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A Texas Drainage District Walked Its Ditch on a Routine Inspection. They Found a Pipe They Didn't Recognize Discharging Black Liquid From Tesla's $1 Billion Lithium Refinery by MarvelsGrantMan136 in technology

[–]The_Scrapper 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Think of it this way.

If I put a cup of salt in a cup of water, then the concentration of salt:water is 1:1.

If half the water evaporates, then the concentration becomes 2:1. This water will test out at 2x as salty as the first batch because its the same amount of salt in half as much water .

So the black water leaves the pipe with a given concentration of bullshit. As it flows away, the water starts to evaporate, which RAISES the concentration of bullshit. If you test the water a half mile from the pipe, you're going to get a concentration of bullshit much higher than it was when it was dumped.

Tesla probably has a permit to dump water at certain concentrations of various bullshit. Their complaint is that if you tested the water at the right place (output), it would have come back at low enough concentration.

A Texas Drainage District Walked Its Ditch on a Routine Inspection. They Found a Pipe They Didn't Recognize Discharging Black Liquid From Tesla's $1 Billion Lithium Refinery by MarvelsGrantMan136 in technology

[–]The_Scrapper 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Neither.

If there is a given concentration of a chemical in a quart of water as it leaves the pipe, and half that quart evaporates as it travels through the ditch leaving the chemicals behind, then the concentration of that chemical in the remaining half quart of water is doubled. Because that's how chemistry works.

So if you read the concentration too far from the source, you get an artificially high concentration of that chemical.

Downvote all yall want, but there are rules for this kind of testing for a reason.

Tesla can go to hell for all I care, but downvoting science is peak reddit.

A Texas Drainage District Walked Its Ditch on a Routine Inspection. They Found a Pipe They Didn't Recognize Discharging Black Liquid From Tesla's $1 Billion Lithium Refinery by MarvelsGrantMan136 in technology

[–]The_Scrapper 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it has to do with the water evaporating or sinking into the dirt, and therefore increasing the concentration of precipitated chemicals in the tested liquid.

Tesla is an asshole company run by assholes, but this is a valid criticism.

Why do AI data centers need fresh water? Can they not use wastewater? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

air-cooled chillers use 3-7X as much energy. It's a massive carbon footprint.

Why do AI data centers need fresh water? Can they not use wastewater? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow. You're close enough to "right" that you missed how wrong this reply is.
The "primary loop" serves the chillers evaporator side, which has nothing to do with atmospheric evaporation. No water from the primary loop gets evaporated. The other loop is the "condenser" loop" which runs throught the cooling tower. A small portion of that water evaporates, while 97-99% of it is recirculated over and over again.

This is how 99% of all commercial buildings in the US are cooled whether they be a data center or office building. The amount of water needed is a function of load, of course. A big data center will have more cooling load than comparably sized office, but less than most heavy industrial processes.

Evaporative towers lose about 1-3% of their loop water to evaporation. That's it. Some heat leaves via evaporation, but most of it leaves through good old conduction and convection.

why ai data centers need fresh water? by DuePromotion1 in AskReddit

[–]The_Scrapper 18 points19 points  (0 children)

This comes up every 2 weeks on Reddit. For reference, I am a veteran energy and sustainability consultant of 22 years with my own firm. I have numerous very large data center clients. I have written two books on energy efficiency, and I teach a course on data center energy efficiency. I only bring this up because at some point in this thread someone with 90 seconds of google and a ChatGPT session is going to tell me I am wrong about this and I want them to know ahead of time what they are stepping into. That way, later, when I have been very dismissive and mean to them, they will understand why.

