to music at catastrophic volumes equivalent to a high level rock concert for at least 4 hours a day (120-130 decibels, the equivalent of 12 to 14 times greater sound energy than the normally safest range of sound for the human ear!)
The science of sound:
A simple definition of noise is – any unwanted sound. Yes, this means you with your iPod playing at 11 and I can hear you across the subway train that I am riding on. Yes the subway train at 110 db, and I can still hear your music more than 15 feet way from me. Yes, I hear your crappy rock band and wish I could be somewhere else but in nearly ever direction is someone else doing the same stupid thing. My only consolation is that in 15 years, I won’t have to put up with this because all of you will be deaf, and my stock in hearing aid companies will be skyrocketing!
Noise is measured in decibels and the scale often employed dB(A) is weighted to the range perceived by the human ear. The decibel system is frequently misinterpreted as it is based on a logarithmic scale. This means that a sound level of 100dB(A) contains twice the energy of a sound level of 97dB(A).
A rise of 10 dB in sound level corresponds roughly to a doubling of subjective loudness. Therefore a sound of 80 dB is twice as loud as a sound of 70 dB which is twice as loud as a sound of 60 dB. Correspondingly, the 80 dB sound is 4 times louder than the 60 dB sound.
Distance plays an important role in the perceived sound level. Sound levels decrease by approximately 6 dB every time the distance from the source is doubled. Sound levels inside a property will be approximately 10dB less than those outside, even when a window is open.
Noise not only affects hearing. It affects other parts of the body and body systems. It is now known that noise:
Increases blood pressure
Has negative cardiovascular effects such as changing the way the heart beats
Increases breathing rate
Disturbs digestion
Can cause an upset stomach or ulcer
Can negatively impact a developing foetus and possibly contribute to premature birth
Makes it difficult to sleep, even after the noise stops
Intensifies the effects of factors such as drugs, alcohol, carbon monoxide and ageing
In fact research now suggests that noise may be causing 2000-4000 deaths annually as a result of an increase in cardiovascular disease
Example Sound Levels
With all of this new science around how sound affects us, it is not a surprise that the term “noise pollution” is gaining traction as a viable source of potential problem for most urban dwellers.
It is difficult to say whether this trend can be stopped. Most people simply do not know enough about hearing to be worried about its potential loss. They believe hearing aids will restore their ability to hear (they won’t, they cannot give you back ranges of sound you have lost, they simply move the sound into a range you may still be able to hear, but there is quality lost) or that science will find a cure for this inconvenience. It may, but no time soon, definitely not in time for our Generation Y and Millenials to have hearing after the age of 40 or so. Likely no scientific research on the restoration of hearing at this point will be helping the deliberate loss of hearing that will be occurring in epic proportions in the next twenty to thirty years. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Buy stock in hearing aid companies, I see big business soon!
In closing, I say to you this: You do not have to value your hearing. You can dispose of it just like you would any other natural resource that you started life with — your liver, your kidneys, your heart, your brain; you are free to do with those things what you like, they belong to you. But remember, once you lose the natural bounty that is yours; your senses, your means of interacting with the world and all of the inherent things that make life worth living will seem a little less bright.
And yes there are people who live without those senses right now, but not by choice and most would gladly trade places with you for an hour of what you have thrown away, simply because you were too unaware of its value to consider it important. Like most things human, you won’t miss it until its gone.
A Matter of Scale 