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Comment by mgw | Hacker News Reader

The Register misquotes itself by writing that “Google's datacenters in Dallas, Texas consumed more than a quarter of the city's water supply”.

Clicking through to the quoted article [1], the figure is actually for The Dalles, Oregon, a city with a population about 80 times smaller than Dallas’.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/19/google_datacenters_da...

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Google in The Dalles, OR site also uses much less water than the Aluminum smelter that used to be at their current location.

That's like saying they're lighter than the moon. Your fact is more about how unbelievably resource-intensive aluminum smelters are.

But it also a reduction from peak water use in that location. That location is used to that level of resource consumption.

You could of course argue it is still too high, but it is also within the current status quo.

And what does “too high” mean, anyway? Using water in The Dallas is a totally different story than using it in Death Valley. Part of the reason the data center is there is the abundance of water.

The fact also makes you notice that no one is writing articles about how much water smelters use...

Because we have recycling centers, which reclaim aluminum using 95% less energy than smelting the raw material.

No, because journalists love writing articles critical of tech companies, some fair some not.

Journalists love writing articles people want to read. People like crapping on tech companies because they look at them everyday in their phones so it rings a bell. The average person rarely thinks of smelters or is confronted with one.

Publishers publish clickbait. Editors and journalists do as they're told.

You can't reclaim aluminum without first smelting it from raw.

But you can then recycle it an unlimited number of times. A large majority of all aluminum in use is recycled.

True but chances are our use of aluminum is not static and is always increasing. That new aluminum needs to be smelted at some point.

I'm just shocked your even smelting in the US still, surely that's done in the near east where power + labour is far, far cheaper.

I feel like _some_ domestic aluminum refining capability has to be a national security requirement, though no idea if we do treat it that way.

Yep that's true, fully accept that.

Alcoa had a pretty large aluminum smelter on the west coast in Ferndale WA, but it shut down near the beginning of covid. The bonneville power contracts with Alcoa were pretty generous, somewhere around $0.035/kWh for ~300MW, and even then, they couldn't make it work.

A PE firm is trying to buy it up, but the bonneville administration isn't playing ball and giving them the same rates, so it'll likely sit empty.

We do it in New Zealand. The power source is renewable and dirt cheap thanks to the games Rio Tinto play, which have resulted in the population subsidising them.

Rio Tinto have a poor record and leave toxic waste in various places. It seems possible that the taxpayer will be tidying up their mess.

Quebec too. And Quebec is far from landlocked, so an abundance of hydroelectricity has alternative markets.

The subsidies are staggering:

> The total cost of $2.7 billion comes to $274,338 per job per year during 35 years for the 740 jobs in the new plant. If we use the figure of 10.0 cents/kWh, which is the expected cost of new projects under study, the cost per job per year rises to $370,864

And these are 2007 number!!! And no, the smelters aren't paying their employees FAANG wages.

> It is far more profitable to export electricity directly through interconnections than indirectly through aluminum ingots.

https://www.iedm.org/files/avril07_en.pdf

That’s a really fixed way of looking at the subsidies. Thanks.

Cheap power requires good infrastructure which countries with cheap labor generally dont have. There are locales in US with pretty good electricity rates

Does anyone know if that steel recycling plant is still operating below the west Seattle bridge?

The point is that water supply is a non issue because it needs 20x less than before.

This makes the datacenter out to be a massive water user. Which it is, in some sense. It's also worth considering that this volume of water usage -- 274.5 million gallons per annum, or 842 acre-feet -- is about 1/3 that of an average-size (445 acre) farm.

From personal experience, most auto-fill fields will correctly find Dallas for "dal", but will quickly update to Dalles for "dall". Which is weird since "dalla" comes before "dalle" alphabetically which makes me think their "learned" use implies more people looking for Dalles type "dall".

I've been caught out by this on multiple occasions.

It's not too weird...

If it offers up "dallas" for "dal", but the user keeps typing, then it's reasonable to assume "dallas" wasn't what they were looking for, or they'd have picked it after "dal".

I hate these autocompleters with this logic. Counterintuitive and let me not type with 1/sec just to be “helped” correctly

Or maybe they type quickly and don’t stop after each and every letter to see the autocomplete results?

Exactly. I'm not typing D...pause...A...pause...L wait for suggested value. I'm typing dall by the time the first suggestion has had a chance to make its appearance. Then again, I'm on a real computer with a keyboard, and not some mobile device where it's impossible to type properly and forces those pauses between letters where the autocomplete might be noticeable.

I am in the same boat but experience this on mobile, too. They just slow everything down by the same factor.

Every time I want to launch Photos.app or Photo Booth.app through Spotlight, it keeps flicking between one and the other almost with every key press... then when I think it's done, and am about to press enter, it updates the top result a millisecond before I hit enter.

Windows 11 search too

I replaced spotlight with alphred and found it to be more consistent (and accurate) with suggestions

You could rename Photo Booth, or even better, delete it.

Nope. System Integrity Protection.

Last week, I helped a friend update their new to them older mac book air. I used my machine to download the most recent OS compatible with their model. Now that's completed, I tried removing the installer from my machine, only part of it will not delete because it has the restricted flag set. According to the internet, I can only delete this file by rebooting into special mode disabling SIP, delete the file, then reboot into normal mode. WTF is that bullshit? This isn't a critical installed file that's a crucial part of the OS. It's just an external file used to install an OS. Totally baffling

That’s hilarious. It used to be hard to track down specific versions of macOS, but if you can’t ever delete them I guess that’s solved.

Sure, it’s hilarious as long as it’s not you. Otherwise, it’s beyond frustrating.

Not sure about the hard to track down issue. If you have a Mac and the App Store, they’re there for the downloading. Trying to download to run in a VM on windows or Linux violating license agreement then it is not mine nor Apple’s issue

For VMs, usually on Macs but also on licence violating machines.

Whatever the need, it’s of no consequence to Apple that it was a struggle. Having it download as an app is irritating too as it adds steps with the conversion.

Argh. And bypassing that is a finicky 10+ step process. And software update will restore the apps.

https://nektony.com/how-to/uninstall-default-apple-apps-on-m...

Why would I want to bypass that? Someone's been putting crazy amount of work to make the system foolproof, only for me to play the fool?

Removing apps you don’t want and will never use seems like something you should be able to do on your machine.

There are people who will run their graphical session as root, and throw in a "chmod -R 777 /" for good measure; and there are people who will go through convoluted steps to disable runtime kernel module loading, mount / read-only, and run their web browser in a container. Now I'm definitely not on the latter extreme, but if I can have a decently-hardened system out of the box, why would I throw that away just to remove a builtin app?

Everything is a compromise, by the way.

Are we still talking about macOS? If so, sudo rm -f does not work on a file with the restricted flag set. Based on that, I don’t see how modifying it with a child would work either. SIP is powerful

stupid autocorrect, s/child/chmod/

because people resent the system being hardened against them, basically.

And The Dalles, unlike Dallas, has a huge source of water available: the mighty Columbia River, currently flowing 140,000 to 240,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). (Snowmelt causes daily surges.)

The Trinity River at Dallas, TX is currently running at 400 cfs, LOL.

You mean The Dalles that sits on the banks of the humongous Columbia River? That’s the one they are worried about using too much water? The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in the Western Hemisphere. Are they worried about the Pacific Ocean going dry?

I get that it's common usage (and that's what language basically is), but when I see "80 times smaller" my brain screams "80 times what? Wouldn't `1 times smaller` be zero?" Yes, brain, yes it would.

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