Silk Road forums

Discussion => Off topic => Topic started by: karensupreme on May 17, 2013, 03:55 pm

Title: The Waste
Post by: karensupreme on May 17, 2013, 03:55 pm
I went into the post office last night at 11:15 pm or so....it was a balmy 80 degrees outside with 75% humidity but wouldn't you know, that post office lobby, with absolutely no one inside of it was 70 degrees.

And I thought to myself....this is one post office. Imagine if this city had the savings of not running the AC for 12 hours when no one is there for the past forty years. How much money would that be?

And then I got to thinking....how much money has been wasted across the US keeping post office lobbies, just like this one, comfortable for the one or two stragglers that come in at night? Christ, would it kill them to turn the air up to 77 (Fahrenheit)? Also I realize how much that last sentence makes me sound like my grand parents.

And then I thought....the AC is just one component of waste, to one component of the government's operational inefficiencies. And when you get to thinking on that scale it isn't hard to see why we run in the red and have had to borrow so heavily to keep all these insane pet projects and social programs going. Of course, when those bills are spread out over 310 million people, the handful of jackasses that meet up in Washington couldn't care less. When things come too easy, they are taken for granted and wasted. Its only when they aren't there anymore that people begin to examine where they went wrong.

Eh, nothing profound here, just rehashing old ground but it still irks me. This is what I do with my days off....come down off LSD and think about operational inefficiencies. No wonder I'm single.
Title: Re: The Waste
Post by: Moon Fried on May 17, 2013, 04:21 pm
But without AC, what if some of our tabs lost its potency in the mail? :-[

Not actually sure if that would contribute significantly.
Title: Re: The Waste
Post by: karensupreme on May 17, 2013, 04:57 pm
I was thinking that though...you've got a good point...maybe they need to keep it at a certain temp in case they've got things in people's mail that are temp sensitive? Oh well, I'm just a crotchety old man with a lot of time to speculate.
Title: Re: The Waste
Post by: Moon Fried on May 17, 2013, 05:06 pm
You bring up some pretty interesting conversation though, no doubt.

I feel like the postal office would be more against items in the mail that are temp sensitive.
Title: Re: The Waste
Post by: astor on May 17, 2013, 05:43 pm
Post offices are the tip of the iceberg. Every office building is like that. Think about all the 30+ story sky scrapers in every major city. They all run heating and AC throughout the night, when no one except maybe a few guards and maintenance people are in them.

We are spectacularly wasteful, which is why the average American consumes something like 200 times the energy of the average person in the third world.

BTW, how many miles per gallon does that car that you drove to that post office get? :)