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"Utility has alerted us to an upcoming brown-out in a region impacting 40 stores. Cool everything down a few extra degrees in preparation."

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A phone call from the HVAC company and physical thermostat dial (in a locked cabinet to prevent incompetent/malicious employees tampering with it) seems a safer solution.

And when it happens at 3 in the morning? And when those people are in a meeting 10 miles down the road?

Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.

Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.

I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.

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