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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Meat was sold in wax paper (butcher paper) for years before switching to plastic. Yes, plastic is superior in pretty much every non-environmental aspect, but waxed paper is hardly an impossible leap. Many smaller shops still use it today.

    Beer is sold in both cans and glass bottles, while still remaining cheaper than water in many places. How is beer able to remain cheap in a glass bottle but premade soup stock would not? Yes, glass bottle would increase shipping costs due to volume/weight/breakage, but I think the significance of this is greatly overstated.

    If beer can stay out of a plastic bottle while remaining cheap the other liquids can as well.

    The epoxy used in cans (and inside paper containers) may not be any better for you but it would be a enormous decrease in quantity of plastic compared to pure plastic containers.


  • That may all be true, but the amount of water used by these data centers is miniscule, and it seems odd to focus on it. The article cites Microsoft using 700,000 liters for ChatGPT. In comparison, a single fracking well in the same state might use 350,000,000 liters, and this water is much more contaminated. There are so many other, more substantive, issues with LLMs, why even bring water use up?

    Edit: If evaporative cooling uses less energy it might even be reducing total industrial water use, considering just how much water is used in the energy industry.