From what I understand, the case for Boston is as follows:
A. Similar good things
Boston has similar urban amenities of the SFBA (colleges, medicine, airport).
Boston tolerates the rationalist kind of weirdness (queer and poly).
Boston has lots of the activity groups rationalists enjoy (contra dance, kink).
Boston has enough rationalists that it’s possible to run weekly events and for people to have their own little friendship groups.
Boston has plenty of buildings that are suitable for large grouphouses.
Tech salaries in Boston are only 10-20% less than the SFBA.
B. Similar bad things
Boston has a very high cost of living ($2800/month for a 2 bed that’s 30 minutes from downtown).
Boston is within the US, so is at the mercy of US federal politics (i.e. revolution risk).
Boston is within the US, so it has similarly insane healthcare costs.
Boston has NIMBY housing policies that are unlikely to change.
C. Large/important improvements
Boston has far less risk of earthquakes and wildfires.
Boston has better non-car transport options. (Although it’s unclear how it compares to NYC and how much worse it is than the best cities internationally.)
D. Small/minor improvements
Boston is much less dependant on the software industry than the SFBA. (I’m unsure if this is important for rationalists, as most of them are software engineers so the main benefit for them is less social homogeneity in their non-rationalist friend groups.)
Boston has a lot more elite schools per capita.
Boston’s architecture is similar to Europe.
Boston skews younger than the SFBA (likely due to its elite universities).
Boston has 4 distinct seasons.
E. Large drawbacks
Boston has the same sky-high cost of living as the SFBA, but only a fraction of the startup scene.
Boston has very cold winters.
F. Small drawbacks
Boston has summers that are hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes.
Boston still has it’s Puritan cultural prudishness.
Boston has below average food culture. (Again, probably Puritan influence.)
G. Other differences
Boston has the blunt communication style you find in Northeastern US cities.
I can see why some individuals would be better off in Boston, but looking at the bigger picture I can’t see how this would be a suitable replacement for Berkeley. It has most of the downsides that people mention (e.g. cost of living, opposition to new housing) when they complain about Berkeley, but can’t offer the rebuttal of “yes, but our institutions are already here”.
If someone can spell out the case for moving the main rationalist hub from Berkeley to Boston, I’d like to hear it, but from my perspective it seems like relocating to Boston would be squandering this one-time opportunity to put the hub in the global maxima.
Big improvements (for me—YMMV): 1. Boston has two of the world’s best few universities very close together. (It’s hard to live close to Stanford without studying there, and it’s a huge trek from Stanford to Berkeley). 2. There’s an obvious Schelling point in Boston for where to live (Camberville), while interesting people/companies/organizations in the Bay are in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, and South Bay/Peninsula. 3. Boston is closer to NYC (and the other big East Coast cities) and Europe.
I’d guess Camberville is significantly cheaper in terms of overall COL than SF but it has similar big city amenities (concerts, opera, museums, huge diversity of events) that Berkeley lacks.
I’m not actually trying to make the case for moving the main rationalist hub; I actually think it’s pretty likely that the hub cannot be moved, at least not intentionally. Instead, I’m trying to describe why people might consider moving here as individuals.
Ah, that makes more sense. I think if you’d posted this last year I would have assumed you were making an individual case, but the recent interest in moving the hub away from Berkeley made me think otherwise.
These are backwards. Cold winters are a lot easier to work around than sticky summers. (A fireplace is simpler than an air conditioner.)
Er, what? This seems completely backwards to me. Putting in an air conditioner is as simple as buying a unit online, installing it into a window, and plugging it into a wall outlet. Putting in a fireplace (!!) is… actually not possible at all, for most people (e.g., anyone living in an apartment).
What does it even mean to say that a fireplace is ‘simpler’…? I can’t map that to anything even remotely relevant to the question of whether I can have a fireplace in my apartment or not. (And the answer is definitely ‘not’.)
While I don’t think this is super relevant, space heaters are pretty easy to buy and use and fulfill the same purpose. Agree that fireplaces seem like a giant pain to install, and are often not feasible.
