141–150 of 326 posts
Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't you want to build a semiconductor fabrication factory somewhere cold? Or is it because Arizona is dry? (honest questions, I don't know what impacts the location of a fab)
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I don't want to be priced out of the water market the same way I got priced out of the housing market. But then again, sacrifices must be made to the profit gods, it is the way. Sigh.
Water should be a basic human right. No human should ever be priced out. Whatever infrastructure is needed to bring potable water to people, the government should pay for it. The whole point of governments is to pay for basic infrastructure like this. Taxes ought to fund something other than politician corruption. Corporations on the other hand have no human rights at all. They can and should be priced out.
That's a pretty steep oversimplification there. Governments usually exist to promote justice and rule-of-law, keep people safe from internal and external threats to their physical safety, and to protect individual freedoms and liberty.
Paying for infrastructure is only a small part of all of that.
Doesn't chip making a lot of water, most of it in Arizona is fed by Lake Mead? The same reservoir that is at 30% capacity, with acute water shortages and with 4 years of increased precipitation necessary for an adequate refill. We are adding a chip making facility which needs a lot of water here? This sounds like a recipe for disaster whenever there is a period of water stress which appears to be occurring in that re…
I live in Phoenix and have heard some of the local discourse about this. Fabs need a lot of water, like a swimming pool. Once you fill it up, then you need comparatively less to stay operational. Intel has invested in both recycling water as well as partnering with organizations on water conservation and ecology projects. Arizona does draw water from the Colorado River, but among the four states, Arizona is at the bo…
And farming has been booming in Arizona. I lived there about 10 years ago and even then there were a lot of complaints about all the tree farms (almonds, etc.) that were showing up in Arizona. Massive water consumption and virtually impossible to be sustainable in the desert.
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I decided to check how much water a plant would use a plant used 4 million gallons of water a day (according to https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta... ) which is about 126000 metric tons a day arizona used 7 million acre-foot of water in 2017 ( https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme... ) which is about 19000 acre-feet a day == 23014434 metric ton a day (using http://www.…
[flagged]
> "Alexa, how much does 4 million gallons of water weigh in metric tons?"
> "4 million gallons of water weighs about 15 thousand metric tons"
:-)
Not that this actually makes it easy to deal with unit conversion, because we still have to find the right gizmo to ask and phrase the question right. "Hey Google" for instance when I ask it the above question just tells me how much a million gallons of water weighs in pounds.
Not being sure if Google was right on that, I asked Alexa how much 1 million gallons of water weighs in pounds. It told me that 5000 gallons of water weighs 41726.320547 pounds. If I ask without saying I want the answer in pounds it then does tell me the answer for the requested 1 million gallons in pounds.
But if we happen to ask the right gizmo, and happen to phrase it just right...unit conversion is no problem for Americans.
(Of course I still had to do it by hand, because Alexa's answer disagreed with the answer at the top of this thread, and I am not confident that when Alexa disagrees with an HN commenter that Alexa is right).
Doesn't chip making a lot of water, most of it in Arizona is fed by Lake Mead? The same reservoir that is at 30% capacity, with acute water shortages and with 4 years of increased precipitation necessary for an adequate refill. We are adding a chip making facility which needs a lot of water here? This sounds like a recipe for disaster whenever there is a period of water stress which appears to be occurring in that re…
Regardless it's not the primary source of water. The majority of water for the Phoenix area comes from central Arizona rivers. The Salt river project, the Salt river and Verde, etc. You can see the big reservoirs to the east of Phoenix and from groundwater.
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I feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of people sacrifice so that one large corporation can profit. Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by improving our economic independence, and that's not a small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check and they obviously benefit from…
Is it potentially a little narrow to frame "one large corporation... profit[ing]" as the main result of consuming the water? They're also: - producing useful things - employing people to do said production (and design the production process, and the thing that's getting produced) - paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced
> paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced
I suspect this is overstated considering how much of these parts likely come from abroad, especially from oppressive countries that subsidize their manufacturing via pollution and pseudo slave labor. But still there are certainly American wholesale and logistics jobs which are supported.
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The "average" chip fab uses about as much water as 3 "average" irrigated center pivot farms. If the fab land was previously irrigated farm land, this will be a net savings of water. Math: 130 acres at 0.25 inches of water = 10 million gallons of water. Done once per week for 3 farms = 4.3m gallons per day. Average chip fab uses 2-4 million gallons per day
2-4 million gallons per day is a lot of water to piss away for some chips that go out of fashion in 5 years.
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I feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of people sacrifice so that one large corporation can profit. Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by improving our economic independence, and that's not a small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check and they obviously benefit from…
What sacrifice are people making when the water is recycled?
Boeing seems like it's already there, and Intel can't be far behind.