Slashdot Mirror
Air Quality in San Francisco is So Bad that Uber Drivers Are Selling Masks Out of Their Cars (recode.net)
California's devastating wildfires are causing unhealthy air conditions for locals breathing in harmful fumes. From a report: In San Francisco, which currently has the second-worst-rated air quality out of any city in the world, one driver was spotted selling N95 respirator masks for $5 apiece. That's significantly above market rate. Right now you can buy a 10-pack of similar masks for about $13 on Amazon. But considering the masks are sold out at many local stores, riders may be willing to dish out the cash for immediate access to the protective gear. Further reading: California needs to reinvent its fire policies, or the death and destruction will go on.
Smoke is coming from the Butte County fire that is 180 miles away. Otherwise, air quality is generally good in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The laws do exist.
But they have to be enforced.
The way trash and waste builds up in city areas. Tent cities and parked RV are allowed in city areas with no enforcement.
That political view of using state laws extends to natural fuel and getting ready.
Laws and tax payers money would have to be used to prevent the build up of waste and junk.
Understand the dead tree issue and do something about it.
Building in zones near wildlands.
Do some fuel reduction projects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
most of the land that's going up in smoke is Federal. As has been pointed out in previous threads the Fed needs to fund clearing dead trees, but that's expensive and those tax cuts don't pay for themselves (no, they really don't).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Actually San Francisco has finally opened the portal to Hell it has been trying to summon for ages by sacrificing homeless people and using Poop-Magics.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
California did not stop the forest service from doing controlled burns... ever. I live in a wooded area in California (mostly National Forest surrounds me, some state parks) and there have been controlled burns every year since I've lived here (42 years).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Gaining: See Southern Border. Losing: See NV, TX, AZ.
Don't worry about it.
Those Red state Republican enthusiasts hate California because it shows the liberal policies can lead to a great economy and a great place to live.
It shows the lies that are spun by the right for what they are.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Fuel reduction in about 80% of the burnt areas is a federal responsibility.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
While the controlled burns and clearing haven't stopped, they've absolutely been reduced. Every article I've read so far has confirmed this. However, it doesn't sound like a one issue problem. (ie the California government is stopping the forest management from doing controlled burns) It sounds like there are multiple agencies involved, and they may have contradictory agendas. If air quality is important to one, and controlled burns harm air quality,then it's hard to justify burning. Additionally, more harms are being built in these regions, making controlled burning a more difficult prospect. Now forest management has to worry about the impacts the fire/smoke may have on residents.
Most of these lands are federal lands, and federal investment in forest management hasn't kept up with the needs. CA doesn't have the funding or manpower to treat the problems which spread across millions of acres of land. The constant drought CA has been experiencing makes it even more imperative to do prevention, but since that drought is spread so far, there's no way they have the resources to do the prevention...
Do I even need to get into PG&E not doing their due diligence to ensure their lines don't start fires in sensitive areas?
Needless to say, this is a catastrophic end to a problem that's resulted from multiple factors that are all difficult to manage in their own right.
If someone thinks the world ends at the border of their hometown, they are a HICK, even if their hometown is NYC.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Facts?
These articles don't say anything about the Forest Service being prevented from doing controlled burns.
vs
The U.S. Forest Service was sued when it tried to create a six-mile fuel break and eventually dropped the project. The opposition from environmental organizations was out of concerns that they would affect “sensitive habitat.” The Santa Barbara County fire chief is now calling for the creation of a network of fuel breaks to provide a frontline defense against future major fires, but these efforts also face pushback.
Read more here: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/...
Being a lying sack of shit work well for you ?
I don't believe California did that in recent history. In the past though it was indeed the policy nationwide to stamp out fires as swiftly as possible, which is not good forest management.
Now there is indeed talk that you could send in loggers to thin out dead trees. The real problem however is the excessive brush and undergrowth, and there's no economic incentive for a logging company to clear that out. Also the dead trees are not high quality wood, so logging companies really want to take out healthy trees when they want to thin a forest.
One issue with controlled burns is that these have gotten out of control in the past. We do need more of this, but not now at this time. Forest management in California is not in a bad shape.
In San Francisco, which currently has the second-worst-rated air quality out of any city in the world, one driver was spotted selling N95 respirator masks for $5 apiece. That's significantly above market rate. Right now you can buy a 10-pack of similar masks for about $13 on Amazon.
Truth is, under most circumstances you'd always buy shit cheaper at a supermarket or whatever and often in volume if it's non-perishable. Which means there's very little point at selling something at 30% or 50% mark-up. I've paid 5 euros at a camping grounds on the weekend for a pack of batteries that would normally cost 1 euro. How often would that happen, maybe once a month? You're not going to get rich making 4 euros/month selling batteries. They still wouldn't sell well for 2 euros/pack. At some point you have to cease looking at "rational" cost and look at lost opportunity costs. I was there, out of batteries, the nearest proper store was far away and the alternative was probably to not buy batteries at all. It wasn't a trap or anything like that, it was just a duuuuuuuh moment as I realized all the batteries were dead.
