- People prefer to stay indoors. Air pollution that reduces your lifespan exists in cities like Beijing and Hebei - even Shanghai (certain months during winter time). Extreme heatwaves during summer time that has the city cooking in 40-50C....it gets so hot that people sleep outdoors on sidewalks! (Shanghai will supposedly be unlivable in 30 years due to extreme heatwaves)
- cheap(-ish) labor, although now labor costs matches that of Mexico
- shitty food sanitary conditions, now with no storefront. Have fun figure out whether your cheap delivered food was cooked with gutter oil or not.
- questionable food ingredient quality. tons of fake stuff abounds.
it gets so hot that people sleep outdoors on sidewalks
Off topic, but I find it funny how society has changed so much in so little time.
When I was growing up in New York, if it was hot, many people in the neighborhood would sleep outside — especially people in apartment buildings. You'd see dozens of them snoring away on fire escapes.
Now those same families probably can't imagine living without air conditioning, even though the city is so much safer today.
The norming of AC in so many places has been quite the shift. I live in an old house in Central-ish fairly rural Massachusetts and I sometimes get funny looks from people when I tell them I don't have AC. (I do have a small window unit I use for sleeping for a week or two in a typical summer when it gets uncomfortably hot to sleep.)
When I was an undergrad and spent a couple summers in the city in the Boston area, no AC at all.
I got many funny looks from hotel staff on a recent trip for asking how to switch off air conditioning, or asking them not to turn it on when they showed me to my room. Apparently most tourists prefer to sit in a fridge.
If I've been walking round outside at 32–35°C, there's no way I want to be in a room at 16–18°, let alone sleep in one. I usually set it to 28° and slept without any bedclothes.
I'm very much in the same boat as you. It's a pet peeve of mine that every building now seems to have a completely different climate to the outside world. I'll never get how people don't understand - or don't want to go through - the process of acclimatisation. If it's 30C outside, having the AC on at 20C all day is of course going to make 30C seem unbearably hot!
As a student I lived in the North of England in Newcastle, where temperatures averaged around 0C in the winter and because we couldn't afford heating the house was often around -2C. I would still walk around in t-shirt and shorts without problem. I later moved in with a group of girls who had the heating knocked up to 25C all year round, and within a week stepping out of the door felt like jumping into an ice bath. Rapid temperature change mess up so many of our bodily processes that I'm amazed it's discussed so little. If I don't sleep with a window wide open I know I'll struggle to get even a single cycle of REM sleep, and almost all of the people I've convinced to try sleeping with a window open and the heating off have told me their sleep improved ten-fold after a couple of weeks.
- People prefer to stay indoors. Air pollution that reduces your lifespan exists in cities like Beijing and Hebei - even Shanghai (certain months during winter time). Extreme heatwaves during summer time that has the city cooking in 40-50C....it gets so hot that people sleep outdoors on sidewalks! (Shanghai will supposedly be unlivable in 30 years due to extreme heatwaves)
- cheap(-ish) labor, although now labor costs matches that of Mexico
- shitty food sanitary conditions, now with no storefront. Have fun figure out whether your cheap delivered food was cooked with gutter oil or not.
- questionable food ingredient quality. tons of fake stuff abounds.