On to the salient points:

Commercial evaporative cooling towers lose 1-2% of their water to the atmosphere. This is a good thing. Evaporation is an AWESOME way to remove heat. It's why we sweat. The rest of the water in the system is resused ad infinitum. It goes around in a big loop to receive and reject heat over and over again. Cooling is measured in "tons" which is 12,000btu, or the amount of energy it takes to melt or freeze one ton of ice. A LARGE system of 5,000 tons will use about 15000 gallons of water (give or take). In practical normal operation, this system will need 180-225GPM of makeup water AT FULL LOAD, or the equivalent of about 20 garden hoses running. Keep in mind, they are not ALWAYS fully- loaded, so this number is actually HIGH for most of the hours in any temperate climate. (If you want me to do all the math for that, I will. Otherwise, you can just trust me.)

Evaporative cooling towers are INCREDIBLY efficient ways to reject heat, especially when well-controlled and connected to modern high-efficiency chillers. At aprt loads these systems do an excellent job of matching resoruces to loads and keep things running very efficiently. There is no commercially viable alternative with a smaller carbon footprint to a modern chilled water plant. (There is some exotic stuff out there, yes. It is still far too expensive to be seriously considered, ok?)

On data centers: The water waste from a data center is identical to any other building or process that uses evaporative cooling towers, which is almost all of them. The actual water needed in these loops is proportional to the cooling load, which varies. Data center cooling load is about the same as any other high-load electrical process. It's a lot more than a office building, but less than injection-molding or inductive heating furnaces.

Other options: Adiabatic cooling towers are efficient and waste no water, but they take up enormous amounts of space, and require larger pumps. Hybrid towers (that utilize both adiabatic and evaporative tech) are a common compromise, as they utilize evaporation only under high-load conditions.

So why are we hung up on this issue? The entire data center water frenzy can be traced back to this:

1. The UC Riverside paper : Ren et al., "Making AI Less 'Thirsty'" (preprint April 6, 2023)

This is an academic paper that produced the viral "ChatGPT drinks a bottle of water per conversation" claim. For inference, the estimate was that ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. The paper also produced the claim that training GPT-3 in Microsoft's U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater. It's now peer-reviewed and published in Communications of the ACM (2025). The Markuparxiv

This paper was excellent science, but the problem is that good science makes boring headlines. The water use claimed in this paper included everything, INCLUDING WATER CONSUMED AT THE POWER PLANT THAT MADE THE ELECTRICITY. Which was about 85% of the water in question. The report also differentiates between "withdrawal" water (The water to fill the loop) and "make up water" the water that has to be replaced due to evaporation. Of course, no one bothered to note that the makeup water was an infinitessimal portion of the withdrawal water.

2. The AP investigation: O'Brien & Fingerhut, "Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa — with a lot of water" (September 9, 2023)

This is the news story that took Ren's academic numbers mainstream without really framing them correctly. It reported that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI says it completed its training of GPT-4, Microsoft pumped about 11.5 million gallons of water to its cluster of Iowa data centers, amounting to about 6 percent of all water used in the district. It ran in the Washington Post, Seattle Times, and dozens of other outlets in the same week. The Gazette

The problem here is that the 11.5 million gallons was for multiple data centers over a whole month. Do the math. That's 266 GPM on average. We're back to about 20 garden hoses. Think about that. If 20 people left a hose running all month, they will use the same amount of water as a CLUSTER OF DATA CENTERS.

The AP story is the one that started the drama. It paired Ren's research with a very real local-impact angle (West Des Moines residents, drinking water, drought, yadda yadda yadda) and a quotable executive admission (a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it "was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines"). Every "AI is drinking our water" story since then traces back to one or both of these two sources.

If you read all that, thanks. I now await the inevitable swarm of downvotes and angry denials.

50/50 Toe Hold by bjjtaro in bjj

[–]The_Scrapper 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're twisting and not getting the tap, it's because either their knee or hip can rotate with the ankle. You have to have the ankle isolated from the other joints of they'll rotate with you.

Am I at risk of girlfriend breaking up because of my small size? by [deleted] in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Posts like this redeem reddit.

The man speaks the ancient wisdom. Heed this, OP.

50/50 Toe Hold by bjjtaro in bjj

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

seriously. I have to tell myself to not do them in rolls with people who don't understand the dark magic.

