Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/31/five-dead-after-air-conditione.html
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Somebody needs to teach them about central air. Even if it’s too expensive for the home, at least a hospital should have it!
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On the other hand, sick people dying in a hospital isn’t exactly uncommon. This could be a case of the heat shortening their life by a few days.
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In Texas, where 97 is a cool summer day, many prisoners don’t have air conditioning. The Texas prison system fought long and hard to keep it that way but just last year a judge finally ruled they have to get air conditioning - at one prison. The order insisted the medical unit have AC immediately. No word on how long it will take before the rest of the prisoners will be treated as human.
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Also, ordering air conditioners from Amazon?
With these temps, the death rate from heat-related illness would have been up nationwide, too. The fact that five people died like this, even with chronic conditions (even if they had dnrs), signals something wrong; especially if your loved one was suffering from a chronic condition, would you rather they pass in comfort, or from being roasted alive?
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Its the same at some prisons in Nevada and Arizona, they don’t give them A/C. And there’s the infamous Joe Arpaio prison where people were outside, and they also under-fed them to cut costs.
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Air conditioning is a vicious cycle driver of climate change.
Healthy humans don’t need air conditioning to survive in Japan, or in the United States for that matter. But perhaps we will, eventually, if we keep burning coal and building nuclear fission plants in tsunami zones so we can run air conditioners.
Unhealthy humans’ lives can sometimes be lengthened by air conditioning. It’s simply trading the health of everyone else - pollution does kill, and keeps killing for a long time - to provide more time on earth to the dying.
Is it worth it? Are all things, in the end, even the death of a species, reducible to “everyone wants to live one more day in cool comfort, no matter what”?
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I don’t mean to disparage the hospital, but knowing how the Japanese law enforcement works (many cases of murder or manslaughter chalked up as accidental because they are not slam-dunks), I wonder how these deaths will be classified?
We’re not talking about healthy humans… Sooo…
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In the summers I frequently see people alone in their cars, idling their engines to power their air conditioners. It’s what I think about whenever anyone suggests that capitalism can deliver us from this mess, “all” we need to do is properly incentive those genius VCs.
If capitalism is the only way to view this setup, the carbon dump will stop when there are no more consumers to serve, no more products to serve them, no more capitalists to generate those jobs.
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There’s a guy trying to use the market to solve the problem, but everyone tells me he’s a crazy techbro who hates poor people and needs to be stopped.
It’s too bad, since he’s done more to resolve the problem than anyone else in my lifetime. But I guess if he’s personally unpopular we have to put that ahead of survival of the species, too?
Hmm, pretty far off topic. Sorry, if anyone wants to talk about Musk there’s another thread active over here.
Here’s a little tidbit picked up from my decade of volunteer EMT ambulance work, thermodynamics, and applying both on the first aid team at my un-air-conditioned factory.
At air temps of 95 degrees F(35.5C) and above fans no longer cool people off. At high temperatures the breeze created by the fan may actually increase heat transfer INTO a person, making them worse off than being in still air.
At 97 degrees fans turn hot spaces into convection ovens.
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You think Elon Musk has done more to combat global warming than anyone else in your lifetime? Are you very young?
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One man with a charismatic brand, no matter if it’s Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, cannot charm the market into behaving responsibly. The market got this way by externalizing costs. Until economists learn to account for the bads created along with the goods, and the cruelty as well as the services, then the cost of breathable air and a livable climate simply cannot be payed in a market driven system.
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The article did not mention that the air conditioning in the hospital had broken down in the past or that the hospital did not carry out any maintenance to ensure it did not happen again. In addition, although the actual temperatures may not sound so high, it must be remembered that Japan has extremely high humidity resulting in a much higher heat index.
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Oh, come on. Everyone in Japan sets their aircon to 28 degrees. That’s reasonable.
The opinion of whether or not to use air conditioning is culturally bound. Americans use it a lot. So do people in Hong Kong, where you walk into a building in of the dead heat of summer and expect to see icicles forming on the ceiling. If everyone in the world used it as much as they do, the planet would run out of electricity.
When you consider the deep-fried, sugar-laden, preservative-filled, processed crap Americans eat, in comparison, I doubt air conditioning is contributing much more to their shortening life spans.
Ito-san, you’re quite a rarity on the Internet–a Japanese person who participates in the global conversation. I really, really wish there were more of you.
Counter question, is there a better way to talk about controlling room temperature and/or responsibility in health care, than veering right into eugenics?
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