Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics

“Baseball.  Cold showers.  Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.

It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat.  In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.

However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids.  Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked:  at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.

That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system.  The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output.  Which is also their minimum output.  My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off.  Period.

What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster.  Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach.  Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.

If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.

Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.

The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward.  As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”

After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.

That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.

I think step five is the hardest.

But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy.  Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates.  So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.

Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time.  Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response.  But soaring oil prices?

Responding to those requires time and investment.  First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases.  After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.

Then, pipe is needed.  And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera.  This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales.  That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.

The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.

Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results.  Now.  Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.

The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located.  They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”

I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?

The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them.  They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:

John Wilder:  “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder.  With me?”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez:  “Huh?  Why are you in my house at midnight?”

JW:  “Let me try a different approach.  How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”

AOC:  “Oh, like 40 or 50?”

JW:  “Good.  Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”

AOC:  “I don’t know?  That they smell like my feet?”

JW:  “Well . . . . okay.  But is it hard to keep them organized?”

AOC:  “OH!  Totally!  I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”

JW:  “Right!  The amount of disorder increases!”

AOC:  “Oh, I get it!!!  Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”

JW:  “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there.  Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”

AOC:  “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner.  Instead?  Only Fans®.”

I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.

Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.

Longer term decisions include:

  • tax policy which drives investment decisions and can kill industries,
  • Social Security and Medicare, in which cash is taken, spent, and then the next generation is saddled with the repayment obligations,
  • immigration policy, which changes the population and workforce over decades,
  • tariffs, which determine winners and losers, and
  • many other things that you or I could name if we just spent 10 minutes thinking about it.

Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades.  The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.

I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.

Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.

But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time.  I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

14 thoughts on “Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics”

  1. here’s our plan let’s build 4.2 million dollar missiles to shoot down 20 thousand dollar drones that the other guys can make 20 thousand a day and we can make 17 a month. LOL they just need to stay on track until our money printer breaks

    1. Elaborate plans and remedies only apply to nations not intentionally self-destructing. The U.S., Canada, Aus, Western Europe . . . these are being deliberately deconstructed by elites to bring about their Glorious New Order. They’ll do as they please. For now.

  2. Almost nobody has AC down here. Just rich tourists and the local wealthy. Few attempt to use AC outside of single enclosed rooms, usually the bedroom. V expensive to cool the entire house.

    Last summer a buddy bought me a portable AC unit to mount in my bedroom window. Old gringos dying in the jungle last about two weeks without some form of AC. Stoves are rare here, obvious reasons.

    Americans live so easily and comfortably that they don’t appreciate (to God) how convenient their lives really are. That ain’t the case in most of the world.

  3. As we get dumber as a people we are going to find out that the complex systems we take for granted are going to suddenly stop working. Hijinks and hilarity will follow.

  4. I’ve always been interested in so-called Sankey diagrams that show the kind of complex system interrelationships you are talking about – not so much the long-term feedback loops but at least the inputs and outputs of the whole system. You are right that big changes are coming, they will play out over long periods of time, and nobody is giving any thought to how this stuff is gonna actually turn out in real life.

    Here for example is a very interesting Sankey diagram showing changes in US energy use over time – going from wood to coal to natgas and oil. Look at today’s skinny, almost invisible threads of energy in from wind and solar, and the even thinner line of electricity to transportation. The currently policy plan is to beef all of those up to where they replace the coal, oil and natgas input lines? Um, how?

    https://us-sankey.rcc.uchicago.edu/

    The real thing we gotta concern ourselves with is not beefing up the solar, wind and transportation electric lines. It’s the sudden reduction in size that’s gonna occur in the natgas and petroleum lines due to supply shocks. Such shocks are coming, and they will happen quickly. Our inability to currently handle even long-term feedback loop changes does not bode well for our future.

  5. Trying to explain the concept of hysteresis to my college de-educated wife seems akin to teaching a baboon to repair a Swiss watch. It can’t be done and the baboon would prefer to fling its own poo, instead. So she just goes on setting the a/c to 62 (as low as the thermostat can register) whenever she suffers a hot flash, and in an hour or less is spreading a blanket across her knees in the frosty house. Single zone, natch, so all 3200 square feet of the place, with ten foot high ceilings, cools to meat locker temps. So cold that I get this terrible ache right in the wallet.

    Embracing the notion of hope springing eternal (while keeping a nervous eye on the definition of insanity as repeating the same action over and over, expecting a different outcome) I continue to try to enlighten her. But, her lack of that crucial ‘Y’ chromosome makes the task nigh on impossible. Thinking about maybe putting a dummy thermostat cover over the real one so that she can crank it down to arctic cold (or up to fiery hell) while maintaining the usual 72 degrees in all seasons.

    Perhaps we could do the same for AOC, handing her fake levers of power, disconnected from anything, to indulge her lust for power without risk.

  6. Your article on thermostat mechanics couldn’t have happened at a better time although you should have expanded it to cover a complete mass and thermal balance on the whole AC system. Why? Because my in-laws have had to repair a fairly new AC 4 different times this year and have spent about $10k in the process (again this is a fairly new unit). I need help explaining this to them.

    They get cold even when it is 95F out (I think that was 200 furloughs or was that picoCoulombs???) and switch the thermostat over to heat in the middle of the summer. Never mind just opening a window of backing off the thermostat as they no longer grasp that it is an on/off switch. But wait, there’s more. The MIL feels a bit of a draft and goes around and closes ALL the vents, so the heat pump is trying to blast hot air into the house in scorching weather but the air has no where to go. This was happening 2 or 3 times per day and ultimately was damaging the HVAC unit. MIL either doesn’t remember she shouldn’t do this (dementia) or fails to grasp the underlying thermodynamics (hence the need for you to fill the mass and energy balance so I can provide her with a how-to manual).

    We ultimately had to put a lock box on the thermostat and put non-closable registers on the vents to prevent them from being closed…….so now the MIL just throws towels over them.

    1. Good heavens! Sounds like a space heater would be cheaper! You could get it for her as a housewarming gift?

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