In 2004, ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) recommended an operating temperature range from 20°C to 25°C. In 2008, the society went further, suggesting that temperatures could be raised to 27°C.

Following that, the society issued Revision A1, which raised the limit to 32°C (89.6°F) depending on conditions.

This was not an idle whim. ASHRAE engineers said that higher temperatures would have little effect on the lifetime of components, but would offer significant energy savings.

Figures from the US General Services Administration suggested that data centers could save four percent of their total energy, for every degree they allowed the temperature to climb. //

Facebook quickly found it could go beyond the ASHRAE guidelines. At its Prineville and Forest City data centers, they raised the server temperatures to 29.4°C, and found no ill effects. //

Google went up to 26.6°C, and Joe Kava, then vice president of data centers, said the move was working: “Google runs data centers warmer than most because it helps efficiency.”

Intel went furthest. For ten months in 2008, the chip giant took 900 servers, and ran half of them in a traditionally cooled data center, while the other 450 were given no external cooling. The server temperatures went up to 33.3°C (92°F) at times.

At the end of the ten months, the chip giant compared those servers with another 450 which had been run in a traditional air-conditioned environment. The 450 hot servers had saved some 67 percent of the power budget.

In this higher-temperature test, Intel actually found a measurable increase in failure. Amongst the hot servers, two percent more failed. But that failure rate may have had nothing to do with the temperature - the 450 servers under test also had no air filtration or humidity control, so the small increase in failure rate may have been due to dust and condensation.

The federal government’s onerous regulations on HSAs have limited their availability to all but the luckiest American workers.

The Prime Meridian is the universally decided zero longitude, an imaginary north/south line which bisects the world into two and begins the universal day. The line starts at the north pole, passes across the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, and ends at the south pole. Its existence is purely abstract, but it is a globally-unifying line that makes the measurement of time (clocks) and space (maps) consistent across our planet.

The Greenwich line was established in 1884 at the International Meridian Conference, held in Washington DC. That conference's main resolutions were: there was to be a single meridian; it was to cross at Greenwich; there was to be a universal day, and that day would start at mean midnight at the initial meridian. From that moment, the space and time on our globe have been universally coordinated.

None of that means that asking Congress to reauthorize federal spending bills every few years isn’t a great idea. Why would stalwarts of “democracy” oppose revisiting spending decisions made by legislators nearly 90 years ago? No living person has ever voted on them. And though “liberals” are generally more protective of Social Security than the Bill of Rights, entitlement programs aren’t foundational governing ideas, they do not protect our natural rights, nor are they at the heart of the American project. Government dependency is, in fact, at odds with all of it.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of private-sector establishments go out of business, and yet not a single federal government program ever does. While nearly every facet of society embraces cost-saving efficiencies, the federal government perpetually grows. It is madness. Simply as a function of good governance, it would be reasonable for Congress to review the efficacy and cost of existing federal programs, and then make suggestions for reforms or elimination or — yikes — privatization. Forget entitlements. Is there any reason we shouldn’t revisit the billions spent on the obsolete Natural Resource Conservation Service (created in 1935 to help farmers deal with soil corrosion) or the Rural Electrification Administration (created in the same year, when large swaths of rural Americans did not have electricity) or the counterproductive Small Business Administration or the subsidy sucking Amtrak corporation? //

In the 1970s, Biden supported re-upping federal spending authorization every four years and requiring Congress to “make a detailed study of the program before renewing it.” Obviously, Biden hasn’t stuck to a single principled position in his entire career. But it is worth noting there was plenty of bipartisan support for sunsetting bills from 1970 through the 2000s — including from Ed Muskie, Jesse Helms, liberal “lion” Ted Kennedy, and George W. Bush.