Having spent weeks at a time in Haiti, completely off the grid, I will say that the thing I missed most - way more than AC or modern plumbing - was cold drinks. We couldn’t partake of the river water, which was at least cool. We had to rely on room temp bottled water, day after day. Since there was no AC, room temp was mid-80’s. Wet, but not particularly refreshing.
Having no refrigeration also means much more planning around food. One only harvests what can be eaten or sold within a few days or it spoils. If an animal is slaughtered one must share with/sell to neighbors so it doesn’t go to waste. Even salt wasn’t easy to come by in that region. Food storage just pretty much doesn’t exist.
Kind of a “let them eat cake” attitude there. A family that can’t afford an air conditioner or a refrigerator isn’t going to be able to afford a whole house standby generator either.
I thought of this comment when I heard this NPR story today:
Srsly? When the story started out, I thought “oh, how awful that they are so desperately poor they can’t afford even basic toilets”. But even before they stated that many people simply prefer to shit in a field (WTF), I started thinking about other poor places I’ve spent significant time among poor populations (Kenya, Jamaica) where this didn’t seem to be at all common.
Combine that with it apparently being a common form of Indian entertainment for men to gather and watch the women shit in a field, and I’m raising a serious eyebrow at India right now. Just, no.
I mean, it’s bad enough if you have to do it in a pinch and it’s a field that doesn’t already have shit in it. But in a country with over ten times the population density of the U.S., and almost three times the density of China, for chrissakes, that field has got to be just, well, full of shit–right? Do they have some kind of informal system of rotation, with unshat-upon corridors? And my god, the smell and the flies! I can’t even.
I saw it labeled in a jar on a shelf with my own eyes. In yellow liguid. In 1967. Tell me I’m wrong, Oh You with an app but no experience. PLEASE tell me I’m a liar.
Serious question, though: Don’t a lot of manufacturing processes require temperature and humidity control? Things like cleanrooms for the manufacture of drugs and integrated circuits, or operating rooms (at least the filtering part of the “conditioning,”) or nuclear power plants? Would modern computers even be possible if those early giant mainframes hadn’t been cooled by an external system, and how much does a home computer’s cooling system owe to technology borrowed from the air conditioning industry?