This water usage argument against data centers is so specious I almost think it's spread as a deliberate talking point by DC proponents.
Power consumption and effect on electricity infrastructure is so, so, so much more consequential and dangerous. It alone is way more than enough on which to base a very solid anti-DC campaign. The water argument weakens the whole anti-DC position by being so refutable.
EDIT: with probable exceptions in specific local instances where water supply is already very constrained, like Utah.
> This water usage argument against data centers is so specious
Conditions for drought have been increasing across the US, including an increase in literal droughts. The ecosystem needs water to survive. We need to give a shit about our water supply. I live in a region that just had a public emergency declared due to drought and our area is upstream on the river that feeds many other states. If we have to watch our water consumption, those other states should be panicking. The power consumption is also a problem, but a lack of water is potentially worse, depending on the circumstances.
We should never assume any aquifer can be used up lightly, whether Utah or in a rainforest. Droughts are going to become more common, and not only does a lower water table impact other human activities, but also plants that have deep roots and anything relying on natural springs that might dry up faster if we're wasting a bunch on evaporative cooling.
Demanding closed loop cooling is just as important as demanding self built renewable power for new data centers.
Just friggin tax carbon. The notion that we pick disfavored new industries and require them to bear the brunt of our renewable buildout is absurd and effectively a tax on the 'new'.
I see no reason we should grandfather in 'heritage carbon emitters' when we are emitting way more than we ought to.
Leaving aside whether a carbon tax would be an effective solution to CO2 (I genuinely don't know), there's no reason to suspect it would be an effective solution to our water crisis, particularly given the huge growth in solar recently.
Datacenters don't need cooling because they're burning gas for their power. They need cooling because computation produces heat. Even if they were feeding as much clean solar power back into the grid as they were using, we would still need to find a solution to their voracious thirst.
Georgists have figured this out long ago. To make a regressive tax progressive all you need to do is turn the revenue gained from it into a flat per capita tax rebate. Also residential water use is tiny. Maybe your water bill goes up $400 a year but that doesnt matter when you get a $1000 rebate because most of the tax is paid by agriculture.
Ultimately 'profit' is the result of transitive dependencies on things people want fulfill what they are willing to pay for. But I agree that we should subsidize residential water and electricity usage. But the base price before subsidy should reflect the externalities.
Nah, it's just that most people function based on intuitive, rather than precise, models of how the world works. They have trouble telling millions of gallons apart from billions of gallons. But they were taught through childhood not to leave the water running while brushing their teeth. So the concept of data centers wasting water is intuitively persuasive to them.
I actually have a great deal of respect for the average person. Most of the time, the intuitive model of the world is very good at getting workable answers. But it completely falls apart when something is outside the universe of what people deal with on a day-to-day basis. Try asking the people in your family what the profit margin of a grocery store is. People might go to grocery stores all the time and know exactly how to comparison shop to optimize their spend. But most actually have no idea about the numbers involved at each step of the supply chain. Trying to explain inflation to people over the last few years has been literal hell, because virtually nobody understands the differences between price levels and the first and second derivatives thereof.
Didn't OpenAI say they thought it was foreign interference?
Personally, I find it ironic to see people going on and on about data centers on platforms like Threads, Reddit, and X. It's like, do you know where your data is going when you press that button?
Sure, but people who use platforms can still advocate against the negative impact of their infrastructure. It's like how participating in an unjust society doesn't negate arguments you make towards bettering it.
Everywhere I live water supply has been constrained. Where I live now gets a ton of snow/rain but we have entire subdivisions planned that can't get built because we don't have water hookup/infra capacity, not a shortage of water. Many areas have had water rights changes that have impacted ag/business/homeowners negatively, to the point people aren't allowed to drill wells on their property. And a lot of this is in communities with plenty of water but the water rights has been assigned 'downstream'.
And yet data centers don't seem to be operating under the same rules at a time when people have it shoved in their faces the techbro billionaires and their bought politicians don't have to follow the rules. That people can't get more housing built but somehow billionaires can magically get datacenters is going to cause resentment.
It doesn't help that data centers do everything in secrecy and then just break ground (because they don't want pushback) so it appears that they haven't followed any of the processes everyone else has to (specifically for limited/coveted/people have been waiting years water hookups). This is why they list the number of houses worth of water used. Because that number of housing could have been built instead or now can't be built without upgrading the municipal water system (at huge expense to the local community that already paid to build out the capacity the datacenters took for their remote billionaire owners' enrichment not local community benefit).
That'd be a terrifying setup for me as a live player! I'm curious where you found low latency wireless headphones though.
Have a look at Loopback - very mature app now. I use this for doing live and studio routing, you set a live profile so that only your soft synths actually get an output and Music (and FaceTime, system, whatever) get sent to the musical equivalent of /dev/null. So an accidental press of "Play" has no effect (beyond perhaps catastrophic stuttering as Music.app opens.)
My laptop is disconnected at the moment so it's full of "missing device" notifications but this screenshot[1] will give you an idea. Profiles on the left, apps in the next column, routing to mixer channels (I have a multichannel interface) next and then "monitor devices" which can be multiplexed.
