AI does not use much water. If you believe it does, like this article does, you have fallen for propaganda and lies, ironic in a post calling everyone using AI stupid.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
Is that supposed be a lot? That article states that all US data centers combined consume 450 million gallons a day, equivalent to 90 towns, which does not sound like very much.
I'm not the one here making assertions, I'm asking questions of the person making claims. I'll leave it to others to judge what is 'a lot' or 'reasonable'.
I don't think 'anyone who thinks X is Y' is a good basis for discussion, which is the real point.
> Approximately 80% of the water (typically freshwater) withdrawn by data centers evaporates, with the remaining water discharged to municipal wastewater facilities.
The electricity, air pollution and noise pollution are all from natural gas. Data centers aren’t loud, on site temporary natural gas turbines are. We can instead install solar and batteries and none of these will be issues. We already grow corn for fuel at 1/10th the land efficiency of solar so it’s not like we don’t have the land for it
I'm not talking about hypothetical possible futures in which people do the right thing. The datacenters that are being built right now and which are in operation right now use single-stage gas turbines, last I checked.
HVAC equipment can also cause a lot of noise pollution all on its own.
I feel like there's a huge political/economic opportunity in the US simply from getting government to shift subsidies from corn/ethanol to solar. Of course you also have to get buy-in from the farmers, but.
You could, you know, stop spreading deception about water usage if it bothers you so much when people call out deception about water usage.
At this point, I almost consider it trolling to bring it up: purposely throw in something incredibly stupid, and then throw a hissy fit when predictably called out on it.
You still have to grapple with the merits of their argument to find out if the indicator is correct or not.
In a world where everybody seems to be quoting grok with no further thought process you would think people would be more welcoming of someone who is "slightly wrong" on occasion. It's the strongest indicator that a flawed human being got their information not directly from a machine.
If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to at least indicate that they are willing to self-correct in the face of direct evidence that they are wrong.
> If someone is spreading deception, intentionally or not, then it's entirely within my rights to point out they are without engaging further.
What is it with millennials and "rights"? It's a sincere question. People don't owe you anything and neither do you owe me anything, sure... so why do you demand another have a higher standard that you yourself hold to. I know you don't hold yourself to that standard because you would rather nitpick someone on a single inaccuracy then grapple with a very real issue (which you yourself would not appreciate if they did that to you). The respectable thing to do is to note the inaccuracy and approach the valid portion of the argument sincerely.
What you demonstrate is a lack of care for those around you, and a lack of care for what is actually true. You would rather "umm actually" then treat others with an ounce of respect. It's shameful and devoid of grace.
Maybe yours do, but all the CyrusOne date centers outside of Chicago smell like is grass and landscaping; they smell a great deal better than the car exhaust choked strip malls that dominate the exurban sprawl areas they tend to get sited in. I would much rather have one of those DCs as a neighbor than I would a Walmart.
As long as they can operate under capacity (for the grid) I don't disagree.
However I live in a much nicer area than Chicago and any Walmart, large mass of people, or DC would really destroy the PV as well as it would be an eyesore.
I don't really understand why so many just want to over industrialize so many beautiful places so that a corp. can sell the next gimmicky iteration of our "best model yet" which is just slightly slower and more expensive then the previous.
They're stinky? How? And how do they pollute water sources? A datacenter is a building filled with computers that uses water and air for cooling. What pollutants get "emitted" by a bunch of CPUs and video cards? No one seems to go into details.
There are certainly problems that can be crated by dumping heat into a body of water, but that's not the argument being made.
I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
It's mostly the emissions from diesel generators which many DCs use as it's far too expensive to ever shut them down. Often diesel generators are used to lighten the load on a power grid as well, so many DCs will run generators 24/7.
That source of power, since our grid is so outdated and struggles with the weight of these power-hogs, EVs as well as increased usage of AC during the summers create some dangerous conditions.
There is the risk of heavy metals getting into the water supply as the copper degrades but that will only be a problem down the line, that's prescient but not yet realized.
