New Beginnings

I apparently grabbed this URL in June 2019. This is the first comment I left in that discussion and it has twelve points:

It would really be better if we promoted more passive solar design instead of more AC.

We used to rely a lot more heavily on vernacular architecture. It is possible to design a space that needs little in the way of active heating or cooling to stay comfortable.

I don't know why this isn't more widely promoted. I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who has thought of this obvious answer and I have no influence in the world, so I'm just howling into the void of the internet to occasionally comment on it on HN where it often then gets dismissed on some excuse or other.

I cannot find it at all on the discussion page of the article in question and several of my replies are down voted while everyone behaves dismissively and acts like I'm being overly emotional or some crap for replying in earnest to the question put to me.

Below is another comment by me in the same discussion:

But that doesn't solve the heat problem for everyone who's living in a house that's already been built

I have a serious medical condition. Years ago, while getting divorced and crammed into a single bedroom with my two teenaged sons fir nearly a year in Georgia, we discovered that getting rid of all cardboard boxes from food items stored in our room reliably and consistently dropped the temp 5 degrees Fahrenheit, lowered the humidity and stopped the invasion of roaches. I am routinely told I'm full of shit for telling that story. It's merely an anecdote.

I've lived without upholstered furniture for years. I currently have no carpeting and no mattresses. We remain strict about removing cardboard and papers from our rental.

I'm in a hundred year old building with no AC. When things get hot, other tenants open their window and door trying to get a cross breeze and are clearly miserable. We just open the window. Once in a great while, I will go run errands or spend time at the library to reduce the number of bodies in our cramped room from three to two to bring down the temperature in our room.

I've lived this way more than a decade. I'm an environmental studies major who wanted to be an urban planner as my dream career.

I get ignored, mocked, dismissed, attacked, treated like I'm stupid and crazy and have no idea whatsoever what the hell I'm talking about.

The world treated me with potentially deadly callous disregard while I was deathly ill and homeless. Now its bullshit misogyny and classism is causing it to continue to turn a deaf ear to suggestions that actually work.

While the world burns and wrings its hands I get on with making my life work. It's increasingly hard for me to believe people actually want to solve this. If they wanted to solve this, they would jump on such anecdotal evidence, do some research to confirm it and start spreading the word.

I've been on HN nearly a decade. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leader board here. Men here routinely get told they must be smart if they have a lot of karma. I routinely get told I'm a fool obsessed with worthless internet points and shut up.

You don't have to rebuild the entire world. Just make some lifestyle tweaks.

But it won't happen because I'm a woman and everyone wants to explain to me why I shouldn't worry my silly little head about such things and I simply don't understand how anything works.