Loopback looks nice, but I prefer to keep the routing entirely within my DAW (or my interface where possible) to keep latency to a minimum, particularly since I'm already using wireless headphones that add 10ms latency.
Another mitigation I now have is to use an aggregate device that has BlackHole on the first two channels rather than the main outputs. That way, if I accidentally start playing audio, it gets harmlessly sent to the void; and it also means I can easily capture and forward it in my DAW if I actually want to play PC audio (for example, listening to a recording during a rehearsal).
It's a bigger issue than one of legality. The high seat in a standard truck cab offsets two of the biggest challenges with driving a truck: it takes ages to get up to speed, and a very long distance to stop. High visibility gives better sight lines for further so the driver can plan. That helps to improve fuel efficiency by better anticipating traffic and planning acceleration accordingly. It's absolutely vital for safety because the driver needs to brake for what's happening a huge distance up the road. If you don't have that line of sight, they'd have to drive so defensively ("stop in the distance you can see to be clear") that any efficiency gains from the aero would be completely swallowed by all the accelerating and braking.
A sports car of course can stop in a heartbeat and the excess power means it can easily manage its flow in traffic. They'd perhaps not even be legal if they took as much road to stop as a loaded truck. It's four times the distance - 150ft for a decent sports car at 70mph; 600+ for a semi.
Since 2020 Fender has been owned by Servco Pacific, a Hawaiian car dealer that has some musical instrument holdings as well (Roland). It has a private equity arm attached from which presumably this idea came.
I wonder if someone up high in Honolulu has decided it's time to start the value extraction phase or prepare for a sale. It doesn't make much sense otherwise: this is a very brand destructive move in a market that's moved entirely by emotion. For sure they know this. Doing it secures their ownership over a bigger piece of IP than they previously had a fair claim to - not just the Stratocaster name, but the shape too. That might the brand more valuable in a sale.
From my cursory search, it just looks like they have a stock ownership position in Roland, not any real say in how Roland is ran. Kinda like how Game Stop has a position with eBay.
Not a lawyer and I don't have any insights to this, but I wouldn't speculate based off this - trademark holders kind of "have to" pursue each violation, because otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
This was already litigated decades ago in the USA, fender trademarked the headstock and lost in on the body. The bodies have been copied for 60ish years already, basically as long as they existed. Fender tried to trademark body shapes decades after and they lost on appeal in 2009.
A barely related ruling in the EU which has very different copyright and trademark law is being used as the basis for this suit.
>> otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
if you've seen a picture of an electric guitar in the last 75 years you'd know this horse bolted a while ago. The "classic" styles of stratocaster, telecaster, les paul and SG have been made by everybody since forever. And that's before you even establish if Fender has some form of "trademark" (on a shape!)
A quick browse of Sweetwater shows 689 different s-style body guitars, four of which are made by Fender under the Squier label. The other 685 different varients are made by companies that I'm not immediately identifying as Fender or Fender-owned. Anecdotally, that doesn't seem significantly different from the status quo I remember 10-15 years ago when I was actively guitar shopping. The body style has been widely used and generic for decades.
I don't know anything about them but it's a cool effect. At least on this strawberry, you're not zooming in but rather traveling closer. I don't see the increasing (made up) detail you'd expect from a zoom, we sort of pop through the skin into an invented interior.
Alright, it's worth a try. I'll do it at night in a balaclava though, because I live in the USA and no matter whether it's local, state, or federal government they'd rather spend $100k prosecuting this than $1k fixing the hole.
Ah, we did it in plan sight, but I guess in the US is different. I head about people arrested while truing to fix the pothole themselves, but not for painting it, yet.
Thankfully the case was taken to the Hamilton County Municipal Court, which I imagine was a much fairer trail than he would've received at Lockland's Mayor Court. He was cleared of all charges[0].
Sadly, @scrumper is 100% correct! In many, many areas and gov-levels of the U.S., the incentives have become so perverse that a municipality will spend 10x or 100x to prosecute people instead of spending 1x to fix things in the first place.
Some areas are even worse, because they'll use the event (e.g. "we have rampant crime now that criminals are spray-painting and ruining our potholes!")...as an excuse to then drastically increase funding for law enforcement agencies! Its bonkers and sad all around!
It isn't beautiful at all, nauseating uncanny valley stuff in my opinion, but AI images do have a style (or rather one of a number of idiosyncratic styles.) The sort of glossiness and unsettling focus in photorealistic images; the terrifying dreamlike surreality of more impressionist graphics; even the cartoony style used in corporate infographics. They're all quite distinctive to me at least and certainly aren't anything a human would produce. You can see the "influences" (i.e. stolen training data) but it really has come up with something itself.
Not that I think it should have. Kill it with fire and EMPs.
Power consumption and effect on electricity infrastructure is so, so, so much more consequential and dangerous. It alone is way more than enough on which to base a very solid anti-DC campaign. The water argument weakens the whole anti-DC position by being so refutable.
EDIT: with probable exceptions in specific local instances where water supply is already very constrained, like Utah.
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