Should Cola production be restricted also?
Yes, but for many other reasons.
UK government advises deleting emails to save water
61–70 of 158 posts
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#62I 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.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#63From the website: HOW TO SAVE WATER AT HOME Install a rain butt to collect rainwater to use in the garden. Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day. Use water from the kitchen to water your plants. Avoid watering your lawn – brown grass will grow back healthy. Turn off the taps when brushing teeth or shaving. Take shorter showers. Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amo…
> Fix a leaking toilet – leaky loos can waste 200-400 litres a day.
I suspect this one dwarfs the others. It's why some water companies have campaigned to ban new dual flush toilets in the UK (there's a common failure mode for dual flush toilets which results in the tap to the cistern not properly switching off once it's full).
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#64Well at least now we know what's in the series of tubes!
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#65I 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…
Closed loop water cooling probably doesn't make a lot of sense at scale; radiators aren't very efficient at the relatively cool temperatures this sort of system would be operating at. Maybe if the water loop was cooled by refrigeration systems? That would be expensive though.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#66Data 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.
Are you suggest they move them outside the environment? Sounds familiar.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Assuming you're using waste water, which most people won't. My household (in the US) uses water from cooking rice to water plants, but I cannot imagine many UK households cook rice to be able to do that.
How? When I use water to cook rice, the rice absorbs that water. That's kind of how you know it's done. How much water are you using when cooking rice that there's some left over to use in the plants?
Rather than the absorption method, the rice can be cooked in a larger volume of water and then poured through a sieve once it's cooked.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
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
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Engineers are pretty clever, but salt water is some nasty stuff.
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
Desalination is energy expensive, and results in a pretty nasty waste. Removing the salt loses the benefit of lower temperatures.
Re: UK government advises deleting emails to save water
#70This is all just so exhausting. Why can't we ask why we just treat this as an engineering issue. If there is some issue with public water supplies, how can the government build infrastructure to mitigate those issues? You see the same thing with energy generation, as though energy is some God given finite resource that we have to cherish and allocate carefully. Rather they should treat it like any other good, allow p…
I'm not an expert but it sounds like fresh water reserves across the planet are shrinking. It is a finite resource [0].