4 ms·

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level t

by ben_w 2mo ago

> Eating meat fills my belly. So do many other things which use less water. The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef. > Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool. What, is 70 not good enough? Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people." * yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.

DeluluDon 2mo ago
>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, In what country do you not have an electric bill?
- ben_w 2mo ago
  It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.
magicalist 2mo ago
When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result. Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...
- ben_w 2mo ago
  Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it. I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
  - jacquesm 2mo ago
    Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      I fear you may be correct. On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?
      - jacquesm 2mo ago
        Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing. Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.
        ben_w 2mo ago
        I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it. So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them. Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.
jplusequalt 2mo ago
Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?
- ben_w 2mo ago
  Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.
watwut 2mo ago
[flagged]
- ben_w 2mo ago
  We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%. Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years. It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".
  - throw10920 2mo ago
    > We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%. Citation needed.
    - ben_w 2mo ago
      IPCC. It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay. At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term. Good news is that in the short term, the higher partial pressure in the air means it leaves faster at first, so things stop getting worse much sooner than that.
      - throw10920 2mo ago
        > It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay. > At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term. So, that's ignoring carbon capture by means natural or artificial, and therefore is a totally irrelevant number, both to this conversation, and to most others.
oliwarner 2mo ago
JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument. AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.
- ben_w 2mo ago
  > JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument. I'm replying to someone who themselves argued the analogies. > Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. To the extent that statement is true, it applies equally to most primary and secondary economic activity. Having a farm in your community has no appreciable personal benefit: for scale, the UK famously gets a lot of their sheep meat from New Zealand, as far away as it is physically possible to be. An abattoir similarly has no substantial local benefit, but worse has much detriment owing to the psychological damage it does to the workers, leading to higher rates of arrest for violent criminal offences: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086026609338164 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816... Unless it's at the scale where it becomes a company town, having a factory, a warehouse, etc. these things are all heavily automated or mechanised and employ only a few of the locals as a percentage of the population. Putting anything that isn't service-sector in your community (i.e. schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) is going to be of "no appreciable personal benefit" when considered in isolation. Almost all primary (farming, fishing, mining) and secondary (manufacturing) comes with negatives (pollution, higher wear on the roads and utilities).

by ben_w 2mo ago

DeluluDon 2mo ago

>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, In what country do you not have an electric bill?

ben_w 2mo ago
It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.

magicalist 2mo ago

When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result. Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...

ben_w 2mo ago
Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it. I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.
- jacquesm 2mo ago
  Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    I fear you may be correct. On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?
    - jacquesm 2mo ago
      Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing. Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.
      - ben_w 2mo ago
        I want to understand how his mind works. Not sure what value this is, now I think about it: I'm unlikely to time a bet against him well enough to win it. So, for this point, I don't care that the words and actions he emits have no apparent rational long-term coherency, but I do care about the coherency of the system behind them which generates them. Think of it like me wanting to learn how an LLM works so I don't get surprised by it doing more than a Markov chain.

jplusequalt 2mo ago

Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?

ben_w 2mo ago
Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.

watwut 2mo ago

[flagged]

ben_w 2mo ago
We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%. Of the two, use of air con in the US is a bigger source than current data centres, and in the middle of the range of extimates for how many new data centres will actually get built over the next few years. It would of course be much better if both AC and DC (in both senses) were powered by renewables, but y'all elected someone who thinks they're a woke Chinese scam or something, possibly because one got built near a golf course in one of his foreign properties, possibly as a favour to the people who gave him that new aircraft for his "library".
- throw10920 2mo ago
  > We (humanity worldwide) need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 99.9%. Citation needed.
  - ben_w 2mo ago
    IPCC. It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay. At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term. Good news is that in the short term, the higher partial pressure in the air means it leaves faster at first, so things stop getting worse much sooner than that.
    - throw10920 2mo ago
      > It is based on the mean lifetime of a CO2 pulse being order-of a thousand years, which is itself approximation of what IPCC says; actual decay rate behavious is not even as simple as exponential decay. > At 1000 years exactly, steady-state requires 99.9% reduction in the long term. So, that's ignoring carbon capture by means natural or artificial, and therefore is a totally irrelevant number, both to this conversation, and to most others.

oliwarner 2mo ago

JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument. AC and meat are bad for the environment but they deliver personal benefit. Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. That's it.

ben_w 2mo ago
> JTFC why are you arguing minutiae? The analogies aren't the argument. I'm replying to someone who themselves argued the analogies. > Having a DC in your community has no appreciable personal benefit, only negatives. To the extent that statement is true, it applies equally to most primary and secondary economic activity. Having a farm in your community has no appreciable personal benefit: for scale, the UK famously gets a lot of their sheep meat from New Zealand, as far away as it is physically possible to be. An abattoir similarly has no substantial local benefit, but worse has much detriment owing to the psychological damage it does to the workers, leading to higher rates of arrest for violent criminal offences: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1086026609338164 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816... Unless it's at the scale where it becomes a company town, having a factory, a warehouse, etc. these things are all heavily automated or mechanised and employ only a few of the locals as a percentage of the population. Putting anything that isn't service-sector in your community (i.e. schools, hospitals, shops, restaurants, hairdressers, etc.) is going to be of "no appreciable personal benefit" when considered in isolation. Almost all primary (farming, fishing, mining) and secondary (manufacturing) comes with negatives (pollution, higher wear on the roads and utilities).