This comparison sounds to me like it is downplaying the significance of the numbers. California's almond-growing is another gross environmental crime, which is regularly controversial in California.
Since California produces about 80% of the world's almonds, it also means that the global water footprint for almonds is about the same as the global water footprint for AI.
More directly, a global analysis does not mean the AI data centers are evenly distributed around the world. From the article:
"A Bloomberg analysis suggests about two-thirds of data centers built or planned since 2022 are water-stressed regions, concentrated in Australia, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Saudi-Arabia, and the US Southwest (Nicoletti et al., 2025). Within the United States, Texas hosts over 400 data centers projected to consume nearly 3% of statewide water supply by 2030 (Martinez, 2025), in a state grappling with recurring drought conditions and aquifer depletion."
"Corporate sustainability reports confirm this concentration: approximately 42% of Microsoft's water consumption occurs in water-stress regions, and 15% of Google's water use is concentrated in high water-scarcity areas (Barratt et al., 2025)."
Comparing water-stressed regions in California for almond production to water-stressed regions used for data centers does seem relevant.
This is not even an argument. 100 years? So you're admitting that almonds in California are clearly a sustainable industry that can exist in the long term.
Life without batternberg cake is something too horrible to contemplate. Unlike AI, the squares are beautifully and reliably deterministic in their placement and the marzipan surrounding it is truly enhancing to society.
I agree with your link that the unsustainable use of water for almond farms causes problems, and agree that these problems are quite similar to that of water use for AI, so both should have high scrutiny. Quoting your link:
> Almonds use roughly the same amount of water as total indoor water use in California. This is unsustainable.
> There are simply too many almonds being planted in areas with unsustainable water supplies (minimal to no groundwater, uncertain or no surface water). ...
> We’re not opposed to growing almonds; we’re opposed to growing them unsustainably and taking water away from the environment and our cities. Almonds are a luxury and export crop; approximately 70% of the state’s crop is shipped abroad for the express benefit of a handful of industrial-scale growers and hedge funds.
> Water is a public trust resource, and Californians must regain control of it as they face a future certain to be beleaguered by drought, low reservoirs and over-drafted aquifers. We can't continue to subsidize agribusiness plutocrats with the water ratepayers need for basic survival.
Water for AI also uses unsustainable water supplies, directs water away from the environment and our cities, and is subsidized for big tech plutocrats paid for by water ratepayers. It also sure seems to me that most AI use falls in the "luxury" category.
Why is that? Vinyl has some unique characteristics. But as far as I’m aware, blu-ray is just a storage format for bits, so other than the box art, what is compelling about a blu-ray pressing?
Like DVD before it, Blu-ray includes region locking as a feature (but apparently ~70% of disks don't bother with it, notably Paramount and Universal don't). Non-locked disks are marked as ABC (A is the Americas and Asia, B is Europe/Africa/Aus/NZ, C is Russia/India/China).
Ever compare a Blu-ray to the same content over streaming? It's not even close. Unlike vinyl records, Blu-ray is vastly superior in quality to alternatives.
In case you're asking "why", it's because your "4K" stream is compressed to hell and back. Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.
But also the reality is that most people have their devices connected through a shitty wi-fi connection and may be effectively limited to 50 or even less mbps, specially if you consider the unpredictability that comes with it.
True. Plus the big streaming services' business model now is low quality content produced in house or with cheap royalties, that people put on in the background. They might have a prestige show or two, but that's just a hook to get you to subscribe, they'd much prefer you watch the cheap stuff.
> Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.
This has not been true for most people for a while now. Even the high end of 4K blue rays tops out around 100 Mbps, which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection.
> which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection
It's only achievable in a real sense if there are video providers out there offering the content at that bitrate. The absolute best you can hope for in optimal conditions is from Apple TV+ at between 30-40 Mbps which is equivalent to what you get with a non-4k blu-ray.
Yeah, you’re right. Despite Grandpa over here having a 1Gb fiber connection, my head was apparently stuck in 2005 thinking 50 Mbps downstream internet is some kind of high-faluten’ wizardry.
Many of vinyl's unique characteristics are severe drawbacks compared to digital disks. I see a lot of kids collecting CDs instead—cheaper, lighter, easier to maintain, you can find cars that play them pretty easily, you can rip them losslessly, more hardware to play them, etc. Plus you can a lot of the same benefits of album art, lyrics, etc.
Blu-Rays also have special features, which most streaming platforms don't offer (I think largely except for iTunes).
