LaTeX approximate tilde: ~ vanishes, \textasciitilde looks missing

In LaTeX body text, ~10 prints ' 10' because ~ is a non-breaking space, so the character silently disappears. \textasciitilde compiled under lualatex with the Times-style font of the mcdowellcv class, but it rendered tiny and raised, and the user reported it as not showing. $\sim$10 renders a visible tilde, though it is wide and math-styled, and the user still found it odd. Rewording as a range (10-15 hrs) avoided the glyph entirely. Check rendered output by cropping the PDF to an image, because text extraction won't show how the glyph looks.