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Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water
- tokyobreakfast 9mo agoAt this point, Google could be a drop-in replacement for the corporate villain in any 1980s/1990s action movie.
- zombot 9mo agoCue the White Knights defending the poor misunderstood megacorp from their keyboards.
- JasonADrury 9mo ago80s and 90s films had better villains. Has google even had a preserved fetal pig delivered to anyone?
- toofy 9mo agofor context for those who don’t know about the dead fetal pig: a couple years ago ebay had to pay out millions to a couple it was trying to intimidate into silence, ebay didn't like the negative publicity the couples writings were generating. ebay harassed and stalked them with tons of horrifying shit, including like mailing cockroaches, live spiders, a dead pig, a funeral wreath and a book on how to survive the death of a spouse. it’s incredible how few people in this sphere have heard about this. the witness tampering, physical stalking, insane online harassment and on and on etc.. again, ebay was forced to pay them millions. i don’t remember all of the specifics but it was the max the law would allow and it was in the millions.
- LightBug1 9mo agoJust wow ... can't believe I missed that ... thanks
- toofy 9mo agoyeah it’s super weird how it seems like no one has heard about this.m the story is bonkers af. needs a movie or podcast series or something.
- JasonADrury 9mo ago>again, ebay was forced to pay them millions. i don’t remember all of the specifics but it was the max the law would allow and it was in the millions. The civil trial hasn't even started yet.
- toofy 9mo agooh, they were found guilty in criminal court and forced to pay a fine of millions [0]. i was mistaken. their criminal fine was the max allowed at $3 million. i can’t even imagine how much they’ll have to pay out in civil after being found guilty in criminal. unfortunately too much time has passed and i can't edit my original comment now. :( [0] https://www.npr.org/2024/01/11/1224333712/ebay-stalking-settlement https://www.npr.org/2024/01/11/1224333712/ebay-stalking-sett...
- galkk 9mo agoI never heard about it but the way you describe it sounds insane/sketchy, on the level of Tesla/racial slurs story with crazy millions initial verdict that ended up much lesser. I mean, I can easily imagine mentally unstable person, that happened to be an employee, doing that shit, but I don’t see company with company processes acting like that. Like how do you expense purchasing and mailing dead pig? The life is full of surprises though, so I’m not ruling out corporate involvement completely. Can you provide sources and verdict?
- toofy 9mo ago> Can you provide sources and verdict? sure. directly from the DOJ [0] and another from CBS. [1] i get it, it sounds insane, but its very real. here ya go. Department of Justice: [0] > Jim Baugh, eBay’s former Senior Director of Safety and Security, was sentenced to 57 months in prison in September 2022; > David Harville, former Director of Global Resiliency, was sentenced to 24 months in prison in September 2022; > Stephanie Popp, former Senior Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to 12 months in prison in October 2022; > Philip Cooke, a former Senior Manager of Security Operations, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 12 months of home confinement in July 2021; > Stephanie Stockwell, a former Manager of Global Intelligence, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in October 2022; and > Veronica Zea, a contract intelligence analyst, was sentenced to one year in home confinement in November 2022. CBS [1]: > eBay to pay $3 million after couple became the target of harassment, stalking > Devin Wenig, eBay's CEO at the time, shared a link to a post Ina Steiner had written about his annual pay. The company's chief communications officer, Steve Wymer, responded: "We are going to crush this lady." > About a month later, Wenig texted: "Take her down." Prosecutors said Wymer later texted eBay security director Jim Baugh. "I want to see ashes. As long as it takes. Whatever it takes," Wymer wrote. > Investigators said Baugh set up a meeting with security staff and dispatched a team to Boston, about 20 miles from where the Steiners live. > "Senior executives at eBay were frustrated with the newsletter's tone and content, and with the comments posted beneath the newsletter's articles," the Department of Justice wrote in its Thursday announcement. theres plenty more links out there if ya need them. [0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cyberstalking-case-sentenced https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe... [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scandal-ina-david-steiner/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
- jackyinger 9mo agoWhy on earth do they want water from the national forest when the massive Columbia River is right there!? Is it too expensive to treat the river water? /s
- renewiltord 9mo ago[flagged]
- FrostOutput 9mo agoI hope you also take a similar view of “corporate needs”. Because their abuses of people and the environment are many.