Space heaters tend to be rather worse at heating a space than air conditioners are at cooling it. (They can also be fire hazards, though that’s not strictly relevant to effectiveness per se.) But yes, a space heater is an option.
Note that aside from the (in)feasibility and (massive!) expense of installing a fireplace, there is also the fact that as a renter, you simply wouldn’t have permission from your landlord to make such modifications to your apartment.
Why are you still hung up on the utterly irrelevant question of whether it is practical to install a fireplace? No one but you has claimed that matters.
Um, we are talking about whether you should move to Boston or not. Whether you can install a fireplace seems way more relevant to me than how conceptually simple fireplaces are.
No one is suggesting you install a fireplace, literally no one, so no, it is completely irrelevant whether you can do so.
The relative difficulty of solving the problems of excessive cold and excessive heat, however, is relevant. And that relative difficulty is cleanly and clearly illustrated by the relative simplicity of the simplest solutions to those problems, which are, respectively, a fireplace and an air conditioner. As I said before:
This has obvious practical consequences for the comparative difficulty of the problems; it’s much easier to fix ‘too cold’ than ‘too hot’.
The fact that a fireplace is simple has the obvious implication that heating is an easier problem to fix in theory, and that has the implication that it is probably also easier to fix in practice. And this is indeed the case.
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’.
Let’s try this again, being more explicit about the analogy, though it’s incredibly simple so that really shouldn’t be necessary.
E. Large drawbacks
Boston has very cold winters.
F. Small drawbacks
Boston has summers that are hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes.
These are backwards. Cold winters are a lot easier to work around than sticky summers; a fireplace is simpler than an air conditioner.
A fireplace is simple, and is the simplest man-made method of dealing with cold.
Because it is simple, manufacturing tolerances and installation tolerances are large.
This makes it cheap, and easy to install, when installing it as intended
If you install a fireplace six inches to the left of the intended location, it will work without problems. (You will probably have other architectural problems, but they are not the fault of the fireplace; if it had been a window or a non-structural column that was moved, that would be equally problematic.)
Derivatives of the fireplace optimized for particular use-cases, such as being addable and subtractable after the building is finished, start from this extremely low baseline. They add complexity, reduce manufacturing and installation tolerances, etc.
But because the baseline is incredibly low, even after making those changes it remains very simple, so the devices remain cheap, easy to install, etc.
End result: Furnaces, space heaters, radiators, all are cheap and abundant.
Contrast with
Air conditioners are the simplest general-applicability man-made method of dealing with heat.
They’re really fuckin’ complicated. Tolerances for installation and manufacture are small.
If you install an air conditioner six inches to the left, it probably won’t work at all; the seal will be crap and you’ll get worse results than you would have from leaving the window closed. At best you’ll get 50% capacity.
Variants exist with better tolerances, (freestanding units with pipe) but they’re more expensive and less efficient.
This also makes air conditioners fairly expensive. An AC unit can cover more ground than a space heater, but even if you want to evenly blanket your home with heat (usually not true, some rooms are much lower priority), it will take only two or three space heaters per AC unit, and AC units cost roughly 5x a space heater.
Because AC units are so complex, advanced variants are not a common product. The main descendant innovation is central air. This has all the drawbacks of a fireplace with regard to installation, though it does have higher efficiency.
Central air has another relevant feature: Even in really hot jurisdictions like Los Angeles or Phoenix, AZ, it almost always also has heat. Because once you’ve set up the ducting and control systems for central-air AC, it is trivially easy to support heat through that. So using it once a decade, or just the possibility that you might, someday, want to sell to an octogenarian with no thermoregulation who can’t take the ‘cold’ of 65 F, is more than enough to justify the cost.
In conclusion: The fact that fireplaces are simpler than AC units has direct, obvious consequences for how difficult it is to keep your home warm vs. cool, regardless of whether using an actual fireplace is practical or even desirable. It is much easier to deal with Massachusetts winters than Massachusetts summers via technological means.
