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UK government advises deleting emails to save water

141 points by bifftastic 1y ago

aranw 1y ago
Knowing the UK government it wouldn't surprise me if we start getting regular emails or text messages reminding us to regularly delete our old emails and text messages to save water
arkensaw 1y ago
Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI
- sour-taste 1y ago
  Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
  - reedf1 1y ago
    My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.
      - jlokier 1y ago
        Often, in a system with a large number of drives where actively-used data and cold data are automatically migrated to active and mostly-idle drives respectively.
    - mrob 1y ago
      Consumer SSDs idle at very low power, but SSDs intended for data centers generally idle at several watts.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes. It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server. In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event. In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet). The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
- pivo 1y ago
  The only thing I can think of is that emails accumulate that that means more storage must be added at the data centres, requiring more electricity use. This seems trivial compared to AI power demands to me.
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  Something is always more than nothing
- regularfry 1y ago
  Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient. Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
- ryao 1y ago
  Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward. I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written. If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.
dbushell 1y ago
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Also the UK government: > Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-blueprint-to-turbocharge-ai https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...
- pinoy420 1y ago
  [dead]
- mytailorisrich 1y ago
  Nevermind water, there were (still are?) restrictions on new builds in the West London area because the grid could not cope due to the ever increasing number of data centres popping up in old trading estates.
- ViktorRay 1y ago
  When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing. He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
  - throwawayoldie 1y ago
    I imagine he was probably still pretty salty about the whole Gollancz/Homage to Catalonia thing.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    There's a reason 1984, V for Vendetta and all such stories come from the UK.
  - refulgentis 1y ago
    Soviet doublethink? Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?
milliams 1y ago
That's pretty funny. It shows the slight gap in understanding about what "data centres" do, mixed with the classic advice to "don't print this email" to save power/trees.
- dylan604 1y ago
  "No trees were harmed by this email, although, some electrons were slightly bothered" or some such was something I remember seeing in response
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Also "this email consists of 100% recycled electrons".
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    The electrons in the AC power lines just had to dance slightly differently, but the ones in the transistors had to take one for the team and get dumped to ground.
Insanity 1y ago
Someone explain to me why this matters please. The emails (passively) stored on HDD/SSDs in a data centre wouldn't be the main contributor to heat generation and the needs for cooling. What would probably increase heat and the need for cooling more meaningfully is actual data transfer and processing (i.e, reading and sending emails). But even so, compared to all the other internet activities (streaming video, gaming, AWS/Azure/GCP).. it's probably a drop in the bucket.
bifftastic 1y ago
Archive link in case the original page is updated: https://archive.is/sAOtC https://archive.is/sAOtC
mytailorisrich 1y ago
Not a single mention of the lack of reservoir capacity, with the last major reservoir built in 1992. Population has grown by 12 million / 21% since. So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.
- sna1l 1y ago
  seriously wtf ... it rains all the time there :)
  - stoobs 1y ago
    Not anywhere near as much as the stereotypes/memes/etc would have you believe. Most of the issue though is the water companies funnelling revenue to shareholders and not maintaining the network, so they lose an awful lot of water through leaking pipes. The privatisation of critical utilities and infrastructure was such a stupid move. That said, the recommendation is nonsense, emails and photos make up a tiny fraction of the cooling requirements for data centres.
    - mytailorisrich 1y ago
      Currently, because of the warming climate, the UK is actually getting more and more rain. But the problem is that rainfall is also getting more irregular, so it rains a lot then not at all for longer than before. Overall this is "just" a question of infrastructure, which means long term investments that have dried up (pun intended!) decades ago.
    - scrlk 1y ago
      The regulators determine how much the utilities can spend on maintenance and construction activities, not the companies. If these activities were not capped, the companies are naturally incentivised to build more to boost their regulated asset value, which means they can make more money.
  - KineticLensman 1y ago
    Rainfall in the UK isn't evenly distributed. The North and West gets much more rain, partly because they are closer to the Atlantic, and also because central hills (e.g. the Pennines) create rain shadows to their east. We also don't have any sort of national grid to move water from wet to drier areas.
sc970 1y ago
History will look back on Apple forcing a U2 Album download as the equivalent environmental disaster as the BP oil spill.
johnisgood 1y ago
From the website: HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. How effective those measures would be? (I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  There is one thing that will get people to save water and that is raise the price.
- philipwhiuk 1y ago
  > Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more. > Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters. > Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. > Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Households with lawns are rarer than they used to be - a big red flag has always been that hosepipe bans never applies to golf courses which use a large amount of water to keep their grass green all year. > Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. A few minutes of water p/person per day. > Take shorter showers. Probably minimal and potentially a hygiene problem. > Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Negligible at best.
  - ryao 1y ago
    > Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.
zahirbmirza 1y ago
Should Cola production be restricted also?
- dylan604 1y ago
  Yes, but for many other reasons.
nenadg 1y ago
just drink brawndo, the thirst mutilator
Theodores 1y ago
They would do better to advise people to boil only the amount of water they need for their tea for the amount of difference it makes. Even the 'take shorter showers' advice is interesting, they could advise people to skip a few and flush the toilet only after having a 'number two'. Recently I had the water board out to investigate a leak. Earlier in the year, before there was any hint of drought, I had been pressure washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails. There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more. There will be
- incone123 1y ago
  Only boiling the water you need for tea saves energy and time but won't save water unless you were throwing away unused hot water.
Fizzadar 1y ago
The problem isn’t home usage, or data centers. It’s the total lack of investment since the water companies were privatised and moved to a model of money extraction for shareholders. Now we have no new capacity in years and more leaks (waste and clean) than ever, and yet it’s always the public who need to save a little more or pay increased bills. Successive governments (both sides) have been shown to be totally spineless with water regulation, despite significant public outrage. Privatisation has been a huge failure and yet we appear to be stuck in this position.
pjc50 1y ago
This is "plastic straws" bullshit. From the statement, quoted from "The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG chair, Helen Wakeham" > "Water companies must continue to quickly fix leaks and lead the way in saving water. We know the challenges farmers are facing and will continue to work with them, other land users, and businesses to ensure everyone acts sustainably. > We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife." Watch how the bait and switch operates. The privatized water companies are (a) bankrupt and (b) leaking hundreds of millions of liters of water (figures quoted in the 500m - 600m region for Thames Water). However, this is politically difficult to fix because it requires the government to do something and maybe even spend some money. So they put out a statement which implies that ordinary people could do something to help, even if it's literally a drop in the bucket. see https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity/uk-appoints-adviser-potential-thames-water-collapse-source-says-2025-08-12/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity...
xenocratus 1y ago
I want a breakdown of how much energy would be saved by deleting old emails vs energy spent by people using VPNs now because of the Online Safety Act :)
Havoc 1y ago
Uk gov is tech illiterate
PeterStuer 1y ago
Sounds like someone got to stuff in their pet peave ham sandwich in that press release.
ratelimitsteve 1y ago
I only read my emails with a paper straw. That should help, right? warily eyes the 400 foot tall nuclear-powered mobile AI datacenter
dylan604 1y ago
I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
  - arkensaw 1y ago
    Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I’ve always thought desalination would make a nice shiftable load to incentivize renewable build-out.
    - foobarbecue 1y ago
      Not really. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-do...
      - arkensaw 1y ago
        Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by topping up water in a system, in times of drought, rather than just waiting for rain.
jl6 1y ago
Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.
- t_tsonev 1y ago
  Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.
  - pixelpoet 1y ago
    Unfortunately this won't help as datacenters are part of the backend, not the front.
- cactacea 1y ago
  > Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
  - jl6 1y ago
    Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used. Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more. If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases. Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    Cleaning takes clean water and turns it into dirty water. Cooling takes clean water and heats it. The amount of clean water stays the same.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
lenerdenator 1y ago
Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered? "Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"
- benjojo12 1y ago
  Email has a specific carve out on the online safety act
  - lenerdenator 1y ago
    So you just get adult materials in your inbox like grandad did, except this time, the inbox is digital and easier to hide from the missus.
  - bhaney 1y ago
    HTTPS-over-SMTP soon?
    - bitwize 1y ago
      Browsing the web Stallman style.
    - jackwilsdon 1y ago
      Richard Stallman is pretty much already doing this! > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse
AvAn12 1y ago
Serious question. Is there any technology to capture the excess thermal energy from data centers and run some of it back into the grid? Or drive some kind of desalination process? Or do anything else useful with this “surplus” heat energy?
- fluorinerocket 1y ago
  Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Not really, because you're pumping it against the thermal gradient to start with. Low temperature difference heat is one of the more worthless things in the universe. The only way you could make this viable would be to change silicon processes to those capable of running at significantly over 100C. This incurs a big efficiency penalty, but then you can start boiling water directly off the die and letting the steam move itself, perhaps to some sort of Stirling engine condenser cycle, with a lot less pumping losses.
- miunau 1y ago
