It does but there is only a chance their usage will be benign depending on location and how much volume of the natural water they are going to be artificially heating. That heat has to go somewhere and more places than not could be overwhelmed because it was cheaper and more convenient to suck up 3/4 of a local stream to heat rather than pipe out deep into one of the lakes.
Also Michigan isn't perpetually wet, the summers can get dry at times which means natural sources slow down and ground water recedes and data centers can't/won't scale down utilization based on seasonal conditions. If they end up relying on pulling from ground water, they might not see any limits or problems on their time scales, but 20 years down the road when the local's natural springs and artesian wells stop performing they might get pissed.
All that said, Michigan is pretty good at trying to protect its water, and I expect there to be a decent amount of pushback and opposition to any irresponsible planning with regards to water usage. But on the other hand, we do have a number of corrupt politicians which a big tech company could easily line the pockets of.
They still sometimes use water from limited resources or add a nontrivial amount of heat to a natural body of water or river. They also often pull it out of aquifers. The largest data center I can find is in Iowa and uses over a billion gallons of water a year, equivalent to tens of thousands of homes.
Now Iowa probably has more water than almost anywhere, but still. Protesting the usage is valid.
Wouldn’t a water treatment plant solve this, so water can be reused and they aren’t pumping it out of the ground, using it for cooling briefly, then dumping it? This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
>This idea of constant fresh water being used doesn’t make much sense to me.
They're taking advantage of inappropriately priced industrial water.
Regardless of if it makes sense, that's what they're doing. Using a lot of cold groundwater and then dumping it.
It would be much more expensive to have a closed loop of cooling water (and you're not going to get a lot of cooling on a humid 90 degree Iowa summer day)
Seems like northern Canada would be a good spot. Plenty of water and cold, and not many people to object to living next door. For most of the year they could just run the pipes outside to cool them down.
Averages in a place like Nunavut are below freezing 8 months of the year. Averages in Michigan are only below freezing 1 month of the year (according to wherever Apple Weather pulls their weather averages)
The population in Nunavut is 40,000 vs 10M in Michigan, despite Nunavut being 21x larger than Michigan. That ends up being 0.05/sq mi in Nunavut vs 174/sq mi in Michigan.
Northern Canada is much colder, has more fresh water, and has drastically lower population density, which should make it easier to find an area where people won't complain (other than environmentalists), and they would be able to better leverage nature for most of the year to help with cooling costs.
Get rid of the cooling towers and condense the water, then treat like normal. Or put it into a closed loop with a radiator.
These are solved problems, I assume it’s just a question of cost and short-term vs long-term thinking.
It seems almost criminal that there are still so many people without safe water, and we’re using billions of gallons for temporary cooling of data centers, just to let it evaporate off.
Using a data center as a heat source for desalination may be another idea, where instead of data centers using fresh water, they could produce it. I looked into it briefly and it sounds like some universities and companies are exploring this. Instead of these data centers causing problems people want to avoid, they could solve problems people already have.
Evaporative cooling towers would be fine if it were a closed loop, the amount evaporated isn't worth that much concern. They're dumping ALL of the water that they intake after using it once. The evaporative or other cooling methods are just to lessen the environmental impact of dumping hot water back into the environment.
Here's another one: golf courses across the US are estimated to use 2 billion gallons per DAY.
700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.
500-2000gallons per pound of beef- and usda estimates place domestic production at 27Billion pounds per year.
We should be good stewards of our clean water (aquafers probably shouldn't be used unless they are of the self-filling variety), nor should down-river be deprived of their share. It's just Water use for forced convection evaporative cooling is not that much in the grand scheme, and most of it is used at the power plant rather than the DC.
The beef water quote is assuming the cattle are being fed irrigated crops. If you graze cattle on land you don't irrigate or feed cattle corn in places where you don't irrigate did you use thousands of gallons per animal or zero?
>700,000 gallons per acre per growing season for Corn, need to look up cover crop water for a per year figure.
You rewrote this comment, again this is very misleading.
