"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
For her problem, it sounds more like her pump is sitting too low in the well.
In general though, data centers should all be banned from using evaporative cooling. Yeah it can be cheaper, but it causes too many issues when you start using it at scale.
What's the issue with it?
It uses up fresh water
What's the other option?
Recycling the cooling water in a closed system. Which they totally can do, and works as well if not better, but it costs more money to set up, y’see.
Well sounds like something the local government should be regulating instead of you know... Providing endless state aid for these developments. Local plebs forgo tax revenue, their eletric bill spikes to subsidize electric for these parasites, water is poluted.
With a government like this who needs enemies
The local government sees $$$ (or gets out-and-out bribed) and so they sign off on it. After all, why should they care if some plebeians have their electric bill go up?
To be fair, several local governments have shot these down. One in Arizona just voted 7-0 to not let one in. But they’re so sneaky and so free with money a lot of governments just let them slide in without residents even knowing.
My grandfather had a large church build next to him and their construction practices led to a bunch of sediment getting dumped in his pond. This was also semi rural Georgia. He fought and got some sort of settlement, I don't know the specifics but he was able to fix the problem. But it took years of time, his dining room table was always covered in documents and plans about it. They wanted to make it out to be some sort of racial thing (old white man doesn't like black church moving in). Even though he got that settlement it was a bunch of pain he had to go through.
I hope this woman gets justice. She's against an even bigger foe. Meta makes such an absolutely ming boggling amount of money, they could easily make this right for this woman, but every SVP is worried about how their numbers are gonna look and if they pay some woman out it will probably cost them some promotion. All because of a flawed rewards structure.
Make it right, Zucc.
How many of them voted for this though?
If it's anything like our city, they literally come in and try and get it through under complete NDA such that the city officials aren't allowed to discuss who they are doing the project for. And they had obviously co-opted the city manager somehow—he fought valiantly to get it passed in the face of the entire city council and mayor. Plus, a third party does all the brokering to act as a further shield from knowing who the ultimate client is. We got wind of it here in time and just stopped Project Blue for AWS here in Tucson by all showing up at all the meetings (the idea of a massive data center that uses like 2k acre feet of water a year in a desert in a drought is hilariously terrible and dystopian).
Also, I should add that the actual result of us stopping them in Tucson is that they will now try and get it passed in either unincorporated Pima County or in a smaller satellite city somewhere around us. So it remains to be seen if they still manage to ram this extreme water and power usage through in spite of the wishes of the residents or not…
(And I should also add, this is a pretty heavily Democrat-leaning space—about the only one in AZ. Republicans hardly even try and run here some years.)
When have you ever in your life had direct voting power over a corporate construction project?
Victim blaming.
The great part about being in a democracy is that if it’s working correctly you almost always lose.
