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.