> I'm willing to bet that a datacenter creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
I agree; however I would not want a DC or a refinery, smelter or steel mill anywhere near my town. We have industrial districting for that reason, and because a lot of DC projects want to be put next to lakes and water sources, this causes issues for the residents.
In the case of one amazon data center, they were pulling in water that already had nitrates in it due to agricultural run off, but it wasn't enough nitrates to cause a problem for anyone until the data center came. It pulled in a massive amount of water, a lot of which was evaporated and that left behind water with very high concentrations of nitrates.
Normally, the nitrates would be filtered naturally and would mostly remain in the top layers of soil. Amazon pumped out 10s of millions of gallons of the vastly more contaminated water. It was so much water that it was forced much deeper into the ground. It was pushed deep enough to reach the aquifer which contaminated the water source for an entire community of 45,000 people.
Suddenly the water coming out of people's taps was polluted at 10x the federal level for safe drinking water. People got sick. Cancer rates spiked. Babies died. Amazon was forced to settle and pay out 20 million for water treatment and to dig new deeper wells for the community.
> I'm willing to bet that a data center creates a fraction of the pollution of a similarly sized industrial facility such as a chemical plant, refinery, smelter, or steel mill.
This is whataboutism. The existence of other bad things, or even worse things, doesn't make data centers good. They are a problem for the environment regardless of whatever else is also a problem and that's something that needs to be considered every time someone wants to build one. The companies who build and operate data centers should be held 100% accountable for the harm they cause.
It's helpful to put this number in context, although if the people you're talking to will do anything to avoid using the metric system, that becomes much more difficult.
Fortunately, now we have computers, which are great at unit conversion, so we can cut right through these feeble attempts at obfuscation. In non-medieval units, 10.9 billion gallons per year is 41.3 million cubic meters per year or 1.3 cubic meters per second. The river a few kilometers from me has a discharge of 22000 cubic meters per second (of fresh water dumped into the sea), so Google is the equivalent using 0.006% of the Rio de la Plata. Lake Superior contains 12070 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.207 × 10¹³ cubic meters, also of fresh water, so Google's current use would dry up Lake Superior in only 290,000 years.
Google is mostly not very close to Lake Superior or the Rio de la Plata; a more relevant river might be the Sacramento River, which drains into the San Francisco Bay where Google was born, and it's much smaller than the Rio de la Plata. Specifically, its average discharge is 797m³/s, so Google is using 0.16% of the discharge of the Sacramento River. (But some of that is at datacenters far from California.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_in_California#Agricultur... tells us that agriculture in California uses 34.1 million "acre feet" of water per year (Americans will do anything to avoid using the metric system, especially when they're trying to be sneaky). In non-medieval units, that's 42.1 billion cubic meters, and per year, it's 1330 cubic meters per second, almost exactly 1000 times Google's use. Of that, 18% (240 cubic meters per second) is spent on alfalfa, or was in 02014, anyway.
One major difference is that you need fresh water, like the water of the Sacramento River, to irrigate crops, but you can cool data centers with salt water from the ocean. It's less convenient, because there are a variety of annoying things that happen with biofouling and corrosion, but that's what you'd do if hyperscalers scaled up by another factor of 100× so that their water usage became large enough to be environmentally significant.
But that doesn't happen until they have 100× the computing power they have today. So anybody who tells you AI datacenters are a major water user is lying.
Oil is not a single good. Different types of crude produce different products at various grades hence why diesel is so expensive in the US compared to something like natural gas
I imagine the native also built up tolerance over generations, not just knowledge as the article contends . Dying from a specific action is quite the evolutionary motivator
As with many psychoactive plants and foods, the adaptation here isn't so much a genetic/physiological tolerance as it is an often in-depth body of knowledge/practices for how to utilize the drug/medicine safely. Look at the notorious Datura for example which can cause you to go into a delirious state for over 2 days. The amount of preparation, processing, and knowledge that goes into administering it safely is lost on modern day kids who simply read an Erowid experience about a powerful psychoactive plant that likely grows locally.
