The apartment I moved into has a built in "smart" thermostat for some reason. The big selling point I guess was that I could control the temperature from my phone and it has built in spyware Alexa so you can uhhh
I removed it and just put an old one on there. Maybe I'm just becoming more of a luddite but I really don't get this huge movement to make everything digitized and "smart".
Smart thermostats actually make a lot of sense from an energy grid perspective because you can sync up the centralized power production with real-time data coming from its consumers, as well as doing things like adjusting peoples' thermostats during blizzards to ensure you don't get rolling brownouts from everyone putting their furnace at 85 degrees simultaneously.
Like everything else though, capitalism decided to use this great idea to shove ads into your eyeballs in the most invasive and wasteful manner possible.
True. Knowing what people have their thermostats set to (especially if those thermostats are on a preprogrammed schedule to change temps throughout the day) allows them to know what demand will be as well though, which is very useful.
Which works right up until climate change decides to dump a foot of snow on Houston and suddenly the grid is overtaxed by a factor of ten and you have no way of handling that other than half-heartedly asking people to maybe please turn their heaters down a little. This way you can go "actually we're going to set everyone's thermostats to 65 so the transformers don't fucking explode and half a million people freeze to death, wear a sweater for a few days."
The apartment I moved into has a built in "smart" thermostat for some reason. The big selling point I guess was that I could control the temperature from my phone and it has built in
spywareAlexa so you can uhhhI removed it and just put an old one on there. Maybe I'm just becoming more of a luddite but I really don't get this huge movement to make everything digitized and "smart".
I am going to become the anprim joker.
Smart thermostats actually make a lot of sense from an energy grid perspective because you can sync up the centralized power production with real-time data coming from its consumers, as well as doing things like adjusting peoples' thermostats during blizzards to ensure you don't get rolling brownouts from everyone putting their furnace at 85 degrees simultaneously.
Like everything else though, capitalism decided to use this great idea to shove ads into your eyeballs in the most invasive and wasteful manner possible.
They can already do this with power meters used for determining electricity usage for power bills.
True. Knowing what people have their thermostats set to (especially if those thermostats are on a preprogrammed schedule to change temps throughout the day) allows them to know what demand will be as well though, which is very useful.
They could probably do that using power meter trend data from previous years as well 😉
Which works right up until climate change decides to dump a foot of snow on Houston and suddenly the grid is overtaxed by a factor of ten and you have no way of handling that other than half-heartedly asking people to maybe please turn their heaters down a little. This way you can go "actually we're going to set everyone's thermostats to 65 so the transformers don't fucking explode and half a million people freeze to death, wear a sweater for a few days."
The scripture is on your side here