Comment by gerdesj

Addendum https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

Not serving people a glass of water is exactly the kind of distraction which prevents people from thinking rationally about what water is used for. It helps about the same as doing a rain dance with the bonus of making people irate about any other possible water usage they hear about before they've even had a chance to look at the full picture.

Remove all water usage by individuals and DCs and you've barely made a dent in water usage, so why is the solution supposed to be a compromise somewhere between the two?

West of the Mississippi, it is remarkably hard to ban the use of water for any purpose in particular. Unlike in the east, where water is considered a shared resource, and political processes are utilized when it is necessary to decide how to use a limited supply, out west we have the ridiculous notion of "water rights" that come with the land. State and federal governments have very limited power to ban the use of water for X if an entity owns the rights to the water is it using.

A glass of water means approximately nothing. It isn't even a drop in the bucket compared to just the water that is used to washed down the drain to clean up the things that are dirtied in the process of producing the thing known as "dinner, at a restaurant." It is an even smaller non-drop compared to industrial and agricultural uses of water that a restaurant has no control over at all.

To pretend that providing an unprompted glass of drinking water (or not) makes any significant difference is reprehensibly inept.

(To be clear, I don't think that your description of the reality you observed is bad in any way. The report is fine; it's a good report. The thing you described in that report is simply very ugly, in and of itself.)

Drought in Texas also makes icewater one of those things you need to request if you are ordering another drink. When I was a kid, restaurants routinely filled glasses for everyone with ice water so they could cool down as they waited to order and eat. Pitchers of water on the table were pretty standard. Today it is not common to find water pitchers on tables and in most places you will need to order a glass of water.

Granted I may not be the local expert on this any more since I have cut way back on restaurant visits over the last 6-8 years.

>Plenty of places are using water faster than the aquifers they use regenerate.

I thought I would split this since it can be a pretty deep subject. When I was in college in the 1980's (geoscience), one of the country's largest aquifers (Ogallala) was in the news all the time. The story was that at the rate they were pumping there would only be 25-30 years of water left in the reservoir. Recharge rates were too slow and the recharge zone was too far west. Late in the 90's T Boone Pickens fired the first real shots in the water wars by negotiating water rights over a large portion of the Ogallala aquifer building a water empire. Part of his plan was to pipeline water to N Texas cities that were running short of water, a consequence of their own failure to look far enough into the future to construct reservoirs and to upgrade systems and to manage supplies so that overuse was disincentivized. The pipelines were never built. Reservoirs are still difficult to construct. N Texas has an even more onerous problem with population growth outstripping supplies. Meanwhile, the Ogallala still has about 25-30 years before it is pumped dry. It isn't that the targets were wrong, it was more that those numbers applied to the areas where pumping was the most aggressive but overall there were areas that still had significant reserves and the programs instituted that encouraged upgrading equipment and more efficient water use were successful in putting the brakes on the decline of the aquifer. I'm probably getting most of this wrong so if you know something different, I'm all ears.

>I hold no issue with banning using that limited freshwater resource for cooling.

In line with the whole water problem here in Texas I agree that there should be statewide bans on using freshwater sources for cooling data centers. I especially would like that ban to be extended to the oil and gas industry so that they are prohibited from using freshwater for frac fluid. Since the shale boom really got rolling here in Texas they have left a trail of dry water wells and surface water pollution from poorly cemented casing or from injection of recovered production and frac fluids into subsurface formations that have created environmental issues when the injected fluids migrate through old joints or along dormant faults, re-energizing those faults and pushing water to the surface, especially through the pincushion of abandoned wells that were never plugged by their operators.

This is Texas so I expect that the industry will continue to get special treatment in Austin and since data centers are the new big thing, they will also take precedence over anything that local residents need in order to live comfortably. As a state, Texas has been rotten from the top down for a long time.

I fully support that, actually.

I didn't realize Kevin O'leary was on HN.