Over at FRK Lenore's posted the ever popular

[conuly]

"A World After Air Conditioning". Or whatever the title is, I'm not checking it.

And about three or four people have popped up specifically to say that life in Phoenix, Arizona would be impossible without air conditioning. (Several other people have observed that it'd simply be unbearable if people built houses to suit the climate.)

And you know, while I sympathize, I have to ask: If it's really unreasonable for the average person in good health to be expected to weather normal, well, weather in an area without intense technological assistance... should we really be living there in the first place?

Admittedly, I ask this while living in a city where we've fit lots and lots of people here using advanced technology such as elevators, but somehow that strikes me as different. (And I'm not saying nobody should ever use air conditioning either, exactly.... I'm not sure what I'm saying, other than that the city of Phoenix is not, in and of itself, a justification for the invention.)

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I suspect a lot of unpleasant environments got settled by poor people who couldn't afford to live in better places, but the land was free in the nastier places. You have to live somewhere, so they settled for what they could get. Then once you have people there, you have inertia, and you have the difficulty of moving, and you start to get things that make the place nice.