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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

I mean... Food is pretty important ...

Which is why the comparison in the amount of water usage matters.

Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a percent of the water that's used for agriculture.

I'll start worrying about competition with water for food production when that value goes up by a multiple of about 1000.

The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.

I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen.

The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.

While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury.

The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.

Beef is not the only meat. Chicken is much less water intensive.

From the animal welfare perspective, there's much more suffering involved in producing a pound of chicken than a pound of beef.

That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are of similar complexity to the larger of these models, counting params as synapses.

Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat, because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans would give up meat.

Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat less meat.

But their point does disarm the suggestion that water consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while meat feeds people.

Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because we like the taste and we're used to it.

I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun, getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a claim to many times the amount of water consumption than AI data centers.

> I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.

I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter notwithstanding)

For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.

Well, yeah. And I'm not vegetarian either. But it's just a fact that beef production is a vastly less efficient user of water than datacenters.

Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds.

Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat, but the current amount is excessive

> Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and almonds. Both alfalfa and almonds contain a lot of nutrients you dont find in large enough amounts (or at all) in corn and potatoes though. And alfalfa improves the soil but fixating nitrogen. Sure almonds require large amounts of water. Maybe alfalfa does as well? And of course it depends on if they are grown for human consumption or animal.

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