  Helsinki has many DCs connected to the district heating network, but it isn't realistic in places that don't have an existing network as creating one in the first place is a huge political/nimby issue. Amsterdam has been trying and failing for years.
- roryirvine 1y ago
  It's low-grade heat, so isn't worth much. If you're going to be doing cogeneration on-site, it can be worth considering a Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power system - but the benefits tend to be fairly marginal. In the future, there's a possibility of extending the "lights out datacentre" concept, and going fully automated. If you don't need to accommodate humans, you can run much higher temperature gradients. With a gradient of around 200 K, for instance, you might expect to recover somewhere between 30-35% of your total energy input. The UK actually ought to be a good choice for an experiment along those lines, given its long history with gas-cooled nuclear systems - sadly, the engineers involved have mostly all retired by now...
concinds 1y ago
Please, nobody comment here, we are wasting water.
- arkensaw 1y ago
  Sorry I upvoted before I thought about the consequences. Please don't read this.
drcongo 1y ago
The UK government is a punchline.
- dylan604 1y ago
  or a joke delivered by an imbecile that totally messes up the punchline
- sparkie 1y ago
  They're the entire circus.
bko 1y ago
This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource
- agentultra 1y ago
  I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
  - bko 1y ago
    Can't you invest in technologies like desalination? For instance, over 3/4 of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, mostly from the Mediterranean Sea. Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
    - agentultra 1y ago
      Huge amounts of energy are required and it creates a lot of pollution as I understand. The world's just going to get thirsty.
  - tim333 1y ago
    In the UK a lot of the stuff falls as rain. You just need reservoirs for when there's a bit of gap during the British summer which runs from July to August roughly.
    - JonChesterfield 1y ago
      I believe the problem is the pipes are centuries old and leak lots but replacing pipes is a nuisance. Lots of hills here so reservoirs aren't too hard to find.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
This is why I compose my emails in smaller fonts, to protect the environment.
Seanambers 1y ago
This is what "ESG" is in practice. Its insanity. Give powers to idiots and they will come up with stuff like this.
Darkskiez 1y ago
I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.
- JonChesterfield 1y ago
  Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.
  - qcnguy 1y ago
    It would require a queueing and progress tracking infrastructure once a request gets too large to process in the span of a few seconds, which is a lot of stuff to build for a very rare operation.
  - Izkata 1y ago
    Try just leaving the tab sitting open for an hour. I have a suspicion the frontend works iteratively on them in the background, and the UI only updates occasionally. I haven't tried it with deletions, but with "mark as read" on a triage inbox this has worked with 40k+ emails.
  - Darkskiez 1y ago
    That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.
pixelpoet 1y ago
Well at least now we know what's in the series of tubes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
You can't delete emails. They are retained by the provider that sent, the provider that received, and the government which got them from both and intercepted in the middle just to be sure.
blitzar 1y ago
No need to keep it, GCHQ have a copy if you ever need it.
bArray 1y ago
> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue? What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.
incone123 1y ago
Great to see the grown ups are back in charge.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse. The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.
- woleium 1y ago
  taking a page out of the plastics lobby book then.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.
- latexr 1y ago
  > The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.
luke-stanley 1y ago
Deleting emails and old pictures is hard work and requires putting the kettle on, they should know this. This is very silly. A study on this would be pretty interesting. This is a national disgrace and I am ashamed.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
As an unashamed digital hoarder I never expected the UK to declare war.
crinkly 1y ago
Having sat in a policy meeting many years ago, as the resident "numbers guy", where they come up with that short of shit, this is clearly the usual design by committee advisory note. Some postgrad intern, getting mugged off by working there for nothing said it, someone more senior needed some padding and it sounded about right and no one in the room even understands everything that has been said. This will all be done behind closed doors with an expensive sandwich provision with at least 2-3 £1000 a day contractors in there. I'll quote another colleague there "If you survive public sector for 6 months you'll be unfit even for Soylent Green". I didn't last 3.
josefritzishere 1y ago
Maybe just shutdown AI instead.
philipallstar 1y ago
Another hidden cost of mass immigration (UK additional ~5m net immigration over the last 10 years[0]) is services such as water and energy suffer badly. Food scales quite well, as it's a dynamic, fine-grained system, but water and energy supply need capital investment to trigger a higher tier of supply. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-report-on-net-migration/net-migration-report-accessible https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
pacifika 1y ago
Ai use in government is on trend
Bender 1y ago
Could there possibly be an ulterior motive? What other purposes might be served by encouraging many people to delete old emails?
irthomasthomas 1y ago
Public advisory: Domestic water consumption is about 2% of the total. 98% is farming and industry. A 50% reduction in domestic water use would equate to a -1% change, which could also be accomplished with only a ~1.10% reduction by industry.
lesser-shadow 1y ago
Just Nuke UK at this point.
drweevil 1y ago
Conservatives: "Build all the data centers you want! The rate payers will he happy to pick up the cost. What's that, water? You should have thought of that before you became the unwashed masses!" Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!" I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.

