this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Same with water usage. Everybody has to reduce water, not wash cars while industry and agriculture who use like ¾ of the water don't do anything
Yes because washing cars is much less important than growing food
Sure but growing water intensive crops in the desert is also not logical.
Living in the desert isn't logical.
Yep… phoenix, Tucson, LV, all of those need to be vacated and the populations moved somewhere useful like the Midwest where they can help grow crops somewhere that makes sense
Why don't humans migrate with the seasons? Are we dumber then birds?
People who live in the desert and then complain about not spraying their giant hunk of metal with water are definitely dumber than birds
Juts search for "AI water consumption" or "data center water consumption". I'll agree that "we could be using this to wash our cars" is a silly argument, but water shortages affect between 2 and 3 billion people every year (https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/imminent-risk-global-water-crisis-warns-un-world-water-development-report-2023). We could be doing more with this water than cloud computing and AI.
Wait a sec, how do they consume water for cooling, i thought it’s in a closed loop as its purpose is only transferring heat
Some facilities is do this. They're not 100% efficient, so some is lost to evaporation, some must be dumped because it has too much mineral content (and too much conductivity) to go back through the cooling system. Reusing is only about 50% efficient (according to Google's numbers).
On a standard PC, you can easily have a loop because the radiator is big enough to exhause all that heat. But when your computer or cluster puts out multiple thousands of watts of heat, eventually you need to get rid of tge hot water and replace it with cold water. And when it gets even hotter, you need a steady stream of cold water that immediately gets dumped.
Half a liter per kilowatt hour. That's the average water use
It's like the idea of recycling plastics with water.
Not all of it is reusable to the same degree. A good portion of water has to be evaporated off to cool down the exterior towers plus water isn't really infinitely usable in these loops. It gets gross or full of materials.
Another thing that people need to remember is generating electricity uses the water here as we literally don't use many methods that don't involve water, we are not on a green grid and neither are these huge data centers for the most part. We boil it for the electricity then have to use additional to clean the system after.
If you live in a low humidity area you can cool with an evaporative cooler cheaper than with air con. Evaporative coolers consume quite a bit of water
Right, so agricultural was a bad example.
Not really. Look at California agriculture. You've got immense and unsustainable amounts of water going to almonds, pistachios, and other cash crops (not to mention animal feed for the Saudis) with voracious demand for more water, despite it causing damage to the water sources.
If you can't imagine a world without eating meat, yes.
The big problem crop for water in California is almonds.
The big problem crop for water in Australia is cotton.
The big problem crop for water anywhere is not beef
The US massively overproduces food. We absolutely can afford to not water some of those crops.
The US massively overuses cars. You can absolutely afford to not wash your car.
We can do both.
You can just... not wash your car. It literally doesn't matter. If water rationing is in effect, washing your car should be the least of your concerns.
I don't care about washing my car. I care that they're moderating our car washing while allowing foreign businessmen to use as much water as they want on hay that gets exported. And that could be fine if they were doing it in the Mid West. No, they're doing it in Phoenix, Arizona. A region that knows it's counting down to a zero day.
So while I'm not washing my car, they shouldn't be watering those crops.
Not washing cars results in long term damage to the car. If you have a 200k mile shitbox with peeling clear coat, sure, you don’t need to wash it because it probably won’t matter.
If you have something nice with good paint, washing is an important maintenance item
If you don't wash your car and you'll get corrosion from the salt on the road. If you live where it snows of course.
This person is talking about being from the desert, so yeah, no sympathy here. The Fremen could figure out that water shouldn't be wasted when it's scarce.
To be fair it's not usually the places with snow putting these bans in.
If the cars are overused that means they require more maintenance, not less. I want walkable places but that's not the argument to make lol
If you wash a car it uses less fuel. Dirt makes cars less aerodynamic.
lol fresh food is like all public health and wellbeing is non existent unless its been heavily industrialised to make as much money out of it as possible.
Farmers'markets exist but in many cases they're more expensive than buying at the grocery store. At any rate we already pay Ag corps to leave land fallow so the West and Mid West doesn't get over farmed again. Telling them to water only 95 percent of their cash crops shouldn't be a problem.
Last I ran the numbers, industry and agriculture used 98% of the water. This being in CA.