curry, spicy, mahou shoujo

Repost @pazispallas

Tiina & her minuls

If you bring up the concept of air conditioners with anybody on the continent, they will explain to you that they don't need them. They will do this consistently, with several reasons given; they may argue that the climate doesn't get hot in summer (it does), that units are expensive (less than heating), that it causes environmental damage (less than heating, per temperature degree). This is because they have been brainwashed by an evil wizard.

It is ninety degrees right now in Freedom units, the buildings are all designed to trap heat, and all the Europeans are sitting around me miserable and sad and irritable, clearly in need of an air conditioner, but too much in the thrall of the evil wizard. Work and travel have ground to a halt, everybody is trying to go out shopping because shops are the one place not cursed by the evil wizard. But still! Still! They refuse to consider that there is a straightforward technological solution to this widespread misery.

I don't think hammering on this works at all, though. It's like that thing where people are more likely to entrench their anti-vax opinions when you try to argue with them about child mortality figures: the more costly it is, and the more people die, the more it gets entangled with identity and stuck fast as a cultural practice. My guess is that the more effective way would be to establish a beachhead, and subsidize a/c units for the people most open to the idea. Let the rest follow suit as it becomes the 'done thing.'

Still, questions of strategy are a little gauche, in that they treat people as puzzles to be solved and not fellow-travelers. When you say "hey, summer is going to be killing thousands of people every year from now on, but we have a solution and here's how to fix it," and people respond "no, we'll just take the excess mortality," then... that's that, to some degree. This isn't like vaccination, where a lack of a/c is somehow dangerous to others or antisocial. There's no law or anything. They just do it.