I have both airPods Pro Gen2 and a recent version of medically fitted hearing aids.

  TL;DR: Airpods are better than nothing as pseudo-hearing-aides and cheaper than my prescription hearing aids

  The Pro's were A LOT cheaper (more than a factor of 10) and the pros have the additional nicety of active noise suppression but:

          My hearing aids work better for speech: which can be literally life or death (or at least employed vs fired) when mishearing something important
          I regard that improved speech for hearing aids as worth the money

          I chose a more open air flow for my hearing aids in order to better deal with playing instruments and situational awareness

          The hearing aids are smaller and more comfortable (although bluetooth is a little iffy from time to time) and have longer lasting batteries

The pros are very nice in computer machine rooms (they handle RF interference and noise suppression) and are better than nothing for speech.

The balance between them may change in the immediate future with recent changes to hearing aid prices and a new tech . Your mileage may vary.

Apple rather slickly has each update of each recent iOS be specific to a phone. ONE physical phone. Probably to prevent the skeleton key scenario.

  Each "copy" (not really an appropriate word here) of the update is unique (I don't know the details) which makes it hard to just use the same binary to on every phone. Each "copy" only works on one phone.

Just a few thoughts:

There is a real advantage to back in the day: parametric statistics needs calculus but a lot of modern statistics
are more simulation-based so that could be stressed. Easier to understand (or at least less difficult) and usually
more accurate. Parametric statistics can wait.

Some appropriate subset of "How to Lie with Statistics" might be apropos early on and throughout the time spent.
It's practical information in life, gives a deeper understanding and is relatively fun. Care needs to be taken that this
isn't taken as "All Statistics Lie".

Consider bringing in language teachers for help. The words in statistics often have a subtle (or huge) difference
from common usage and they may be able to help with that. I had a mathematics background when I started statistics
and wasted a lot of time in early days because "variable" meant something different than what I was used to.

RealNetworks has a service, "RealTime", that works across most platforms for doing just this kind of thing. The use case explained to me was a family sharing video where much of the family is Windows but also there is a Unix person, a few Apple-or-nothing, and another few "Android All the Way".

Since this indeed describes my extended family, it was helpful.

> No company would want to give north korea or isis a reason to actively target undersea cables.

  It might give them MORE reasons but, given my understanding of their agenda, those two (at least) already have reasons
  to want a capability of targeting undersea cables.

  A bit more in the sensor department might at least give warning that something is about to be damaged
  and info about the thing doing the damaging.

It might be worth looking at INGRES (not INGRESS) and their business history.

They've managed to stay in business as long as Unix has had commercial databases (albeit with a close call every decade or so) and currently are in a similar position to yours but are still standing and still innovating. Many lessons in tech company survival, some of them of the "don't do that" variety to be learned there.

Sadly, the people that know the name tend to think of Ingres as what it was way back in the 70's-80's, not what it is, so the company is called "Actian" these days.

  I wonder if sleep apnea is considered dementia in this context?

  Sleep apnea is highly correlated with obesity at that age and it can give the sufferer a disturbingly
  similar experience to senile dementia when severe and untreated.

  A competent epidemiologist would control for the "They die before they develop dementia" effect.

  Given this is a peer reviewed study I think it hugely likely they controlled for that.

  Having gone through some hand nerve damage over the years I found it useful to have more than 1 keyboard;
  having my hands in different positions during the day has proved useful to preventing further problems.

  Most of my typing is done on a Unicomp Model M, which is very much an IBM Model M. I type most
  reliably there although the I can type longer at the Kinesis models and probably would be almost as fast if there
  if I really devoted the effort to it.

I find the clickety-clack of Model M type switches cheerful and I need all the happy thoughts possible when
debugging Ansible scripts.

I probably wouldn't inflict that on people in an open office.

Unix wasn't the the only OS written mostly in a portable language. Among the others was Primos. In the early days it was Fortran 66 (e.g. if-then but no if-then-else) Writing a screen editor in Fortran was an interesting experience.

  Later on they used PL/1 subset G.

  Does fiction include about 50% of the technical documentation available?

Two things helped me so far:

1) A Sleep Study

  I thought I was sleeping well because I fell asleep easily and stayed asleep. Nope: That
  was my body trying to make up in quantity what the sleep lacked in quality. I thought my problem was
  caused by too many electronic distractions (yeah some, but not most of it).

  You don't get enough deep and REM sleep, you don't have focus and your ability to remember new things takes a BIG hit.
  My problem was ridiculously easy to treat and I deeply regret spending several years not realizing I was being fuzzier than
  I needed to be for want of a couple slightly uncomfortable nights wired up.

  2) Turning off the router at night

  Also helpful: I put my home router on a timer. 10pm, BANG! No internet on anything but my phone, which is OK to use
  for short periods as an internet device and keeps me in touch if need be. Nonetheless it's much easier for me to decide to close
  my eyes now. That probably only works because my phone screen isn't very big.

Pity we can't have this for capacitors (or so I expect: too cheap a part). I've never lost anything to an exploding battery but exploding capacitors....yes. On the other hand, the capacitors I'm involved with have never been directly dangerous to my flesh.

At my job it was noticed I was getting increasingly conservative about the systems. Some of that was justified but eventually I found I had a medical problem that made learning new things hard; it had been gradually messing with memory....very very slowly so as to be hard to notice until it became obvious something was very wrong indeed and being fired became likely.

    Learning new stuff when you can't reliably remember what you learned the day before will rapidly decrease ones enthusiasm, even if one recognizes change as necessary.

    Before losing insurance, I started insisting on checking out possible causes. If you're lucky (I was) there might be a simple fix: diet change, CPAP, whatever. That's the good news. Not so good: the longer a problem goes on, the longer it may take to recover and one may never get back to 100%. Very scary but it's better to get back 90% than to continue to degrade.

    I'm convinced that for some significant fraction of older workers, this kind of thing can be some or all of their problem and I urge people reading this who have memory and learning problems they didn't use to have: check out stuff like sleep apnea, vitamin deficiency and the like.

It doesn't and yes that is sad....although Android was single-user-account until recently. I have wondered if that's a feature for Apple: makes sharing a single device trickier so each person has one.