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- you can eat a cow. you cannot eat an llm.
- we should eat less cows.
- we should feed cows grass, not corn
- fuck elon musk. he promised to build a water treatment plant in memphis to cool grok and then ‘paused’ the planning. not the construction, the planning.
- pleas do not use grok.
- you should plant a garden.
I’ve seen hundreds of sexy cows and only one or two good-looking data centers.
That sentence does not read well, regardless the intent I put to it.
I am at loss if I should commend you or be horrified. If not both.
“Fuck one cow, and you’re a cow fucker. Fuck one datacenter? You’re a hero.”
“Burn a cow, you’re a monster. Burn a datacenter, become the monster monsters fear.”
- I beg to differ
chomps down on a piping hot gpu
Crunchy, yet delicious.
Hey! That’s my brain!
Talk about crunching numbers amirite?
grooooan :p
plant a garden
Yes! My family has one and we have to give away zucchinis now, there’s no way to process them. If you’re concerned about water use, research what plants naturally thrive in the climate in your area. Check if a well can be dug so you don’t need to use expensive and treated tap water.
Rain barrels are a really good solution to water needs for home gardens, and usually pretty inexpensive.
I got a couple of flavouring barrels from a food plant I worked at, an adapter to hook them to my downspouts, and a submersible pump that lives inside powered by a solar battery. They’re sealed so no issues with mosquitoes, and the pump feeds a garden hose so I’m not carrying buckets around. I basically never use tap water in my garden at all.
Be sure to look up local laws before getting a rain barrel. For some reason some cities have laws against them.
This is sadly true. Some places are so dry that capturing rainwater can disrupt the local water table (this is a wild guess). Other places are governed by idiots.
My city gives out rain barrels a couple times a year.
yeah the plants really love the un-chlorinated in floridated water.
ok so check it - we started shredding the overflow squash and cooking it down into tomatoes to make a great pasta sauce.
also zucchini bread is awesome.
We’ve tried all kinds of recipes and now have an extremely high-zucchini diet and so do the chickens, yet the freezer keeps filling up. The plants are in overdrive this year. Luckily my parents work in the town and their colleagues gladly take the extras.
do you have a magic trick for battling the squash vine borers?
6 - a native species garden
Milk cows need corn, alfalfa, and grass, because they need the extra nutrients, since they’re, y’know, raising a baby.
And before anyone goes off on me about how we shouldn’t have dairy cows, y’all can pry cheese and ice cream out of my cold, dead fingers.
No, cows do not need alfalfa or corn. They evolved to eat grass. They need grass. The rest is from intensive farming practices, partly because the USA has a culture where beef is better if the cow was so overfed that the muscle tissue is riddled with fat (it’s called marbling) and partly because you can raise cattle’s weight and therefore selling price more quickly if they’re overfed. This drives more profits at the expense of the cows’ health from eating food that they struggle with, giving them recurrent stomach issues and bacterial infections. They then solve that problem by routinely giving them low dose antibiotics, which is the perfect breeding ground for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria, causing serious problems for human health - we’re rapidly running out of antibiotics of last resort.
There are plenty of countries that raise their cows in large fields instead of in barns, eating natural grass that grows purely from rain that falls from the sky, but it’s less profitable and needs protecting from American imported beef which is cheaper and more fatty.
The methane is a global problem with beef and dairy, though. Cows release a lot of greenhouse gasses however healthily or naturally they’re fed.
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN so the cow can make enough fatty milk that it’s good for the calf and for butter, and so the cow stays healthy in the process. Do you have any idea how much extra protein and fat a pregnant and nursing female of any mammalian species needs in order to stay healthy?
Even the local dairy farms around me, that keep their cows on grass as much as they can, supplement feed.
Here’s an actual farmer talking about it if you want to hear from someone in the industry.
For more cow related content, here’s him on how the beef cattle industry are largely a bunch of whiny bastards who want to have their cake and eat it too, if you want to have something that is actually worth getting mad about.
An addendum, just for funsies: him talking about the silliest chicken myth he’s ever heard (and he’s heard a lot).
How did the cows discover agriculture and grew their own breeding supplements of maize and alfalfa before human husbandry? Should we tell the Moose, Elk, and Bison to go buy some tractors or do you think they’ll manage with just plows?
