alt Hacker NewsAC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful. At least data centres enable me to communicate with distant colleagues, watch enriching movies, and use very strong AI tools to accelerate my research.
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Data centers also enable the NSA to store the metadata and contents of every phone call you make and police to (without a warrant) to track anyone who's walked in front of your doorbell or many street corners in your city. They also store all the location data your phone collects for Google or Apple, nearly your entire internet history collected surreptitiously because many sites automatically use your GMail or Facebook logins, and your entire purchase history collected via Visa or MasterCard.
And even better: all of that data is aggregated together and stored in its entirety several times over across multiple data centers because everyone shares your data with everyone else, such that if any single of more than a dozen data centers is ever compromised, it all gets leaked to whomever compromised it.
My building is leaky. The association won't fix it. How about this compromise, you set yours to 74 to compensate for my 68. Fair enough, or will you say I should move?
> AC at 68F is obnoxious and wasteful.
It's actually significantly more environmentally friendly than heating to above 68F in the winter in most cases, since most AC is done with heat pumps but most heating is oil/gas (100% fossil fuel consumption) or resistive electric heaters (dramatically less efficient than heat pumps). On top of that AC use aligns strongly with solar generation output while heating load does the opposite, which means that even when heating is done with electricity it comes disproportionately from gas turbines at natural gas peaker plants.