Plugging Ear Plugs

By Nicholas Stix

Steve Sailer has a post up on ear plugs.

The wonderfulness of earplugs: I want to plug earplugs, which have made my life better. I work better and sleep better because of them. They also make airline travel less awful. You can buy a big jar of 100 orange foam ones for about $10, which should last you a year. If you have to work in a cubicle, what are you waiting for?

I wrote back as follows (except for a couple of spelling errors, which I’ve “sicne” corrected),

The orange ones do not in practice match their decibel claims. (If you have the same ones I once bought out here, they say something like "32.") I've been using ear plugs since the early 1980s, when I worked on the assembly-line at Daimler-Benz in West Germany. However, those plugs, which were available free from dispensers on the line, were made out of cotton balls (IIRC), and disintegrated deep into one's ear, leading me to suspect that they would be as dangerous to one's hearing, long-term, as using no ear plugs at all.

Since we're doing plugs (pun intended), these days I find Flents' Quiet Please white foam plugs, which claim only a 29 rating, much better than the orange ones. A friend once bought me some white foam plugs via mail order from a (I think) different company. They were the best I ever had, but during the early 1990s the box (and thus the company name) and the friendship both went astray.

Regards,