Most kids that are ingesting the devil's trumpet are doing so explicitly because they're chasing after the anticholinergic toxidrome and the badge of honor. "Safe" doses of nightshades like datura and belladonna dilate your pupils and make you sleepy. That's not what they're interested in the plant for.
Datura is fucking dangerous. Deliriants are no joke in general. That one in particular is really dangerous because it grows absolutely anywhere and is very easy to identify.
Source; chemistry was my favorite class in high school and college because it helped me understand how to extract what I wanted from plants like jimsonweed and Mimosa trees.
That's actually a good point that I hadn't considered.
I still maintain that deliriants are for nobody though.
DMT is fine in moderation. But anything that is labeled as a deliriant will not give you any kind of joy or knowledge. It will just fuck you for a lot longer than you think.
In the Chingichngish religion, a Datura potion was administered either once or 3 times in a person's life (puberty and, in some cultures, also marriage and before death). Not that it was a particularly widely practiced religion.
The tribes are ofc intimately familiar with the dangers of Datura. Experts that had studied the plant their whole lives were in charge of this ritual. They knew what season, what time of day, and how to harvest Datura (indeed modern science show Datura alkaloids vary drastically by time of day, weather, and environmental conditions). They also paid attention to the age and condition of the plant and the type of soil. Plants growing in indirect sunlight are less potent and preferred for initiation rituals. People undergoing the ritual had to go through a rigorous physical and dietary regime in the days preceding.
They had a clear distinction between a Datura "trance" vs just straight up delirium and the experts would closely watch the person receiving the potion to know how they are doing. The initiate is never left alone and is closely supervised during the full experience (which is multiple days)
Anyways my point with all this is that, this is NOT the same experience you get from reading some Erowid posts. Even if you are taking all the precautions. A traditional "trance" that's closely monitored by an expert is a different experience entirely.
It's also extraordinarily easy and discreet to grow cubensis shrooms. The age of buying awesome RCs online are OVER, there's nothing left but horrible, horrible chemicals. Do not go there
Actually it’s entering a new era with GLP1s and peptides. Nothing will replace “our” era which ushered in bitcoin, dark net markets and hell true online community which met its end with the analogue act…
But it’s a new rebirth. Peptides are here and are unscheduled and do not fall under the analog act. Everything that was experienced in that early 10s era is happening all over again now :)
Are there peptites do get high? To my understanding that stuff is more or less the opposite of getting high, more self optimisation, more control about self aspectsy etc.
Antinuclear have and always had zero power to stop nuclear plants. Except for Germany, if nuclear stopped growing was because of its economics. The same economics that stopped solar photovoltaics until it made sense.
Even France, that is heavily pro-nuclear, can't find the economics to build new nuclear energy at decent pace.
Also, nuclear was not replaced by more carbon, except again a for a couple of years in a small country (by global standards) called Germany. Everyone else is planting more clean energy.
What we did: growing China and all Asia at high rates based on coal, for decades. Offsetting by a lot internal combustion engine efficiency by buying bigger and more cars. Buying stupid and useless stuff on the other side of the planet. Everyone first hobby today is "travelling the world", preferably by plane. Being 10 billion people, and richer (more capita and more consumption per capita). None of those thing would be solvable with more nuclear plants.
You're acting as if politics AKA overregulation (first person to say "You think nuclear should be unregulated???" gets a medal) has had no effect on the price of nuclear energy.
Dude, Germany sets the tone for whole EU and then some more (aka Switzerland, they are extremely pushy also in matters which should be completely upon given country, like citizen gun laws).
They are the biggest economic force bar none (at least for now, lets see in few years when their car industry will be mostly a thing of the past). They steer 500+ million continent like a fiddle.
I have to crap on Merkel here yet again - she was horrible, utterly despicable leader. Much of the backlash in popularity of extreme right across Europe is her doing. She killed nuclear which wasn't in greatest shape, but it was well before we had actual replacements. She studied as nuclear physicist. Europe as a continent would be in much better shape politically, economically, militarily and socially if she didn't get so much power for so long. German ADF is completely her doing.
