AI uses less water than the public thinks • Hacker News Board

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#421

Post by Straw » Tue, May 05, 2026, 6:33 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #419

Straw wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The land and any associated rights was taken from the Native Americans by coercive force. Not a market. Not that they have any particular claim to it; states own land, not ethnicities. The particular state that controls land sometimes changes. This has little to do with any discussion of water rights. I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever ri…

I can see you don't recognize native sovereignty. Tribal nations are domestic dependent nations, and count as a "state". The water rights were not taken by coercive force but remain with the nation, and at least nominally protected by treaty rights. It's very odd that you talk about a decentralized market when water allocation in the US Southwest was decided by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. This is central allo…

A state is an entity with a monopoly on coercion. The tribal nations do not have this- while they have some carve-outs, ultimately federal law trumps theirs. So its not a matter of recognition, they simply do not meet my definition of a state.

Nominally is exactly right! The treaties have been violated many times.

You're missing the 1959-61 famine in China! Sure, famines have happened for other causes. Typically 100+ years ago before technology advanced. Now, famines largely come from poor governance.

Thanks for the background info!

Yes, I agree it is a patchwork system- and its probably quite difficulty to analyze! I'm arguing that a private ownership model with trading would lead to better outcomes, and basically end for all practical purposes water shortages.

For example, the smaller mostly Hispanic farmers you described above wouldn't lose their water rights in a rights ownership system- they could hold them, rent them out, sell them etc. But they wouldn't lose them merely for being unable to farm. Of course, water rights are a resource rent and it might be desirable to tax them as well- effectively economically partially public ownership- but this doesn't change the core argument about the efficiency of tradable rights.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#422

Post by trollbridge » Tue, May 05, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

phil21 wrote: post #143

trollbridge wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.

Not all of us. I'm totally fine with water pipelines in exchange for long distance transmission lines for solar power and other such infrastructure like gas pipelines from areas that produce stuff we do not. Export an abundant resource for a scarcer one seems win/win to me. Kind of the point of interstate commerce.

In my corner of the Great Lakes, we have so much excess natural gas that it is actually being sold for negative prices. So a pipeline to ship natural gas out would be good, but we certainly don't need any pipelines to ship it in.

There is also an excess of electricity (thanks to gas peaker plants), so there are lots of transmission lines being built. (My property has an old transmission line on it, and then a new one perpendicular to that, solely built to try to do something with all the excess gas and then excess electricity being generated.)

So with that in mind... we'd probably rather our lake doesn't get drained, thanks, and is just left the way it is.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#423

Post by trollbridge » Tue, May 05, 2026, 10:11 PM UTC

tt24 wrote: post #156

trollbridge wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.

Sorry but that isn’t your water. Do you own the Great Lakes? The Great Lakes are part of the United States and Canada. If the United States or Canada would like to repurpose the water within them for some better use then that sucks for you

I one of those people that think that natural resources should belong to the people who customarily reside in an area and have an investment in its long-term health, both of the people in the area and also of the environment.

Draining the Great Lakes is not a good idea.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#424

Post by trollbridge » Tue, May 05, 2026, 10:14 PM UTC

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #155

trollbridge wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us by the Great Lakes would prefer that our water not get sold to other places, thanks.

Why? We have 27 quadrillion gallons in lake michigan alone. You could pump millions of gallons a day out and if it just stopped raining it would take 3 million years to drain it. Stop listening to Charlie Berens.

For reference, Yuma uses around 100 billion gallons of water a year for irrigation. The whole state uses around 2.2 trillion gallons per year.

That's 6 billion gallons a day. And if there were a supply of lots of fresh water, you could expect the consumption by agriculture in desert areas to go way up, so yes, it is entirely possible for lakes to get drained by schemes like thus, such as the Aral Sea disaster. Lake Chad and Lake Poopó are examples from two other continents of the same level of destruction.

Re: AI uses less water than the public thinks

#425

Post by 52-6F-62 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 3:05 PM UTC

rick_dalton wrote: post #227

52-6F-62 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think good faith would request that the source used for these kinds of questions is not one of the VC firms at the root of these questions. Doubly so when they use such innocuous and authoritative titling as "Our World in Data" which implies some collectivist, community-based outlook that this website is indeed not. To wit, this page is produced in part by the Global Change Data Lab which is a team of economists, a…

Ourworldindata basically just uses data from published research papers and makes interactive graphs that are easy to understand. They also cite their source in every graph and every article. Trying to paint them as disingenious is pretty baseless, you would have to take it up with the authors of the source data and not owid.

It's literally funded and published by the VCs backing so many of the AI companies here. Literally the fountain of money that produced Sam Altman.

I'm going to have to ask for a little more rigour than "they use data".

Data can be wielded in all manner of manipulative fashion to suit a preferred narrative. And when it's wielded by engineers defending large AI (or any) companies, they should at least acknowledge the fact that the data reporting is "coming from inside the house", so to speak.