I think most people learned that because of COVID, didn’t they? N95s (worn properly) block 95% of pm2.5, which takes a danger level of 400 μg/m³ (well into the hazardous range) down to 20 μg/m³ (about half the cutoff for “unhealthy”).

Yet only a handful of people locally were wearing N95s when the levels were that high, locally. People just don’t care about their health, I guess? Not sure how else to interpret it.

The Paradox of Tolerance

Holy shit, that’s insane. No wonder the US has triple the healthcare spending of their peers with worse health outcomes.

Sure, but even so: that hardware isn’t going to be obsolete or wear out for a long time.

Compared with going to a concert that can be $10K for 2 people to attend a single show.

idk about these; I haven’t driven significantly in Toronto in over a decade, but Calgary has mobile speed cameras in unmarked cars, so they can be moved around. They just look like a car parked on the side of the road. And people slow down for school zones in Calgary.

I think they’re very effective. As soon as you cross the border to BC, where automated speeding cameras are illegal, people drive about 10km/h faster, it feels like. On Deerfoot (in Calgary), you’d occasionally have someone pass at +30. On the Island Highway, +40 isn’t atypical. (That’s 150 km/h… Crazy fast, especially knowing that kinetic energy is the square of velocity.) And people regularly blast through school zones in BC at +30, and +40 isn’t overly unusual (70 km/h in a 30 zone). (Comparatively, 50 in a 30 zone was the usual max I noticed in Alberta).

Or maybe it’s just that BC drivers are massive speeders, and the speed cameras thing isn’t the reason. Hard to know without data.

Nobody here has mentioned the elephant in the room: Corporations are being allowed to “legally” dodge $15 billion in taxes every year