141 points by bifftastic 1y ago

Knowing the UK government it wouldn't surprise me if we start getting regular emails or text messages reminding us to regularly delete our old emails and text messages to save water

arkensaw 1y ago

Ok I'm not a physicist but surely long term storage of pictures and emails does not actively generate heat in a data-center? Encouraging people to log on and delete old pics and emails is only going to create more heat as servers have to spin up access to stuff. The real culprit of data-center heat usage is surely AI

sour-taste 1y ago
Storage on spinning disks does. Storage on ssds does as well but should be much less. Cold backups don't. Now, the idea that people can just delete their cat pictures to meaningful impact cooling in the dcs is just garbage, particularly now when most of the energy used in the dcs goes to gpus
- reedf1 1y ago
  My understanding is that SSDs are in the sub-watt territory when idle. So ironically the act of deleting the email instead of keeping the drive in steady-state will likely use significantly more power.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    How often do you think a device is idle in a data center? My guess is not very often if ever.
    - jlokier 1y ago
      Often, in a system with a large number of drives where actively-used data and cold data are automatically migrated to active and mostly-idle drives respectively.
  - mrob 1y ago
    Consumer SSDs idle at very low power, but SSDs intended for data centers generally idle at several watts.
- dylan604 1y ago
  If the drives are spinning, they generate heat. The drives spin regardless if they are empty or full. In an array setup in large storage pools, there's no spinning down the drives either. Sadly, there's no countering these suggestions to those making them, as they clearly have no understanding of what they are talking about. They're just trying to make their 15 minutes. It's one thing if they want to raise awareness of how much water is being used by data centers, but it crosses into absurdity with suggestions like "delete your data from the cloud".
philipwhiuk 1y ago
In theory if you delete enough you can power off a server. In practice the random storage and delayed deletion makes this an absurdly asynchronous event. In reality the UK just doesn't have that many consumer data centres, they mostly serve business. There's not likely even that much AI compute in the UK (yet). The actual reason (as said elsewhere is water storage planning).
pivo 1y ago
The only thing I can think of is that emails accumulate that that means more storage must be added at the data centres, requiring more electricity use. This seems trivial compared to AI power demands to me.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
Something is always more than nothing
regularfry 1y ago
Some of the responses here are assuming that your old emails are sat there, quiescent. A better model might be that they are part of a dataset that is actively scanned, repeatedly, so deleting them makes those scanning processes more efficient. Exactly what those processes might be is left as an exercise for the reader.
ryao 1y ago
Storing pictures and emails in a data center does generate heat, but it is negligible. Also, claims of data center water usage are heavily overstated. Some do, but only during summer months. I assume the reason for the UK’s asinine advice is because of they think there is a link between heat generation and water usage at data centers. While a link does exist, it is not straight forward. I have only ever toured a data center once, but the one I toured had no water usage by the cooling infrastructure as far as I could tell. However, the facility’s APUE was something like 1.7, which is high. I have read that some facilities with impressively low APUE numbers use water during particularly hot summer days, which is presumably for evaporative cooling. Unfortunately, I have yet to see one of these facilities in person to know the details beyond what has been publicly written. If it counts for anything, I have hundreds of commits in OpenZFS. I know some things about data centers from a mix of professional contacts since my work is used in them (which is how I got the tour in the first place), and personal interest in the subject, but I am far from an expert on all aspects of how data centers work. Speaking of which, I doubt there is any one person who is an expert on all aspects of how data centers work, since the knowledge is spread across multiple types of experts. A physicist would not be my first choice of expert when asking questions about data centers. A data center technician would be a better person to ask.

