Fireplaces are thousands of years old, because they are very simple. The most complex part is arranging air flow to not choke the room with smoke, and even that was present in prehistory. You can explain every aspect of their operation to a five year old, and if they’re a bright five year old, you won’t even have to repeat yourself later.
Air conditioners are less than two centuries old, because they are very complex mechanisms. No comparably-effective simpler technology exists, especially not for humid places. Many intelligent adults have some difficulty understanding their operation. (In hot, dry places adobe, for heat capacity, and windcatchers for active cooling, are pretty good low-tech tools, though still discovered well after the fireplace, definitely not explainable to a five year old, and maybe 20% as good as AC at best.)
Creating heat is so simple you can and will do it by accident. Moving heat is a difficult, precision operation. This has obvious practical consequences for the comparative difficulty of the problems; it’s much easier to fix ‘too cold’ than ‘too hot’.
This is all completely irrelevant to the question of whether I can have an air conditioner and/or a fireplace in my residence. You do see that, right?
You were responding to a comment about practical considerations relevant to living in a certain city. The question at hand is: what is, in practical terms, easier to deal with: hot summers, or cold winters? Everything you’ve written in your latest comment has zero bearing on this question. The comment is plainly a non sequitur. And your first comment was simply wrong, as, again, the matter at hand concerns the practical considerations, which are as bendini summarized them (and as I elaborated on).
What I would like to understand, and am hoping you might explain, is whether you disagree with my assessment of the practical considerations (and if so, on what basis), or, if you do not disagree, why you believe that your first comment makes sense as a reply to bendini’s.
Your objection was the non sequitur. My reply is not irrelevant to that objection, but that doesn’t matter, because that question is itself irrelevant to the one at the top of the thread. No one cares, and it does not matter, “whether I can have a fireplace in my apartment or not”.
The point is blindingly obvious, which is why I explained it in small words above, but I can excerpt the critical pieces for you:
Cold winters are a lot easier to work around than sticky summers. [...] Fireplaces [...] are very simple. [...] Air conditioners [...] are very complex mechanisms. [...] This has obvious practical consequences[...]; it’s much easier to fix ‘too cold’ than ‘too hot’.
Fireplaces and ACs are the simplest available solutions to those problems, and their difficulty is vastly different. More sophisticated solutions exist, but the difficulty of practically implementing them is likewise determined by the massive disparity in difficulty of the underlying problem.
This reply seems like either obstinacy and rudeness put together, or deliberate trolling. So I will bow out of this conversation, and trust that anyone reading this will see what is obvious.
Well, if they see the obvious it won’t be because you helped, since you still haven’t, despite very clear step by step explanation. I am rude because you have ignored all polite explanation and obstinately insisted on discussing irrelevancies.
For comparing potential cities and climates, the simplicity of the mechanism of adjusting the conditions to human preferences is essentially not a consideration. Cost matters, convenience matters, and I could be convinced that the simplicity of the methods people actually use matters. But fireplaces are irrelevant since essentially no one in Boston is using one as their primary method of heat.
Cost and convenience are almost entirely determined by simplicity. The fact that a fireplace is much simpler than an AC is directly causally linked to the lower cost in money and inconvenience of fixing the respective problems they address. Whether you actually use a fireplace is immaterial.
If we knew very little about the level of technology in a society or how expensive things work, sort of reasoning might make sense. Fireplaces are simple, heat pumps are not, so we might expect that dealing with excessive cold might be easier than dealing with excessive heat.
This is not at all the situation in which we are having this discussion. The actual mechanisms that people use for heating and cooling are much more complex than the simplest devices capable of the job, and the cost and convenience of cooling relative to heating has changed massively as technology has improved. If you’re trying to figure out whether Boston is a good fit for you, I still maintain fireplaces are irrelevant.
the cost and convenience of cooling relative to heating has changed massively as technology has improved
Not really, no. That’s the point: the problems retain their natural relative difficulty. The complexity suggests certain properties about the relative situation, and those properties have remained true.
The problems have not retained their natural relative difficulty, which is why the introduction and falling costs of Air Conditioning have led to large migration to the Sunbelt.
