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California: Big Brother to control your thermostat?

  • #21
JLAP is completely correct - this site is about as reliable as Weekly World News. Go to the main page and see what they consider "news" - most of it is quite simply made up, with no basis in reality.

Also, a small, evil part of me wants this to be real so I can go to California and hack people's homes wirelessly. "So, 120 degrees should be good, now let's set the washing machine to turn on and off every 3 minutes...."

But yeah, this story belong with "Dwarf Shoots Two-Headed Bigfoot".

Mokele
 
  • #22
JLAP is completely correct - this site is about as reliable as Weekly World News. Go to the main page and see what they consider "news" - most of it is quite simply made up, with no basis in reality.

Also, a small, evil part of me wants this to be real so I can go to California and hack people's homes wirelessly. "So, 120 degrees should be good, now let's set the washing machine to turn on and off every 3 minutes...."

But yeah, this story belong with "Dwarf Shoots Two-Headed Bigfoot".

Mokele


Umm...


Plus:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/us/11control.html?em&ex=1200200400&en=fdc66b5d69c13c6e&ei=5087

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/01/11/america/calif.php

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,321970,00.html

http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=/Nation/archive/200801/NAT20080111a.html

Obviously, this isn't made up.
 
  • #23
the problem with this is that unless you build all homes identically it wont work........my thermostat set on 68 keeps my house warmer than some of my friends who set theirs at 75.....also if i happen to turn the thermistat down to 65 the temp in my house actually drops almost 10 degrees from where it is a 68......same token when set at 72 my house gets hotter than heck and rises much more than you would think for the 4 degree change................so unless you can build everyones house identical.....the guberment having a remote control to your thermistat is a piss poor idea.
 
  • #24
Ok, those are good sources - when I replied, only the first link worked, and that site is about as dubious as it gets.

Honestly, I doubt this will make it anywhere - it'll die in committee or be roundly voted down.
 
  • #26
Jeez, what ever happened to educating the public on problems like this and telling them what they can do to help the issue?

And btw, JLAP, bat boy is great! Just like that 40lb woman(or was it less?). I'm surprised that story is still going around, I remember reading that crap magazine when I was like 8-10 on a trip to Sunshine Key.
 
  • #27
My thermostat is set on 53. Hence, my heat has come on only twice, briefly, this winter so far and...I'm cold all the time and dress inside like I'm outside. At least no one can accuse me of over-using my share of natural gas. :usa2:

Needless to say I love going over to other people's houses or going out to dinner or going anywhere a building is heated. It feels sooooo good. :)
 
  • #28
53? holy crapola! Thats suicide Suzzane! I'd at least put that baby on 60-65ish!
 
  • #29
Why doesn't the electric company just spend the money to update the infrastructure and build nuclear power plants to solve the power crunch? I did not finish reading the thread since I am in class, but Hell stop trying to salve the symptoms and fix the problem. The dilapidated electrical grid and lack of power plants is the problem. Just fix the problem and the symptoms will go away. Nuclear power is green power for the most part people.
 
  • #30
Just building more power plants wont solve the problem. The electrical grid in this country is poorly out of date. Most of it was designed or built 20+ years ago before we all had home computers, central air, and so many other electronic devices. The grid can not handle more power trying to force more through is just going to blow transformers and relay stations. Remember that black out that affect many states in New England, Michigan, and Canada a few years back. One of the causes of that issue was the out of date power grid which was trying to handle more power than it could. The solution a complete overhaul of the electric infrastructure in this country, but good luck getting that payed for.


I keep waiting for the government to put something in our toilets to monitor our bowel movements to see if flushing that toilet really was needed. LOL.
 
  • #31
The power grid system works. If there is a fault and a transformer blows, the grid automatically reroutes the power around the fault. What happened in that blackout was not cause by the system being incapable of handling the power load. There was a fault in the grid near brookpark ohio. The switch that was suppose to shut off that that portion of the grid, was forced to remain open because it Edison power workers had jimmyed it so they wouldn't have to keep resetting it. Since it didn't isolate the problem, the fault was allowed to enter the rest of the grid and which shut down in a domino effect. You can argue that the switch that was jimmyed was old and had shut down a number of times when it shouldn't have, and that's the reason the workers bypassed it. But if it was working, it would have prevented the blackout.
 
  • #32
If, in fact, this story has an element of truth to it, I don't see it as an omen of America's transition to a secret police thought monitoring totalitarian dystopia. In energy and resource-crunched urban areas, I would view this as a move in the right direction. The "slippery slope" methodology is useful in some cases, but it generally just creates blanket statements that become air-tight barriers to innovation and change. People seriously need to pick their battles.
 
  • #33
If, in fact, this story has an element of truth to it,

Which story are you referring to?
 
  • #34
When CNN, or even Fox news says something on the matter, then I'll take it halfway seriously. Maybe a quarter seriously, in the case of Fox news.


Glenn Beck is talking about it. I'll take it halfway seriously.
 
  • #35
As someone else mentioned earlier, band-aid methods are not going to fix this problem. We need a serious energy revolution in this country, and until then things are just going to get worse and worse. Government has no business messing with our liberties no matter how insignificant the value is.
 
  • #36
The fact that the bypassing of a single switch can shutdown such a large area tells me there is a problem in the infrastructure. Obviously our electrical grid has been interconnected in ways it should not have been. If it was cut off to a regional area, or even one state I could understand, but for such a large area to be blacked out by the failure of a single fail safe switch tells me the power grid is handling more than it was designed for. This is still a failure of an outdated overworked power grid.
 
  • #37
The switch did not fail. It was forced to remain open by the workers. It is there to shut down and isolate the fault. Computers then reroute around the fault so nobody loses power.

It failed to isolate the fault and the fault was then passed to other switches that did what they were designed to do, shut down. But since the fault was not isolated it spread to other switches that shut down as they were designed to do. It was not a failure in the system but a human failure that caused the blackout. No matter how good a system is, if the safety measures are bypassed the system will fail if there is a problem.

Don't get me wrong, we need a lot of improvements and changes. We need to changes in all parts of the system, from the power plants all the way to the consumers.
 
  • #38
So now the government can remotely control your house appliances? Why don't we all just go live in a cubicle? Seriously, come on houses are private places (emphasis on private).
 
  • #39
Your appliances can already be controlled remotely with rolling blackouts, which are more and more common as individual power consumption gets outrageous.
 
  • #40
People don't seem to remember that the rolling blackouts in California in 2001 were the result of a scam by Enron to fleece California by creating artificial shortages. They deliberately brought plants down to specifically make this happen, and the end result was California signed emergency energy contracts for BILLIONS of extra dollars. It was just a scam - and it was a direct result of misguided de-regulation schemes. We cannot de-regulate industries that are vital to our survival - giant energy conglomerates don't care about the welfare of the people - they just seek maximum profits. The MUST be regulated, and heavily so.

Instead of going totally psycho and trying to control our thermostats (it's hard to believe this is actually a proposal), they ought to threaten to immediately appropriate and nationalize any energy company that creates an artificial shortage. You can bet it will never happen again if they do.

Capslock
 
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