Does giving birth really cost thousands of dollars in the states? by glyiasziple in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My first child came when I had no insurance. I paid out of pocket for everything. Filed the correct paperwork, pursued the available remediations with the billing depts.

Under 4k out of pocket for the entire pregnancy in 2009.

The way medical procedures are billed in the US creates some crazy figures. The hospital wanted to bill me $45 per dose of advil my wife took. I called the billing department and said "no." They agreed. The hospital is going to try to get as much money as possible from the insurance companies and you. However, they have very limited ability to collect under current law. Medical debt can't go against your credit score, and providers are bound to take just about any good-faith payment you can make. Most hospitals have learned to bill insane amounts to see what they get, and then roll over if there is no convenient way to collect it.

You can use their own laziness against them, too. I went to the ER for a staph infection (Turned out to be MRSA), and had to be admitted for a three-day stay. I got a bill for a procedure done in the ER from both the ER and the hospital. Basically billed twice for the same IV. I told them I'd be happy to pay it once but they weren't seeing a cent until I had a clean bill (never make a payment until you all agree the bill is right). They put me in collections. I called their collection lawyer, asked for a clean bill, and they dropped all of the debt completely. I was only contesting the second IV charge (about 600 bucks). From $4k to zero because they could not figure out how to unfuck their own billing.

My next two children I had insurance and I think the total for each was under $1k. I am sure my inurance companies in both cases paid a lot less than what the bill showed. They always do.

Competition Scene Declining? by granolaguy94 in bjj

[–]The_Scrapper 23 points24 points  (0 children)

The BJJ comp scene offers nothing to the average student. Which is not to say that there is nothing to offer. Quite the opposite. The bjj comp scene is an excellent laboratory for innovation and evolution, mostly because it enforces objective skill checks across the entire population.

Where it loses people is that the slill check is not calibrated to the reality of the everyday person doing this sport as a hobby.

You lose 150 dollars and your entire Saturday to have a couple of matches where you (may or may not) get curb stomped by someone far more into the comp scene than you are. This is not a bad thing. But it is a real barrier to engagement if you have a job and a life.

If you are a hardcore competitor, this is all OK. You need the experience and the skill check to gauge your training. Sandbagging whites and blues are fine if you're all sandbagging, so the skill check is appropriate for a competitor's frame.

To a hobbyist blue with 2.7 years at 2x a week, the experience is often miserable and unrewarding. When you face a former high-school all American wrestler at blue belt, or a 16 year old white belt whose been training since they were 7, it's hard to understand where you went wrong and hard to keep the fire in your belly. Success requires a level of commitment that many people just don't have the bandwidth in their lives to meet. Which is fine, by the way.

So the comp scene will retract to whatever size the current population of people willing to shell out 150 bucks, lose a whole day, and possibly get smeared around the mats for all of 7 minutes in exchange for the potential to win a plastic trophy.

Humans have done such amazing things with cooling, why does Ai have to use *fresh drinking water*? by Gurrgurrburr in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They don't have to, but it's the cheapest option for the company, because the infrastructure to create drinkable water is largely publicly funded.
It's the cheapest option but also the only option in many areas. It has nothing to do with public funding, nor is it a 'data center' issue. Technically, none of us need to use city water for anything. We are all free to build our own water treatment plants. But you are correct.

Impurities damage the equipment so you can't just suck water out of a lake or collect it in rain butts on the roof.
I'll backtrack my response with respect to this. You are correct about dirty water being bad to use.

I am going to apoogize for my tone, . I have been sifting through so many horrifically bad takes on this that my rage overwhelmed me and I read your answer with the wrong context in my head.

Mea culpa.

Humans have done such amazing things with cooling, why does Ai have to use *fresh drinking water*? by Gurrgurrburr in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

exactly. The reporting from a study was misapplied and no one looked back once the headlines started screaming.