Honestly, I feel that this is sometimes the exact opposite of the sunk cost fallacy - we've spent tons of money to get here but then we're going to skimp on the last dollars to actually take advantage of it. Like you go to a foreign country with airplane tickets and hotel and whatnot but then it's like should we really go out to eat or just grab some snacks from the local store. And I'm like the opportunity cost of going out to eat at a fancy Greek restaurant is just the cost of going out to a fancy restaurant, we've already paid for everything else. Yes in isolation we can go to McDonald's and it's a lot cheaper, but in total we're then paying a ton of money for the same shitty experience we could get at home. If we ever wanted to do it later, we'd have to re-sink the cost of going to Greece so the opportunity is "cheap" here and now. So... if you're about to step of out the taxi and see smog hell, is $5 worth it? I think yes.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I just posted a bunch of links showing that yes that is ongoing.
Hell even as the fires are raging the Santa Barbara fire chief is still getting pushback on creating a firebreak.
Just by the evidence of the forests burning in massive conflagrations it's hard to see how you can say "Forest management in California is not in bad shape"
Every trip you take with Uber or Lyft increases the miles per person travelled by 40-60 percent, on average.
Solution: use public transit, an e-bike, or an e-scooter, and buy a good air mask. And, based on the months we lived amongst forest fire smoke in Washington State, some goggles (the ski goggles help). Also, add some blinky lights, because smoke reduces visibility.
If you do drive, turn your air onto "recirculate" - you're just sucking in microparticles that aren't screened with auto air conditioning filters. You're going to need to replace your air filters as soon as this ends, by the way.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think nationally, San Diego is given way higher marks as having the best climate in the country, Los Angeles is arguably warmer and certainly less windy than San Francisco. Berkeley is fucking frigid most days because it gets the full blast of pacific air every afternoon.
Redwood City, Stanford both have far superior climates Stanford University exists 30 miles south of San Francisco for a reason, it could easily have been built in the city.
Curious if you have visited San Francisco outside of the indian summer season? San Francisco is a great city to live in due to lack of rain and snow, but I don't think anyone (besides you) has ever called San Francisco weather best in the country. Like the other guy said, the cities on the other end of the tunnel live in an entirely different microclimate, completely disconnected from San Francisco which is basically a mountainous peninsula 7 miles out in the pacific ocean, and the climate reflects that.
moox. for a new generation.
It's one guy. One stupid picture of one guy offering a Home Depot mask for $5 taped to his seat gone viral, and the echo chamber of lazy news goes crazy.
When the real world turns
You don't have a monopoly on what is the "real world". They are as much "real world" as you are.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Why has this polarizing stupidity become regularly modded up here?
Come on, I would think that regulations should be used to stop all of that bad air. Issue solved.
I agree. Regulations should be used to stop all of that bad air, starting with building codes. It should be illegal to build a flammable house. Steel building, earth bag, rammed earth, compressed straw bale, cob, adobe... we have available to us numerous functional methods of construction which do not produce flammable structures, some of which are thousands of years old. They are literally as old as civilization.
Some of the first laws in California prohibited the starting of forest fires. But that was how the natives avoided this problem. They had over ten thousands years of civilization in the regions currently on fire to figure out how it worked. They set fires literally every year, and it cleared out the understory and made things better for everyone. All of these areas of California which are burning are not only going up like torches, but the undergrowth was full of poison oak. Fire is the best way to control it, but you have to do it every year or else you're letting it get big enough that when you do finally burn it, you will actually put people at health risk due to the oils in the plant being dispersed into the atmosphere. Some people are very allergic to it.
We didn't want to permit that burning to occur because it interfered with our ability to build flammable homes with trees looming over them, but that has always been a shit idea. Now everyone can see why. Still, I haven't heard one word from our fearless leaders about building codes that would solve these problems. All they've actually done that's meaningful is permit PG&E to pass on the costs of fires to customers instead of having to pay it out of the company coffers and profits. PG&E has started some of the largest fires in Californian history by not keeping up with power line maintenance, specifically tree clearing, and the people of California are going to have to pay for that now.
Of course, they didn't start all of the fires (including the Camp fire itself) and the real underlying problem is that we need to burn these forests every year or two. Nobody should be permitted to build anything flammable in a forest that isn't entirely made out of untreated wood and only used seasonally so that when it burns it doesn't matter, or that can't be trivially towed out of there yearly during scheduled burns.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Banning straws, "sanctuary" state, endless regulations, cities filled with people living in tents on the sidewalk, streets covered in human shit and needles, all while whole towns burn amid yearly wildfires. Hotel California is rotten.
When it hits 50 in Alaska the bugs have 1 week to fly, fuck and reproduce. South of the Arctic circle the bugs are much more relaxed. Granting the mosquito is Minnesota's state bird. They're barely the size of sparrows though, small for you.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'