MichaelBurjack

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Productivity improvement:

- investing in digitization, automation, or technology to enhance business productivity and competitiveness

- reshoring production, research & development (R&D) operations, recruiting highly qualified personnel (HQP) and expertise

Market expansion and diversification:

- developing and diversifying markets to help businesses find new customers

- business support, market development and diversification, and guidance services (e.g., advice for businesses from a sectoral expert organization)

Strengthening supply chains and trade resilience:

- optimizing supply chain logistics and ensuring compliance with standards to gain market access and/or enhance sales

- strengthening domestic supply chains and facilitating internal trade to increase the resilience of businesses and reliability of domestic markets

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This $1B program — even if it all went straight to subsidizing tariffs on Canadian imports — would be a pretty small rounding error out of the total $200B raised through tariffs from the article.

If anything, RTRI funds are largely about efficiency and pivoting to new markets. While there may be some outcomes that result in producers being able to lower their export costs, they're not "paying for" US tariffs.

Edit: formatting.

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Maybe this article works better for you, and if not, I'm sure you're just as capable at using Google as I am. There are many other high-quality studies that cover this topic in exhaustive detail.

I consider outdoor air to be unshared, except in cases of large dense crowds (such as say outdoor festivals or sporting events).

I consider risky shared air to be indoor air with one or more other individuals that are not known to be taking infection-prevention precautions.

One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.

For example, a CO₂ reading of 2300ppm (common in a small or medium room with a few others, or larger rooms with a crowd or conference room, or in a car) means 5% of your air is rebreathed (5% of your intake is output from another person's lungs).

A way to think about this is we take ~20 breaths a minute on average. So in that scenario, it would be equivalent to one breath every minute coming directly from someone else's lungs. If they happen to be contagious with an airborne contagion (such as Covid, or influenza, or RSV), there's a high likelihood that you will catch it if you're spending more than a short time in that environment.

There are nuances, such as maybe the air is being scrubbed (eg by a HEPA filter) which won't affect the CO₂ levels but will drastically lower the infectious risk of that environment.

But I'll offer one reply at your word that it's genuine and not passive-aggressive.

1. I am currently dealing with the after-effects of a previous Covid infection that requires expensive, ongoing medical treatment. I'm not anxious to test what additional infections may cause.

2. Wearing an N95 respirator is a cheap and easy preventative measure that is highly effective.

3. I adjust my habits based on measured risk. In my part of the world (Alberta), the current risk forecast for November 8-21 is that approximately 1 in every 81 people are currently infected with Covid. I relax my masking when it's 1 in 10,000 or less (which is not an unreasonable number; it's been there in the past).

4. Recent medical studies suggest that repeated Covid exposure is particularly harmful for children. Long Covid is now the #1 chronic condition in children in the US (displacing asthma as the top chronic childhood condition). As a parent, I see it as my responsibility to give my children the best chance at a long, healthy, medical-intervention-free life.

A few links (or just use Google):

Google is your friend; this [1] is but one France-specific example of coverage. You can find many similar articles in jurisdictions across Western Europe raising concern specifically in the last month or two.

Edit:

Many jurisdictions stopped collecting and/or sharing robust datasets in 2023 (KFF even calls attention to this). This often means digging through opaque reports to get useful data.

Here's an example [2] from the UK government, in PDF format, but bottom of Page 10 looks pretty "surge-y" to me over the last couple months and not yet at peak.

Edit:

Another example of good data horrible to access. Scotland wastewater monitoring [3] I can't provide a direct link; have to click on "Respiratory pathogens" and the first chart is wastewater monitoring; July 2024 shows the highest "surge" in levels since 2022.

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