dbushell 1y ago

> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Also the UK government: > Taken together, the 50 measures will make the UK irresistible to AI firms looking to start, scale, or grow their business. It builds on recent progress in AI that saw £25 billion of new investment in data centres announced since the government took office last July. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-blueprint-to-turbocharge-ai https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-sets-out-b...

pinoy420 1y ago
[dead]
mytailorisrich 1y ago
Nevermind water, there were (still are?) restrictions on new builds in the West London area because the grid could not cope due to the ever increasing number of data centres popping up in old trading estates.
ViktorRay 1y ago
When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing. He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.
- throwawayoldie 1y ago
  I imagine he was probably still pretty salty about the whole Gollancz/Homage to Catalonia thing.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  There's a reason 1984, V for Vendetta and all such stories come from the UK.
- refulgentis 1y ago
  Soviet doublethink? Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?

milliams 1y ago

That's pretty funny. It shows the slight gap in understanding about what "data centres" do, mixed with the classic advice to "don't print this email" to save power/trees.

dylan604 1y ago
"No trees were harmed by this email, although, some electrons were slightly bothered" or some such was something I remember seeing in response
- fsflover 1y ago
  Also "this email consists of 100% recycled electrons".
- bee_rider 1y ago
  The electrons in the AC power lines just had to dance slightly differently, but the ones in the transistors had to take one for the team and get dumped to ground.

Insanity 1y ago

Someone explain to me why this matters please. The emails (passively) stored on HDD/SSDs in a data centre wouldn't be the main contributor to heat generation and the needs for cooling. What would probably increase heat and the need for cooling more meaningfully is actual data transfer and processing (i.e, reading and sending emails). But even so, compared to all the other internet activities (streaming video, gaming, AWS/Azure/GCP).. it's probably a drop in the bucket.

bifftastic 1y ago

Archive link in case the original page is updated: https://archive.is/sAOtC https://archive.is/sAOtC

mytailorisrich 1y ago

Not a single mention of the lack of reservoir capacity, with the last major reservoir built in 1992. Population has grown by 12 million / 21% since. So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.

sna1l 1y ago
seriously wtf ... it rains all the time there :)
- stoobs 1y ago
  Not anywhere near as much as the stereotypes/memes/etc would have you believe. Most of the issue though is the water companies funnelling revenue to shareholders and not maintaining the network, so they lose an awful lot of water through leaking pipes. The privatisation of critical utilities and infrastructure was such a stupid move. That said, the recommendation is nonsense, emails and photos make up a tiny fraction of the cooling requirements for data centres.
  - mytailorisrich 1y ago
    Currently, because of the warming climate, the UK is actually getting more and more rain. But the problem is that rainfall is also getting more irregular, so it rains a lot then not at all for longer than before. Overall this is "just" a question of infrastructure, which means long term investments that have dried up (pun intended!) decades ago.
  - scrlk 1y ago
    The regulators determine how much the utilities can spend on maintenance and construction activities, not the companies. If these activities were not capped, the companies are naturally incentivised to build more to boost their regulated asset value, which means they can make more money.
- KineticLensman 1y ago
  Rainfall in the UK isn't evenly distributed. The North and West gets much more rain, partly because they are closer to the Atlantic, and also because central hills (e.g. the Pennines) create rain shadows to their east. We also don't have any sort of national grid to move water from wet to drier areas.

sc970 1y ago

History will look back on Apple forcing a U2 Album download as the equivalent environmental disaster as the BP oil spill.

johnisgood 1y ago

From the website: HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. How effective those measures would be? (I do not understand the down-votes, it is a great way to hear other people's opinion(s). Is that so bad?)

