I wonder how much we could reduce A/C usage by changing how we build. Contractors seem ignorant of traditional practices that used to help in part no doubt because they think they can throw A/C at bad design.
For instance, what if we used masonry instead of wood frame houses (masonry tends to insulate better; look at infrared pictures of American wood frame houses and European masonry). Also, orienting houses in proper relation to the sun and arranging rooms in a way that facilitates better air flow (embrace the summer draft). Also, evaporative cooling. I am not proposing we eliminate A/C, only find ways and build in a way that allows us to cool houses for cheaper or even for free.
"suddenly I’m hearing a lot about “brown” identity (we’ve been reduced to a color) from white people and white dominated institutions"
Even here, you're committing the same fallacy by using the term "white people" which is promoted by the same people. There are no "white people". I presume you know something about European history. Try finding unity in that mess that could legitimize the notion of a coherent "white people". One "white" country subjugated the other. Much of the continent was never involved in any colonial endeavors, and it ignores the imperialism elsewhere in the world. "White people" almost smells like an attempt by former colonial powers to diffuse responsibility. They can't deny they were involved, but they can obfuscate it by unjustly spreading the blame across all of Europe, all Europeans. It's also a way to get ahead of the problem and to draw from victim cache by association. You see similar attempts by some to downplay German atrocities during WWII by exaggerating complicity in conquered countries.
But I agree with your general point and the right to your suspicion. There are political incentives to promote this kind of anti-intellectual stuff. All it does is reinforcement racist ideologies that e.g the Americans specialized in. It also results in division and conflict, something political regimes have long used to distract the people and keep the ire of the public away from the ruling class.
It sound like you're talking about, or at least brushing up against, prudential judgement[0]. Sometimes, the optimal move is not to seek the optimum.
An obvious class of problems is where determining the optimum takes more time than the lifetime of the problem. Say you need to write an algorithm at work that does X, and you need X by tomorrow. If it would take you a week to find the theoretical optimum, then the optimum in a "global" sense is to deliver the best you can within the constraints, not the abstract theoretical optimum. The time to produce the solution is part of the total cost. An imprudent person would either say it's not possible, or never deliver the solution in time.
Yeah, that is pretty close to what I'm talking about. Coming at it from a different perspective - learning theory - but it seems to be the same overarching idea. I'm extending it a little though to something similar to anachronistic reasoning being incorrect - you can't divorce prudential decisions from their context. When you do judgement of the decisions is flawed because it doesn't acknowledge the actual constraints the decision was made under.
The absurd overuse of AC seems like a peculiarity of the United States. Walk into an American household in the summer, and you find people watching TV with blankets or a sweatshirt because the temperature is so low. In the winter, the opposite is true: the house is overheated, so everyone wears short sleeves. You’re pretty much forced to do this in older apartment buildings where you have no thermostat and the landlord cranks the heat up to Saharan temperatures. The only way to regulate the temperature is to open windows, and that doesn’t always work well. Tell me that’s not wasting energy. Maybe start there if you want to actually contribute meaningfully.
Such a bizarre set of practices. The point of HVAC is to bring the temperature to a comfortable level while you wear season appropriate clothing, not to eliminate or invert seasonal differences.
For shared housing like apartments I kind of get extremes opposite the outside temperature. I can be in my underwear (work from home for the win) still a little warm and my wife will be wearing long clothes and one of those hoodie blankets. If there were a weight differential I imagine this would only get worse. Multiply that by everyone living in a building, you're going to get some people far from the mean. Things like wearing tons of clothes in the AC and opening windows in the winter are just ways to give more granular control so it's not trying to fit everyone into one bucket. In single homes it tends towards more plain inefficient as the number of people to optimize for lowers but that leads to the next point.
In general I don't think efficiency is really a problem. It's self regulating, being more inefficient costs you more so you must find it worth it and that's your choice. The real issue is the incentive mismatch of dirty energy sources being cheaper than clean energy sources. There is nothing inherently problematic with someone deciding using 2 mWh instead of 1 mWh in a month is how they want to do things or deciding it's not worth trying to change things around to optimize.
It's a thing in the nicer parts of India too, but I agree. I remember going to NYC when it was quite hot and seeing Toy Story 3. The cinema was so cold, each seat had a huge AC blasting on it at an arctic temperature. I'm not sure what the intention is. It does seem to me, as you say, that the greatest desire of americans is to live in the southern hemisphere, whether unconsciously or consciously. My guess? Americans have a strong erotic lust for both power and the subversion of nature, so it is almost sexually arousing to demonstrate enough power, even unnecessarily, to totally reverse the seasons. See also: guns, massive cars with 10 cup holders, huge interstate roads with 5 lanes in each direction, extremely consumer-engineered foods, etc.
I once heard that certain car models couldn't be sold on the US market without changes because the AC didn't cool the interior fast enough after sitting in the sun.
I'm not sure if this was just a joke. I could totally see this being true whichsays a lot already.
The vulnerable narcissist vs. the grandiose narcissist. That is, the Hollywood-archetypal "nerd vs. jock", though I have also met some grandiose nerds in my time in addition to the vulnerable stock.
On a different node, I also see that accusing someone of "narcissism" can itself be an expression of envy. If you succeed, you can debilitate someone else with doubt and guilt to prevent them from pursuing what they want.
