This is the EU Commission in Brussels. “It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont told POLITICO, making a justifiable analogy since the upper floors, where housing commissioners worked, kept their air conditioning running while the proles in the lower floors sweltered
Americans wouldn’t stand for this.
Not yet, anyway.
1. Could there be a more throbbing example of the unethical “Let them eat cake!” attitude, though it is more like “Let them jump into rivers and drown!”?
2. Why would anyone trust the EU if its leadership could even consider something like this? Yet this is the same orientation that Communism inflicted on its populations. I saw the end results as well as the brainwashing of the public it required when I had (and I do mean had) to be in Moscow in the Nineties for two weeks.
3. Bernie Sanders honeymooned in Moscow. What does this tell you? And he’s being credited with remaking the Democratic Party, along with fellow useful idiot AOC.
4. Yet young voters in droves rushed to the polls in New York to elect exactly the kinds of candidates who hold the “government knows best” and “Know your place, serfs!” world view that is antithetical to American traditions, values and thought.
5. The Democratic Party, now being increasingly dominated by socialists and Communists, is counting on Trump Derangement to let it triumph in November, while its policies, and the even worse policies supported by the Democratic Socialists, are ostentatiously irresponsible and anti-American. Good plan!
Ethics Alarms 
Assuming the air conditioning had to be shut down (I assume it was overloaded and might have broken completely otherwise), what would be your solution Jack? Leave it running only on the most-occupied floors? Turn it off on every floor in solidarity?
Also are there any air conditioning experts in the commentariat? I’m wondering if (assuming the key mechanical parts are installed on the roof) it might be the case that if you’re going to shut down any floors, they have to be the ones farthest away from those key parts, in which case this could simply be a consequence of how the system works (unless that’s still “systemic feudalism” or something…)
Per the statement, the shut down was necessitated by hot weather. Likely a brownout due to high demand. The equitable solution would have been to send everyone home, no?
“If the EU were a state…” What statistic is being used to rank them? I’ve heard that the UK, if it were a state, would rank 51st in median household income, which sounds suspiciously similar. The EU, in per-capita this or that, might also rank very low, but in absolute terms, Germany (part of the EU) at $5.45 T has a greater GDP than California.(highest in the US: $ 4 T). (Wikipedia).
Yup, bad stat. I can’t find any consistent comparison, so I’ll kill it. Thanks. It’s tangential to the post anyway.
The EU GDP is pretty close to equal to the US, I think.
65% is the most reliable stat I’ve seen.
The GDP of the EU is about 25 trillion. The US is about 30 trillion. The EU has 1.25 the population of the US.
The warmth of collectivism.
I’m not an HVAC expert, but I’m pretty sure cold air sinks and hot air rises. I’d hope that in a cold winter the building would be heated from the bottom.
Back to this summer, if the ventilation connects the floors together (the stairwells will, if they’re allowed to prop the doors open) then it makes some amount of sense to cool the upper half of the building and allow the cold air to sink to the lower floors. How effective that will be is subject to experimentation, and there may be options they’re overlooking beyond just picking one contiguous block of floors to cool. A better option might be running the air conditioners on even-numbered floors for a while, and then switching to odd. That takes more work but might be better at keeping people cooler.
In the long term, I’ve read about a building that uses the cheaper night-time electricity to make a large amount of ice, so that it can keep the building cool during the day without using electricity during peak hours. That seems like a good way to make efficient use of energy.