To clarify, I was thinking more about the overall effect of the weather on people. You are not indoors all the time, nor can you cover every square inch of your body with warm clothing. At least from my point of view, being outdoors in 20F wind in a winter coat is worse than 85F in shorts + t-shirt. I’m not disputing that air conditioning is more technologically complex than a fireplace, I just don’t think it’s a major factor.
I think it is a pretty major factor. 20 F is not that common, and much easier to work around than 100 F, which is approximately as common. Both are pretty terrible outdoors; 20 F often comes with some benefits that make it worth suffering through, most of which involve snow, and 100 F doesn’t AFAIK, but that’s a minor detail. And you’re correct that the difficulty of dressing for the weather is not obviously tied to the difficulty of controlling an indoor environment; I think there’s a weak correlation there, but it could just be noise.
It’s only inside that you can really work around either extreme enough to be comfortable. And how hard that is differs greatly due to the different underlying complexities of the problems.
This makes [a fireplace] cheap, and easy to install, when installing it as intended
This is not true at all. Fireplaces are very expensive to install, costing thousands of dollars at the low end (and going into five digits of dollars). (Furthermore, if you live in a rented unit, you generally have no option to install a fireplace at all.)
If you install an air conditioner six inches to the left, it probably won’t work at all; the seal will be crap and you’ll get worse results than you would have from leaving the window closed. At best you’ll get 50% capacity.
This is also not true at all. I can move my window air conditioner six inches in either direction right now (I’d just have to undo/re-do some screws and reapply some foam padding), and it would work just as well. The same has been true for every other air conditioner I have owned.
At this point you must be deliberately misreading everything I write. No one could be that wrong by accident.
I can move my window air conditioner six inches in either direction right now
I conclude that you have not actually tried this, because if you had you would have noticed that it reduces the capacity of the device massively. AC units need to be placed centrally in the window with carefully-guided siderails.
What does “installing it as intended” actually mean in practice?
I conclude that you have not actually tried this, because if you had you would have noticed that it reduces the capacity of the device massively. AC units need to be placed centrally in the window with carefully-guided siderails.
You conclude incorrectly. I have indeed shifted my A/C’s position, in the way I describe, multiple times (spanning multiple units). There was no detectable effect on the A/C’s performance.
From what I understand, the case for Boston is as follows:
A. Similar good things
Boston has similar urban amenities of the SFBA (colleges, medicine, airport).
Boston tolerates the rationalist kind of weirdness (queer and poly).
Boston has lots of the activity groups rationalists enjoy (contra dance, kink).
Boston has enough rationalists that it’s possible to run weekly events and for people to have their own little friendship groups.
Boston has plenty of buildings that are suitable for large grouphouses.
Tech salaries in Boston are only 10-20% less than the SFBA.
B. Similar bad things
Boston has a very high cost of living ($2800/month for a 2 bed that’s 30 minutes from downtown).
Boston is within the US, so is at the mercy of US federal politics (i.e. revolution risk).
Boston is within the US, so it has similarly insane healthcare costs.
Boston has NIMBY housing policies that are unlikely to change.
C. Large/important improvements
Boston has far less risk of earthquakes and wildfires.
Boston has better non-car transport options. (Although it’s unclear how it compares to NYC and how much worse it is than the best cities internationally.)
D. Small/minor improvements
Boston is much less dependant on the software industry than the SFBA. (I’m unsure if this is important for rationalists, as most of them are software engineers so the main benefit for them is less social homogeneity in their non-rationalist friend groups.)
Boston has a lot more elite schools per capita.
Boston’s architecture is similar to Europe.
Boston skews younger than the SFBA (likely due to its elite universities).
Boston has 4 distinct seasons.
E. Large drawbacks
Boston has the same sky-high cost of living as the SFBA, but only a fraction of the startup scene.
Boston has very cold winters.
F. Small drawbacks
Boston has summers that are hot, humid and swarming with mosquitoes.
Boston still has it’s Puritan cultural prudishness.
