Smackledorfer: BigNumber12: Air conditioning is what made this nation great fat

That really makes no sense. Do you really think people who can't stand the heat are going to pick up and go for a run? No, they'll be even less active. They'll be sipping mint julips in the shade


It's a pretty interesting theory to read up on, actually. The air conditioning itself isn't the sole factor, but what it enables when coupled with other ideas. Reasonably-priced air conditioning enables people to move to places that should otherwise be largely uninhabitable - deserts. And so, from an early age, they find themselves retreating indoors during the hottest parts of the year (most of it) to conditioned space, rather than being active outdoors like they would in a cooler climate. This is particularly true now that electronics offer endless entertainment in that cool, conditioned space.

This also produces people's trying to recreate their New England neighborhood in the middle of Nevada, and our fantastic national water redistribution system makes it possible, where it has no business being. But that's another issue.

Smackledorfer: BigNumber12: It's a pretty interesting theory to read up on, actually

No, its just a conflating of multiple things and blaming it on air conditioning.


Why are you getting defensive? You live in Michigan. Michigan-levels of use of air conditioning aren't the problem.

Air conditioning should also mean heating since the machine is conditioning the air to a temperature of your liking.

mephisto6:
Go live with my cousin Byron in Jackson Hole, WY.
He's a nordic, swede lookin dude, so not too hard to look at. He might put you to work insulating pipes in sub-zero weather, but that's just a bit of ditch-digging and you might have to boil water a few weeks here or there in order to bathe or drink.

No worries, though. you can just put on some more clothes.

at 4 am you can even help clear out the driveway with a shovel! Don't forget to de-ice your car by 5, though... you'll be done by around 6, which should give you plenty of time to navigate the frozen bridges and slowly spinning hunks of metal on your way to work.
No worries, though at 5pm you get to do it all over again. So, whaddya want for dinner? Power's out, wanna go get some wood for the stove? We'll be done eating and hand washing dishes by 10. Ok goodnight, lady. See you in about 4 hours.


Or, just go for a swim.

You sound bitter against people who hate the heat. I don't have a pool.

I actually lived in the mountains during my teen years. So here's another CSB:

When I was 16, I drove my dad's '90 pickup (with rear-wheel drive and 4 gears) to high school, which was at the bottom of the mountains. To make it back home in the winter, I'd drive the farthest I could toward my home until roads got too steep and the truck would start to skid. I'd then pull the truck to the side, put the chains on, and shovel snow into the bed, just to get enough weight on the rear-wheels to make it up the mountain. I carried the shovel, gloves, and chains around behind my bench seat for just such times. It made for a few days of awesome snowball fights, to have a truck-load of snow in the high school parking lot, but it melted all too fast, since just off the mountain, the temps went up about 20 degrees. My dad wouldn't let me put other heavy things in the truck bed, so that's the only way I made it to school and back for that whole winter.

Turns out that doing all of that was far easier than the things I've done just to keep somewhat cool in the heat, and I completely miss it. I'd love to be de-icing that old truck's windshield and shoveling my old steep driveway. I have millions of stories of far rougher times spent in the desert summers than I will ever have of my mountain winters. I would love your cousin's good life, and even doing insane manual labor in freezing temperatures. I love manual labor. You don't even know how much of a perfect life that would be. I swear, I daydream about owning a bunch of yaks, somewhere in the Siberian tundras. Icy living is easy-mode. Feeling nauseous and dizzy for entire summers because of over-heating during simple tasks, and lack of real a/c is physically and emotionally exhausting.

Boudica's War Tampon: theurge14: Try a humid Texas summer night where it's 10pm and it's still 90+ outside. Now the AC is off and all you have is a box fan and you're soaking your sheets with sweat.

I do not know how people in the Southeast get through the summer. I live in Arizona. 110 isn't bad when the humidity is low but jeebus I cannot understand how anyone can live through near 100 temperature and near 100 humidity.

Actually, that's an exaggeration.

Some miserable records from the Weather Underground Link

Appleton, Wisconsin on July 13, 2005 (during the murderous heatwave that killed 750 in Chicago): Air temp 101 F, dew point 90 F, heat index 148 F, humidity a mere 71%. Midway Airport saw 106 F, dew point 82 F, heat index 133 F, humidity 48%

Dharan, Saudi Arabia on July 8, 2003: Air temp 108, dew point 95, heat index 176 F, relative humidity 68%

100 F with 100% humidity would result in a heat index around 195 F.

(Steadman, 1979), describes the heat index. Steadman notes in his paper that his model assumes that the heat index ranges from 16 C to 50 C (61-122 F). Reports like Midway and Appleton above are, literally, off Steadman's charts; such calculations are extrapolations of a quadratic equation defined over relative humidity (in percent) and dry-bulb temperature. As such, they are not necessarily reliable beyond the domain over which they are calculated and the range of the function generated.