The neighbors of a data center in Georgia are steaming after they discovered the facility had sucked up nearly 30 million gallons of water — without initially paying for it.

  • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Personally, I would have just “fixed” the problem by turning it off without notice. Then arrest whoever comes to turn it back on.

  • Drusas@fedia.io
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    16 hours ago

    They should have had their permits revoked and been forced to shut down.

    • Ænima@lemmy.zip
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      12 hours ago

      We can’t get the judicial to arrest literal child fuckers. It’s laughable to believe they’d care about water being stolen by the same people.

  • reddig33@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    By “drained” they mean stole.

    “One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.”

    • kaidenshi@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Exactly. If I modified my water meter to hide my usage, or tapped my neighbor’s pipes, I’d go to jail. This data center needs to be shut down and the owners investigated and charged with felonies.

      • plateee@piefed.social
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        19 hours ago

        Yeah, but you see you’re not cooling millions of dollars of GPUs so someone can make AI generated tits or cheat on homework. That’s a public service!

        /s

    • s38b35M5@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      “They’re our largest customer, and we have to be partners,” she said. “It’s called customer service.”

    • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Bullshit the utility knew. I worked in the water industry. No way the corporation took 30 million gallons of water without their knowledge. Totally Bullshit! They knew, just paid to turn a blind eye.

  • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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    23 hours ago

    One of the more “out there” arguments I’ve read in recent times was a guy arguing basically that data centers don’t make water go away because of the water cycle. That water can’t really be destroyed. It made me feel the same way as when people respond to the killing of the earth with “The earth isn’t going anywhere. It’ll still be here and in a couple million years it will be fine.” Fucking psychos.

    • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      22 hours ago

      I hate to tell you, but he was right. That’s what closed loop systems do. IDK about this particular story, it sounds like they were open loop. But you should be able to recycle water indefinitely once it’s filled and working.

      • platform9469@lemmy.ml
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        13 hours ago

        Are you a bot? Or just a paid shill? You can just do a miniscule amount of searching to find closed loop systems are extremely rare in America due to the costs. Its much easier to just steal and polute potable water

      • how_we_burned@lemmy.zip
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        16 hours ago

        Yeah the thing about the closed loop systems is that they pump a shit ton of chems to kill anything in the water. However no matter what shit grows in the loop. So they end up flushing the loop and dumping the water and chems into the sewer, before repeating the process.

        So no, closes loop DCs aren’t great.

        And i literally work in one. Just the other week the DC manager told me they had a leak. A stupid amount of water was lost.

        But because water is so cheap for commercial metro users it was more a oops then a wake up. Bare min repairs and bam, back up and running.

        The point is these “closed” systems aren’t perfect and shit happens. Especially as they age out.

      • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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        22 hours ago

        That’s only if the system doesn’t use evaporative cooling, which most of them do since it requires a lot more cooling infrastructure to not rely on evaporation. Instead of the water evaporating in the cooling tower it’d have to sit for much longer in a cooling tank to allow the heat to radiate away, and that’s a very slow process.

      • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz
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        22 hours ago

        Le sigh.

        Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people. -source

        • ikidd@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          19 hours ago

          Sorry we’re all so much stupider than you and that no other systems exist to cool datacenters than the one you happen to have read about that time.

          • platform9469@lemmy.ml
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            13 hours ago

            Oh so you are just doing propaganda while being a smug prick. Correct. You are much stupider. Just because technologies EXIST doesn’t mean they are widely in use. Its obvious you’re pushing an agenda, one that will poison drinking water for humans, so I’m guessing you’re just a bot

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.world
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      22 hours ago

      Please don’t burn them. Firefighters will then spend good amount of time, water, and foam to put out the fire.

      Defund them, ban them, discourage companies from building them, turn off the existing ones. But do not burn them.

  • homes@piefed.world
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    22 hours ago

    so… it wasn’t “unnoticed”…

    I hate these shitty headlines, like

    “Chemical X - (Perfectly Safe) - Kills 5,000 Daily!”

    same thing here. the press lies to push the same bullshit