Matt McIrvin's Freaky Alternate Reality

There are also situations where the heating is of some conventional fossil-fuel-burning type but the controls and incentives are perverse. For instance, in the building where we lived in Arlington, Mass., there was a furnace that was directly below our apartment, whose operation was in no way related to the temperature in our apartment, for which we were not billed (heat is included in rent by state law) and that provided us with much more heat than we needed for most of the year; we'd sometimes have to run wall air conditioners just to make the bedroom bearable. So from the perspective of our behavior, the apartment was effectively in the tropics.