I'm not sure what you mean by karma in this case, but I wanted to note that the word "supernatural" is very often misused. Once you start prodding people about what they mean by "supernatural", you quickly discover that they don't know what "natural" or "physical/material" mean, much less what "supernatural" means, and the whole conversation descends into grumbling.
Here's one definition of "supernatural order" [0].
Perhaps only as part of a way to ease those with low income. But this is no good in general. You are charging one person more than another for the same good simply because of higher income. This is price discrimination and is unjust. Usury can work in an analogous way, such as when someone raises prices to exploit increased need even though the cost of production of the good sold is the same.
> property owners provide almost no value
They provide shelter and must maintain that property. Problems occur when they begin to charge unjustly for services rendered. This calls for regulation, not state ownership. No need to go to extremes.
> The current setup creates guettos [sic] by default, by siloing people with different monetary and social capital into different building and areas, hurting social mobility
Social mobility isn't the only consideration and not the summum bonum and it exists precisely to allow people to sort themselves into social classes (otherwise, why have social mobility in the first place). People of a given social class tend to live closer to each other because they share class cultural similarities, concerns, and affinities. That doesn't mean there is no contact between people of different classes, but the solution isn't to mix everyone up into a uniform mass. There's a middle way between the hermetically sealed ghetto and uniform distribution, and it doesn't involve violating the principle of subsidiary.
Ultimately, it is poverty that is a problem, not having a lower or higher income as such.
Our culture is in love with bullshitting. If you can bullshit to get what you want (ostensibly), then you're the man. Notice how getting away with things is glorified. It's like you managed to hack the Matrix or steal the cookie from the cookie jar your mommy didn't want you to touch. It's the childish satisfaction that you're hot shit because you got past the grown ups.
Of course, you can get away with a lot of bad things. The question is: should you do such things? The answer is: no. No one of any sense of dignity will lie, cheat, steal, or bullshit. No one who know how harmful it is to themselves to do such things will do them. It is beneath them and their love themselves too much to want to harm themselves. It's degrading. Wine won through illicit means tastes like urine anyway, if it tastes like anything at all. It's like the devil has offered you a glass of Chateau Lafite under the condition that you hand him your taste buds, or that you let him take a dump in it first.
Give a shit about things worth giving a shit to the degree that they are worthy of being given a shit about. Don't worry about approval from others. Virtue is its own reward. Don't whine. Don't be envious.
> in awe of the natural world as some do with religion
I have a real problem with the distinction between "religious people" and "non-religious people" because it presumes a distinction that I don't think exists. Everyone takes something to be the highest good. Most philosophers (for most of human history, anyway) and what you call religious people typically take God to be the highest good, the supreme summum bonum. Others worship pleasure or power or Man or nature or whatever else. In this sense, everyone is religious. We just differ about what the highest good is and what Man's orientation toward that good is.
What you call religious people do experience awe at creation. Indeed, God is not generally knowable directly, but creation is taken to tell us about the creator or first cause (what is in the effect must be in some way in the cause for you cannot give what you do not have).
> mysticism can be fun in a world with rules.
Two problems. First, mysticism isn't obscurantism. I believe Rahner somewhat obnoxiously called mystery "inexhaustible intelligibility" which is to say that true mystery is fully intelligible, but we cannot exhaust the knowing of that thing. I might imagine this to be something like trying to swallow the Nile. There's no end to it. The mystery par excellence for Catholics, then, is the beatific vision.
Second, what do you mean by "rules"? There are no rules, but things do have natures and what we call "scientific laws" are just shorthand descriptions of tendencies of things of a certain nature. There are no externalized laws "out there" that "govern" the world from without, imposing order onto what is otherwise some kind of unintelligible chaos. Things themselves are ordered by virtue of what they are. It's important not to commit the reification fallacy here w.r.t. "law". Furthermore, it almost sounds like you're saying that what you call religion is somehow antithetical to there being natures and principles. On the contrary, that is essential to something like Catholicism. Read the first few verses of the Gospel of John. Jesus is identified with the Logos, which is to say something like the order of the universe which was made incarnate in the hypostatic union. Natural law theory, something traditionally embraced by the Catholic Church, presupposes not only the utter intelligibility of the universe, but that things have natures and that the basis for ethics is human nature.
So what I sense here is a number of presuppositions, among them that "religion" (a word itself too broad and vague) is essentially (and only) an emotional phenomenon, which, in the case of something like Catholicism, isn't true.
> I have a real problem with the distinction between "religious people" and "non-religious people" because it presumes a distinction that I don't think exists
The distinction between people who believe that someone is watching and judging and people who don't does exist (ask them, they'll tell you which camp they fall in to).
I suspect he is referring to what is underneath powering the surface level appearances and processes that we interact with? Here the distinctions are quite different imho.
For instance, what if we used masonry instead of wood frame houses (masonry tends to insulate better; look at infrared pictures of American wood frame houses and European masonry). Also, orienting houses in proper relation to the sun and arranging rooms in a way that facilitates better air flow (embrace the summer draft). Also, evaporative cooling. I am not proposing we eliminate A/C, only find ways and build in a way that allows us to cool houses for cheaper or even for free.