Boston has below average food culture. (Again, probably Puritan influence.)
G. Other differences
Boston has the blunt communication style you find in Northeastern US cities.
I can see why some individuals would be better off in Boston, but looking at the bigger picture I can’t see how this would be a suitable replacement for Berkeley. It has most of the downsides that people mention (e.g. cost of living, opposition to new housing) when they complain about Berkeley, but can’t offer the rebuttal of “yes, but our institutions are already here”.
If someone can spell out the case for moving the main rationalist hub from Berkeley to Boston, I’d like to hear it, but from my perspective it seems like relocating to Boston would be squandering this one-time opportunity to put the hub in the global maxima.
Big improvements (for me—YMMV):
1. Boston has two of the world’s best few universities very close together. (It’s hard to live close to Stanford without studying there, and it’s a huge trek from Stanford to Berkeley).
2. There’s an obvious Schelling point in Boston for where to live (Camberville), while interesting people/companies/organizations in the Bay are in SF, Oakland, Berkeley, and South Bay/Peninsula.
3. Boston is closer to NYC (and the other big East Coast cities) and Europe.
I’d guess Camberville is significantly cheaper in terms of overall COL than SF but it has similar big city amenities (concerts, opera, museums, huge diversity of events) that Berkeley lacks.
That’s a pretty good summary!
I’m not actually trying to make the case for moving the main rationalist hub; I actually think it’s pretty likely that the hub cannot be moved, at least not intentionally. Instead, I’m trying to describe why people might consider moving here as individuals.
Ah, that makes more sense. I think if you’d posted this last year I would have assumed you were making an individual case, but the recent interest in moving the hub away from Berkeley made me think otherwise.
These are backwards. Cold winters are a lot easier to work around than sticky summers. (A fireplace is simpler than an air conditioner.)
Er, what? This seems completely backwards to me. Putting in an air conditioner is as simple as buying a unit online, installing it into a window, and plugging it into a wall outlet. Putting in a fireplace (!!) is… actually not possible at all, for most people (e.g., anyone living in an apartment).
What does it even mean to say that a fireplace is ‘simpler’…? I can’t map that to anything even remotely relevant to the question of whether I can have a fireplace in my apartment or not. (And the answer is definitely ‘not’.)
While I don’t think this is super relevant, space heaters are pretty easy to buy and use and fulfill the same purpose. Agree that fireplaces seem like a giant pain to install, and are often not feasible.
Space heaters tend to be rather worse at heating a space than air conditioners are at cooling it. (They can also be fire hazards, though that’s not strictly relevant to effectiveness per se.) But yes, a space heater is an option.
Note that aside from the (in)feasibility and (massive!) expense of installing a fireplace, there is also the fact that as a renter, you simply wouldn’t have permission from your landlord to make such modifications to your apartment.
Why are you still hung up on the utterly irrelevant question of whether it is practical to install a fireplace? No one but you has claimed that matters.
Um, we are talking about whether you should move to Boston or not. Whether you can install a fireplace seems way more relevant to me than how conceptually simple fireplaces are.
No one is suggesting you install a fireplace, literally no one, so no, it is completely irrelevant whether you can do so.
The relative difficulty of solving the problems of excessive cold and excessive heat, however, is relevant. And that relative difficulty is cleanly and clearly illustrated by the relative simplicity of the simplest solutions to those problems, which are, respectively, a fireplace and an air conditioner. As I said before:
The fact that a fireplace is simple has the obvious implication that heating is an easier problem to fix in theory, and that has the implication that it is probably also easier to fix in practice. And this is indeed the case.
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’.
Let’s try this again, being more explicit about the analogy, though it’s incredibly simple so that really shouldn’t be necessary.
These are backwards. Cold winters are a lot easier to work around than sticky summers; a fireplace is simpler than an air conditioner.
A fireplace is simple, and is the simplest man-made method of dealing with cold.
Because it is simple, manufacturing tolerances and installation tolerances are large.
