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Comment by bonniemuffin | Hacker News Reader

It seems like a pretty big jump from "wait a few days for air conditioner parts" to "modern life is no longer possible"!

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> It seems like a pretty big jump from "wait a few days for air conditioner parts" to "modern life is no longer possible"!

Where there are delays, they aren't necessarily “a few days” but months, and, yeah, life in, say, California's Central Valley in a hot, dry summer without AC is somewhere between unpleasant and intolerable.

Not just California.

I live in Michigan -- about once every 7 years we get unseasonably warm summers. It's been 85-95 degrees through June with the sort of humidity that makes it feel like you have to actively think about breathing.

People die from heatwaves; modern conveniences like A/C make that sort of thing a lot less common these days, so while the original comment writer's attitude that "modern life is no longer possible" may have been meant to poke fun at "first world problems" -- yeah, I get it, we all have it pretty good -- these "conveniences" do more than just "make quality of life a little better"[0].

[0] Not saying there aren't downsides, either, but I'm not willing to give up my A/C for 'em.

The 2003 heat wave in Europe apparently killed about 70,000 people. Home AC is somewhat less common in Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crvi.2007.12.001

Not just home A/C but many of the hotels I visited did not have A/C (or it was set for the whole building, and way too hot at that).

We visited the UK in late May during one of those heat waves and got stuck on the London Underground in a very hot train. Lots of fun!

This person lives in a mild climate zone

There's at least a billion people that live nearer to the equator than anyone in Europe or the USA and don't have air conditioning.

Nearness to the equator is not the only relevant factor to the importance of AC. If you turn off the AC in many places in the USA in the summer, lots of people die.

Those places already have lots of people die from heat waves, and modern society still functions.

Note that the original comment didn’t say “modern society.” It said “modern life” and was very clearly describing the commenter’s ability to keep their own household running.

I didn't take "How much longer before modern life is no longer possible, I wonder..." to mean "how long until I'm forced to call in a specialist." The rest of their post is personal though, so I'm not confident in my interpretation that "modern society" would mean the same thing.

> Those places already have lots of people die from heat waves

AFAIK; the pieces where lots of people tend to die from heat waves in are the places where there isn't a regular annual need for AC.

I don't know where that would refer to in the US. Illinois? Oklahoma? Missouri?

Which, in the US, is Hawaii and some of the minor islands, and maybe parts of Alaska.

also Maine (in most years)

I knew a guy who lived in Maine before he moved to Nevada. He said the weather was 'not fit for man nor beast'

Latitude isn't the only thing that determines climate. Phoenix AZ is a lot hotter than Ecuador, Kenya, or Indonesia.

Also, this isn't just about cooling; it's about heating, too. Imagine living in Saskatoon SK without a working heat source. Nobody does that. If you're not relying on electric/gas heat in such places, you're relying on fire.

Heating is extremely simple compared to cooling. There will never be a part shortage for heating appliances. A space heater is basically some high-resistance wire and a fan.

One important factor is that there are design decisions made which are optimized for air conditioning such as buildings without any windows that open.

Im from a tropical country and houses are built with consideration for airflow, such as concrete walls with no insulation, gaps in the roof, etc. Also, days are shorter(no 8 pm daylight). American suburban homes are built with central AC in mind of course I dont expect people to know how to deal with heat without experience living in hot countries.

This is somewhat true for older (say, 1920s) American houses. There’s some consideration for airflow and making sure that the tree shade on the roof creates a strategic sun heat gradient.

> There's at least a billion people that live nearer to the equator than anyone in Europe or the USA and don't have air conditioning.

Nearer to the equator pretty consistently means less seasonal variation in temperature, it does not mean higher summer peak temperatures.

They're also less economically productive than people in cooler climate or with air conditioning.

Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore: "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

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