- galkk 9mo agoYes, corporations are not saints and stories about nestle? contracts that allow to sell them bottled glacier water boil my blood equally. At the same time I cannot not to notice that only environmentalists, activists and watchdogs are quoted in the article. One (bark) got even quotes from 2 different people. Not a single scientific entity, like university etc was presented.
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoUniversities, in general, do not want to be seen as criticising the whales. I'm not sure whether Google or Microsoft is more lucrative, but they're both pretty big sources of low-oversight grant funding.
- Peteragain 9mo agoFrom a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.
- kuerbel 9mo agoWho are "these guys"? Are they the same people mentioned in the article? Why would you assume that everyone caring about the environment is the same? If you are referring to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_darter_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_darter_controversy It says: This accusation ignores the fact that the formal species description (Etnier, 1976) was thoroughly peer-reviewed before publication and has withstood decades of scrutiny—-even from biologists employed by TVA. Etnier himself acknowledged that genetic affinities between snail darters and stargazing darters would be instrumental in fully understanding their degree of relatedness and divergence (Etnier, 1976:487). Regardless of whether snail darters are genetically distinct from stargazing darters based on current scientific data, the Little Tennessee River population in the 1970s would have nevertheless represented a population separated from the core population of stargazing darters by over 700 river miles of habitat highly modified by nearly 100 years of impoundment projects. As such, the Little Tennessee River population may still very well have qualified for protection under ESA as a sub-species or as a distinct population segment, as the ESA is applied today.
- galkk 9mo agoAt this moment I just assume by default that those “watchdogs”, “environmentalists”, “nonprofits” are mix of nimby-ists and/or thinly veiled attempts of extracting money (it’s a nice things you got here. It would be a shame if some rare species of a frog would be found here. A small donation for the great cause/good, of course, would help us to work on ensuring that nobody gets in harms way).
- viccis 9mo ago>I just assume by default Gitmo couldn't get me to admit to this degree of intellectual cowardice
- random_savv 9mo agoThis comment made me curious is such a thing actually happens. As it turns out "greenmailing" is a thing, but not from environmental groups. Here's what claude found for me: <ai> The concern isn't baseless—there are documented cases of parties using environmental law as leverage, particularly California's CEQA. But empirical studies show only ~13% of such lawsuits actually come from environmental groups; the majority come from labor unions, business competitors, and NIMBYs hijacking environmental review for unrelated purposes. In this specific case, WaterWatch has a 40-year track record on Oregon water issues and the concerns about fish habitat are supported by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs—so the 'thinly veiled shakedown' framing doesn't really fit </ai> I hope doing that research didn't spend too much water!
- cm2187 9mo agoStupid question: datacenters need water for cooling right? But they don't boil that water, ie it comes out of the datacenter just a little warmer? If that is the case does it matter to the city? The warmer water can still be used for agriculture or any other common usage.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIt's not a stupid question but: technically, after passing through Google's facility that is now gray water, and you can't use that for agriculture or any other 'common usage' without a whole raft of work and you can't just dump it into the aquifer either.
- DanielHB 9mo agoDon't they reuse the water by cooling it outside the data center? Most power plants do that.
- jacquesm 9mo agoYes, but that does not mean it is now clean water. Anything could happen between the moment Google ingests it and spits it back out, the assumption that it is 'just' a little warmer is nice but it misses the option of for instance contamination from a secondary circuit or various substances leaching into the water used as a coolant.
- chinathrow 9mo agoSo where toes the "not clean water" go then usually in such a setup?