My family has grown corn for 140ish years. In that time we have used exactly 0 gallons of water to grow corn. We don't irrigate, we don't have the mechanisms to irrigate, nobody in 100 miles irrigates (they do in far western Iowa and Nebraska and other marginal-to-grow-corn places) 80% of the corn grown in the US is grown with no irrigation.
It rains. That's it.
Even people who irrigate don't use that much water, they supplement the rain.
700,000 gallons per acre per year is the amount of water you'd have to use to grow corn in the desert which nobody does (I'm sure one or two crazies can be found on very small scales)
It is a disingenuous argument made either out of ignorance or manipulation.
I don't think 2 feet of irrigation per year is an outrageous claim, certainly you see that in western Kansas, and maybe half that amount in Nebraska. In California we need 2-3 feet per year, but California only has a small fraction of corn land compared to the corn belt states. And yes, that is stupid, but isn't that the point of this thread? People do outrageous stuff with water all over America to a far larger extent than anyone is proposing to do with data centers.
I'm somewhere south-ish in the US- We get the same amount of rain, but in torrents over a couple hours every 6 weeks with triple digit temperatures in between.
So, nothing disingenuous or even really ignorant on my part- just the idea that consistent rainfall can be trusted so much that crop failure due to no rain is an acceptable risk is alien enough it didn't cross my mind... Especially when I was mainly trying to put it in perspective. People space out when Billions come into play. So, I find comparisons with a factor <100 more digestible, and thought I'd share.
You're missing the point. We don't irrigate. 80% of corngrowers don't irrigate.
We don't have the irrigation hardware, we don't have the wells to irrigate, there is no irrigation.
It's an outrageous claim because it's false.
The folks who do irrigate corn more than a foot per year shouldn't be allowed. It is a huge unnecessary waste of water and we aren't lacking for corn production.
At least your stance on this topic is internally consistent, setting you apart from most of the commentariat. For that, I salute you.
As you have established, eastern Nebraska and western Iowa have an abundance of rain, surface water, and shallow aquifers. Would you then agree that it is a perfectly appropriate place for data centers?
Data centers just shouldn't be using groundwater as a heat sink, regardless of where. That is an inappropriate usage of a natural resource.
The Ogallala aquifer is dropping considerably and geological processes happen which means even if you stop pulling water out of it it never restores. The most wasteful usages of it (growing corn where it has no business being grown where the majority of the water must come out of the acquirer, data centers that cool from the aquifer, etc) need to be curtailed.
Just because a small minority of people grow corn in the near desert doesn't mean that ALL corn grown is wasteful. Environmental enthusiasts lie with statistics they don't understand and as a result you don't get good environmental policy because too few people who actually understand the situation care to make reasonable choices.
Eating beef pastured on naturally watered land and unirrigated corn has a much different environmental impact than cattle grown on semi-arid-irrigated corn. If you just have "america beef fuk yah" vs. "save muh envroments!" it's just meaningless sectarian strife between fools.
This makes sense to me. I also don't think that data centers or anyone else should draw down fossil aquifers that never recharge[1]. But that wasn't what I asked. In data center country, the eastern Nebraska / western Iowa area that is thick with major data centers, the aquifers are alluvial. They are above the Ogallala, and they are tied to the Missouri River. They are a renewable resource and I see no problem with utilizing their water for human purposes.
1: A good book about this is "Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains"
The Chrome Browser can transcribe audio into text, with what I consider good accuracy. It's well out of the realm of a conspiracy theory when it's been demonstrable for a couple decades.
Don't forget energy usage. The phone would need to be on high power mode all the time to run those kinds of algorithms. There's a reason "Hey Siri" has dedicated low-power hardware - it means it can work without burning through the battery.
This article contains a fun breakdown of the types of informal votes including a category for "the usual anatomical drawings" (0.7% of informal votes):
For the purposes of this comparison, those "informal" votes still count in the typically used participation statistics. Voters intentionally case "wasted" ballots in other countries too.
"I don't like any of the rat-bastards."
"I don't care."
"I think it's funnier to draw a dick. (And I don't care.)"
"I trust other people to make the right choice."
"I refuse to participate in this bourgeois sham election."
...are all reasons I've heard, even if I don't actually understand any of them.
