It's not just that France isn't installing them. It's that laws prevent installing them, and laws keep offices and schools warm on purpose.
The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.
Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.
French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.
Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.
And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.
That's incredibly misleading. For a high salary, this American couple you mentioned, are probably living in California or New York or New Jersey or another high tax state.
Now redo the math.
I and most people in my peer group pay over 40 percent of income in taxes, and that's NOT including property taxes, which are much, much higher than in Europe. Some much more than that - like triple (city, state and federal).
State taxes were completely ignored from your math.
This message, and the message before it which I am at pains to rebut much of, contains a lot of misleading cherry-picking.
And you compared European universities to a two year county college degree?
Healthcare costs were also greatly glossed over. I'm hoping someone else is triggered but if not I'll be forced to step in and correct this stuff.
> We’ve reached a point where an update to macOS — or to any app I rely on, really — is a source of dread rather than excitement. I now expect the new version to be worse.
I actually relate to that. It used to be cool and exciting to update to see what new things are coming for free. I was just looking up what Fedora Workstation 45 might bring.
Updates on phones, TV's, cars and non-Linux operating systems on PC's/laptops are downright scary to me now. What will they add that I don't want? What more connectivity to the external world are they going to wire in?
MacOS lost everyone's trust by ruining the experience, but even before it happened that trying to resize a window makes it feel like life will be at 80 years-old, hunting a tiny invisible border, even before that there wasn't anything exciting.
What Microsoft I think did (and I can't prove it), before I moved off of Windows 11, was to bundle all changes in "required security updates." So you have no choice but to update (or go through special settings to turn it off, or just defer it), but when the machine comes back you have a new Welcome prompt to some new connectivity to something nefarious. AI features I never asked for, that's the most recent dark pattern here.
Your error here, or the missing piece if we're generous, is what people are spending money on. Health care is astronomically more expensive here. Schooling isn't free after high school. Day care isn't free. Hell, even property taxes are simply 'not a thing' in France or the UK, where the taxes and Council Tax, respectively, are a tiny fraction of what Americans pay in property taxes ---- which, of course, pay for the 'free public schools.'
Now, let's talk about insurance, that's also much higher. In states like California and Florida, home insurance is through the roof, in some states like NJ and NY, car insurance is through the roof. Both going up way above inflation (like the items in my first paragraph).
You might counter with energy costs are much higher in these European countries (and similar ones like Germany, Benelux, etc), and the purchasing power might be higher, but the wages are so so much lower.
That said, this trope of people misspending their money needs to consider this outrageous costs of things that many people around the world never need to think about. The shitty wages in France are overshadowed by so many essentials being available without a high cost or any cost in some cases.
That makes sense, and it probably should be said more. It's probably just because we invest in what we know. If you're a real estate broker, you have an interest in properties, you think about it all the time, so you'll buy your own properties, or invest perhaps in builder stocks. If you're in tech, well, I don't need to say it because that's most of us. If you work in the energy sector, I imagine you know a thing or two about transport and esoterica of speculative miners or drillers, etc.
I hate Google, but whenever I tried (for months at a time) to use Duckduckgo or Brave search I had a terrible experience. In one case buying shoes brought me to a scam copycat website that Google never would have done. More importantly the searches just feel fuzzier than Google. Which is the opposite of what I want! How come no one trusts me to use literal strings.
Or is the indexing just worse and Google wins?
That's why I'm wary of Kagi. Love privacy and customization. But functionality kind of matters, too. I don't want to buy a smart phone that sucks at making basic phone calls.
Some have long splash screens and nag screens to punish those not on Wifi. TCL I believe was doing this, and I've read scattered reports of that behavior. Do research beforehand just in case.
After some research I went with a Sony Bravia. The screen is ridiculously reflective which is unusable next to any window at certain angles, and it wasn't the cheapest, but after some research since it uses that Google TV crap and has no splash screens, I could keep WiFi off on it and use my Apple TV.
TCL and now LG are to be fully avoided, Samsung isn't to be trusted (a future update if you allow it can lead to what happened here with LG). Samsung probably has the best hardware, but too bad.
If we don't vote with our wallets the enshittification of everything tech will march over and trample us that much faster.
