Just Nuke UK at this point.
UK government advises deleting emails to save water
151–158 of 158 posts
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#152Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#153Conservatives: "Build all the data centers you want! The rate payers will he happy to pick up the cost. What's that, water? You should have thought of that before you became the unwashed masses!"
Liberals: "The capitalists are going to build data centers. It's inevitable. Progress and all that. It's up to us to mitigate the drought by showering less and deleting the emails!"
I was going to include the far-left position, but hey, they don't have a chance in hell of breaking through the capitalist two-party system. The prognosis is not good.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Desalination is cheap though. It's just never really been needed at scale in the UK because of rainfall. Maybe it's time to reassess
Not really. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-do...
Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by topping up water in a system, in times of drought, rather than just waiting for rain.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/how-much-energy-do...
Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by…
Hm, the only reuse of municipal water I know is using treated sewer water for watering plants. I don't think any US cities recycle water back into a potable water system -- have you heard of that happening anywhere?
(I don't remember how this relates to the original argument)
Edit: oh if you meant "data center" by "municipal" then I guess! I thought you meant city drinking water
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, its maybe more expensive than I realised according to that source, but I would argue that comparing it to something like charging EVs or running a fridge is not a fair comparison. If you desalinate 1000 litres of water it's not the same as a household using 1000 litres of water. Not exactly. Once water is in a municipal system it's cleaned and reused many many times. Desalination could overcome water shortages by…
Hm, the only reuse of municipal water I know is using treated sewer water for watering plants. I don't think any US cities recycle water back into a potable water system -- have you heard of that happening anywhere? (I don't remember how this relates to the original argument) Edit: oh if you meant "data center" by "municipal" then I guess! I thought you meant city drinking water
Ok I had heard of it happening in the UK but now I can't find any evidence of such, apart from a just approved scheme to treat wastewater and pump it into the Thames upstream, which is then used to source drinking water in London. So in a way, its going to happen in London, even if it hadn't already been, as I had believed.
But I would hope datacentres could use recycled or desalinated water for cooling rather than using drinking water.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#157I 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.
That system was what fed into the one I touched, which was an offline batch pipeline, so I wasn't tooinvolved with the Gmail internals that you're talking about. I know about 10 years ago many Googlers had the same sort of problems as you describe, I assume it's a tiny bit better these days, most of the backend has been replaced over that time. Expensive operations are often slow to ensure there is reasonable isolation between users, so you don't hurt someone elses experience when you do these things. They aren't frequent operations/CUJs so they aren't optimized either.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#158I 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.
Possibly worse for many users is that labelling has the same flaw.
And even if it does complete, you'll often never know. Upon command, Gmail tells you "I'll do it later". And often never alerts of completion.