> To me, this absolutely feels like a NOBUS vulnerability, if the SIM manufacturers and/or core network equipment vendors are in cahoots with the NSA and let the NSA take those keys, they can potentially listen in on all mobile phone traffic in the world.
This feels like the obligatory XKCD comic[1] when in reality there isn't any secretive key extraction or cracking...things are just sent unencrypted from deeper into the network to the three-letter-agencies. Telco's are well known to have interconnect rooms with agencies.
Not a requirement, but if for some reason you don't do the Right Thing that the NSA wants, oh dear your CEO goes to jail, he was a bad boy, look at all that insider trading. You'll do the Right Thing next time we ask, capiche?
There are also endless ramblings of some german blogger about how he has been sabotaged at the University of Karlsruhe, regarding very early development of encrypted digital telephony and data-transfer in the 80ies/90ies, by very incompetent and corrupted professors, connected to this.
> I've always considered insurance false-economy and avoided it wherever possible, especially for events with losses <$20k.
Everything is relative, right? Self insurance is fine if you can afford it. Most people can't wear a $20k hit without potentially ending up homeless or in significant financial distress.
(It's far from the only reason states don't use compulsory voting, I should say. There are many reasons both to have compulsory voting, and many arguments against. But the fact I was trying to point to was that the vast majority of countries don't use mandatory voting - because, one must assume, they feel the cons outweigh the pros)
I'll change a few words, and hopefully illustrate why "[countries] feel the cons out weight the pros", doesn't look the most likely explanation to me:
"There are many reasons both to have gerrymander and not have gerrymander. The USA has gerrymander, because, one must assume, the USA feels the pros outweigh the cons."
Countries don't make the laws. They delegate that job to politicians. It should come as no surprise that even for an obviously anti-democratic practice like gerrymander, politicians get away with adding laws that favour them personally over democracy.
As for the arguments on www.idea.int, they say the leading one is "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with democracy". It's a circular argument. You don't have complete freedom under democracy, and there is no definitive list of freedoms democracy does give you. It varies from country to country. In some countries you don't have the freedom to not vote. So the argument made is really: "the leading argument against compulsory voting is that it is not consistent with the freedom associated with definition of democracy I just made up".
The other argument they raise is "random votes". True, there are random votes - 7.3% according to them. But that 7.3% is swamped by the 40% of additional voters in the USA who vote if you had compulsory voting. Besides, I'm suspicious of that 7.3% figure. In Australia we measure these things as best we can, and the figure is 1% .. 2%. Informal votes are around 5%, which if you add them together does bring the total to 7%. A vote is counted as informal votes when it's impossible to determine the voters intentions. Some are deliberate protests, but it seems most are just mistakes. In any case, they aren't "random votes" and don't effect the outcome directly so the 7.3% figure is misleading.
I've never head an Australian (where we do have compulsory voting) make what www.idea.int says is the leading argument for compulsory voting, which is that "decisions made by democratically elected governments are more legitimate when higher". Again, since I've never seen a solid definition of "legitimately elected government", I suspect it also suffers from the "definition I just made up" problem. I fact I've never heard anyone make any of the arguments on www.idea.int's list.
What Australians do say is it makes detecting many types of voting fraud easier, because it becomes trivially easy to check people votes just once: count the votes. Because detecting voting fraud is easy, there are no stringent ID checks. You just turn up, no ID required, get your name crossed off the electoral roll, get your ballot paper and vote (or not). So it in compulsory effect makes it easier to cast a vote. It also makes voter disenfranchisement much harder for a pollie to pull off, because people start yelling loudly if they cop a fine because someone makes it near impossible. Surprise, surprise, disenfranchisement is common in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... It's not a thing in Australia.
Those are clear and obvious effects. A debatable one that I think is true is it pulls the vote toward the centre. The people pushing for extreme views always vote because they want things to change. Those that are happy with things as they are sometimes assume it will continue if they do nothing.
It's a process thing but it's not a regulatory thing.
There are no regulations governing the transition of cap table management, as generally this thing is handled by most companies internally by their Legal and/or Finance departments. It's just tech that felt the need to create software for something that can be done in Excel.
