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Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

Same region all the new data centers are being built. Unfortunately, humans can't eat data like they can wheat.

Wheat, being basically worthless, is predominantly not irrigated. A data center that draws water from a river or aquifer is not a rival to wheat, which relies on rain. When farmers have invested in irrigation they largely grow something else that's worth actual money.

DNA is technically data, right?

You can eat soybeans, though, which are seeing record production thanks to it supplanting what is affectionately known in agriculture circles as poverty grass.

There's some cosmic irony that this is happening when the people who came up with the derogatory term "soy boys" are in office, but I'm too depressed to laugh about it.

AFAIK the first occurence of that expression is from Katy Perry in 2018: https://youtu.be/tWbLkXhGEmo?si=EGtXdwHneXGQRWbP&t=153

Perhaps someone in the industry can chime in, but I had read that the soybeans that the US primarily grows and previously sold to China were used for pig feed. In my mind I pictured it like "cow corn" -- humans technically can eat it, but it's chewy and not very good.

Are there different grades of soybean?

There are different grades with different properties. However very few are consumed by humans. When sold for humans it is called edamame.

The most common use is crush the beans, and collect the oil feeding the rest to pigs. If you read the ingredients at the grocery store, soy bean oil comes up a lot. Soy bean oil is also often used in diesel engines after processing.

> When sold for humans it is called edamame.

Edamame is limited to special varieties that are harvested before ripening, which isn't the soybeans those supplanting wheat will be growing. You're probably thinking of tofu, natto, or something in that vein.

Most of those things don't look like soy beans. (then again almost nobody is eating unprocessed wheat either)

Steak doesn't look like a cow either.

> unprocessed wheat either

Bulgur is a staple in many regions. It's a groat so technically slightly precessed but many consider it whole.

My wife couldn't understand why I didn't care for edamame. After 40+ years on this planet I finally figured out that I really struggle to digest soy protein. They sneak that stuff in everywhere, but I do my best to avoid it.

Yes, the modern food landscape is a horrific catastrophe for anyone with serious dietary restrictions. It's actually disgusting how many things i used to eat have gone the way of soy/sorbitol and completely fucked their product just to pinch pennies. It happens to something i like about 3 or 4 times a year. They sneak those things in and i am unsuspectingly poisoned for weeks. It's one of the things about the modern world i despise the most. I'd trade the modern food choice for that of the 1800s just to be able to eat any of it. And the sysco-ification of all local restaurants is just as bad if not worse. Sysco doesn't give a Fuck about the quality, they'll put as much filler and fake shit as they can cram in and then the restaurants i can trust grows smaller and smaller every year. I'd have to be rich to be able to eat out! It didn't used to be like this >:(

Ah, so you've also given up on chocolate-coated-anything, any packaged desserts, etc?

As much as it bothers me, I do feel like I've had a healthier diet since cutting out soy. It's not the soy itself which makes these things unhealthy but rather that it's used as a filler in processed foods.

I'll be honest, though, I do miss Nutella.

> When sold for humans it is called edamame.

or tofu, soy sauce, miso, natto, tianmianjiang, a thousand other things made from soybeans

all of them are heavily processed and don't look like soy beans. (not everything heavily processed is unhealthy)

Natto still looks like soybeans when they arrive on your plate. They are fermented, but calling that heavily processed seems like a stretch.

i don't think tofu is heavily processed...

Thanks.

Tempeh (the cousin of natto) is delicious too and can be used in a variety of recipes from grilled to stew to ice creams.

You can also buy dry soy beans. They're not popular human food not because they taste bad or are hard to eat, but because they take so damn long to cook. However, stick them in an Instant Pot for an hour, and you can walk away while they cook.

They're mild, a little nutty, but also a little waxier in texture than most beans (similar to edamame in that way, but closer to other beans than edamame when they're cooked from dried).

I still haven't found a great use for them other than as a slightly weird substitute for other beans, because there's not a lot of recipes around for them (because they historically took like 3 hours to cook), but I personally enjoy them just fine.

> humans technically can eat it, but it's chewy and not very good.

Not just technically. It is a relatively common food. A fair bit of it is crushed (i.e. turned into cooking oil). But it is also a product used in a number of processed foods, tofu, etc. Granted, it does seem to be eaten less commonly in the USA, but is more often used in Asian cuisines.

> Are there different grades of soybean?

All crops have different grades. Poor weather conditions is the most likely reason for a downgrade.

I would appreciate tofu being cheaper than pork again.

It is...? H-mart + Wegmans has tofu at ~$2.5 for a 400g block. The cheapest bulk pork is at $2.6, but most portions / cuts sell at $4.

Costco has tofu for $1.50/block in my area.

Must just be my relatively rural area, then.

Shark attacks increase relative to ice cream sales. Unless you have some theory that correlates the two, that you're willing to share, we shouldn't entertain this.

> Unless you have some theory that correlates the two

I guess you meant something more like "shows a causal relationship"?

Because they're already correlated, which I thought was the point..

Well, I don't quite get the sophistry there, so I'll just agree that you're probably right in a way that has no bearing on the point.

This doesn't have anything to do with data centres.

"All the new data centers" are being built everywhere.

They are planned everywhere, if they are actually being built is a different story

Largely not. Data center people aren't idiots. They site their projects in places with water and power, or if not power then at least gas. I don't think you'd be able to point out a project that actually exists and is competing for a scarce local water resource.

Data centers don't use much water on the scale of things. The numbers look big in isolation, but most people have no idea how much water a country really needs and isolating the numbers makes data centers look bad.

Absolutely. It's tiring to squeeze all the facts into every post, though.

But aren't they trying to build data centers outside of smaller localities, where they do exist somewhat in isolation? Water cannot just be transported thousands of miles, water itself exists in isolated pockets. Straining the water resources of towns is a problem! You can't just say "the US is big so if you look at the maximum possible widest numbers, it looks small". You have to look at the actual human impact. I think data centers look bad because of the human impacts that I've seen, not some highly abstracted spreadsheet.

Water is a locally isolated resource, but again these guys aren't dumb. Nearly all of the water impacts from data centers that I have seen in the news are imaginary. Most actual large-scale facilities have been built in places where water is so abundant it constitutes a natural hazard. In other places, the data centers exist alongside other much larger water consumers, which in my mind tends to absolve them. For example, one of the most objectionable (IMHO) data center sites is Phoenix, but all of the data centers in the area use something like 1% of the water evaporated by the local nuclear power station, not to mention golf courses and agriculture, so it seems weird to complain about the data centers.

> Straining the water resources of towns is a problem!

Citation needed.

I'm sure you can find a few outlier cases, but in general speaking terms datacenters - AI or not - are not even a rounding error on any local water source so far.

It's just not a thing. It's made up for social media rage bait.

> I think data centers look bad because of the human impacts that I've seen

What human impact is this, precisely speaking? Outside of the (again) few outlier cases, datacenters are basically warehouses you didn't even know existed until you were told to be mad about them. Plenty of friends who know I'm in the space have recently asked me about this, not having a clue they've been living within a mile of a facility for the past decade.

Facilities with co-located power plants are not datacenters. Those are power plants with a datacenter attached to the side of it. The power plant would be the concern. Even then, these are exceedingly rare and a symptom of a generation or two of American's deciding not to invest in energy infrastructure.

Power usage is a concern due to the lack of investment in generation or transmission infrastructure in this country the entire time all HN members have been alive - along with the outsourcing of effectively all US industrial capacity to third world nations. Anything else is effectively amped up rage bait without a grounding in reality.

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