RagingNerdoholic

Where are you seeing this?

I took this screenshot from 338 Canada five seconds ago:

That's still from March 9th. Things are changing fast.

Ah yes, certainly this will never ever be abused by law enforcement ever.

Government: "wear a mask to protect others"

Conservatives: "Nuh uh! You can't tell me what to do! Hurr durr honk honk muh freedumbs!!"

Government: "wearing a mask is strictly prohibited"

Conservatives: "As you wish, my sire, whose boot shall I lick?"

It’s important to note that the mask is far more effective in stopping the wearer from transmitting a virus than it is in stopping the wearer from contracting a virus.

While this is generally true, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a properly-fitted respirator provides very good protection. Even more so if it's an elastomeric with P100 filters (99.97% PFE with absurdly high fit factors).

But...

You're absolutely right, if everyone would consistently wear at least an earloop respirator like a KF94 or KN95 — even if the quality is a bit sketchy and even if the fit is less than ideal — that would cut down on viral particulate emissions a great deal and task your own respirator with orders of magnitude less particulate to filter out.

Just saying, "it's capitalism's fault," is not entirely incorrect, but it is definitely oversimplifying. Chronic diseases are complex, incredibly challenging to solve, and can vary a great degree by individual.

The government gave the NIH a billion dollars to study long COVID and the result ... fuck-all. Literally all they did was loosely define some things that the enormous and growing patient community already knew. No treatments, no diagnostics, nothing.

To be clear, capitalism certainly plays a substantially antagonistic role in solving chronic illness, but just throwing money at a problem doesn't solve it either.

There's no such thing as an "electric car tire." They just use standard passenger vehicle tires rated for the appropriate weight class.

"Tougher" just means they handle more weight by holding higher air pressure, so they'll have more layers of steel, kevlar, canvas, etc. The materials that makes contact with the road still wear the same.

I know motorcycle tires need replacing fairly frequently, but I had no idea it was a racket. Although, I'd think they'd generally need to be softer for maximum traction on two wheels.

Is it not because they have so little contact area compared to passenger vehicle tires?

They're not prototypes, they exist and they're called tweels. They're only really useful for low-speed industrial equipment where ride quality is a low priority.

I've been saying this for a while. Not only that, but electric cars are substantially heavier than their ICE-powered equivalents, meaning both tires and roads wear out more quickly. Plus, there's a ton of pollution and other environmental damage caused by battery production that at least partly offsets the lack of tailpipe emissions.

As loathe as I am to admit, because I'm a car enthusiast and I enjoy driving, cars cannot be the default mode of transportation everywhere indefinitely; they will always need to exist, but should mostly be for small centres with no capacity to implement transit infrastructure and last mile type of things.