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN
You clearly have no idea that grass contains protein.
You’re wrong, and instead of finding out whether cows are typically fed on grass alone, yes alone, in the uk and Ireland (but not America where they do it the cow-hurting fat and bacteria ridden way), your source is some American blogger?!
It does, just not enough to keep a pregnant cow healthy. And he blogs, yes, but he’s also a farmer, in case you missed that part. My source is also the farmers around me who keep their cows on grass as much as possible.
Why do you think farmers can’t blog, just curious?
Yes, they do, it’s for PROTEIN
You clearly have no idea that grass contains protein.
It does, just not enough to keep a pregnant cow healthy.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. You’re spouting such a bunch of crap. Cows don’t need anything except grass, and that’s how they’ve been in the UK for centuries and centuries. They evolved eating grass. Grass is their natural diet.
Maize isn’t even indigenous to the UK, only really got going in the 20th century and yet cows have been living in the UK and cultivated for dairy and meat since before the industrial revolution! You didn’t even bother to look anything up, you just have the american perverse cow-damaging position as explained to you by what authoritative source? One blogger!
Why do you think farmers can’t blog, just curious?
Holy straw man, batman!
One US blogger’s ignorance can’t wipe out thousands and thousands of years of happy grass-eating cows without intestinal problems. Even when they’re pregnant! Duh.
- He’s a farmer
- You didn’t watch the video, did you?
- Are you a farmer?
Well, if you compare against one of the known worst offenders you will always look better.
But also, the cattle farms at least produce food. For humans to eat. Like, we need food. We don’t need waifu chatbots.
This is the same argument as “a human baby takes years of nurture and training until it can do task too.” Like, yeah, but that’s a human. The reason we do all this shit.
In all fairness, while humans need food to survive, we don’t need beef and there are objectively better options for sustainability than animal agriculture.
Not saying AI isn’t abhorrent, but the argument that beef makes food so its water consumption is not appalling isn’t strong.
we don’t need beef and there are objectively better options for sustainability
Of course. It’s still of greater and more essential use to us than waifu chatbots.
the argument that beef makes food so its water consumption is not appalling isn’t strong.
I didn’t say it’s not appaling. I did say at least it makes something useful, and that comparing the two does not absolve AI.
Not just produce food but also material like hides for leather production. And leather can be used for clothing.
However meat production is not better in comparison. Both are polution centers. Meat farms AND ai
OP is an AI booster, check their profile.
This is an attempt to disregard the damage that’s done by slop generators, comparing it to most inefficient food source.
Hope you have a terrible day, op.
Its post history is all over the place. To me it looks like an AI bot account.
I hate this kind of reasoning.
“Let’s ignore this big problem because there are other bigger problems”
The same people say shit like: “Why are you sad? There are so many people who have it even worse than you!”
All this makes us do nothing until the “smaller” problems become so big that the damage is done and then those people will say “Well, we are in too deep. It it what it is. Can’t change it now 🤡”
There’s a comet colliding with earth? Pff, the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our galaxy, too!!!1
To be clear: I am a vegan and think it’s a great choice to make for both the environment and moral reasons if you have the ability to do it. I don’t really proselytize about it, but it makes me very happy when people choose to go vegan. I absolutely do think the huge environmental impacts of animal agriculture, especially industrialized cow consumption, are things that should concern people and see real pushback on a major scale.
But this feels like a really cherry-picked ‘whataboutism’ graph and that raises my hackles. In the first place, this focuses on one very specific metric (water consumption) without considering the major other negative impacts of data centers like electricity rates, infrasound noise pollution of surrounding communities, and so on. Other people have also pointed out that this ignores things like the amount of water used in chip manufacturing. Recycling water for data center cooling makes data centers use less water, but, in a cruel twist, also concentrates pollutants already found in the groundwater, which means that the water that does get returned to the environment now has a higher concentration of pollutants.(And yes, in some cosmic irony, agriculture including animal agriculture was involved in releasing those pollutants in the first place). Meta had an incident where data center construction released bacteria-contaminated water into the environment.
