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Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course. How much water
by adrr 1y ago
Biggest alarmist is movement against Nestle using water for bottled water in California. They don’t even use as much as an average golf course.
How much water is wasted on golf courses in these arid regions? Or growing water intensive crops like alfalfa that isn’t even directly used to feed people.
- sellmesoap 1y agoThere are a lot of historical reasons for people to be angry at Nestle, aside from their impact on water.
- pfdietz 1y agoIt's become a meme, or a badge to display your tribal affiliation, to be mad at Nestle. Monsanto is another example of this phenomenon.
- sellmesoap 1y agoDo you think that leading mothers away from natural breast feeding into buying nestle formula is good for babies? Terminator crops that won't propagate from seed also have the same SaaS feel, making two natural solutions for human sustinanace up for rent, directing science research away from negative conclusions about both these scenarios, creating dependency on both these industries sounds like a win for money but not human wellbeing. Sign me up for the tribe that says no to that! Edit: adding a reference for nestle on the topic. https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant-formula-low-and-middle-income-countries https://voxdev.org/topic/health/deadly-toll-marketing-infant...
- pfdietz 1y agoGreat examples of the sort of nonsense I was talking about. Formula is fine. How do I know that? If it weren't, if there were any evidence it was bad, the FDA would not allow it to be sold in the US. But there's a wide variety of such formulas here. Perhaps you think formula is fine for we smart first worlders, but poor dumb third world mothers have to have their agency removed and us determine what they can choose? Strong pass on that; this is no longer the age of European colonialism. Terminator crops... oh boy. This one is hilariously ridiculous. Their sin is that they don't allow the farmer to retain seeds and plant them again. You know what else has that property? All hybrid seeds! These have been around for nearly a century. No hybrids breed true if you try to replant them; the uniform combinations of genes in the first generation hybrid becomes randomized in the second generation. You aren't complaining about terminator seeds, you are complaining about modern agriculture.
- sellmesoap 1y agoWhat I'm complaining about is everything being for rent. And how we get there in mamy cases is by turning a blind eye to knock on effects of these technologies. There's a reciprocal immune response between mother and baby through nursing. I haven't heard of a formula that has this feature. That link I posted claimed that approximately 212,000 babies died a year in areas without clean water when supplied with formula. That's a bleak outcome, is that just the cost of progress for you?
- pfdietz 1y agoYou're again engaging in the patronizing approach of removing any agency from those involved in these countries. Some mothers there would certainly benefit from access to formula, just as they do in your country. You remove this because you don't consider them able to make choices for themselves. It's the same horrid mindset of the colonialists, seeing the third worlders as primitives "just down from the trees".
- sellmesoap 1y agoI agree about the agency, except the game is rigged, once you stop breast feeding it's hard to start again. So a mother is sold on a way to feed a baby that can free her up to work and anyone can toss a bottle to the kid, but then water quality becomes problematic, and the baby is the most vulnerable. You can't fall back to breast feeding. And the formula is no doubt funded by third world debt arrangements. Nestle didn't have the foresight to think about water quality, and it resulted in a tragic outcome. Even though they also sell water, they could have been the hero and made twice as much money if they were in the loop (not sure if they were in the water business back then).
- recallingmemory 1y agoYep, 1.6 trillion gallons of water from the Colorado river goes into irrigation for alfalfa[1]. Google's total water consumption across all data centers in 2023 was 6.4 billion gallons[2]. People are sounding the alarm about water usage in AI data centers while ignoring the real unsustainable industries like animal agriculture. 1: https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-water-use-cherish-hamburger/ https://coloradosun.com/2024/04/04/research-colorado-river-w... 2: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-jump-48-in-five-years-due-to-ai-data-center-boom/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/google-emissions-...
- Aurornis 1y agoIt’s a great example of using large numbers without context to scare people. Say “6.4 billion gallons” in isolation and people will be horrified. Put it in context relative to something like alfalfa farming and it doesn’t even appear on the same scale.
- recallingmemory 1y agoAbsolutely, not to mention the difficulty people have in grasping the difference between a billion and a trillion.
- BurningFrog 1y agoAlways use the same unit in comparisons. Instead of "1.6 trillion vs 6.4 billion" write "1600 billion vs 6.4 billion"!
- dmd 1y ago"You have a million dollars? Damn man you a regular Elon Musk or something"
- rogerrogerr 1y agoWhat’s the difference between a million and a billion? A billion.
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- tsongas4 1y agoRight cause we have all gone and measured truth. Not just read possibly biased information off a screen. Asimov wrote about this in Foundation. If you are not checking yourself it's blind faith in inherently self selecting dishonest people
- FredPret 1y ago> How much water is wasted on golf courses... Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. I mean unless you transport it off-planet. You can waste the energy you spent cleaning it and pumping it around. But between nuclear and solar we ought to have an overabundance of that. In a market economy, if it becomes "economically infeasible" to purify used water, the price goes up slightly, and suddenly it makes a lot more sense to treat dirty water, or even seawater. You see the same type of argument against oil or mineral use; the idea that we'll run out. But people who argue we'll run out almost always look at confirmed reserves that are economical to extract right now. When prices rise, this sends a signal to prospectors and miners to go look for more, and it also makes far more reserves economical. For example, Alberta's oil sands were never counted as oil reserves in bygone decades, because mining it made no sense at the time. But the economy grew per capita and overall, prices rose, and suddenly Canada is an oil-rich nation. A similar dynamic applies to water and everything else. Of course there are finite amounts of oil and uranium and so on, but the amounts just on this one planet are absolutely mind-boggling. The Earth has a radius of 6400km, and our deepest mines are 3-4km. We may expect richer mineral deposits (not oil) as we go further down. Keep following this price logic and at a certain point it'll make sense to mine the far side of the moon, the asteroid belt, and so on ad infinitum.
- cornstalks 1y ago> Zero. You can't waste water, it goes in a cycle. You can waste water because not all water sources are equally renewable. Some underground aquifers recharge slower than we extract from them.
- dpc050505 1y agoFresh water in a reservoir above a water treatment plant is not the same as salt water in the ocean even if it's the same molecule in the same cycle.
- FredPret 1y agoIf it's the same molecule but downhill and mixed in with some other ones, it's just x number of joules and y number of dollars' worth of infrastructure away from being among its own kind and uphill from your tap again. We get blasted with an uncountable number of these joules from above (the sun) and below (nuclear). Our economy is generating an exponentially increasing number of dollars. I understand wanting to be careful with resources, but not to the point where frugality becomes a goal in and of itself.
- seanalltogether 1y agoI remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoMany golf courses in arid regions are on greywater.
- datatrashfire 1y agoWhy is water used for golf a waste vs other uses?
- celestialcheese 1y agonit: Nestle sold off it's water brands in 2021 to a private equity group.[0][1] 0 - https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-sell-56bn-water-division/ https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2025/05/09/nestle-to-s... 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l2Bas81NDY
- bongodongobob 1y agoThe issue with Nestle is that they are paying pennies on the dollar compared to the public because "muh job creation" or something to that effect.