a defiant potato

There's no way that wasn't interpreted as a divine punishment.

Only $2.50 each!

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outdoor unit outside (the condenser), and you just drill a hole for the hose and cables.

There, problem solved. German windows have nothing to do with it. In places where AC units are uncommon, they are simply mostly unnecessary, or mostly unaffordable. Of course, the way climate is going, they are becoming less and less "unnecessary".

Meanwhile, there does appear to be some resistance to AC adoption. Some of it is for dumb reasons (aesthetics, "I'm not used to it so it's bad"), but there are also good reasons. By design, an AC unit cools an indoor space by emitting heat outside. There's no way around it. Add to that the energy consumption, and it's clear that a sudden large-scale adoption would make the streets hotter, and climate change worse. But that's for the long term. In the short term, people are already dying, so something's gotta give.

Topical example: one summer in the '80s, there was a freak heat wave in Greece, with many hundreds of casualties. At the time air conditioning was almost unheard of, and most people didn't even have electric fans. Well the fans immediately disappeared from all the stores because everyone bought one, and AC units started selling, and by now they are common. Not ubiquitous, but many residences have them, and at least public buildings and such are guaranteed to have them. Necessity conquers all. It would of course be better to do the necessary thing BEFORE the mass casualties. If only we could somehow predict them. :/

I think everyone should come to terms with the fact that AC is becoming necessary, and quickly equip, at the very least, public buildings and public transport, and any place where old people go. But also, ideally, we should be already making plans to radically rethink:

architecture

urban planning

work hours and labour rights

and rebuild cities from the ground up if that's what it takes. Because this is an emergency, and AC units alone won't cut it – they're a strain on the power grid, and they fail when it fails, and they can only improve indoor spaces. Tools at our disposal: trees, running water, roofed walkways, atriums, patios, fabric stretched from roof to roof to shield the streets from the sun, narrow streets, optimal orientation of streets and buildings and windows for better shade, materials science and technology, the careful study of tropical and subtropical architecture and urban planning, etc.

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

Per wikipedia:

The Titanic was made of steel, presumably to resist corrosion (i mean. thats why boats are made of steel i assume) but even when iron/steel rusts people did not expect to find like. decomposition. bacteria are EATING the titanic.

and there's wood furniture from the titanic that isn't decaying. hell, there are wood ships at the bottom of the ocean that archaeologists study. so the expectation people have for the titanic is not that the steel would decompose at the bottom of the ocean. Even in 100 years, since there are much more ancient preserved wooden ships iirc.

The sister ship HMHS Britannic is still perfectly preserved because of the way it sank, and partly in due to the coral that has grown around it keeping the structure in tact I believe was the reason.