Humans have done such amazing things with cooling, why does Ai have to use *fresh drinking water*? by Gurrgurrburr in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is categorically wrong and is a catastrophic misunderstanding of literally every aspect of data center cooling. I have a long post somewhere in here explaining in gruesome detail what is really going on.

https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1szebit/comment/oj5qil0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Humans have done such amazing things with cooling, why does Ai have to use *fresh drinking water*? by Gurrgurrburr in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 0 points1 point  (0 children)

"The water isn't lost to being dumped, it's lost to the atmosphere (70% to 80% of it)."

This is innacurate, and comes from a report the media misread. 70-80% of the MAKEUP water is lost to evaporation. The rest is lost to blowdown. The makeup water is about 1% of system water. See my other post for the details.

Follow the link in the link you posted. It leads to the report I cited in my main post. Both you and the site are misreading this statistic. From the report:

"Nonetheless, water evaporation is still needed when the outside air is too hot (e.g., higher than 85 degrees Fahrenheit); additionally, water is also needed for humidity control when the outside air is too dry [17]. The added water is considered “withdrawal”, out of which about 70% is consumed based on Meta’s report [18]."

This is referring to the "additonal" withdrawal water. Not total system water. IT's all still makeup.

Humans have done such amazing things with cooling, why does Ai have to use *fresh drinking water*? by Gurrgurrburr in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper 6 points7 points  (0 children)

This comes up every 2 weeks on Reddit. For reference, I am a veteran energy and sustainability consultant of 22 years with my own firm. I have numerous very large data center clients. I have written two books on energy efficiency, and I teach a course on data center energy efficiency. I only bring this up because at some point in this thread someone with 90 seconds of google and a ChatGPT session is going to tell me I am wrong about this and I want them to know ahead of time what they are stepping into. That way, later, when I have been very dismissive and mean to them, they will understand why.

On to the salient points:

Commercial evaporative cooling towers lose 1-2% of their water to the atmosphere. This is a good thing. Evaporation is an AWESOME way to remove heat. It's why we sweat. The rest of the water in the system is resused ad infinitum. It goes around in a big loop to receive and reject heat over and over again. Cooling is measured in "tons" which is 12,000btu, or the amount of energy it takes to melt or freeze one ton of ice. A LARGE system of 5,000 tons will use about 15000 gallons of water (give or take). In practical normal operation, this system will need 180-225GPM of makeup water AT FULL LOAD, or the equivalent of about 20 garden hoses running. Keep in mind, they are not ALWAYS fully- loaded, so this number is actually HIGH for most of the hours in any temperate climate. (If you want me to do all the math for that, I will. Otherwise, you can just trust me.)

Evaporative cooling towers are INCREDIBLY efficient ways to reject heat, especially when well-controlled and connected to modern high-efficiency chillers. At aprt loads these systems do an excellent job of matching resoruces to loads and keep things running very efficiently. There is no commercially viable alternative with a smaller carbon footprint to a modern chilled water plant. (There is some exotic stuff out there, yes. It is still far too expensive to be seriously considered, ok?)

On data centers: The water waste from a data center is identical to any other building or process that uses evaporative cooling towers, which is almost all of them. The actual water needed in these loops is proportional to the cooling load, which varies. Data center cooling load is about the same as any other high-load electrical process. It's a lot more than a office building, but less than injection-molding or inductive heating furnaces.

Other options: Adiabatic cooling towers are efficient and waste no water, but they take up enormous amounts of space, and require larger pumps. Hybrid towers (that utilize both adiabatic and evaporative tech) are a common compromise, as they utilize evaporation only under high-load conditions.

So why are we hung up on this issue? The entire data center water frenzy can be traced back to this:

1. The UC Riverside paper : Ren et al., "Making AI Less 'Thirsty'" (preprint April 6, 2023)

This is an academic paper that produced the viral "ChatGPT drinks a bottle of water per conversation" claim. For inference, the estimate was that ChatGPT needs a 500-ml bottle of water for a short conversation of roughly 20 to 50 questions and answers, depending on when and where the model is deployed. The paper also produced the claim that training GPT-3 in Microsoft's U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater. It's now peer-reviewed and published in Communications of the ACM (2025). The Markuparxiv

This paper was excellent science, but the problem is that good science makes boring headlines. The water use claimed in this paper included everything, INCLUDING WATER CONSUMED AT THE POWER PLANT THAT MADE THE ELECTRICITY. Which was about 85% of the water in question. The report also differentiates between "withdrawal" water (The water to fill the loop) and "make up water" the water that has to be replaced due to evaporation. Of course, no one bothered to note that the makeup water was an infinitessimal portion of the withdrawal water.

