The thing I keep thinking about, and I feel like I’ve never been able to properly communicate, is that the machines our society runs on are built to run in a certain temperature range.
The 2021 texas winter fiasco was a perfect demonstration of what happens when we try to run a society’s machinery outside of it’s expected temperature range. Yes, the ERCOT goofballs were trying to save money by narrowing that expected operating range because “It never gets that cold” and “It never gets that hot”, but my badly articulated point still stands - a system was made to operate in a temperature range outside of it’s capability, and it started to fail. They were minutes away from losing very expensive and hard to replace equipment. What we don’t want is for one of the more competently-run power grids in the world to start to buckle due to temperatures, because the same thing that happened in texas could happen on a larger scale.
And that’s just talking about the power grid. Anything with a heat exchanger in it, including your car and air conditioner and all the refrigeration that is needed to keep everyone fed, is designed to run in a certain temperature range, and will stop working if you run it outside of that range for too long.
But wait, we can just design stuff to run in a wider temperature range! We certainly can. But we would have to redesign everything that moves heat around.
Like drop the macho act and ask for help, buddy. It’s ok.
And watch the people who said they cared suddenly get real scarce.
I wish it wasn’t that way, and I’m happy it’s no longer that way for me. But there are people around you right now who know of they speak up, loved ones and friends will tell them “it’s no big deal” or “It’s all in your head” or my favorite, “man up”.
I was living in Oklahoma and I remember some of the local media mentioning this “coronavirus” thing that was spreading in China. I also remember people joking about Corona (the beer) being suddenly less popular.
Then in February, March, and April it getting more and more serious, and this is about the time that people started claiming it wasn’t real, and if it was, it wasn’t that bad, and if it was, then it was from a chinese lab bent on taking down the US…
April-May had me re-adjusting my previous opinions of people around me that I thought were rational.
Im in Oklahoma. It was cold, with a day of powdery dry snow that we normally don’t get. Might have had 3"-4" of coverage. The schools were closed until today. We never lost any utilities, just stayed at home, got high, and did some baking.
It was above freezing today and yesterday, so we have some fun icy patches that haven’t cleared.
Two of my favorites are from books and don’t have pictures: the nanotech weapon given to grunts in “Old Man’s War” and the Soft Weapon from Niven’s short story titled, appropriately enough, “The Soft Weapon”. There was an animated Star Trek episode based on The Soft Weapon, but I can’t remember what I looked like, I just remember the producers weren’t brave enough to animate an alien with two heads and three legs.
Other than those, I really liked the silly guns in Ratchet and Clank, epecially the Vacuum Cannon.
A pile of speed camera guts, 10 meters of 900-pair phone line, a grounding grid from a substation, and some coils from an orphanage’s air conditioner, probably.
There are washing machines without anything more complex than a switch in them. If you really had a “pile of disassembled washing machines” you’d know that.