SoftTalker 1y ago
There is one thing that will get people to save water and that is raise the price.
philipwhiuk 1y ago
> Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. This assumes water is inconsistent. Once the rain butt is full, there's no more benefit. And then in a long dry season once it's emptied, it's not saving any more. > Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. If you're on a water meter you're already incentivised to fix this - so a better answer is water meters. > Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. > Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Households with lawns are rarer than they used to be - a big red flag has always been that hosepipe bans never applies to golf courses which use a large amount of water to keep their grass green all year. > Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. A few minutes of water p/person per day. > Take shorter showers. Probably minimal and potentially a hygiene problem. > Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Negligible at best.
- ryao 1y ago
  > Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.

zahirbmirza 1y ago

Should Cola production be restricted also?

dylan604 1y ago
Yes, but for many other reasons.

nenadg 1y ago

just drink brawndo, the thirst mutilator

Theodores 1y ago

They would do better to advise people to boil only the amount of water they need for their tea for the amount of difference it makes. Even the 'take shorter showers' advice is interesting, they could advise people to skip a few and flush the toilet only after having a 'number two'. Recently I had the water board out to investigate a leak. Earlier in the year, before there was any hint of drought, I had been pressure washing the green mould off my late father's house, leading to a lot of water usage. And yes, I did use a lot of water then, far more than could be saved by skipping showers, using the dishwasher instead of hand washing crockery and by only boiling the water I needed for tea, nevermind deleting emails. There will always be some that consume water at an entirely different scale to others, there needs to be a pricing mechanism for this beyond the metering they have now, where everyone gets an allowance for their basic needs and those watering gardens, washing cars or power-spraying houses pay considerably more. There will be

incone123 1y ago
Only boiling the water you need for tea saves energy and time but won't save water unless you were throwing away unused hot water.

Fizzadar 1y ago

The problem isn’t home usage, or data centers. It’s the total lack of investment since the water companies were privatised and moved to a model of money extraction for shareholders. Now we have no new capacity in years and more leaks (waste and clean) than ever, and yet it’s always the public who need to save a little more or pay increased bills. Successive governments (both sides) have been shown to be totally spineless with water regulation, despite significant public outrage. Privatisation has been a huge failure and yet we appear to be stuck in this position.

pjc50 1y ago

This is "plastic straws" bullshit. From the statement, quoted from "The Environment Agency’s Director of Water and NDG chair, Helen Wakeham" > "Water companies must continue to quickly fix leaks and lead the way in saving water. We know the challenges farmers are facing and will continue to work with them, other land users, and businesses to ensure everyone acts sustainably. > We are grateful to the public for following the restrictions, where in place, to conserve water in these dry conditions. Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife." Watch how the bait and switch operates. The privatized water companies are (a) bankrupt and (b) leaking hundreds of millions of liters of water (figures quoted in the 500m - 600m region for Thames Water). However, this is politically difficult to fix because it requires the government to do something and maybe even spend some money. So they put out a statement which implies that ordinary people could do something to help, even if it's literally a drop in the bucket. see https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity/uk-appoints-adviser-potential-thames-water-collapse-source-says-2025-08-12/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/land-use-biodiversity...

xenocratus 1y ago

I want a breakdown of how much energy would be saved by deleting old emails vs energy spent by people using VPNs now because of the Online Safety Act :)

Havoc 1y ago

Uk gov is tech illiterate

PeterStuer 1y ago

Sounds like someone got to stuff in their pet peave ham sandwich in that press release.

ratelimitsteve 1y ago

I only read my emails with a paper straw. That should help, right? warily eyes the 400 foot tall nuclear-powered mobile AI datacenter

dylan604 1y ago

I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fresh water issue. I'm assuming some sort of closed system where evaporation isn't an issue to leave deposits. Saltwater would also have a lower freezing temp, so you could chill the water cooler than fresh as well.

bee_rider 1y ago
Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
- arkensaw 1y ago
  Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I’ve always thought desalination would make a nice shiftable load to incentivize renewable build-out.
  - foobarbecue 1y ago
    Not really. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-does-desalinisation https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-do...
    - arkensaw 1y ago
      Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by topping up water in a system, in times of drought, rather than just waiting for rain.

