Comment by WarmWash
1 hour ago
Framings like this are bad because people think 280 households of water is a lot.
If we instead look at almonds, something that is a bit of a luxury nut and not at all a necessity, each almond takes about 1 gallon of water to grow.
A single truck shipment of almonds contains somewhere around 40-50 million almonds all packed up ready for their delivery to Costo or wherever.
So to frame this another way, Google's DC uses approximately 1/3 of a single truck load of almonds worth of water a year. Most almonds are grown in drought stricken California as well.
I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
Sorry if you think 280 household of water is not a lot and if the facts don't help your cause.
For a small locality it is a real amount of water. And if there's a draining reservoir, then that's _even more_ water being pulled out of a reservoir.
The almond discussion is tiring as well. We're not growing almonds in most of the world. The water in Montana isn't the water in Cali as well.
If the facts aren't on your side on a specific issue, at least have the courage to accept it.
> I'm sure we'll be staging the protests and forgoing our emerald nuts 100 cal snack packs any day now.
People protest golf course water usage. Water usage problems in Cali are not as big of a concern to people in Montana than water usage in Montana.
And of course there are people who think that the added buildout of data centers _for AI usage_ (people acting like "oh these data centers are just from everything", let's not kid ourselves what the source of the demand is) is a net negative. People don't think that about food.
Personally I think we shouldn't be setting up massive farms in a desert (and perhaps just figure out how to make society work in a way where during winter we accept having less fresh veggies available) either.
Data center defenders need to get better talking points, cuz they sound very silly (perhaps as silly as the arguments heard on the other side!)
That turns the focus to almonds and how insanely bad they are.
I like when a framing offers a bunch of equivalents. Then the reader can be distracted and horrified by a bunch of issues simultaneously.