Borderdog

I occasionally have sex with my wife of 36 years and occasionally have sex with my hand...Does that make me bisexual?

Many of you are too young to remember the most powerful commercial ever. It was Apple's commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl introducing the MacIntosh computer. 


To this day, Apple still believes in the "Orwellian" theory: George Orwell described a number of things that would be destructive to the welfare of a free and open society. 
1). Invasion of personal privacy, either directly physically or indirectly by surveillance.
2). State control of its citizens' daily life, as in a "Big Brother" society.
The list goes on and on. 

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights was created for a reason. We, the people, are supposed to be in control of the government. But, it seems to be turning in the other direction, where the government is controlling us. We are slowly being brain-washed towards a dystopian existence.

I applaud Apple for standing up!

Let's get to the heart of this whole discussion.

One of Benjamin Franklin's most famous quotes: 

This is my first post on AppleInsider. I have been lurking for years. Been a Mac user since 1984. I have 3 Macs, 3 iPhones, an iPad, and an apple TV. So take all that with a grain of salt. 

I'm semi-retired now from the construction business; I was a custom home-builder for 40 years. I've built some incredible homes, which included some really complex heating/cooling systems and, complex electrical and lighting systems. I was also deeply involved in energy conservation within the home. 

What I have learned is: keep your winter-time thermostat at 68º and your summertime at 75º. We used Honeywell's programmable thermostats, but they don't really save you money. The best thing is to leave your thermostat alone at a set temperature; 68 in winter and 74-76 in the summer. When you turn your thermostat down at night in the winter, and then program it to ramp back up at 5:00 AM, you're not saving anything. There is a lot of mass within a house...furniture, interior wall, floors, etc. When that programmable  thermostat sets back the temps for the night or while your gone for the day, it has to expend an inordinate amount of energy to reheat the air plus the mass within your house.
No reason for any type of smart thermostat. 
It takes less time to manually reset your thermostat than it does to pull out your iPhone or tablet to regulate your home's temperature. Sheesh!

Now the same goes for lights. A properly wired house has two switches for a hallway; one switch at either end (that's called a 3-way because of the way it's wired, 3 switches controlling the same lights is called a 4-way). So what is so hard about when you enter or exit a room or hallway to just flip the fuckin' switches. It takes less effort than grabbing you iPhone.

We are turning into a bunch of techno couch potatoes, without even realizing we would expend less energy by manually turning lights off or on and manually adjusting the thermostat. Home automation is a joke!

The only place I use any automation is for my home theater/listening room. I can click one button and my system turns on and then after a few seconds, the lights will dim or turn off. 

I can program any of this stuff, but I still think it's a joke.