Of course when she met real power dealers like putin she caved immediately so he played her like those proverbial fiddles.
Russia has huge influence in German politics. I believe there is connection there as well, but I cannot find any public information to cite regarding funding of anti-nuclear power movements.
I gave you links that support my argument, very well.
I am not sure what else you want. Quotes from each one, inline?
If you don't have the time to read what I posted, and understand how it applies to this thread, then please copy and paste this thread into an LLM chat bot, and ask for clarity. I just tried that, and even an LLM understood my response.
Holy fuck, Batman. No one's interested in that LLM verbiage. You made specific claims. Claim A:
"Environmentalist groups were in some cases entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
It's clear from context that you're talking about genuine organizations and not astroturfing. So far you've not named a single one that was "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests."
This is the most obtuse interaction I have ever had on this website. Is this simple enough?
> In 1969, Robert O. Anderson, an oil man whose long career included a stint as the Chief Executive Officer of Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) (now part of BP, the company formerly known as British Petroleum), gave David Brower $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth (FOE).
You think it is obtuse because your lies are being called out.
FotE was founded by David Brower, Donald Aitken, and Gary Soucie as its Wikipedia page and multiple other sources corroborate. Emphatically, it was not "entirely formed by fossil fuel interests". Hence, your claim is a lie.
Moreover, Robert O. Anderson donated a large portion of his fortune to philanthropic causes. Among them, an art museum and a literary magazine. $200k was chump change to him. Anderson's philanthropy was his own personal interest and had nothing to do with the "fossil fuel" industry.
So unless you want to make the rather dubious claim that Harper's Magazine was bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, you have nothing.
Successful massive nuclear and renewable deployment at world scale, would it have happened, would have only solved one third of the problem. Agriculture, construction and all carbon-emitting industry processses (steel production) require their own solution too.
Sure, my point is that it would not have been enough to divert climate change, though it would have probably bought a few years/decade and allowed public discourse to move above "nuclear vs wind power" while burning more and more coal, and start discussing other problems. (on another hand, everything that public discourse touches gets politicized to stupidity so I'm not sure if I'd rather have the public choose how to decarbonize concrete production or some magical alternative that does not involve the general public talking about it).
Since uranium at 3x the current price could supply the current world primary energy demand with burner reactors for only about 5 years, diverting climate change with nuclear would have required mass rollout of breeder reactors. These were stopped by their own inherent cost and technical problems, not by greens.
And now, not even the French are pursuing them, sending the strong signal that nuclear is off the table as anything but a minor contributor to stopping CO2 build up.
I think it is extremely simplistic to blame the nuclear transition's failed potential solely on them.
1. The fact that nuclear power has been quite safe so far does not mean that it would have been just as safe if its deployment would have rapidly spread.
2. Nuclear energy is unfortunately tightly coupled with nuclear weapons, as well as the treaties and geopolitics that were designed to keep them only in the hands of the few. Quite many late 1900s crises in Europe could have looked different if nuclear material was even more widespread than it was. I don't even wanna think about nations outside Europe that have been extremely unstable in the past and in recent history.
3. Seeing how intensely fossil fuel companies spread misinformation and disinformation about green technology and climate science, it's hardly a far-fetched idea that that same industry had a hand in helping policymakers steer away from an energy source that would unseat it from the throne.
Too much about nuclear safety was based on trust and if that fails the consequences are huge. In Europe we learned the hard way what it means if a plant is not safely build and how bad the communication is when there is an accident.
And then you are also going to trust the same people when they are saying the waste issue is solved.
If your arguments are luddites and fearmongering you have not improved trust in any way.
Nuclear, even with Chernobyl which infamously cheaped out to use an explosive roof, is safer than almost every energy source, only solar is safer per kWh
No nuclear accident has involved a reactor built after the 1960s. Yet we regulate as if a dozen more Chernobyls have happened
No. You can shit all you want over the antinuclear boys but:
* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.
* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.
* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.
Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.
EV only this year became comparable in prices to gasoline cars thanks to massive efforts by Chinese companies to reduce battery prices and improve drivetrain.
With that further changes can be very quick as forcing EV no longer requires reallocating money from other things.
If 100% of new cars were EVs then there might be feedback loops that accelerate the long tail. Like gas stations becoming leas profitable, less prolific, and more expensive.
You might also see battery prices push the price of new cars well below that of second hand ICE vehicles.
Even if the replacement window for existing vehicles doesn’t change, the environmental impact would run ahead of the adoption curve. High volume use cases like delivery and Ubers would be the first to switch to EVs.
Climate change is related to our consumptions, period, focusing only on energy or transport doesn't tackle the whole problem: we consume too much, eat too much (cattle and fish in particular) and destroy too much in our quest for more and more.
Inefficient transport or energy is just one aspect of the whole problem.
But I'm tired of hearing how it is just a matter of energy or transport, it's literally missing the forest for a tree, even if it might be a particularly big one.
Your chosen forest exists within the even bigger forests of human action and ecology. That doesn't mean we have to focus that wide. When one part of the picture is both specialized and huge, it makes sense to focus on it.
And compared to Twitter or others discussed here no government agency or similar uses Hacker News as their primary channel for news updates. However Twitter, Instagram and auch are used for such official purpose from different agencies worldwide. Thus access for the respective citizens is relevant.
This is because our glorious government makes it illegal to build housing. Japan doesnt force anything, their private companies built tons of housing because there is profit to be made and its not illegal without years of reviews, insane taxes, bribes to various orgs, etc.
Your policy doesn’t even work in CA, new housing is absurdly expensive to build and the profits aren't even high.
> Japan doesnt force anything, their private companies built tons of housing because there is profit to be made and its not illegal without years of reviews, insane taxes, bribes to various orgs, etc.
Now, would you want to live in a country with conditions so absurd that "hikikomori" and micro apartments [1] are a thing?
> “A lot of younger people these days don’t have many possessions, unlike older generations – they have a few items of clothing and not that much money, so these apartments are ideal for them,” said Nakama, whose 1,500 micro-apartments have an occupancy rate of 98%.
Yeah fuck that shit. That's just exploitation, and no wonder the few young people that Japan has end up with all sort of mental health issues, no partners and a birthrate near zero. Nothing to own because there's nowhere to store something you own, not enough space to even invite another person over, much less have sex.
Cram me into such an "apartment", I'd go and search for a gun to off myself.
Why use suicidal hyperbole. It’s low class along with the language.
I don’t know if what you stated is enough evidence to prove much of anything either. Just because building housing is cheap and quick in Japan does not mean it needs to be small.
> Just because building housing is cheap and quick in Japan does not mean it needs to be small.
The thing is, cheap housing comes at a cost. Housing barely qualifying as more than "a roof over the head" is the most efficient use under capitalism... but as usual with capitalism, the second-order effects / externalities (most importantly, the collapsed birth rartes) aren't priced in. Unfortunately, for Japan's society it may already be too late to turn around.
And even more unfortunately, here in the Western countries we are headed to repeating the mistakes Japan has already shown.
>Now, would you want to live in a country with conditions so absurd that "hikikomori" and micro apartments [1] are a thing?
If it meant I could cut my rental or mortgage bill in half, absolutely. People have different preferences, not everyone needs or wants the same amount of space.
To the contrary, IMHO. When you have to stay at the office until the boss leaves... you don't need a large apartment, you won't have much free time to enjoy it anyway.
The excessive amount of both fake and real work makes such horribly insane housing practices possible in the first place - if people had more free time, they'd go nuts from being cooped up.
The main cause of water fear mongering is that one woman’s well was dirty during construction of a data center. First construction is not the center running, and having lived on a well they get dirty for all kinds of reasons.
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