Comment by paytonjjones
16 hours ago
There are a lot of dumb political discourses but this is one of the dumbest in years. It's puzzling to me how water got latched onto instead of, say, energy or rare earths.
16 hours ago
There are a lot of dumb political discourses but this is one of the dumbest in years. It's puzzling to me how water got latched onto instead of, say, energy or rare earths.
It’s all of these things. People want water for humans, not technology of questionable utility. They also don’t want their power bill going up due to dramatically increased demand from the data centers.
Is this a yes-and kind of thing or a no-but? I'm asking because maybe water serves as a good indicator for the other resource consumption issues around data-centers. Most of the water issues are are directly related to the energy and rare-earth issues you're talking about. This paper covers the scope of energy, consumption, and downstream water usage for servers:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3724499
So yeah, I don't think water is a red herring but more like a canary.
It's more tangible for people, if they would give up golf or eat less red meat, it crusade about those activities, they could do more for mother earth
It's almost as if there are some very powerful forces that want to discredit political dissent.
It's astroturfed, as is most memetic outrage that makes no logical sense
TFA:
> Making matters worse, many datacenters now in the pipeline in the US are slated for areas already experiencing drought, according to analysis by The Guardian newspaper.
If it's astroturfed it's only because the people complaining don't have enough water to grow natural grass on their lawn. FTFY.