Comment by Tmpod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tmpod | Hacker News Reader

I always struggle to take these sort of posts from people who don't live in "Europe" seriously. Europe is not a unit like the USA is, it's very diverse, and you generally can't neatly extrapolate your observations from one country to all others.

It hasn't ever been this hot, this regularly, especially in the northen parts of the continent. Add that to the number of historical building, streets, etc, that really can't (or shouldn't) get littered with eyesores on every balcony, and you can understand why AC units never picked up much steam in a lot of places. But that doesn't mean people have some twisted aversion to the technology, in fact, it already exists in many places. Where I'm from (a southern country), it's more common for a public place (buildings, transport, and so on) to have AC than to not have it. On people's homes, it's less common, but there's been a natural increase in demand. Unfortunately, many can't justify the investment to retrofit it into existing buildings, though new ones are likely to be built with central HVAC systems.

I don't know, it feels weird to read pieces like this one. It seems clear the author does not live over here and has a skewed conception of what Europe is and the peculiarities of each country and region. His previous post on the topic even goes as far as calling out some form of resistant to "foreign technology"...

It's easy to make blanket assumptions, but a bit of empathy and a more careful approach into these issues would go a long way.

Europeans (and oftentimes Americans themselves) tend to underestimate American diversity.

Even on this AC issue where I would admit that there is less national variance compared to the EU. Yet still, about 90% of the US has AC but there are places like San Francisco where only 50% of buildings have AC. In Berkeley California only 20% of buildings have AC.

Again, on this AC issue I admit has less variance than Europe has, but that builds my point if anything. On other issues Americans can have much more variance than your premise implies. Have you considered the life of an Utah Mormon (who may use food rations in lieu of kitchen furniture) is drastically different than a kid growing up in the Bronx (who may have grew up playing on public outdoor courts and have radical independence since middle school because of the MTA)? Have you compared a rural Appalachian’s lifestyle and culture to that of a SF big tech worker? North New Jersey full of suburban white-collar workers who would have trouble understanding southern New Jersey full of farms who have annual festivities where they compare tractors and catch greased-pigs. I find that even “coastal elites” from SF and NYC — people groups who should be most ideologically/socially aligned due to their shared economic statuses, ability to travel, and many points of cross contamination/communication — don’t fully understand eachother’s drastic ideological and lifestyle philosophical differences very well. Moreover, within just one borough of one city there can be drastic diversity in between its townships: NYC Queens having much more diverse townships than any particular borough in Europe.

Europeans who rely of the premise that America is not diverse I find to be just as dumb as the average American.

You're right, the USA is huge and highly diverse as well. Yet, I'd still say it's more of a unit than the EU is, in many ways, and especially more so than "Europe". That's what I meant with "Europe is not a unit like the USA is"; not that the USA has absolute unity and Europe has none. But I may be wrong about the USA's cohesion on a deeper level, I've never been there and only see it through an outsider's lens.

Determining whether Europe or the US is more diverse is like asking the question: “are there more doors or wheels in the world?” To answer such a question, you need to over qualify your definition to the point where the final answer is meaningless and thus doesn’t act as a useful premise for any argument. Maybe there exists a perfect definition of diversity that would be useful, but still in this unlikely case, the question would require so much non-existent data that answering it would be exorbitantly expensive.

Respectively, anyone who claims to know if the US or Europe is more diverse is making as fallacious of an argument as someone saying that they know if there exists more doors or wheels in the world. In both examples, they likely over-qualify their definitions. If they somehow aren’t overqualifying their definitions, they certainly do not have the necessary data to back up their claims.

How does qualifying the definition go from being fine, to being overqualifying? If you want to compare two things, you do have to define what those two things are in the first place. The answer is wheels, because of the many small ones. Toys, office chairs, and luggage. Vs an estimatable quantity of doors because we know roughly how many homes there are in the world. The final answer doesn't become meaningless simply because you've defined the problem concretely. There are many debates to be had, but as to the question of is Europe or America more diverse, the proper response, thus, is: by what metric?

You are playing the doors/wheels game naively because you have already overly qualified your definition of what is a door and what is a wheel without realizing it.

Have you considered for example if ball bearings wheels? Are gears and sprockets just notched wheels? Do cabinet doors count as doors? Do windows count as doors? Do microchip logic gates count as doors? What about pet flaps? Heart valves? Etc etc.. One’s definition of wheel/door can not account for these and countless other grey areas while still being useful.

Maybe one can strain oneself to find a definition that works like how people strain themselves to find a definition of sandwich that includes hoagies but disclude hotdogs, or one can just work backwards from one’s crude definitions and misclassify many objects.

Regardless, there is no right answer if there are more doors or more wheels. The question is too vague. Something that may be possible to answer is a more qualified question like “are there more human-sized doors or wheels for human transportation.” But again now the question is not our original question. And even if we were satisfied with just answering this more qualified question, we would have trouble answering it without a lot of money or making bad assumptions like the distributions of doors/wheels in a given house is uniform across all cities/towns/suburbs/houses etc..

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