jl6 1y ago

Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.

t_tsonev 1y ago
Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.
- pixelpoet 1y ago
  Unfortunately this won't help as datacenters are part of the backend, not the front.
cactacea 1y ago
> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?
- jl6 1y ago
  Yes, water is a renewable resource, and like other renewable resources the thing we should be concerned about is not the fact that it’s used at all, but how and where it is used. Water usage matters in water-stressed regions. In other regions, conserving other resources will matter more. If you take the stance that data centers are bad because they use water, and thus your usage of data centers should be reduced, then you are likely to be optimizing the wrong thing in many cases. Simplistic advice to delete emails to save water may well cause less efficient usage of resources whose conservation matters more.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Cleaning takes clean water and turns it into dirty water. Cooling takes clean water and heats it. The amount of clean water stays the same.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

lenerdenator 1y ago

Given that emails could contain adult material, and that you need to register yourself to view adult materials in the UK, what is one to do if they want to delete emails in their web-based email service of choice but hasn't registered? "Oi oi, stop right there, in the name of His Majesty the King. 'ave you a deleting loicence?"

benjojo12 1y ago
Email has a specific carve out on the online safety act
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  So you just get adult materials in your inbox like grandad did, except this time, the inbox is digital and easier to hide from the missus.
- bhaney 1y ago
  HTTPS-over-SMTP soon?
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Browsing the web Stallman style.
  - jackwilsdon 1y ago
    Richard Stallman is pretty much already doing this! > I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse https://www.stallman.org/stallman-computing.html#internetuse

AvAn12 1y ago

Serious question. Is there any technology to capture the excess thermal energy from data centers and run some of it back into the grid? Or drive some kind of desalination process? Or do anything else useful with this “surplus” heat energy?

fluorinerocket 1y ago
Yes, direct immersion cooling coupled with an organic rankine cycle could do this. But you won't recover much electricity because of the relatively low temperature of the heat source- 60 to 70 deg c dielectric fluid.
pjc50 1y ago
Not really, because you're pumping it against the thermal gradient to start with. Low temperature difference heat is one of the more worthless things in the universe. The only way you could make this viable would be to change silicon processes to those capable of running at significantly over 100C. This incurs a big efficiency penalty, but then you can start boiling water directly off the die and letting the steam move itself, perhaps to some sort of Stirling engine condenser cycle, with a lot less pumping losses.
miunau 1y ago
Helsinki has many DCs connected to the district heating network, but it isn't realistic in places that don't have an existing network as creating one in the first place is a huge political/nimby issue. Amsterdam has been trying and failing for years.
roryirvine 1y ago
It's low-grade heat, so isn't worth much. If you're going to be doing cogeneration on-site, it can be worth considering a Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power system - but the benefits tend to be fairly marginal. In the future, there's a possibility of extending the "lights out datacentre" concept, and going fully automated. If you don't need to accommodate humans, you can run much higher temperature gradients. With a gradient of around 200 K, for instance, you might expect to recover somewhere between 30-35% of your total energy input. The UK actually ought to be a good choice for an experiment along those lines, given its long history with gas-cooled nuclear systems - sadly, the engineers involved have mostly all retired by now...

concinds 1y ago

Please, nobody comment here, we are wasting water.

arkensaw 1y ago
Sorry I upvoted before I thought about the consequences. Please don't read this.

drcongo 1y ago

The UK government is a punchline.

dylan604 1y ago
or a joke delivered by an imbecile that totally messes up the punchline
sparkie 1y ago
They're the entire circus.

bko 1y ago

This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow prices to encourage additional supply and build around actual needs rather than judging whats a valid use of the resource

agentultra 1y ago
I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0]. [0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx0298
- bko 1y ago
  Can't you invest in technologies like desalination? For instance, over 3/4 of Israel’s drinking water comes from desalination plants, mostly from the Mediterranean Sea. Deleting emails to save water usage is not the answer
  - agentultra 1y ago
    Huge amounts of energy are required and it creates a lot of pollution as I understand. The world's just going to get thirsty.
- tim333 1y ago
  In the UK a lot of the stuff falls as rain. You just need reservoirs for when there's a bit of gap during the British summer which runs from July to August roughly.
  - JonChesterfield 1y ago
    I believe the problem is the pipes are centuries old and leak lots but replacing pipes is a nuisance. Lots of hills here so reservoirs aren't too hard to find.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

This is why I compose my emails in smaller fonts, to protect the environment.

