Anecdote:
I used to get new glasses/prescriptions every year. Every year my prescriptions would get stronger.
Last couple of years I stopped renewing my glasses and whenever I absolutely need to get new glasses, I have the store use my old prescription.
For whatever reason, my eye sight stopped getting worse. I think by wearing stronger prescriptions, your eyes adapt to it and you get more and more myopic.
Warning to anyone taking the above as medical advice: perhaps it might work for you, but do discuss with your doctor and check that you are not driving vehicles with worsening sight while believing it's fine. By all means try it, but get it checked so at least you have the data to know whether it works for you.
Start by finding an eye doctor that doesn't have a glasses shop attached, imo. Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess. Without insulting any doctor in specific, my thought is that making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.
> Or one that isn't "attached" to such a shop in a way they would profit from it, I guess.
Costco is set up this way: their optometrists are contractors who get a flat fee per eye exam, and they don't know or care about what else you buy while you're there.
> making a profit from glasses being sold is likely to impact how likely the doctor is to prescribe new glasses.
And beyond that, following the logic from the recent surgery thread: they see their patients see better. They see all the good cases, where someone walks out more confident and with better sight. Their product helps people. But then so do homeopathic placebos (to a certain (measurable) extent), and that's the hard part to figure out.
Of course, in this case everyone truly does see better when they walk out and what GP is wondering about are the long-term effects. This stuff is complicated, though I frankly have a hard time believing this claim of "just stop wearing glasses and you'll see better". Surely someone would have noticed that? But without doing a deep dive into the research here, it's all just speculation on both their part and mine.
I meant that you can discuss it with your doctor to get their factual knowledge or pointers, and then draw your own conclusions. I didn't say, and didn't mean to say (sorry if it came across like that), that you should follow their advice to any degree. I trust the overwhelming majority of people (doctor or patient) to use their own reasonable judgement, and the rest won't be helped by this advice anyway.
And for what it's worth, you may have had a string of bad doctors. I never had that feeling with any of mine (though I've only ever seen doctors in the Netherlands and Germany).
Your experience is similar to mine. I got glasses at the age of 13, but didn't like wearing the glasses, so never did. Both my late father and my sister (since she was about 12 years old) have to wear thick glasses. My sister started out about the same eye power as I did, but she wears her glasses everyday. My sister's glasses got thicker year over year, and finally she got LASIK a couple of years ago. My sister doesn't work with computers whereas I spend ~10-12 hours a day with computers/TV screens (when I use computer, I don't wear glasses and my eye doctor told me that's okay). For me, my eye power stayed about the same and never got stronger glass prescription over the last 25 years or so.
Having said that, I started wearing glasses about a year ago when watching the TV between 10pm-12am (thanks to my wife who likes watching movies and I joined in). Turns out, my eyesight (near-sight) got a bit worse in a year and now I have a slightly thicker glasses. Again, this is all anecdotal and maybe age comes into play here with my eye sight (but the common knowledge--not sure how true that is--is that the nearsightedness gets better as people age, so what I'm experiencing is the opposite).
Studies of deliberate undercorrection show a slight acceleration in myopia progression. Myopia progression slows and stops naturally after adolescence, whether you wear the correct prescription lenses or not.
The same thing happened to me where I got continually stronger prescriptions, but I stabilized anyways at around 18. My optometrist told me that's very common after adolescence.
I really wouldn't recommend using an incorrect prescription. In the US anyways shops won't let you use a prescription older than 1 year.
Your eyesight might have stopped getting worse on its own. As is the case for most people (myopia doesn't run away to infinity after all!). Which is why corrective surgery is only indicated after your prescription has been stable for some time.
You're probably just getting old. Normal people get farsighted as they age. Myopic people stop getting worse, or even improve a little, and start developing astigmatism.
And to everyone saying "its just age"... well, it doesn't seem that way.
I noticed this pattern and stopped going to the Optometrist for five years. When I finally went again, my myopia was -0.25 worse, so I got new glasses. Then I went again the next year and its -0.25 worse again.
My myopia didn't worsen over a period of five years. Then suddenly worsened over a period of one year.
so I have 2 pairs of glasses, one for clarity at infinity for driving, and another one that's clarity at arms length when I work in the office and staring at monitor all day. I do that because I want my eyes to relax, give it a try!
I asked the optometrist. He was a little offended that I wasn't going to use the new measurements but I pleaded with him enough that he relented.
One very interesting thing that convinced me to start doing this: if you get measurements taken at night (vs early in the day), your prescriptions will be stronger as your eyes are already tired. So your new glasses may be too strong for you but your eyes will adapt to it and become worse.
An optometrist in Germany told me the same regarding measuring eyes in the morning, for what it's worth. I came in after work and they basically turned me away because they didn't think I'd get a good measurement at that time.
Was this in the US? I’ve tried and everyone told me filling an expired prescription is illegal. Even places that don’t do exams. I have an old prescription and don’t want to get an exam because of the pandemic.
I'd recommend getting glasses online from Zenni [0]. They just ask for the measurements of the prescription. There's nothing about expiration dates. And they're super inexpensive! Glasses are a racket.
I can't speak for the quality/durability of their frames, as I only used them to get some prescription lenses for my Valve Index so I can play in VR without wearing my glasses.
For a while I could order from the UK, but I think (at least for the shop I used) they changed this to be more restrictive like the US.