And yes, of course, animal agriculture and in particular cow consumption have so many more negative environmental impacts than just water usage, too. I am vegan. I actively condemn this shit. But in general, I have seen this argument used in a lot of “whataboutism” whose primary point appears to be, “this new unnecessary thing we’re pushing may cause a lot of bad things, but if you look at these cherry-picked metrics, it’s not as bad as this other thing that you already consume, so you might as well let us do whatever we want, too.” “You are in blood stepped in so far that, should you wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er, so build those data centers” is not a good argument.
I have you tagged as “researches before blindly commenting”, thank you for staying true to that and the information.
I think the anti-AI protest should not focus so much on one issue, the water consumption was something that often filled my feed. This comparison to beef is kinda weird and ill-intended, as it takes the worst part (the biggest number) of one and compares it to datacenters saying “see, it does not matter, there are worse things”. In my opinion the discussion should be more about “do we even want datacenters including all the risks and problems coming with them”. And as you nicely put, there are more disadvantages with that and we should be careful.
I have you tagged as “researches before blindly commenting”, thank you for staying true to that and the information.
I am extremely flattered by this; thank you so much. You’ve made my day here.
Both of you made my day with this interaction. Beautiful stuff.
It also doesn’t mention the amount of methane that cows produce either, which is insanely disproportionate and is destroying our climate. I’ll continue using AI all I want as long as those who complain about AI continue eating beef, while I myself do not eat beef, because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef. So it pays for itself more than enough.
because the benefit gained from using AI far outweighs the benefit of eating beef
Are these benefits in the room with us right now?
Benefit gained from using LLMbeciles? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! wheeze
the benefit gained from using AI
They always tell on themselves.
Here’s an idea: no beef and no chatbots
This is one insane take. If you recognize that both are bad, why do choose between one or the other?
Hello concern troll!
Do the boots really taste so good as to completely lose any sense of self preservation in a vain attempt to proselytize sane and cognizant people?
Per what?
This looks to be the total number of each category. If so, it’s a useless graph. How many L/day are used per single unit. Maybe per farm/datacenter.Edit.
I did the math
3,562 Cattle farms
21,617,069 L/day/ranch5,400 data centers
416,667 L/day/data center45 AI data centers
600,000 L/day/AI data centerThis does not take into consideration the heat produced nor fossil fuels consumed by each.
If water is your only metric, cattle ranches are worse. But this isn’t a good metric for many reasons, since livestock, being food, is a commodity, while data centers are not.
Let’s normalize to technology, ans ignore beef for a moment.
AI data centers consume about 33% more water than non-AI centers.
There is not a situation where this is fine.The other part I don’t see talked about is that evaporative cooling produces water vapour, and water vapour increases greenhouse effects. Normally we don’t worry about water vapour emissions because it tends to fall out as rain or snow a couple of weeks later, but this is continuous usage. Continuous plumes of 600 tonnes of water vapour per AI data centre per day.
I think that’s more of a localized pressure, like how corn sweat makes the Midwest super humid.
Yes beef is probably the least efficient massively consumed food.
Yes, people got mad at me for pointing out the land use for data centers is also minuscule compared to any suburban development.
That doesn’t make it any less of a concern, but one of the major issues of data centers is that they are bypassing costs by unloading them onto average citizens. They don’t want to pay taxes and higher costs for energy and water so they offload electric costs onto everyone else and then abuse the water supply to avoid making a closed loop system.
I keep quoting the exact stat wrong, but most of the world’s freshwater goes into agriculture and farming.
Yes, water consumption is a shit reason to argue against data centers. Power consumption is the real big issue
It’s still a valid reason considering how many US counties are struggling with droughts.
But following that argument wouldn’t you want to shut down the big water consumers? There are many things using more water than AI data centres.
Not sure how to correctly link comments across instances on lemmy, but I went way too deep into this in another comment here https://slrpnk.net/comment/23703343
Tl;dr for this specific case: (animal) agriculture is the main reason the aquifers in USA are drying out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Accelerated_decline_in_aquifer_storage
It’s not even power consumption but the sudden change in power consumption, faster than infrastructure can respond. And more importantly it’s datacenters just bypassing rules for everyone else, such as by running on generators
There was a video that put it in interesting perspective …… ai datacenters are only increasing our power usage by like 1%/year and we used to grow energy consumption by multiples of that. It’s not a big deal …… except that now our infrastructure planning and investment is geared toward zero growth.
In recent years our energy consumption has been flat, so that’s what the industry can support
1 pound of beef equals 650,000 prompts in terms of emissions. Livestock is about 150x more emissions than AI.
