> Eating meat fills my belly.

So do many other things which use less water.

The estimates I've seen place the water consumption of water at such a low level that a whole month subscription consumes roughly as much water as 1-120 grams* of beef.

> Setting my AC to 68 keeps me cool.

What, is 70 not good enough?

Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money, damages the environment directly and indirectly, and further enriches a few already rich people."

* yes, one to one hundred and twenty, there's that much uncertainty in the estimates for the AI.

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magicalist 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

When Amazon gets to run an offgrid power plant for a new data centre that's permitted to release more co2 than any other single power plant in the US[1], you'll pardon me for wondering what the rush is and why it becomes literally everyone else's problem as a result.

Build the data centre, sure, but if it takes you five years to build out the grid and sufficient generating capacity in a non stupid way in order to do that, sorry, but that's by far my preferred route to get there.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-cente...

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ben_w 16 minutes ago | parent [-]

Rush may be FOMO. Even as one who likes using AI, I think the economics is an investment bubble and mostly avoid it.

I can't read your link, paywall, but my question regarding Musk's infamous polluting DC, I wonder why it had to be built near so many people. It's not like there's going to be a need for a huge pool of workers to commute to it.

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jacquesm 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

Because they aren't really people unless they could afford a DC of their own. When you view half the world or more as NPC then it becomes trivially easy to ignore the needs of others.

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ben_w 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

I fear you may be correct.

On the other hand, how does that combine with his apparent narcissistic need to be seen? Is his need so simple it can be met with "line go up"?

	▲	jacquesm 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Why would it have to be consistent? I've seen so many things be said and be done that do not mesh at al that this is really a very minor thing. Think about it, the list is just about endless by now it's hard to tell the lies from the intentions and the character deficits.

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DeluluDon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Air con, and basically all things connected to the power grid, also "costs [your] community money,

In what country do you not have an electric bill?

	▲	ben_w 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It can be done even in rich countries, but the point is I think the opposite of your implication: I am claiming that it is hard to avoid causing costs to one's community (and that almost everything causes more impact than one might expect), I am not claiming to have achieved such avoidance.

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jplusequalt 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Does that water usage take into account all the water that went into training the models, including the electricity it took run the data centers the GPUs are housed in?

	▲	ben_w 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Training is part of why there's two orders of magnitude range in the estimates. However, I believe yes, they do include energy production impact.