This makes it cheap, and easy to install, when installing it as intended
If you install a fireplace six inches to the left of the intended location, it will work without problems. (You will probably have other architectural problems, but they are not the fault of the fireplace; if it had been a window or a non-structural column that was moved, that would be equally problematic.)
Derivatives of the fireplace optimized for particular use-cases, such as being addable and subtractable after the building is finished, start from this extremely low baseline. They add complexity, reduce manufacturing and installation tolerances, etc.
But because the baseline is incredibly low, even after making those changes it remains very simple, so the devices remain cheap, easy to install, etc.
End result: Furnaces, space heaters, radiators, all are cheap and abundant.
Contrast with
Air conditioners are the simplest general-applicability man-made method of dealing with heat.
They’re really fuckin’ complicated. Tolerances for installation and manufacture are small.
If you install an air conditioner six inches to the left, it probably won’t work at all; the seal will be crap and you’ll get worse results than you would have from leaving the window closed. At best you’ll get 50% capacity.
Variants exist with better tolerances, (freestanding units with pipe) but they’re more expensive and less efficient.
This also makes air conditioners fairly expensive. An AC unit can cover more ground than a space heater, but even if you want to evenly blanket your home with heat (usually not true, some rooms are much lower priority), it will take only two or three space heaters per AC unit, and AC units cost roughly 5x a space heater.
Because AC units are so complex, advanced variants are not a common product. The main descendant innovation is central air. This has all the drawbacks of a fireplace with regard to installation, though it does have higher efficiency.
Central air has another relevant feature: Even in really hot jurisdictions like Los Angeles or Phoenix, AZ, it almost always also has heat. Because once you’ve set up the ducting and control systems for central-air AC, it is trivially easy to support heat through that. So using it once a decade, or just the possibility that you might, someday, want to sell to an octogenarian with no thermoregulation who can’t take the ‘cold’ of 65 F, is more than enough to justify the cost.
In conclusion: The fact that fireplaces are simpler than AC units has direct, obvious consequences for how difficult it is to keep your home warm vs. cool, regardless of whether using an actual fireplace is practical or even desirable. It is much easier to deal with Massachusetts winters than Massachusetts summers via technological means.
To clarify, I was thinking more about the overall effect of the weather on people. You are not indoors all the time, nor can you cover every square inch of your body with warm clothing. At least from my point of view, being outdoors in 20F wind in a winter coat is worse than 85F in shorts + t-shirt. I’m not disputing that air conditioning is more technologically complex than a fireplace, I just don’t think it’s a major factor.
I think it is a pretty major factor. 20 F is not that common, and much easier to work around than 100 F, which is approximately as common. Both are pretty terrible outdoors; 20 F often comes with some benefits that make it worth suffering through, most of which involve snow, and 100 F doesn’t AFAIK, but that’s a minor detail. And you’re correct that the difficulty of dressing for the weather is not obviously tied to the difficulty of controlling an indoor environment; I think there’s a weak correlation there, but it could just be noise.
It’s only inside that you can really work around either extreme enough to be comfortable. And how hard that is differs greatly due to the different underlying complexities of the problems.
This is not true at all. Fireplaces are very expensive to install, costing thousands of dollars at the low end (and going into five digits of dollars). (Furthermore, if you live in a rented unit, you generally have no option to install a fireplace at all.)
This is also not true at all. I can move my window air conditioner six inches in either direction right now (I’d just have to undo/re-do some screws and reapply some foam padding), and it would work just as well. The same has been true for every other air conditioner I have owned.
At this point you must be deliberately misreading everything I write. No one could be that wrong by accident.
I conclude that you have not actually tried this, because if you had you would have noticed that it reduces the capacity of the device massively. AC units need to be placed centrally in the window with carefully-guided siderails.
Link? I hadn’t heard this before.
What does “installing it as intended” actually mean in practice?
You conclude incorrectly. I have indeed shifted my A/C’s position, in the way I describe, multiple times (spanning multiple units). There was no detectable effect on the A/C’s performance.