It really is annoying due to the difficulty finding a good optometrist who does more than the basics. The entire process is still a matter of closest estimate when you consider that our eyes don't work in exact "steps" along a range. On top of that, the center point of the lens varies a lot based on exactly how a set of frames sits on your particular face. I've had plenty of glasses that were headache city because the IPD was right, but the lens center didn't line up properly with my pupil (vertically, when worn).
Then don't even get me started on the whole Luxottica thing where it can be another pain in the ass to find nice looking frames at many optometrist-attached stores. There are a few others with both optometrists and glasses sales (Warby Parker, if you have one of the brick and mortars nearby, for example).
For someone like me, even the "cheap" stores usually involve an extra $150-200 per set of glasses due to my cruddy eyesight and the need for the highest index lens material. I usually end up bouncing back and forth between somewhere like Warby when I really am due for another exam and will stomach the $200 cost for $20 worth of plastic. If I break or lose my specs too soon after, I tend to just suck it up and roll the dice with one of the cheapie online vendors.
>The study analyzed 200 pairs of glasses that had been ordered from 10 different websites. The lenses were analyzed based on a number of criteria, including measurement of sphere power, cylinder power and axis, add power (if specified), separation of distance of optical centers and center thickness. The AOA reports that in some cases, single vision lenses were delivered instead of the bifocals that had been ordered. In other cases, specific lens treatments were either added to an or were left off.
>>almost half of the eyeglasses tested in the study (the AOA reports the number at 44.8 percent) didn't have the correct prescription strength or presented problems with safety.
I use firmoo, and I haven't had any issues with the lenses. The only tricky thing is that you need to basically estimate the fit based on the dimensions of glasses frames that you already own.
get the best eye test you can, with a prescription.
buy cheapo online chinese.
zenni optical works fine for me, but with prices from 10 bucks, try several vendors and see which one you personally like.
I think it's calls + the app itself (Electron?) is slow. After a certain page size is reached, editing becomes unbearably slow which necessitates starting a new page.
It's based on a Fender Blues Jr according to the vid. It sounds pretty good for a free plugin, but as you said there's tons of free VSTs and cheap solid state amps that can do better.
I think it sounds good for a hobby project though!
Linking a store page just to illustrate that price tags are pointless when you talk about musical instruments, and also to give people who don't know an impression of what these $$$ go for.
You still need a sound system to get the sound out of a plug-in, and PA systems certainly aren't free. The cost of a comparable PA system + free plug in will easily exceed the cost of this amp.
This is why talking about $$$ while comparing a plug in vs. speaker hardware is kind of silly.
>I think it sounds good for a hobby project though!
And it's great that we have this project! The project is great, the documentation is lacking, the title is not good at all.
They're in a good position as a net creditor nation. While they have a large national debt and have been undergoing QE, they have a steady income stream from treasury bills.
The income stream is unlikely to be steady; the real value of the fixed stream of dollars is (probably) going to drop.
It isn't really conceivable at this point that the US reduces their debt:GDP load without a currency crisis. Their period of service as the reserve currency is probably also drawing to a close; based on the poor fundamentals that the article mentions.
I think this is the case. Japanese (and other East Asians) already have a pre-existing mask culture. Wearing a mask is normal over there and is encouraged. They also do not hug, shake hands and have body contact with does that are not family or close friends. Another big factor is that they tend to follow the rules unlike in Italy or America where social distancing suggestions were not taken seriously by a large chunk of the population.
Even with these explanation, I'm still perplexed as trains in Japan are always packed and it's impossible to stay 6-feet away from others when you're travelling in dense cities in Tokyo. You're also constantly touching poles/handles in the train or pushing elevator buttons.
The social distancing suggestions (laws) in Italy have been taken extremely seriously. It is effectively voluntary, so there are some people who flaunt the rules. But people went from kissing everyone to never getting <2m from a non-household member in a matter of days. I went from passing many thousands of other people on my daily movements to 4-5.
I think people in Italy feel that the quarantine isn't working because it's not strong enough. And people around the world kind of expect Italians not to take it seriously. Actually, it doesn't work except to decrease the exponent on the growth of the epidemic. In China, with a much stronger lockdown, they had the same R0 as we have in Italy now ~1.25 until they started moving people who were symptomatic or had contact with positive COVID cases to hotels and, if serious, field hospitals and ICUs. We have to do the same or it will sweep through the entire population.
> I think people in Italy feel that the quarantine isn't working because it's not strong enough.
That's also because, in my view, those in power have no idea how to read the curves and the scale, and the fact that you have at least 10-14 days in lag before seeing any effect. Also, this is about growth, so the number of cases (and, unfortunately, deaths) will keep on increasing even with a perfect containment until it "burns out". Again, the powers that be, at least in their public statements, seem to have little to no understanding of this fact.
But they also prefer cherry picking those who don't follow the rules (or go with statements that can't be traced to the data itself).
What is needed most now is field hospitals, staff and protection equipment, because the system, again even assuming a perfect containment, will take at least a month to get relief from the pressure. But those, as opposed to quarantine measures, still go through bureaucracy (note for the non-Italian HN crowd: it's really hard to explain because it is something very peculiar of highly burocratized governments, and in some aspects, unique to my country).
Also this won't be able to go perfectly for more than a couple months at best, IMO. Let's not mention economy, for now, but isolation (despite the "reassuring" messages from the media) will start taking its toll sooner or later. We're at week 3 and for me (in Lombardia) I'm already starting to feel that. Not that I'm going to break quarantine, but if the period extends for too long, some may tempted to do so, with potentially bad effects.