- jacquesm 9mo agoWater treatment plants.
- DanielHB 9mo ago
- DanielHB 9mo agoI know google fiber kinda flumped, but if they are already doing their own power generation for data centers they might decide to sell that power to the public too. What is really scary is that I foresee a day where these big tech companies will see it is more profitable to serve utilities to people than web services. Then, after they have a monopoly in most areas, they will enshitify it too.
- Ekaros 9mo agoI don't think that will happen. Being utility is hard and margins are not great unless you get some government money like credit. And even those might go away with change in regime. There just isn't enough margin or "free money" for someone like Google.
- direwolf20 9mo agoThis is true, to supply software you can build it once and replicate endlessly, to supply email you need to run servers. That's commoditised and the team just sees a slider controlling number of servers. But to provide power or internet you need to dig up the roads and lay a wire to every house. It's a totally different kind of business to which a tech person is completely unaccustomed. It would be more likely for a plumber or electrician to do such a thing. It's true a tech company could buy wholesale fiber access and provide internet on top of that, like they provide email on top of wholesale servers, but that's only one part of the business. Tech companies are struggling to even build datacenters right now because of underestimating the work involved. They're really not used to things that don't scale by themselves.
- netdevphoenix 9mo agoThe amount of people here in the comments happily suggesting to let Google use the clean water for their AI datacenters and return dirty water to use in crops is a bit worrying
- jongjong 9mo agoYes, clearly it should be the other way round; people should be drinking clean water and Google should use their waste water for cooling.
- ciconia 9mo agoI'm not sure but I'm guessing gray water (or treated waste water) is not suitable for cooling purposes? Particle charge in small pipes and scaling may be a problem. Also, collecting gray water or channeling treated waste water - depending on the location that might be a problem. Not that I'm in favor of using drinking water for cooling slop factories, but I guess the reason we don't see waste water being used for cooling is cost (unless governments start mandating that...)
- netdevphoenix 9mo agoI believe (happy to be corrected!) it's the same reason juice has little to no fibre: particles in the liquid could potentially clog the data centre cooling systems. But Google should just include the filtering cost as part of their operational expenses
- bko 9mo agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but isn't water for cooling a closed loop? The water is used to cool, presumably it becomes water vapor and is re-condensed when cooled and used again. Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be. It signals the scarcity, allows it to flow to the most productive resources, encourages new production and sources, and provides revenue.
- a022311 9mo agoGuess what people usually use to cool water vapor... It does make sense that datacenters would be cooled just like your water-cooled PC but that's probably not very sustainable given the fact that they don't do so.
- 0-679-72034-0 9mo ago[flagged]
- pjmlp 9mo agoHow far we have fallen from the "Do no evil" marketing.
- MrBuddyCasino 9mo agoMore people should scrutinize the methodology behind these AI data center water usage reports. One widely cited Berkeley Lab figure includes the water evaporated from reservoirs behind hydroelectric dams. Excluding that factor cuts their water usage estimate by more than half. On AI & water, looks like all US data center usage (not just AI) ranges from 628M gallons a day (counting evaporation from dam reservoirs used for hydro-power) to 200-275M with power but not dam evaporation, to 50M for cooling alone. [0] So not nothing, but also a lot less than golf. [0] https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-data-center-water?hide_intro_popup=true https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...
- ericyd 9mo agoIt's possible to be both anti-golf, and anti-water-waste-in-tech.
- MrBuddyCasino 9mo ago[flagged]
- slumberlust 9mo agoBack to Reddit you go.
- MrBuddyCasino 9mo agoAh yes Reddit, where all the conservatives hang out. Even your insults are stolen from the Right because the left has zero original ideas themselves.
- jeffbee 9mo agoEven this article mentions how ridiculous this article is. Google's gigantic data center uses a third of the water in the Dalles, a miniscule community of only 17000 people. So they are using the water of 5000 homes, i.e. nothing.