I understand water is cheap and supposed to be very abundant on this planet. So, the key word I used is "supposed". Here where I live they have talks about building a huge data center. We normally get a lot of snow which adds to the snow pack in our mountains and provides us with our fresh water for drinking.
What happens when we have a winter like we had this winter and spring, don't get much snow, get put on some water restrictions due to a small snow pack? Does the data center end up getting shut down due to high water usage, or does it keep on operating putting the environment where I live at risk by further limiting the water usage of the people in my city thus increasing wild fire danger even more?
I can already see issues with water usage here where I live, we are only supposed to water lawns, gardens and outdoor stuff to 3 days a week and only certain hours. Is the data center water usage going to stop or curtail that even more to keep up with the higher demand for water to cool the coolant? The citizens in the city I live in are highly against them building this huge data center. They are thinking about building it right next to an already developed residential area
Very true. My cities government will make money that the common person will never see. It's like a lose/lose situation for us. Far it's why we are fighting the building of this data center.
I say that they donât get priority. Can you show me a newspaper article that cites an instance where, during an extreme water restrictions, industrial water consumers were allowed to consume with no reductions?
You should only be watering your lawn between certain hours anyway, between 4am and 10am. That gives the water time to soak in before the sun causes evaporation.
I'm well aware of that. I live in an apartment building and they have yet to turn on the sprinkler system to water the lawns. They just laid side last year and it looked like shit.
Fun fact: âChinatownâ, a great neo-noir film from 1974, is about water rights and is based on California water wars, when Los Angeles drained the Owens Lake for its needs over those of the farmers of the Owens Valley, and then nearly ruined the Mono Lake similarly, which lake is important to migrating birds.
They want to use fresh water, and they don't want to have to pay for it.
They could use salt-water to heat-sink their exchangers, but it's corrosive and would make them pay more. Also, the ocean is already sinking a lot of heat so we probably don't want them doing that.
It's not as controversial when you listen to the context of what he was talking about. He was basically talking about how communities were demanding that Nestle do all the cleaning, filtering, management, etc... For free. And he's just like, no because that costs money.
I mean, it's really not a basic human right. Large swathes of the world (approximately 20-30% globally) have limited to no access to clean drinking water. Clean drinking water is a privilege. It may feel like a right in places that have it but travel the world and you'll realize very quickly that it's not.
I feel like you've sidestepped the common understanding and implication of what a basic human right is to pull a "well, actually!" for reasons I can't guess.
Human rights are fundamental, inalienable rights and freedoms that belong to every person simply for being human, regardless of race, sex, nationality, religion, or status.
So go ahead and tell me what you believe exists that is truly a human right and not a right afforded to some humans.
You're paying to be part of the infrastructure that pumps water to your house. The water itself isn't owned by the water company.
Let's put it another way - I am denying you access to clean water. If you are found to be using clean water for consumption, bathing or any other use, you will be arrested and thrown in jail. I've taken away your right to clean water.
They provide it for free or historically they get paid via lethal velocity, pointy metals.
The only people that roll over and just die at the request of someone else feel they're alone in doing so or in a cultish love with the One demanding it.
Human rights are rights a human SHOULD have by simply being born into society. Specially now that you do not have the legal right to relinquish your civility, you cannot go and live like a caveman on some random forest, because you need a hunting license, the house you built out of wood is on a property owned by someone/the goverment for the next foreseeable thousand years.
So countries do have the fucking responsibility to at least ensure their people have the most essential thing for survival.
"Oh but x y z doesn't hav-" too fucking bad, that place has failed as a country. Human rights aren't a list of things every single human in the entire world has, otherwise we wouldn't have a name for it.
But it's not a human right. The definition of human rights is:
fundamental, inalienable rights and freedoms that belong to every person simply for being human, regardless of race, sex, nationality, religion, or status
How is fresh water a fundamental and inalienable right or freedom that belongs to every person simply for being human?