Having it, physically. It’s harder for companies to play silly games like put the media into a vault, take it off their streaming platforms for tax reasons, etc… I started collected physical blu rays when HBO randomly took a million things off its platform so that it could do accounting tricks.
I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.
Following your lead, I haven’t researched Örebro’s proposed policies. But I would find it surprising if “large scale remigration” really was scoped to an everyman’s definition of “few years”. I would expect that their targets for “large scale” exceed three or four years’ worth of immigration.
Even if you scope it out to "everyone that's not a citizen or has the equivalent of a green card," is that so evil? If a country accepts immigrants they should be able to send them back at will unless they become citizens. That shouldn't be controversial. You can argue if it's a good or bad policy, of course, but it's not ethically wrong to do so. Yes, they'll be in more danger and have worse lives when they go back to wherever they came from, but again - a country should exist to serve its citizens, not the entire world. It's not sustainable.
Re-migration almost always targets children _born_ in the country.
In this thread a speaker of the party is quoted as talking about people who had Swedish passports i.e. citizens.
Would you not see it as ethically bad to split the citizens into "true" citizens who can't have their citizenship stripped and second tier citizens who can?
> Would you not see it as ethically bad to split the citizens into "true" citizens who can't have their citizenship stripped and second tier citizens who can?
Potentially. I'm not familiar enough with their system to have an opinion. In the US system, I feel like actual citizenship is the hard line. With everything else you're here at our convenience, though I'd say if we were to kick out greencard holders en masse (for some reason) it should just be that they don't get renewed, not immediately kicked out.
Yes, it is very much accepted and pretty uncontroversial that it is unethical to send someone away who’s made a new home in some country. Tearing them out of the local community and kicking them out against their will is immoral.
Snapchat has to be the all time worst offender to me about abusive level of notifications. Luckily, you can turn them off, but holy cow batman, that's a lot of notification options to deal with.
For me the worst is NextDoor. I don’t have the app installed, but they also have email notifications. There are seemingly 100 options and I turned them all off when I first made the account. Periodically they add new ones and auto-enable them for everyone. There is not universal way to shut them off, short of blocking them all together or deleting my account. The account was such a pain to setup that I’m hesitant to delete it, for the 1 time every couple years where it’s useful.
Even worse with ND e-mails are how they've absolutely perfected the cut-off character limit for what's being posted in your area. So my inbox is just perma-barraged with click-bait-y "This place on Smith Street has the best...", "Health officials are investigating an outbreak of...", etc.
Yes. I’d rather live with the temporary inconvenience of needing to open the Uber app to check the status of my ride once a month than wade through notification spam on an intermittent basis forever.
I just refuse to grant permission as my default. If I ever feel like I’m missing out, I can turn it on later. Usually I don’t and if I do I quickly regret it.
Has been like this on my phone for a while. It's crazy when you see someone who hasn't blocked everything and their phone dings multiple times a minute.
What sorts of processing times are you seeing for I-130 green card applications? I filed for my wife in late July, and we've still not received anything but a receipt notice.
Apps (such as Signal) that care about end-to-end encryption do their own key management. So, Apple / Google servers only ever see ciphertext, and don't have access to the key material that's used for the encryption.
Afaik, e2e messengers don't include ciphertext with push notifications. It's an empty push to wake the client. Then the client contacts the origin to fetch the ciphertext.
A Signal developer 12 days ago said Our FCM and APN notifications are empty and just tell the app to wake up, fetch encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then generate the notification ourselves locally.[1]
It’s ironic seeing Gruber gripe about screen percentages used when his own website dedicates only about 50% of the screen width (on mobile) to content, and leaves the other half blank. Not to mention the light-grey-on-dark-grey and the tiny font.
Just as I need an ad blocker to browse the modern web, I need Reader mode to read Gruber’s rant about it.
Of course, the relevant thing for us as a species is whether or not the forecast temperatures are sustainable for us.
The planet as a whole will do just fine. We're not going to break the planet. The reason that people bring up the huge anthropogenic spike in temperature is because us anthropoids evolved in the context of a narrow band, and it would seem as though we're moving the global climate out of that band.
We aren't hunter gather's, mammals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and
Modern Humans can just use air conditioning tech, most people in india already have a tanki, people will just dig as far as they need to keep their water cool like they already do. Irronically the people most affected are the affluent in places like dubia, if the grid fails and they don't have backups.
This is about as much as the annual consumption of the California almond farms.
(An acre-foot is approximately 1200 cubic meters.)
https://www.c-win.org/cwin-water-blog/2022/7/11/california-a...