Power consumption has issues other than emissions, the increased demand is driving up utility prices and reopening coal plants.
Yep livestock and beef specifically is insanely bad for the environment. People who don’t want to go vegetarian/vegan can still make a meaningful difference by cutting out beef.
So, from a real source and not some reddit or linked in post: https://bryantresearch.co.uk/insight-items/comparing-water-footprint-ai/
Yes, this is true. But, those numbers do not include:
- water required for Chip/GPU production
- the fact that datacenters are often build in areas with already little water
Scrolled through the article, found this:
Impact on the economy: AI and tech creates well paying, future-proof jobs, and AI tools unlock new levels of productivity for the entire economy. On the other hand, jobs in animal agriculture are declining over time, and many are low paid and back-breaking.
So they’re paid off by big tech to push whataboutism about AI data center water use.
EDIT: They’re literally citing themselves about the water usage claims!🤣
You mean their graph? That is common to mark your Images that can be reused.
And now. They are not paid by fucking Tech. And you can also watch Hanks video on this, or, do the math yourself
It’s at least 10x than what OP claims
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/ai-data-centers-water-consumption-140002428.html
AI data centers are currently consuming 550 million gallons of water per day
I don’t see a date at OPs data. But still the basic assumption holds.
550m gallons is 2B liters/day?
Roughly, yes.
Water is a distraction. The heat and fossil fueled power consumption is the real problem. They will burn us all alive and we have to sit back and let it happen because the fascists are in power, I guess.
The cattle industry is a HUGE HUGE HUGE problem, yes it’s true and it’s a global problem. It uses a ton of water, land and resources, makes a ton of methane that contributes to greenhouse gases. THAT SAID, everyone is talking about the water usage of data centers but no one is talking about the way they generate electricity, disposable fuels, they use fossil fuels to power generators to create the huge amounts of electricity they use. They are hugely polluting due to this, their water usage is problematic and it’s the only problem we are talking about because the media has yet again dropped the ball at the behest of the billionaire class. Data centers water usage is problematic but a tiny drop in the bucket compared to their emissions. They have other serious problems too like sound pollution and wastewater runoff that is a direct result of running generators.
The water usage of data centers is “reasonable” (I personally disagree but this chart illustrates the trap) compared to other industries, literally everything else about data centers is wildly unreasonable and the media is essentially silent about it.
I can’t eat data
Then why do they call them chips?
Yeah, its ok to have just one byte…
It’s because gallium arsenide is tasty. Yummy!
I don’t use cows for data storage.
I would not recommend using an AI data center for storage either.
Cool, who gives a shit? That seems besides the point. Are you using that to continue justifying eating beef which is consuming way more water than AI?
Yes
I’ll have what he’s having
The point is that the beef industry, while consuming that water, provides a good that is useful. AI data centres do not. The logic that “this thing uses a lot of water so adding anything else that does” is kinda sus, to put it mildly.
That being said, pork belly slays any cut of beef. Beef is grossly overrated.
yes, beef is comically inefiecient (most meat production is too, but beef takes the crown for ineffiency), and data centers have a big incetive to have closed loops water cooling systems, although specially wih loops this big there will always be some significant ammount of lost water
Yes. Water consumption has and always will be a dumb ass argument against data centers. There are PLENTY of good reasons, especially power consumption, that it baffles me that the movement hangs on this one.
Interesting I’m of the we have figured the power consumption (technically the issue is now political) issue but the water consumption is a problem. Wanna compare notes? (The noise is a massive huger problem)
I’m not entirely sure, but it seems to me that you claim that the energy consumption issue of datacenters has been solved.
In what way has it been solved? The only way to solve it is after all by not having AI datacenters consume energy at all, being superflous things and all since: 1. we can easily live without AI datacenters. 2. we desperately need to cut back on energy consumption in every way possible on account of climate change.
Those factors seem at odds with your (possible) claim that the energy consumption of those centers has been solved.
We have figured how to create renewable energy, it’s just the politics of today that don’t let its use.
I don’t agree with your only way to solve it.
Why do you think renewable energy can’t meet these demands?
If you really wanna compare notes, feel free to add some here https://slrpnk.net/comment/23703343. I’m on @[email protected]s side
