Jsfitchpatrick

A hilariously bad metaphor, if you know how collectivist heating worked in the USSR. In Soviet Moscow, they had a centralized heating system for the whole city. Heat was centrally generated and then distributed through a network of pipes to houses and other buildings. The service was very, very cheap to the end users. Hooray! Workers of the world, unite! But people got what they paid for. A thermostat in your house would be too individualist, so they didn't exist. The level of heat was set collectively by government administrators. They had to base their decisions on weather forecasts because it would take about 12 hours for a temperature change to work its way through the system. So when the forecasts were wrong (which was often), the heat level was wrong too. On top of that, every building is different. So no matter what heat level the government chose, some people would be too cold and others would be too warm (except for the times when the heat ran out due to shortages, then everyone was cold). People in buildings that were too hot would open the windows, even in the middle of winter, wasting heat that could have been used by others. And because there were no price signals, they hardly faced any costs when they did so. The heating system didn't even have meters for individuals to measure their usage. Officials in post-Soviet Moscow estimated that the whole system used about as much natural gas per year as all of France. The collectively owned underground pipes that carried the heat suffered from the classic problem: If everyone owns them, then nobody does. The pipes fell into disrepair and would be replaced by above-ground temporary pipes (which could go anywhere since nobody owned the land either). And they would stay that way for years. That is, if you were one of the lucky ones who got temporary pipes in the first place. Others were just left out in the cold. So yeah, if I was trying to promote collectivism, I probably wouldn't use a heat metaphor in winter. There are a lot of people who lived in collectivist countries who would dispute its association with warmth.