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Comment by ypeterholmes | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see more attention being paid to the psychological impacts of noise. Our cities are full of noise pollution- car alarms, motorcycles with tricked engines, the list goes on. These things are detrimental to health.

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I thought I had insomnia for a decade, until the pandemic and moved to a quiet suburb. I now routinely sleep 9 hours a night.

Yup, both for me and our cat, who calmed down amazingly moving from a dense houserow on a main-ish street to a house set 50m back from a very quiet road. Almost a different personality, and almost none of the anxiety cats usually show of moving. After one night hiding out, he was like "this is great!".

We also feel like moving again, because the soundscape has gotten so loud from highways 5-10km away. It's just steadily gotten louder in the background, but in the first months of the pandemic shutdown we could hear nature dominant again — it was just bliss! Now, it's all come roaring back louder than ever, Amazon is building a warehouse 7km away... Definitely wanting more quiet . . .

Interesting and i kind of agree, but what about a girlfriend / wife?

I feel like scuffling about in one's own bed is ultimately what wakes me up sometimes and i haven't really found a solution that isn't sleep in separate rooms.

I already do like to sleep with white noise and earpieces.

Consider having separate top-sheets + blankets, perhaps with an over-layer blanket over all of it. Then, your partner's tossing and turning will jostle the bed, but won't pull on your cocoon of blankets (and vice versa).

Or even separate twin xl mattresses (and box springs if applicable) with a strap kit and shared king fitted sheet. My wife and I did this about 2 years ago and it's been great. She wanted a traditional mattress and I wanted to diy a memory foam mattress with a 6" layer of memory foam* (2-4 is normal). I sink into my viscoelastic cocoon every night and she sleeps on top of a normal mattress.

*Note that this is usually considered uncomfortable and possibly bad for your back. I'm a side sleeper who always had elbow and shoulder pain in the morning and it worked for me, but do your research if you ever decide to diy a mattress. It also weighs about as much as a dead moose.

A memory foam mattress that isolates your partner's movements can help.

But, foam mattresses can also by much hotter (actually more insulating) than spring mattresses which will also disturb sleep, so make sure you check that before switching.

having recently been mattress shopping, note that boxspring/whatever else you have under the mattress can have a huge impact on the isolation from left/right of the mattress. I also recommend Consumer Reports' mattress reviews. Our mattress had excellent isolation in the store, but at home, on our adjustable platform, isolation is much lower! The adjustable platform sways left and right quite a bit.

Here in Germany it's common for couples to have a duvet each. I don't like that but I do the size of the bed hugely affects my sleep. Even an extra 20cm can make a difference, maybe you could try going oversized.

I moved to country where the o my noise I hear at night is a bubbling stream. Still get insomnia. So YMMV

Sorry you’re living that experience. Wasn’t trying to say insomnia doesn’t exist. Just for me, it was just I’m sensitive to noise and the lack of it helped me sleep. Hope you find a way to get consistent sleep.

Car alarm ban in new models seems like a no-brainer. They create a nuisance and don't even work as intended. There are so many silent ways to notify the owner of potential theft. I don't mean with fancy smartphone stuff necessarily, I mean via the RF key fob everyone already carries. Some vibrate.

What's funny is CA outlawed ICE cars by whatever year but didn't touch car alarms. And a while back they mandated that truck reverse beepers be even louder than elsewhere, which is a trickier situation than car alarms, but I've noticed Amazon vans with white noise reverse sounds that do the job well.

I hope they ban clickers that use the actual car horn instead of a mild beep (or even better, haptic feedback!). The noise we use to say "yes, the door is locked" should not be the same noise we use to say "WATCH OUT OR WE MIGHT DIE!"

Yeah, that ticks me off too. In any big apartment complex, there is constant honking from these, and it's totally unnecessary.

All the keyfobs I've seen are purely one way.

I can believe there are keyfobs with RF receivers for some newer/fancier vehicles. I've just never seen one.

Same. The carmakers just don't care I guess.

on the other hand, the subtle noise of nature has a deep calming reach that I still find surprising

As long as we allow modern capitalism to be the driving force of society, these harmful things will never go away

I think you mean to say as long as humans continue to prioritize other things over these things, these things won’t change.

As opposed to what, a centralized economy? Because that went well for the people who have suffered it...

Maybe when the AGI overlords land they'll know how to plan an economy properly.

I'm not a fanboy of cut throat capitalism but your take seems poorly thought out. Can you describe in detail how these harmful things would magically disappear if capitalism were no longer the driving force of society? My socialist neighbors can be just as loud and annoying and inconsiderate as my capitalist neighbors.

"Capitalism" is a pattern that emerges from the behavior of humans, who act on the motivations and intentions they already have, and not an independent source of causality.

Reifying post-hoc descriptive models and regarding them as the source of a problem is a sure-fire way to make that problem intractable.

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