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UK government advises deleting emails to save water

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Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#141

Post by irthomasthomas »

refulgentis wrote: post #137
ViktorRay wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When George Orwell wrote 1984 it wasn’t just the Soviet Union he was criticizing. He was also satirizing some of the most absurd parts of British political culture too. Doublethink wasn’t just part of Soviet political culture. It was part of British political culture and clearly still is based on what you just posted.

Soviet doublethink? Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?

I heard Russel Brand once say something like the mark of an intelligent man is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas. And then I remembered his first TV job as Big Brother's Big Mouth!

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#142

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #141
refulgentis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soviet doublethink? Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?

I heard Russel Brand once say something like the mark of an intelligent man is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas. And then I remembered his first TV job as Big Brother's Big Mouth!

However, holding two conflicting ideas and not even realising the contradictions is a mark of a brainwashed individual.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#143

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #99

The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse. The distasteful part of all this is that thi…

To be fair, it's not so much this government that should be blamed for chronic mismanagement - they inherited the situation. I would like to blame Thatcher for privatisation of essential monopolies and also the water company management for essentially diverting as much money as possible from their customers into their own pockets - Thames Water being the prime example of huge debts being created and money not being spent on upgrading infrastructure.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#144

Post by mytailorisrich »

aldous wrote: post #58
mytailorisrich wrote: post #7

Not a single mention of the lack of reservoir capacity, with the last major reservoir built in 1992. Population has grown by 12 million / 21% since. So turn the tap off while brushing your teeth and delete your old emails, and all will be fine.

Nine new reservoirs are planned by 2050 apparently. But as general point reservoirs are... a) only part of the solution (water reuse schemes can be much cheaper and more effective) b) really difficult to build! Finding an appropriate location (google the Tryweryn reservoir in Wales for an example of the consequences of building one in a problematic location), planning constraints, environmental impact and subsequent…

Yes reservoirs "planned"... after 35 years of inaction.

More reservoirs are unavoidable. There is no alternative, "reuse" schemes are gimmicks.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#145

Post by 1718627440 »

reorder9695 wrote: post #128
pjc50 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, dual flush toilets are supposed to be a water saving measure.

Have you ever actually pressed the smaller flush button?

Yes? Are they seriously people who don't know how to operate a toilet?

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#146

Post by 1718627440 »

cactacea wrote: post #77
jl6 wrote: post #34

Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. What matters is whether the data center is in a water-stressed region. According to the article: > The remaining areas are normal: Hertfordshire, London, Kent, Devon and Cornwall. So maybe the advice should be to migrate your workloads from regional data centers into London data centers.

> Data centers don't really "use" water; it gets released back into the environment one way or another. By your definition nothing uses water as long as hydrolysis isn't involved?

Cleaning takes clean water and turns it into dirty water. Cooling takes clean water and heats it. The amount of clean water stays the same.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#147

Post by davidgerard »

dylan604 wrote: post #31

I just heard this while driving, and I couldn't stop laughing at how confident the lady was in this being a solution. The storage pools will not suddenly no longer be needed because people stop syncing their devices to the cloud. It will just be used by something else. One question I had is what would replacing fresh water with saltwater be viable? We have endless amounts of saltwater that would solve the wasting fre…

oh, where was this on? Was it the MP on the press release? I'll see if I can get it off iplayer or something, I wanna hear this

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#148

Post by Izkata »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #134
Darkskiez wrote: post #62

I used to work on the system at Google which processed deleted emails to ensure they are deleted across all systems it might have touched (eg, delete any calendar events created by the email, rebuild indexes, delete backup restore keys etc). Deleting an email was remarkably significantly more resource intensive compared to just leaving it alone, so this advice could only make the situation worse.

Do you happen to know why deleting lots of emails at once doesn't really work? Gmail that is. Select all 100k or so, delete, gets rid of the first N but not the rest, and N is order of some hundreds. It means delete old emails is far more time intensive than it should be.

Try just leaving the tab sitting open for an hour. I have a suspicion the frontend works iteratively on them in the background, and the UI only updates occasionally. I haven't tried it with deletions, but with "mark as read" on a triage inbox this has worked with 40k+ emails.

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#149

Post by latexr »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #141
refulgentis wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soviet doublethink? Is this holding two ideas in your head at the same time, or holding contradictory ideas in your head at the same time?

I heard Russel Brand once say something like the mark of an intelligent man is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas. And then I remembered his first TV job as Big Brother's Big Mouth!

That’s a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/01/05/intelligence/

Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water

#150

Post by latexr »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #99

The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure at a pretty fundamental level. It is likely going to consume far more power upon deletion than it would if you just left the data alone. Ignoring that deleting emails would have no consequential impact on water consumption, technically the advice is likely to make the situation worse. The distasteful part of all this is that thi…

> The irony is that deletion is one of the most expensive operations in data infrastructure

I’m pretty sure the true irony is the government—an entity ostensibly at the service of its citizens—asking said denizens to perform low-impact actions detrimental to themselves so that massive faceless corporations can continue to exploit them with impunity while reaping massive profits and laughing all the way to the bank.

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