I had the most ironic rollercoaster ride thanks to your comment.
I copied it into DeepSeek because I figured who's better to teach me about greatness of Chinese government policies if not the most popular Chinese LLM?
Anyhow, it must have detected _something_ in your comment because Chinese censorship policy kicked in and DeepSeek refused to talk about it. Funny because I would wager the overall sentiment about China's abilities to govern in your comment was positive but okay.
I literally asked it "expand on it so I can learn more about Chinese policies" and that was enough to get censored!
Anyhow, after saying few times "huh? but I want to learn what's great about Chinese policies!" it finally gave me response in... Mandarin. So I asked it to provide me that information in English and... it refused. Talk about difficulty of finding any materials in English ;-)
After starting a new chat and using plenty of positive adjectives to make sure I don't want to learn a single bad thing about China, I finally got a list. Looks like China is 100% successful in everything they do! How neat!
So I said "That's cool. Does this set of policies have one name? Can you recommend any books about it? In English of course" and...
...request denied again.
I mean, maybe it says more about how horrible DeepSeek is for this kind of research but boy, it was so ironic I now have stack of iron at home.
I'm from Poland originally and I also set my thermostat to 20C. My entire life in fact. Not once did I consider it some virtuous effort. If I didn't read your post I still wouldn't know that it's something special.
Are you sure your roommate wasn't just used to 20C and it felt good to him? I often feel "it's too hot in here" when I have to visit offices with temp set higher.
Edit: I had to check because I thought I'm going insane but 18-21C is recommended by WHO?
I think the AC adoption is completely normal and some people really have fun playing astrology and interpreting everything as something more interesting than it truly is.
My house is by no means modern (built by pirates in 1600s) but it's fine 99.9% of the time without AC. So once a year when there's a heatwave, after several days, it may heat up too much inside and then for 1-2 days I walk around pondering "huh, perhaps I should install AC" - heck, if there's that 2nd day I may even Google about different AC models.
But next day heat is gone and I'm like "meh, okay, maybe I will get it some other time" and then I never return to it until the next year's heat remind sme about it again.
Once hot weather in my area becomes much more frequent, I'm sure I will then be finally wiggled into buying AC.
You can already see it across Europe too. Places that had hot weather for a long time have AC: Italy, Spain etc. I have seen plenty whether staying with my Spanish friends or vacationing in Italy.
But I also see it on a local scale too: I live by the sea but my friends living in central London whi often have 5C degrees more already did have plenty of chats about different AC models years ago. They got coaxed into buying AC by frequency of the event.
There is IMO all there is to it. People will just move slow and natural human laziness does not discriminate: old people who may die in this heat will also be caught among those who think they can make due one more year without AC. The only alternative to speed this up would be governments subsidizing or forcibly installing ACs in people houses.
And sure, you can moan about some specific regulations or show some one absurd story from that or this place - but if the real inertia was there, it would happen.