WATCHMAN'S TORCH Issue #30
HOW ROGUE APPLIANCES ARE BEATING THE SYSTEM
// HARDWARE IN HOT TIMES //
THE UNDERGROUND BOOM OF BLACK MARKET AIR CONDITIONERS IN EUROPE
By Urban Hernandez
Dear privacy seekers,
It got hot. Properly hot. France, the UK, and Germany all sitting around 40°C (104°F), with Spain and Portugal deciding that wasn’t dramatic enough and pushing past 44°C (111°F). Hot enough that our own European operations slowed to a crawl, and hot enough that we started wondering what the actual experts were telling people to do about it.
So we did what you do when the world stops making sense: we pointed an AI at the internet and told it to read everything the “reputable sources” had to say about surviving an European heat wave. Merge the repeats, count the mentions, translate the noise into English, and hand it back to us clean.
What it handed back was this table. I’m printing it as-is, because I don’t think I could improve on it if I tried.
Limit indoor heat // Mentions: 1
Turn off non-essential electronics and appliances to prevent generating additional heat inside your home.
Check warnings // Mentions: 1
Regularly monitor local weather alerts and air quality indexes to plan your day safely.
Maintain indoor air quality // Mentions: 1
Avoid smoking indoors, limit the use of cleaning sprays, and use a damp mop to keep dust down.
Conserve water // Mentions: 1
Follow local drought restrictions by limiting outdoor watering and turning off running taps.
Travel smart // Mentions: 1
Avoid driving during peak heat, check public transport conditions in advance to minimize wait times, and bring water.
Swim safely // Mentions: 1
Choose supervised areas, enter the water gradually after sun exposure, and always watch children near water.
Prevent wildfires // Mentions: 1
Do not barbecue near dry vegetation, never throw cigarette butts on the ground, and postpone risky outdoor work.
Seek official help // Mentions: 1
Contact your local council if a hot home is negatively affecting your health.
Use breathable bedding // Mentions: 1
Sleep with a thin sheet made of cotton, silk, or linen.
Freeze your bedding // Mentions: 1
Place your bed linens in the freezer briefly to make falling asleep easier.
Sleep alone // Mentions: 1
Sleep by yourself to avoid absorbing another person’s body heat.
Maintain salt intake // Mentions: 1
Do not drastically reduce your salt consumption, as you need to replace minerals lost through sweating.
Dress appropriately // Mentions: 2
Wear and reapply sunscreen, a hat, and light, loose-fitting clothing.
Use fans safely // Mentions: 2
Use electric fans to help cool your skin only if the room temperature is below 35°C.
Stay indoors // Mentions: 3
Keep out of the heat and avoid going out during the hottest hours of the afternoon.
Limit activity // Mentions: 3
Postpone sports, gardening, DIY projects, and non-essential travel until the coolest parts of the day.
Eat cooling meals // Mentions: 3
Eat light, small, low-fat meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Monitor vulnerable people // Mentions: 3
Check on the elderly, children, and isolated or sick individuals to ensure they are coping well.
Know the symptoms // Mentions: 3
Watch out for warning signs like high fever, incoherent speech, and dehydration.
Apply first aid / Call for help // Mentions: 3
Call emergency services (like 999, 112, or 15) immediately if someone shows signs of severe heat illness.
Block out the sun // Mentions: 4
Keep windows, blinds, and shutters closed during the hottest parts of the day.
But not too much // Mentions: 1
Avoid closing your blinds completely to prevent trapped heat from creating a mini greenhouse that could allegedly shatter your window glass (or at least, that’s what I was told).
Ventilate when cooler // Mentions: 4
Create cross-ventilation by opening windows early in the morning or late at night.
Seek shade // Mentions: 4
Choose shaded areas when walking, park your car in the shade, and take regular breaks out of the sun.
Hydrate often // Mentions: 4
Drink plenty of water throughout the day and always bring a water bottle when traveling.
Use water to cool down // Mentions: 5
Bring a spray bottle on public transport, take lukewarm showers, or jump in a pool to lower your body temperature.
Spread yogurt on windows // Mentions: O_O
If you still can’t beat the heat, just spread yogurt on your windows to block out the sun.
Follow the whole table to the letter and you end up with a fairly specific picture:
Someone sealed into a blacked-out room reaching 32 degrees, sleeping alone on bedsheets fresh from the freezer, refreshing weather alerts on their phone, spray bottle in hand, salt intake carefully maintained, steadily working their way down a checklist that ends with them coating their own windows in cultured milk.
The yogurt line, for the record, comes from the BBC — an outlet funded by a mandatory license fee paid by the British public. Make of that what you will.
We did not test the yogurt. Some lines you don’t cross.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is an insult to your intelligence. There’s a very suspicious item missing from this list: mechanical cooling or, in plain terms, air conditioning. We already covered this kind of public-facing weasel language in CONGRATULATIONS. YOU NOW UNDERSTAND NOTHING. Watchman’s Torch Issue 028 — how officials use words to bury a debate and walk it in circles until everyone forgets what was being asked in the first place. You could say we cherry-picked the advice to exclude AC. We didn’t have to. If anything, we had to go hunting for the few mentions of it at all — and every single time AC came up, it arrived wrapped in more warnings than a Chinese popcorn cannon bought on Temu, all pointing to the same conclusion: THIS IS NOT THE SOLUTION.
On the rooftops of some of these very same “trusted media” headquarters, you’ll find — suspiciously enough — rooftop industrial AC units. It all comes to a head with Emma Beddington, a Guardian columnist, who wrote that “air conditioning isn’t the answer,” while confessing in the same breath to owning a unit herself — a little freestanding one, run “maybe 10 times a year,” which she says she’s “deeply, guiltily glad of.” Her word, not mine.
So just go buy one, problem solved, right? Wrong. Not even close.