Comment by hughw

17 hours ago

Retail water[1] costs $881/bbl which is 13x the price of Brent crude.

[1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/Aquafina-Purified-Drinking-Water-...

6 comments

hughw

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dakolli  17 hours ago

What a good faith reply. If you sincerely believe this, that's a good insight into how dumb the masses are. Although I would expect a higher quality of reply on HN.

You found the most expensive 8pck of water on Walmart. Anyone can put a listing on Walmart, its the same model as Amazon. There's also a listing right below for bottles twice the size, and a 32 pack for a dollar less.

It cost $0.001 per gallon out of your tap, and you know this..

  • hughw  16 hours ago

    Water just comes out of a tap?

    My household water comes from a 500 ft well on my property requiring a submersible pump costing $5000 that gets replaced ever 10-15 years or so with a rig and service that cost another 10k. Call it $1000/year... but it also requires a giant water softener, in my case a commercial one that amortizes out to $1000/year, and monthly expenditure of $70 for salt (admittedly I have exceptionally hard water).

    And of course, I, and your municipality too, don't (usually) pay any royalties to "owners" of water that we extract.

    Water is, rightly, expensive, and not even expensive enough.

    • dakolli  16 hours ago

      You have a great source of water, which unfortunately for you cost you more money than the average, but because everyone else also has water that precious resource of yours isn't really worth anything if you were to try and go sell it. It makes sense why you'd want it to be more expensive, and that dangerous attitude can also be extrapolated to AI compute access. I think there's going to be a lot of people that won't want everyone to have plentiful access to the highest qualities of LLMs for next to nothing for this reason.

      If everyone has easy access to the same powerful LLMs that would just drive down the value you can contribute to the economy to next to nothing. For this reason I don't even think powerful and efficient open source models, which is usually the next counter argument people make, are necessarily a good thing. It strips people of the opportunity for social mobility through meritocratic systems. Just like how your water well isn't going to make your rich or allow you to climb a social ladder, because everyone already has water.

      I think the technology of LLMs/AI is probably a bad thing for society in general. Even a full post scarcity AGI world where machines do everything for us ,I don't even know if that's all that good outside of maybe some beneficial medical advances, but can't we get those advances without making everyone's existence obsolete?

    • not_kurt_godel  16 hours ago

      I agree water should probably be priced more in general, and it's certainly more expensive in some places than others, but neither of your examples is particularly representative of the sourcing relevant for data centers (scale and potability being different, for starters).