It's certainly an element to it, combined with a lack of leisure time resulting from longer working hours and weaker unions. The power of the automobile industry in infrastructure design certainly didn't help either.
Still, the way we eat is so deeply ingrained in culture that I can't help but feel it goes deeper than this. People will not eat in their cars in Turin even though it's very much a car city. I'm from up north in Scandinavia where distances are greater (though more in time than in distance, as we travel on small winding roads rather than highways), and eating in the car still seems somewhat unheard of there.
Not that you're wrong - I think there's a profound change in culture that has taken place, but I agree the distances in the US would certainly be one of the mechanisms behind it.
I'm curious if people eat in their cars in Latin America now.
Maybe I have my European biases, but it's amazing to me that the absurdity of eating restaurant food in your car rather than around a table is not striking to everyone.
Of course, in the late 40s this would be a fun gimmick - what is really absurd is that the concept of eating in your car seems to somehow have become normalized somewhere along the way. Again, seen with European eyes - of all cultural differences, there are others I struggle more with.
Yes, that sounds about right - the relative effect of the tower probably depends a lot on various factors like how windy it is, if extreme heat occurs only for a day or if it has been ongoing so that the water under ground is heated as well, etc.
These comments were in response to @Gangreless, who stated that a modern AC "can only cool about 20f below the outside temperature". I didn't catch that it was fahrenheit first, and now that I know I am happily backing off rather than having to think in terms of freedom units.
We're talking celsius, I hope for your sake it doesn't routinely get to 100 C where you are. :)
Edit: The user actually said 20 F, I got confused by the mix of units. "50c to 35c is 27 degrees" didn't make sense to me, but I figured I'd let it slide. No idea what's going on here. :)
These days in Yazd the average warmest temperature in July is 40 degrees, so if what you're saying is correct they'd be able to cool it down to a liveable 30 degrees even in the warmest part of the day. And at night temperatures still dip to 26, so the indoors temperature probably wouldn't quite reach 40 even without this system. So it might make the difference between 40 degrees outdoors and high 20s indoors, which is fantastic.
Would be interesting to know if average temperatures got up to 40 in the summer around the time they were built as well, or if average temperatures in the region have been rising.
There are all these Christian fundamentalists who have been told all their lives they'll go to hell if they're not one hundred percent completely straight all the time, and God sees them and knows what they're thinking. Assuming there's a biological element to homosexuality, a large portion of these people are not completely straight from nature's side. Assuming people are often excited by taboos, they might secretly be more bi-curious (or whatever the word is) than the average population.
For these people, every single step towards gay and trans rights is making it a little bit harder to live in complete denial. They cannot simply ignore it, because they're obsessed with it. One improper thought and they'll burn in hell.
Of course this crowd is terrified of trans people.