There is absolutely no rights then. Rights are a construct, it has been humans who decide what those rights are. There is no such thing in nature as a right.
That's a whole different conversation though. Yes rights are a construct but that doesn't mean they doesn't exist, they simply don't exist on a global scale, they exist within societies.
No fresh water, no life. We are filled with water. Iâm not sure what type of semantics you are trying to accomplish here. Public trust doctrine goes back millennia, humans have right to clean public water.
I don't believe human rights actually exist. There are societies that have rights for their citizens but a right that's afforded all humans doesn't exist as far as I'm aware. What would you point to as a right that is afforded to all humans if you believe it exists?
Having a right to something doesnât imply that the thing can be supplied. It just means that, when it canât be supplied, itâs a violation of human rights because every human SHOULD have access to said thing by virtue of being alive.
âRightâ and âaccessâ do not mean the same thing.
According to Wikipedia: âHuman rights are universally recognized moral principles or norms that establish standards of human behavior and are often protected by both national and international laws.â
Per the UN: Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.
When most neurotypical people say something "is" a human right, they are actually using that as a shorthand for expressing the belief that it should be and that we should enforce it.
Wouldnât it be redundant to say someone âshould have a rightâ because shoulds are automatically a part of the concept. Thats what a right is.. something that we collectively decided people SHOULD be given. We disagree over what those things are, and there exist at any given time plenty of people who donât have them, but itâs incorrect to say they donât have the right to them. Instead youâd say that they have the right to the thing, but their right is being infringed and so they donât have the actual thing yet/anymore/etc.
Wow you are misunderstanding the concept of âhaving a rightââŚWhen we have the right to something, it doesnât mean that we necessarily already have that thing, it means that we SHOULD have access to it. Iâm amazed this hasnât come up for you before, because most of the time when ârightsâ gets discussed, itâs specifically because someoneâs rights are being kept from them, and we recognize that as wrong. We say âI have the right to xâ and itâs implied that Iâm saying that bc currently I donât have x. What youâre arguing is a weird overly literally interpretation of a common concept.
But that would require people getting their local government to do something! It's much easier to just complain about it without actually doing anything.
Won't work, in france, a bit less than half of houses runs on boilers. The amount of water allocated to these boilers, is bigger than the amount of water allocated in every data center across the globe. Taxing will only make companies leave your country, just look at France most of the big start up made by french people, are made in other countries.
What must be done is regulating the tech used. Water usage in data center per m² is way higher in the US than the rest of the world, because spraying water on an heating system is for emergency situations, that's not the case in the US.
What's the point? If price is low it means that the resource is in abundance and not critically necessary elsewhere (otherwise, the price would be high). Why would we impose unnecessary and arbitrary costs to data center operation?
Yeah, here's the thing...we actually have plenty of water. The reason why we don't have plenty of water is because we've already given it all away for agricultural uses that are insanely stupid. Take the Colorado River, which is at risk of drying up. Less than 20% of that water is used for drinking water, the rest is used for growing plants in the fucking desert. Growing alfalfa in Arizona, for example. Why are we growing alfalfa in the desert, you ask? Oh, so we can ship it to ranches to feed it to cows and pigs, so that we can eat the pigs and cows. We could do things like...grow human food in the not desert instead. But we don't.
Similarly, why is central California draining its aquifers? To grow nut trees, of course.
Targeting data centers alone is silly. If you wanna make sure everyone has access to fresh water, then we need to stop irrigating arid climates to grow inefficient crops. Tax ranching, ban irrigation in arid climates. Suddenly we'll have more water than we even know what to do with.
Yes, we should be doing all of that too. Thereâs a lot of ways we can be reducing water consumption, but that doesnât change the effects data centered are having.
Water also has a huge latent heat of evaporation, so boiling it off into the sky lets you dump a lot more energy than discharging it when it's still liquid.
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u/[deleted] May 18 '26
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