The Guardian: The air conditioning trap: how cold air is heating the world

As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying an air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.” [...]

What fuelled the rise of the air conditioning was not a sudden explosion in consumer demand, but the influence of the industries behind the great postwar housing boom. Between 1946 and 1965, 31m new homes were constructed in the US, and for the people building those houses, air conditioning was a godsend. Architects and construction companies no longer had to worry much about differences in climate – they could sell the same style of home just as easily in New Mexico as in Delaware. The prevailing mentality was that just about any problems caused by hot climates, cheap building materials, shoddy design or poor city planning could be overcome, as the American Institute of Architects wrote in 1973, “by the brute application of more air conditioning”. As Cooper writes, “Architects, builders and bankers accepted air conditioning first, and consumers were faced with a fait accompli that they merely had to ratify.” [...]

As the rate and scale of building intensified, traditional architectural methods for mitigating hot temperatures were jettisoned. Leena Thomas, an Indian professor of architecture at the University of Technology in Sydney, told me that in Delhi in the early 1990s older forms of building design – which had dealt with heat through window screens, or facades and brise-soleils – were slowly displaced by American or European styles. “I would say that this international style has a lot to answer for,” she said. Just like the US in the 20th century, but on an even greater scale, homes and offices were increasingly being built in such a way that made air conditioning indispensable. “Developers were building without thinking,” says Rajan Rawal, a professor of architecture and city planning at Cept University in Ahmedabad. “The speed of construction that was required created pressure. So they simply built and relied on technology to fix it later.” [...]

One step towards solving the problem presented by air conditioning – and one that doesn’t require a complete overhaul of the modern city – would be to build a better air conditioner. There is plenty of room for improvement. The invention of air conditioning predates both the first aeroplane and the first public radio broadcast, and the underlying technology has not changed much since 1902. “Everything is still based on the vapour compression cycle; same as a refrigerator. It’s effectively the same process as a century ago,” says Colin Goodwin, the technical director of the Building Services Research and Information Association. “What has happened is we’ve expanded the affordability of the air conditioner, but as far as efficiency, they’ve improved but they haven’t leaped.” [...]

Researchers have also shown that people who live in hotter areas, even for a very short time, are comfortable at higher indoor temperatures. They contend that, whether it is a state of mind or a biological adjustment, human comfort is adaptive, not objective. This is something that seems obvious to many people who live with these temperatures. At a recent conference on air conditioning that I attended in London, an Indian delegate chided the crowd: “If I can work and function at 30C, you could too – believe you me.”  

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The Guardian: The machine always wins: what drives our addiction to social media

The problem is that widespread knowledge of the dangers of addiction does not stop it from happening. Likewise, we know by now that if social media platforms get us addicted, they are working well. The more they wreck our lives, the better they are functioning. Yet we persist. Some of this can be explained away by the manner in which addiction organises our attention. The platforms, like gambling machines, are experts at disguising losses as wins. These work thanks to an effect similar to that exploited by practitioners of “cold reading” and psychic tricks: we attend to the pleasurable hits and ignore the disappointing misses. We focus on the buzz of winning, not the cost of playing the game, and not the opportunities lost by playing. And if occasionally the habit threatens to crush us, we can fantasise that one day a big win will save us. But to explain away behaviour is not really to explain it. It is to collude in the rationalisation of behaviour that may not be rational. [...]

With social media addiction, there are many more variables than with drugs, so it is hard to know where to begin. The designers of the smartphone or tablet interface, for example, have made sure that it is pleasurable to engage with, hold, or even just to look at. The urge to reach, irritably, for the device during meals, conversations, parties and upon awakening, can partly be attributed to lust for the object and the soft, nacreous glow of the screen. Once we have navigated to the app, it is the platform designers who take control. For the duration of our visit, life is briefly streamlined, as with a video game, into a single visual flow, a set of soluble challenges, some dangled rewards and a game of chance. But the variety of possible experiences include voyeurism, approval and disapproval, gaming, news, nostalgia, socialising and regular social comparisons. If we are addicted, we might just be addicted to the activities that the platforms enable, from gambling to shopping to spying on “friends”. [...]

The platforms don’t organise our experience according to a masterplan. As the sociologist Benjamin Bratton puts it, the mechanism is “strict and invariable”, but within that “autocracy of means”, the user is granted a relative “liberty of ends”. The protocols of the platform standardise and order the interactions of users. They use incentives and choke points to keep people committed to the machine. They manipulate ends for the benefit of their real clients – other firms. They bombard us with stimuli, learning from our responses, the better to teach us how to be the market demographic we have been identified as. But they do not force us to stay there, or tell us what to do with the hours spent on the platform. Even more so than in the case of drugs, then, the toxicity is something we as users bring to the game.

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BBC4 In Our Time: Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in September 1812, Napoleon captured Moscow and waited a month for the Russians to meet him, to surrender and why, to his dismay, no-one came. Soon his triumph was revealed as a great defeat; winter was coming, supplies were low; he ordered his Grande Armée of six hundred thousand to retreat and, by the time he crossed back over the border, desertion, disease, capture, Cossacks and cold had reduced that to twenty thousand. Napoleon had shown his weakness; his Prussian allies changed sides and, within eighteen months they, the Russians and Austrians had captured Paris and the Emperor was exiled to Elba.

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Politico: The End of the German-American Affair

At both the official and unofficial level, the foundation that has supported the transatlantic alliance since the 1950s is crumbling. About 85 percent of Germans consider their country’s relationship with the U.S. to be “bad” or “very bad,” according to a recent study, while a clear majority want Germany to distance itself from the U.S.

Angela Merkel is in the United States this week for the United Nations climate conference but a meeting with the U.S. president, who is also in New York, is not on her agenda. Merkel didn’t see Trump during her last visit to the U.S. in May either. [...]

Merkel's role in America's culture wars, where — depending on the stage — she plays either the villain who opened the floodgates to uncontrolled Muslim migration, or the saint who rescued people in need, has complicated Germany's PR effort. That was apparent during the German leader's May visit, when she was celebrated like a lost savior during her commencement speech to Harvard graduates. [...]

But the “difficult topics” that Merkel referenced dominate the official conversation. Whether the question is Iran, trade, defense spending or climate change, Berlin and Washington are at loggerheads. Even in areas where strategic logic should make them natural allies — such as confronting China’s growing influence — the two have failed to move beyond their differences. [...]

In truth, the U.S.-German alliance has never been a partnership of equals. Tension has been part of the mix throughout the post-war era to varying degrees. If Konrad Adenauer and John F. Kennedy shared a mutual dislike, Helmut Schmidt and Jimmy Carter absolutely despised one another. [...]

The German distrust began to take hold in the aftermath of 9/11. Though Germany joined the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan against the Taliban, Berlin refused to participate in the Iraq War, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to support claims that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

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The Memory Palace: Safe Passage

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Vox: The gun solution we're not talking about

It seems like after every mass shooting, politicians talk about expanding background checks for gun buyers. But background checks don't actually do a great job of keeping dangerous people from getting guns. What does? A licensing system, where before you can buy a gun, you need a license from the state.