Thread

1. unglaublich · 1790770721 · focus · HN ↗

   They refuse it because if they would say "1 million liters a year!" the knee-jerk reaction will be completely predictable even though that's just tiny compared to a small swimming pool or industrial or agricultural site.

   The debate is completely based on emotion and anger right now, so sharing information will only give the emotional/angry folks more mud to throw with. The majority of people has no clue about how to put things like energy use and water use in perspective, and they're also not interested in doing that. Because they have decided to green-wash their AI-fears as environmental fears... which is a big fat joke because datacenters aren't significant polluters or consumers compared to almost all other industries.

   Look, I get it, many people are afraid of the societal impacts of AI, or distrust it in another way. But let's be honest and focus on _that_ instead of naively acting as if our anti-datacenter sentiment comes from environmental concerns (the last few decades have shown we don't GAF about the environment).

   1. Sharlin · 1790771534 · focus · HN ↗

      Well, water usage is usually metered in cubic meters. A thousand m^3 per year sounds much less than a million litres.

      1. emil-lp · 1790774870 · focus · HN ↗

         Perhaps for people in the US, but this would be elementary school arithmetic in Europe.

         1. Sharlin · 1790777761 · focus · HN ↗

            I’m European and I’m extremely sure that when 90% of people hear "x m^3" they don’t think of it as "1000*x litres". And the majority of people likely can’t recall on the spot that 1 l = 1 dm^3 (a unit nobody uses), even if they remember that you multiply by 1000 to go from m^3 to dm^3. In any case most people don’t do conversions like that unless someone specifically asks them to.

            Volumes are in general very unintuitive to people due to the cubic scaling. It’s further confused by the fact that the widely used decilitre, centilitre, and millilitre do scale linearly, unlike cubic metres. So 1 l = 1 dm^3 but 1 dl = 100 cm^3…

            1. freecodeio · 1790782823 · focus · HN ↗

               I don't know where do you live but even my small nephews and nieces understand that a 1 meter cube of water is A LOT OF WATER, because mentally, we have lots of 2 liters bottles to compare it to

               1. Sharlin · 1790793091 · focus · HN ↗

                  Sure. But the average water use per person per year where I live is in the tens of cubic meters. So 1000 cubic meters per year isn't that much.

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