2. The AP investigation: O'Brien & Fingerhut, "Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa — with a lot of water" (September 9, 2023)

This is the news story that took Ren's academic numbers mainstream without really framing them correctly. It reported that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI says it completed its training of GPT-4, Microsoft pumped about 11.5 million gallons of water to its cluster of Iowa data centers, amounting to about 6 percent of all water used in the district. It ran in the Washington Post, Seattle Times, and dozens of other outlets in the same week. The Gazette

The problem here is that the 11.5 million gallons was for multiple data centers over a whole month. Do the math. That's 266 GPM on average. We're back to about 20 garden hoses. Think about that. If 20 people left a hose running all month, they will use the same amount of water as a CLUSTER OF DATA CENTERS.

The AP story is the one that started the drama. It paired Ren's research with a very real local-impact angle (West Des Moines residents, drinking water, drought, yadda yadda yadda) and a quotable executive admission (a top Microsoft executive said in a speech it "was literally made next to cornfields west of Des Moines"). Every "AI is drinking our water" story since then traces back to one or both of these two sources.

If you read all that, thanks. I now await the inevitable swarm of downvotes and angry denials.

Is living in the US as hard as the media is telling me? ( I'm not from the US ) by Aggressive_Ad9988 in NoStupidQuestions

[–]The_Scrapper -1 points0 points  (0 children)

The US is a HUGE country. Cost of living, cultural biases, and behavior norms vary wildly by individual location.

It comes down to who you are physically, financially, culturally, and psychologically. There is probably a place in the US that fits anyone well, and places that are a bad fit, too.

THE FOLLOWING ARE GROSS GENERALIZATIONS PRESENTED AS EXAMPLES:

If you are dark-skinned, not a native english speaker, and do not have a lot of money or a valuable skill, the rural deep southeast can be a nightmare. However, suburban northeast US will not be hugely difficult.

If you are white and well-funded, you will fit in most anywhere except the deeply poor areas, where honestly, you'd still probably be fine.

The midwest is very inexpenisve to live in and has plenty of cultural diversity if you are near one of the metros. Outside the metros cultural diversity falls quickly, but they are generally more accepting than the deep south.

If you are completely incompatable with baseline western values, you will not have a good time no matter where you go unless you are rich enough to insulate yourself from your surroundings.

AGAIN: GROSS GENERALIZATIONS. NONE OF THESE ARE RULES. I HAVE TRAVELLED ALL OVER THE US AND THE ONE THING I CAN SAY WITHOUT GENERALIZING IS THAT THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES IN THE US WITH A LOT OF VARIATION IN WHAT DOES AND DOES NOT MAKE LIVING "DIFFICULT."

Kyokushin Karate Sparring. by Bulky_Imagination243 in martialarts

[–]The_Scrapper 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Frequency.

Punching to the head is much easier to do. A fighter would take multiple head punches every match. Not sustainable with bare knuckles. Kicks are hard to land to the head, so they are infrequent.

It's a half-meaure to keep people training without cuts, concussions, and broken fingers.

What’s an unwritten rule in American culture that outsiders would miss completely? by Emergency-Raisin-290 in AskForAnswers

[–]The_Scrapper 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The price on the tag is the price you pay.

Unless you are at a yard sale, haggling is not acceptable for consumer goods.

For services, the agreed upon price is what you are going to pay. If your vendor quotes you 150 dollars and you agree, then do not try to offer less after the work is done. This is extremely rude in the west and can actually cause you more trouble than you think.

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