Seanambers 1y ago

This is what "ESG" is in practice. Its insanity. Give powers to idiots and they will come up with stuff like this.

Darkskiez 1y ago

I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.

JonChesterfield 1y ago
Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.
- qcnguy 1y ago
  It would require a queueing and progress tracking infrastructure once a request gets too large to process in the span of a few seconds, which is a lot of stuff to build for a very rare operation.
- Izkata 1y ago
  Try just leaving the tab sitting open for an hour. I have a suspicion the frontend works iteratively on them in the background, and the UI only updates occasionally. I haven't tried it with deletions, but with "mark as read" on a triage inbox this has worked with 40k+ emails.
- Darkskiez 1y ago
  That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.

pixelpoet 1y ago

Well at least now we know what's in the series of tubes! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago

You can't delete emails. They are retained by the provider that sent, the provider that received, and the government which got them from both and intercepted in the middle just to be sure.

blitzar 1y ago

No need to keep it, GCHQ have a copy if you ever need it.

bArray 1y ago

> Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems. Let's ignore that most emails will be in semi-cold storage. Let's ignore that energy usage per email would be absolutely minimum. Did they not consider that thousands of people hitting the email servers requesting to view and then subsequently delete emails, wouldn't be an issue? What I (tongue-in-cheek) suspect is that GCHQ and the like are having difficulty in searching so many emails. Maybe by reviewing the email it triggers a filter policy which aids in searching them. After all, the Online Safety Act mostly seems to be targetting data in transit.

incone123 1y ago

Great to see the grown ups are back in charge.

jandrewrogers 1y ago

The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse. The distasteful part of all this is that this is the government transparently deflecting responsibility for their incompetence. Instead of addressing their chronic mismanagement of the water supply they've decided the better course of action is to sell the narrative that this will all go away if you delete your vacation photos.

woleium 1y ago
taking a page out of the plastics lobby book then.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.
latexr 1y ago
> The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.

luke-stanley 1y ago

Deleting emails and old pictures is hard work and requires putting the kettle on, they should know this. This is very silly. A study on this would be pretty interesting. This is a national disgrace and I am ashamed.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

As an unashamed digital hoarder I never expected the UK to declare war.

crinkly 1y ago

Having sat in a policy meeting many years ago, as the resident "numbers guy", where they come up with that short of shit, this is clearly the usual design by committee advisory note. Some postgrad intern, getting mugged off by working there for nothing said it, someone more senior needed some padding and it sounded about right and no one in the room even understands everything that has been said. This will all be done behind closed doors with an expensive sandwich provision with at least 2-3 £1000 a day contractors in there. I'll quote another colleague there "If you survive public sector for 6 months you'll be unfit even for Soylent Green". I didn't last 3.

josefritzishere 1y ago

Maybe just shutdown AI instead.

philipallstar 1y ago

Another hidden cost of mass immigration (UK additional ~5m net immigration over the last 10 years[0]) is services such as water and energy suffer badly. Food scales quite well, as it's a dynamic, fine-grained system, but water and energy supply need capital investment to trigger a higher tier of supply. [0] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisory-committee-report-on-net-migration/net-migration-report-accessible https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

pacifika 1y ago

Ai use in government is on trend

Bender 1y ago

Could there possibly be an ulterior motive? What other purposes might be served by encouraging many people to delete old emails?

irthomasthomas 1y ago

Public advisory: Domestic water consumption is about 2% of the total. 98% is farming and industry. A 50% reduction in domestic water use would equate to a -1% change, which could also be accomplished with only a ~1.10% reduction by industry.

lesser-shadow 1y ago

Just Nuke UK at this point.

drweevil 1y ago

Conservatives: "Build all the data centers you want! The rate payers will he happy to pick up the cost. What's that, water? You should have thought of that before you became the unwashed masses!" Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!" I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.