Environmentalists worry Google behind bid to control Oregon town's water
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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.
I have $1,000,000,000 and an insatiable appetite for both material and domination. My 9 neighbors, stupid naive fucks that they are, only have $100,000 in total and do not have imaginations sufficient to even begin to want all materials and power in the world.
So of course, when the sole owner of water comes along and offers to sell it, I buy it all for $100,001. I can really never have enough water, especially as I need to power wash my driveway everyday. (I absolutely cannot stand the sight of grime.)
Anyways I guess my point is, I’m glad we all understand that price determines efficiency. Once my 9 neighbors die of dehydration, I’ll be able to gather more materials and power with less obstruction and competition. Hooray!
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.
I might not want to sell the spare room in my house to creepy stranger, and I shouldn't have to outbid them if I already own it.
Who owns the water?
>Either way, prices should determine what an effective use of resources should be.
And with the AI frenzy, generating slop is considered way more important than people having access to water.
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...)
Next is open loop cooling using secondary loop. Take a river, lake or sea. Pump some water from it, pass through heat exchanger and pump back out. Manageable for most of the year. Worse version is pump ground water and return it to these. Depletes the ground water...
And finally evaporative cooling. Which is boiling, but not at boiling point. Water goes to sky. No immediate return to local ground water or downstream the river... In this case you actually do in sense use up the water. Kinda like burning fossil fuels returns co2 to atmosphere. It will later turn to biomass, but that is a separate cycle.
Rain is more of a location problem. The evaporated water returns as rain quickly, but maybe somewhere else, such as over ocean. And the aquifer compresses and loses water retention ability.
You can use it for irrigating your lawn but not for vegetables, especially not if you plan on selling them. But 'light' gray water requires relatively little treatment before you can use it again, however this could still be quite expensive compared to just letting it go. I wonder if they've done any quantitative research on this that's public.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/blog/making-the-energy-efficienc...
That's why central heating systems that run 'low' every now and then stoke up to 60 degrees or more on the secondary circuit for tap water.
And data centers are the perfect location, endless 35 to 45 degree water. Cooling towers are the main problem for this, another is aerosols of water that has been sitting in the sun for a while, for instance in a garden hose exposed to the sun.
Drinking water from the mains is metered, so it is observable from the business perspective. Life finds a way. Heat exchangers and datacenter plumbing absolutely breed life and put things into the water that were not there when it was pumped in.
Imagine if a datacenter used a shady supplier of pipe that used, say, lead in their alloy. Do you want that datacenter grey water going into crops?
But yes, it rarely enters the building via different pipes. I'm sure that's a thing somewhere too.
It's a bad idea to drink hot water from the tap because of the concentration of metals that accumulate in the water heater. Don't assume that a little metal in your water is perfectly safe. As for agriculture, now the metals can concentrate in your lettuce.
And, as other commenters have pointed out, what else is in there? How about Legionnaires Disease?
The main reason we are talking about this is because 'environmentalists' (which in itself gives a hint about the levels of expertise) are worried, they are not worried for no reason. Listing a multitude of reasons should at least make you pause about whether or not they are sincere in their concern.
The degree to which industry would wreck the environment if we let it is by now very well documented. But the EPA has been gutted and lots of safeguards have been abandoned in the name of 'progress'. This is not without risk and I am very happy that in spite of all this a lot of people are still willing to speak up and to make sure that at least the worst excesses are curbed.
You can approach this with curiosity to try to learn about the subject and to try to understand what drives the worry of people that have studied this stuff for a long time. These are not just idle musings. Or you can put up a barrage of questions effectively casting doubt on anything that might be of concern.
I am all open to there being problems with re-using water used to cool datacenters (hence my question). But 1) "it boils" defies common sense, no component in a computer should run at >100 degree celcius continuously, so I find it hard to believe that datacentres boil water (and I would have noticed the big cooling tower on the side of them). 2) Legionnaire disease is certainly a big deal in residential buildings with stagnant warm water, sitting in pipes sometimes for days until someone takes a shower. I fail to see how it is a major issue for a continuously flowing industrial application where the water spends very little time at elevated temperature and is continuously flowing before being released into colder water. 3) "contact with metal is bad" certainly doesn't come from someone who has seen the water supply chain in the UK or any European country with ancient infrastructures. Many of which are still made of lead. 4) "water is then not suitable for human consumption", well neither is the water in a lake. All drinking water has been filtered and sterilised. I would be surprised water used for cooling has been treated that way. So unclear to me why there would be any expectation that the water coming out of a datacenter should be any cleaner than the water coming out of a lake.
Now there is common sense, and there are regulations. The two often form a perfectly disjoint venn diagram. So I am happy to believe that there are regulations resulting in absurd situations. But from an actual risk point of view, I don't see how a datacenter "consumes" water, in any comparable way than a swimming pool, agriculture, chemical plants, or gardening, where the water cannot be used for anything else after that. To me it is more akin to a nuclear power plant, which releases water at a slightly higher temperature (despite actually boiling it), and therefore has a fairly limited impact on the water supply.
Exact values matter. Some power plants had been found dumping +10 C water into lakes/rivers, while they had permit only for +5, and it totally destroyed local ecosystem. And most efficient (in terms of money) is evaporation cooling, where at least part of water is "lost".
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-dat...
There just isn't enough margin or "free money" for someone like Google.
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.
Has google even had a preserved fetal pig delivered to anyone?
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.
The civil trial hasn't even started yet.
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-sett...
the story is bonkers af. needs a movie or podcast series or something.
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?
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-cybe...
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/feds-charge-ebay-stalking-scand...
(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).
Gitmo couldn't get me to admit to this degree of intellectual cowardice
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!
Where did I say that rules do not apply/shouldn’t apply? I specifically stated my opinion about many types of activists. I’ll repeat my other comment - article quotes only activists/enviromentalists/watchdogs, without any mention of their qualifications in the subject matter. Executive director at Bark, conservation director for environmental group (wtf does it even mean?) are not qualifications