That doesn’t follow. The sun belt became habitable because it got easier to fix, but that wasn’t asymmetric in difficulty, just asymmetric in relevance; the difference between ‘pretty easy’ and ‘very easy’ matters much less than the difference between ‘really hard’ and ‘a little bit hard’.
Fireplaces are thousands of years old, because they are very simple. The most complex part is arranging air flow to not choke the room with smoke, and even that was present in prehistory. You can explain every aspect of their operation to a five year old, and if they’re a bright five year old, you won’t even have to repeat yourself later.
Air conditioners are less than two centuries old, because they are very complex mechanisms. No comparably-effective simpler technology exists, especially not for humid places. Many intelligent adults have some difficulty understanding their operation. (In hot, dry places adobe, for heat capacity, and windcatchers for active cooling, are pretty good low-tech tools, though still discovered well after the fireplace, definitely not explainable to a five year old, and maybe 20% as good as AC at best.)
Creating heat is so simple you can and will do it by accident. Moving heat is a difficult, precision operation. This has obvious practical consequences for the comparative difficulty of the problems; it’s much easier to fix ‘too cold’ than ‘too hot’.
This is all completely irrelevant to the question of whether I can have an air conditioner and/or a fireplace in my residence. You do see that, right?
You were responding to a comment about practical considerations relevant to living in a certain city. The question at hand is: what is, in practical terms, easier to deal with: hot summers, or cold winters? Everything you’ve written in your latest comment has zero bearing on this question. The comment is plainly a non sequitur. And your first comment was simply wrong, as, again, the matter at hand concerns the practical considerations, which are as bendini summarized them (and as I elaborated on).
What I would like to understand, and am hoping you might explain, is whether you disagree with my assessment of the practical considerations (and if so, on what basis), or, if you do not disagree, why you believe that your first comment makes sense as a reply to bendini’s.
Your objection was the non sequitur. My reply is not irrelevant to that objection, but that doesn’t matter, because that question is itself irrelevant to the one at the top of the thread. No one cares, and it does not matter, “whether I can have a fireplace in my apartment or not”.
The point is blindingly obvious, which is why I explained it in small words above, but I can excerpt the critical pieces for you:
Fireplaces and ACs are the simplest available solutions to those problems, and their difficulty is vastly different. More sophisticated solutions exist, but the difficulty of practically implementing them is likewise determined by the massive disparity in difficulty of the underlying problem.
This reply seems like either obstinacy and rudeness put together, or deliberate trolling. So I will bow out of this conversation, and trust that anyone reading this will see what is obvious.
Well, if they see the obvious it won’t be because you helped, since you still haven’t, despite very clear step by step explanation. I am rude because you have ignored all polite explanation and obstinately insisted on discussing irrelevancies.
For comparing potential cities and climates, the simplicity of the mechanism of adjusting the conditions to human preferences is essentially not a consideration. Cost matters, convenience matters, and I could be convinced that the simplicity of the methods people actually use matters. But fireplaces are irrelevant since essentially no one in Boston is using one as their primary method of heat.
Cost and convenience are almost entirely determined by simplicity. The fact that a fireplace is much simpler than an AC is directly causally linked to the lower cost in money and inconvenience of fixing the respective problems they address. Whether you actually use a fireplace is immaterial.
If we knew very little about the level of technology in a society or how expensive things work, sort of reasoning might make sense. Fireplaces are simple, heat pumps are not, so we might expect that dealing with excessive cold might be easier than dealing with excessive heat.
This is not at all the situation in which we are having this discussion. The actual mechanisms that people use for heating and cooling are much more complex than the simplest devices capable of the job, and the cost and convenience of cooling relative to heating has changed massively as technology has improved. If you’re trying to figure out whether Boston is a good fit for you, I still maintain fireplaces are irrelevant.
Not really, no. That’s the point: the problems retain their natural relative difficulty. The complexity suggests certain properties about the relative situation, and those properties have remained true.
The problems have not retained their natural relative difficulty, which is why the introduction and falling costs of Air Conditioning have led to large migration to the Sunbelt.
That doesn’t follow. The sun belt became habitable because it got easier to fix, but that wasn’t asymmetric in difficulty, just asymmetric in relevance; the difference between ‘pretty easy’ and ‘very easy’ matters much less than the difference between ‘really hard’ and ‘a little bit hard’.