Was Global Entry in the US a tactic to trick us into giving up our biometric data for speedy re-entry? I can say it's now barely faster than waiting behind the line for the stamper officials in their booths.
And then there is the question of how much net worth of these EU elites is tied to U.S. stock market wealth, itself hugely big tech. We know they are EU elites because there is a culture of going to the best schools where you learn culture and start in big business circles right away like your parents did. These aren't freedom-fighters looking for independence. I remember fondly Gerhard Shroeder, the leader of the SPD, later becoming a Putin ally and making millions sitting on boards of Russian energy companies. Is it any wonder that the country which moved away from nuclear and is a big environmentalist haven is one of the most dependent on Russian gas?
My fear is with these types of issues of sovereignty (or corruption), the reaction is often right-wing or left-wing populism. The type of thing that got Trump there in the first place.
One of the biggest flaws of the site was the ability to close questions as 'Duplicate' or similar. Multiple times I would google a problem, the SO question was exactly as asked the first result, half-answers or 'Closed as Duplicate', then you click on the supposed "duplicate" and the nuance was totally missed.
The other was the 'ability to read the room.' Even late-stage SO had the 'mods' not understand that they were the first google results, and their mean-spirited dismissals were being seen by thousands of hits.
Ketamine with psychotherapy has become mainstream and legal I think in a wider context, and there are different ways they do it - one is to give that heroic dose under supervision with a drip which can be a controlled administration.
Psychedelic therapy with mdma or mushrooms is only legal in very few places. Personally I find mdma is more promising for what you (we) experienced there. There's a sort of ancient wiring due to childhood threats. MDMA has been proven to help soldiers with PTSD, which I think is a big adjacent to this (the vigilance being the common facor)?
Mushrooms are not quite the same, but give you more intensity control (and are much shorter duration). And legally there is ketamine therapy.
I'm not sure if it'll completely remove the cortisol issues I have. This feels biological, maybe due to early traumas. Are psychedelics supposed to fix these? I thought it was more for depression than always-on vigilance.
Removing all real dangerous stressors (like work and house woes) would really help. I tend to be a lot more tolerant of less sleep while on vacation. That said, I spend a lot of money and time finding quieter hotel rooms or airbnbs.
The only point I was trying to make is, "it's more complicated than <the parent comment I was replying to>." The household affordability problem is extremely complicated. In some cases it's indeed NIMBYism - some law that limits to single-family housing, or complicated HOA rules, etc. Local board approvals required.
Sometimes it's just plain-old high-demand. Who doesn't want to live in a big fancy metropolis as a 25 yr-old with money? More people move in than it's physically possible to build (we're not China).
Sometimes it's regulations - you need to pay construction workers a min wage of $50/hr if you build a unit more than 99, or no tax breaks for you. Sometimes land is expensive. But so is the architect, the materials, the permits. Then you have environmental regulations, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult. Then you have regulations to protect the consumer so the place doesn't burn up or fall on our heads, sometimes that make sense, some that are too difficult.
You have interest rates that are high.
We have the private equity investors buying up bulk new construction.
We have wage growth that didn't match the growth of housing costs.
Hopefully I've made my case that housing affordability has many factors.
I'll need to save this message so I can cut and paste it elsewhere because about once a month on HN someone posts that the problem with housing affordability is not enough building and NIMBYism, which is only one of the factors here.
California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.
Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc
So it's luxury only in NYC
None of this is NIMBYism.
Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise
Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc
Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.
What's missing is how much ability you have to sleep, rather than some sort of sometimes controllable factor like schedule. In my case, my brain wakes me up with anxiety one hour or more before the alarm rings (I never check time, I'm guessing). My room is always cold and relatively dark - not photo development dark, but not far.
The cortisol spikes are what get me. I can drink or not drink, exercise or not exercise, take magnesium or not take magnesium. The brain wants to tell me at 630 or 7 all the things that can go wrong or todos, instead of letting me sleep til 8. Sometimes it's much earlier than that.
I also wake up at the slightest sound or movement. It's been like this since I was a child. I'm defective, and all the bro science Youtube videos with top 10 science -based 'hacks' don't solve the problem. Know what does? Anti anxiety medication, but doctors don't prescribe benzos anymore.
The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.
Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.
French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.
Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.
And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.