I can't find the citation for it, but in at least one case, part of the reported allocation of water for datacenters was due to the water consumed during construction. I would consider this kind of consumption legit if called out as a temporary usage of water, but FUD if just assumed as part of the overall calculation of ongoing water demand.

As for creating/destroying water:

https://www.fwpcoa.org/content...

"Air cooling (water-free): Many smaller or older data centers rely on air conditioning and chilled air circulation to remove heat. These use mechanical chillers or heat exchangers and do not consume water for cooling (aside from minimal water for humidification). Air cooling is common in cooler climates or where water is scarce, but it can require more electricity to run compressors or fans.
Evaporative cooling (open-loop): A majority of large, modern data centers use water-based cooling for better energy efficiency. This often involves cooling towers or evaporative chillers: warm water absorbs heat from servers and is then cooled by evaporation in a tower. As water evaporates into the air, it carries away heat â" dramatically cutting the electrical power needed for cooling. The trade-off is high water consumption. Most big data centers today use some form of evaporative cooling because itâ(TM)s energy-efficient, especially in hot climates, but it directly uses water (often drawn from municipal supply).
Closed-loop water cooling: In closed-loop systems, water circulates in sealed pipes or coils that cool the servers without directly exposing water to air. Because the water isnâ(TM)t evaporated to the environment, losses are minimal â" itâ(TM)s mostly the same water recirculating (with some makeup water added occasionally). These systems can include water-cooled heat exchangers or liquid-to-liquid cooling loops. Closed-loop cooling can reduce freshwater use by up to 70% compared to traditional open evaporative methods. The downside is higher cost and complexity, but they are far more water-efficient since water isnâ(TM)t âoeburned offâ into the air."

"However, a growing number of data centers are now shifting to recycled water. Tech giants have begun partnering with utilities to use treated wastewater (effluent) for cooling instead of fresh drinking water. For instance, Google uses reclaimed or non-potable water at over 25% of its data center campuses (one notable example is its Douglas County, Georgia data center, which runs on recycled municipal wastewater). Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced in 2023 that 20 of its data centers are cooling with purified wastewater instead of potable water. After cycling through the cooling system, this water is sent back to the treatment plant to be cleaned and reused again. These initiatives leave more drinking-quality water for the community and exemplify the industryâ(TM)s trend toward âoestrategic water sourcing.â Still, as of today, reclaimed water use is the exception. Most data centers worldwide are still using fresh water for cooling, although this is slowly changing with new projects and local regulations."

So evaporative cooling "destroys" water. And using treated wastewater (pure enough to use for datacenter usage and probably irrigation, but still too ick for some people to drink directly - aka toilet to tap), if part of their investments were to purify even more water than the municipality was already processing, combined with closed loop usage could be considered "creating" water.

Your guess is as good as mine though, it all sounds like marketing hype in an attempt to combat FUD.

Which is why it gets ridiculous. You can build an oven with a few conveniently shaped rocks. You can build an over with raw river clay, then use that oven to make better bricks, then use those bricks to make a better oven, which you can use to make even better bricks.

So, all it takes to turn somebody into a greedy capitalist exploiter is...the ability to stack rocks into a box with an opening.

https://jeffollerton.co.uk/201...

If it does, it will just be replaced by other mosquitos in turn when it disappears. Other mosquitos that don't give humans terrible diseases.

Nonsense. Some of our earliest examples of recorded writing are taxes being collected in the form of grain, sheep, and other goods.

Yep. I've been using that name for it going as far back as when it ignored MIME extensions/headers and attempted to actually decode the attachment(s), thus causing it to forward an email virus or worm simply by opening the main email.

You buy some flour for a dollar. You use that flour to bake bread. You sell that bread for two dollars.

Why the price increase? Because you've improved the capital.

Without money, you can't really have a society bigger than 'small village.' Money is 'a placeholder for value.' It lets the breadmaker acquire a breadmaking tool from the blacksmith who needs no bread, and lets the blacksmith then acquire cloth from a weaver who needs no iron.

Rural ISPs often wire up farms as a core part of their business. I remember when Cambium released a firmware that allowed for the Canopy series of fixed wireless broadband gear that allowed for a CPE to slowly physically move, doing all of the re-ranging and what not to allow it to be, to a very small extent, mobile. Why? So that an SM could be mounted to a tractor.

It's also where you learn that corn silk really fucks up with 5 ghz RF.

y on devices equipped with just 16GB of VRAM,

Ah yes, 'just' 16GB of VRAM. Ah, the days of my youth, when I thought upgrading my ATI Mach 64 from 2mb to 4mb of VRAM was unjustifiable, and the guys at the computer store looked at me funny for wanting a whopping 32mb of RAM for my Pentium 66 rig.

Fucking dihydrogen monoxide. Terrifying stuff. Did you know that it can cause terrible burns and skin damage in liquid, solid *and* gaseous form?

I mean, First Nations people aren't native to The Americas, either, they wandered over a land bridge about 15,000 years ago.

Aedes aegypti is an invasive species to North America, only been here for a few hundred years, so I doubt that the food chain has grown radically dependent on them.

I already turn off Apple Intelligence, and don't use Siri. So I'll just disable all of this.

Now if I could only get rid of that "Build your ideas with Gemini" banner at the top of the Slashdot page...