Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI uses less water than the public thinks

californiawaterblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 425 posts

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#351

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cma wrote: post #295
da_chicken wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't do this for gasoline No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year. > Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because so…

Heavier commercial trucks that run on diesel tend to cause more damage. Scales with roughly 4th power of axle load.

That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.

The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.

The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#352

Post by AngryData »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #150
bronson wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they're taking water from already parched regions, often pumping it out of the ground. Even if the water did come back locally as rain (it doesn't), it still makes it impossible for people to live off the same aquifers and water sources sustainably.

People are losing their minds in Wisconsin saying proposed data centers will drain lake michigan. I'm not kidding.

To be fair if you are evaporating water you could be losing some of it outside of the Great Lakes water basin, you are increasing the evaporation rate above what is natural for that area of land.

However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down lake evaporation because the air over the lakes is already saturated with humidity most of the time.

But there still can be a problem if all that water is being pumped from deeper underground aquifers instead of surface water, so the source still matters. Those aquifers still should replenish fairly quickly in that area, but draining aquifers can happen in decades if the demand is there, while replenishment from non-surface aquifers can take hundreds of years even in water filled areas. And in certain ground compositions, underground aquifers can collapse and subside if the water is mostly drained, never again being able to hold that much water again and causing changes in surface topology.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#353

Post by [deleted] »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #335
da_chicken wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona . Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.

I think it’s a good thing when non-americans want to invest in businesses that operate in america. They’ll use that investment to hire americans and produce goods that are sold to americans. I’m sure american capitalists would love to be the only ones allowed to invest here, as they would be able to get more equity for their capital, but it’s not good for anyone else and not really even good for them long term. Smart…

[deleted]

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#355

Post by tempaccount5050 »

AngryData wrote: post #352
tempaccount5050 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are losing their minds in Wisconsin saying proposed data centers will drain lake michigan. I'm not kidding.

To be fair if you are evaporating water you could be losing some of it outside of the Great Lakes water basin, you are increasing the evaporation rate above what is natural for that area of land. However the place for that to be least likely to be a problem would be Wisconsin with their evaporated water blowing east over top of the Great Lakes 90% of the time and any excess humidity will rain back down or slow down l…

The plans are for Lake Michigan adjacent cities. It's a complete non issue and probably the best place in the country to build them.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#356

Post by cameldrv »

da_chicken wrote: post #170
legitster wrote: post #70

> Using the prompt, “How much water is likely to evaporate from data centers in California per year, assuming they are all using mostly evaporative cooling?” several free AI websites provided ranges of estimates, below. These AI also can provide ranges and sources for calculation assumptions. Data centers with closed loop cooling systems are absolutely built all of the time. Total evaporative cooling has the advantag…

Yeah, there are alfalfa fields in central Arizona . Alfalfa basically turns water and sunlight into cellulose about as quickly as plants can. Worse, the owners of those fields are often foreign companies. That means they use tremendous amounts of water in one of the driest regions on earth, in the middle of a multiple decade drought, and the wealth these farms generate disappears overseas.

My understanding is, that at least in California the Alfalfa itself is often also exported to Gulf countries that are too dry for pasture or growing feed, but they want to raise cattle. Alfalfa really is almost like dehydrated water like aluminum is solid electricity.

Of course, the farmers pay almost nothing for the absolutely gigantic amounts of water, and meanwhile they pester me to use a low flow shower head and charge me $400/month for a few gallons.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#357

Post by AnthonyMouse »

wahern wrote: post #251
jerlam wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the exact situation described above, but water rights are often linked to property rights, and those are regularly treated as sacred. It doesn't matter if the owners are foreigners and the law is outdated. And those with land often have more money and power than the small government with jurisdiction, assuming the lobbyists haven't taken control of the latter.

> and those are regularly treated as sacred They indeed are treated as sacred, it's enshrined in the Takings Clause of the US Constitution. The big problem in the American West it that the model of property rights in water sources makes it very difficult as a technical matter to put a price on a specific claim and to adjudicate disputes, without triggering a cascade of pricing and rights dilemmas upstream and downstr…

> But there's no simple way, and in particular no cheap way from a budgetary perspective, to get there even if the motivation existed to get around the monumental collective action problem, which it doesn't.

It seems like maybe there is though.

The first problem is the "use it or lose it" provisions where someone has the rights to use water but not sell it, thereby encouraging waste. That one has a solid solution: If they have the right to use it, they get the right to sell it. Make sale inalienable from use. Then you don't have to pay them anything because you're giving them something instead of taking it. But you get higher water availability as now all these people wasting "free" water start selling it because the opportunity cost of not selling it is now worth more than the wasteful use. The only "problem" here is that they get a windfall, but we can solve that in the same way as the second "problem".

Which is the takings clause. The purpose of that is to prevent unequal takings. If the government needs your land to build a railroad, they have to pay you for it, because they're taking yours but not anyone else's. Whereas when they take everyone's property at the same rate it's called property tax, and that's allowed. So if you just got a windfall of water rights in a dry place, congrats, you now have a valuable property right which is subject to property tax. Not using the water and don't want to pay the tax? Then sell the water. Since the buyer values it at more than you do, and the tax is less than 100% of the value, everyone comes out ahead compared to the status quo. The previous inefficient user gets $100 in money instead of $10 worth of inefficient use, the government gets some proportion of that in new tax revenue (variously property tax on the rights and income tax on the sale), the buyer gets water it values at >$100.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#358

Post by bryan_w »

hugeBirb wrote: post #231
Levitz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not explicitly a great argument, but it's an excellent premise to set. Because this whole thing has absolutely nothing to do with pollution or water. It has to do with people hating AI and looking to portray it negatively. The proof is that if they actually cared, there's a million better places to put their efforts into. It is not an honest issue and it deserves no attention. The vast, vast majority of people t…

Bob: "I hate and what they're doing to this cute fluffy animal I would like to do things to stop that" Tom: "Well actually they're not nearly as bad as to said fluffy creature and if you actually cared about fluffy creature you'd only focus on them" Great argument. Hate to be the one to tell you this but, two things can be true at once.

I'm pretty sure most people would see Toms point as valid?

If Bob made a huge deal about company's abuse of fluffy animal and never otherwise talked about fluffy animal, that would seen as inauthentic

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#359

Post by loeg »

hansmayer wrote: post #245
loeg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't mine. You sort of created it in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47978872 .

Really, wasn't yours? I mean you literally used "net jobs created" as an argument ?

That part was not discussing data center jobs; it was asking cdrnsf if they'd object to other industries bringing in jobs that just happened to be above median wage (which would increase the COL for existing residents).

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#360

Post by thelastgallon »

This only considers water for cooling the DC. A LOT of water is needed for power generation.

U.S. power generation is the largest industrial user of water, withdrawing approximately 47.7 trillion gallons in 2021, mostly for cooling thermoelectric plants (coal, nuclear, natural gas).

Post reply on HN