Comment by bahmboo
16 hours ago
Groan. Your comment is the most depressing thing I've read today. What a sad way to look at the world. People are doing stuff and having fun. Meanwhile a whole sub-cult is sucking from the doom straw and mumbling carbon, water, greed, blah. The sport of Golf consumes far more resources than any AI data center.
Wow, just a quick check .... it appears you are correct.
Indirect Water footprint via Electricity Usage:
I don't really get the golf course hate.
We need more green spaces, we need people to be active. Golf is a fairly quite sport, animals do foster around the greenery with golf courses. I would much rather a golf course than hot concrete everywhere.
I'm not hating on golf. My grandfather would be appalled! In crowded urban areas they don't work so well anymore. And I'm also not against using our resources for human pleasure!
its because "green spaces" and "spaces with greens" are not the same. just imagine a 150 acre generic park or forest instead of an over fertilized over watered field for a single game played by only .002 percent of people.
golf is generally a huge waste of space for the amount of value we get from it per person and should have no place anywhere near a population center where we actually need more green space.
Golf courses are not green spaces, come on now. They are most often limited in their access and devoid of greenery native to the area or that supports pollinators. Grass does not equal green space, and certainly not the flavor of green that is present in golf courses. The alternative to a golf course is not hot concrete either, that's a false dichotomy.
the golf stat is actually way worse than this... because you aren't accounting for active users. how many people actually benefit from all that water.
a golf course... at BEST has two or three foursomes on each hole on average at a time. so 36-48 players concurrently. accounting for less than perfect utilization it rounds to a rough throughput of about 1000 people per day per course. winter Exists and so you probably get like 20-50k people per year.
or maybe an easier term would be the estimated 160m people who played golf at least once last year.
which means that not only are we using that much water for so few people (.002% of the population) we are also reserving all of that space for so few people. for courses out in the middle of nowhere that doesn't matter but for example are thousands of acres of courses inside and near cities. one in LA reported 117k visits one year and that required dawn to dusk 365 play only possible in a climate like LA.
A typical course is ~150 acres so we could fit 50 soccer fields into that same space and service 3.2 million players. Ill spare the envelope math but its pretty hard to come up with any other use for that space/water that could serve less people.
ok one more example that doesn't need water either. just up the street from the high volume golf course is runyon canyon. similar size 150 acres, serves 1.5m visits a year.
Basically golf is a major waste of resources for very little benefit in basically every way possible, and should be zoned out of existence.
Yes. And right after we kill golf lets pave over Central Park. And we can tear down sports arenas and concert venues after that. It's a huge waste when you think about how few people actually go there and what benefit they actually have. Sports overall are a waste of time. Everyone should just walk in the woods instead. Except soccer. You're right that we need thousands more soccer fields. Its way more efficient than any other kind of exercise. And there is so much demand for soccer in the US, you can't even find an empty field. In contrast to golf courses which are mostly empty like you noticed.
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I’m not commenting on whether generative AI is especially resource-wasteful or not, but a lot of people online seem to have newly discovered the existence of data centers.
Remind me what golf club comes close to the energy consumption of a data center?
Or do you literally mean the entire sport of golf vs 1 data center?
That's fair and I left it as is knowing that. But it was still factually correct.
The main point is people worrying about resources and how to allocate them. We are creatures who want joy and I will not apologize for that. Certainly in face of abstract things such as "the environment". Which environment? I am a humanist. That definition varies. Golf is not the problem sorry to pick on it!
I was curious and tried to come up with a crude estimate - all of the golf courses in the US use approximately the same amount of energy (mowing, fertilizer, etc) as one 1GW DC does.
K, but they're paying for that energy though. And the land and the building costs, etc. I really don't want to live in a country where the government just arbitrarily says "Oh, sorry we have 'enough' datacenters / Subway sandwich shops / golf courses / storage facilities so you aren't allowed to build one" -- even if it becomes a populist belief that they should.
The fact is, at this point there is so much demand for DC capacity that the prices are super high, and thus it's worth building them. Many people believe that it's a bubble or whatever. If they're right, well then a lot of people building DCs right now will lose their shirts. If they're wrong and the demand is sustained, DCs are exactly what we need to be building.
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Is there such a thing as a 1GW data center? Like a beefy gaming PC easily uses 1 KW According to Google, an individual GPU tower consumes anywhere between 10-100kW. An 1GW data center is can fit in a size of a mid size apartment.
Okay, but firstly golf is probably the most useless sport ever and secondly there is more than one AI datacenter.
Yes, some people have fun, but most of the "fun" nowadays is just endless mindless consumption.
Golf consumes more water than ALL datacenters on earth.
But they both consume too much water. That's why we need less of both. Much less golf courses though.
How people derive fun is different from person to person.
The fun of some is the horror of others.
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Lol. Let's not pick on golf? All sports are pointless depending on how you look at them. But here we are thousands and thousands of years later and humans want what humans want.
I just ignore most of these people. 99.9% of the time they're losers who peddle misinformation.