Comment by kstrauser
6 hours ago
> People have no reality of how cheaply priced industrial water is in this country.
Driving between SF and LA, you see a gazillion signs from water leeches complaining that the government won't give them yet more nearly-free water. No, I don't want to go without fresh crops. But yes, I absolutely believe that, say, growing almonds in basically a desert should be a financially expensive operation, and if that makes the end result more expensive, then so be it. And if that means it's no longer viable to empty rivers for the sake of a tasty bag of snack nuts, I can learn to live with it.
exactly! LA is peak capitalism over the environment. the amount of ecosystems destroyed by Los Angeles’s insatiable thirst for water is impressive
This is a really awkward situation because while we'd really want the market to sort of auto-balance the costs between different suppliers it's also really hard to look at PE ratios right now and believe that the market is anywhere near sane. OpenAI could trivially monopolize the water supply in CA[1] with its current warchest and that would, for everyone, be terrible in some fundamentally obvious ways - so we've clearly got a pretty gigantic misalignment in the market which means we're reliant on the government specifically picking winners but ideally doing so in a sensible manner.
How many well cooked dinners is a prompt worth? Not nearly as many as the market currently says. If it were anything less vital we could probably just ride it out until the bubble bursts but if acceleration continues then in time water usage might actually rise to the levels that the most fear mongering folks are saying it's at.
1. Accidentally even - without even reaching into the realm of malicious intent.