"I swear I wouldn’t have done it if I lived in the parched Southwest, but an invigorating blast from the Catskill/Delaware watersheds was irresistible. Little did I know then that I was speaking truth to shower. Meanwhile, nobody is throttling the cataracts of
water needed to cool servers at the gargantuan data centers firing up our artificial intelligence future. In 2023, according to the Financial Times, data centers in Northern Virginia alone used
nearly 2 billion gallons of water. University of California at Riverside
researchers estimate that, in 2027, thirsty AI will slurp up between 1.1 trillion and 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally.
Don’t blame China’s DeepSeek; its energy demands are much lower than competitors,’ and it uses no water at all to answer questions about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs or a democratic Taiwan."
From
"Your showerhead is lying to you/Higher pressure is a blessing in more ways than one" (WaPo)(free-flowing-access link, so you can finally rinse that metaphorical shampoo out of your lusterless headhair).
Why was the author "speaking truth to shower"? Because studies show that people use less water when they're not struggling with low water pressure.
And
here, listen to Trump talk about his "beautiful luxuriant hair" in "this crazy shower" that just goes "drip, drip."
Me, I take a bath. It takes me 15 minutes to fill the bathtub. I doubt I'd ever take anything close to a 15-minute shower.
Posts
59 comments:
My plumber fixed all of our faucets. I have REALLY thick long hair. He told me that the pressure will be so great, that the conditioner will flow off of my hair in seconds. He was right. It is blissful. The Government needs to stay out of our bathrooms!! (and every other part of our lives)
I've probably had 5 showers in the last 15 years. It's a bath for me unless I'm stuck in some godforsaken Irish Airbnb that only has the comically misnamed "Power shower".
“free-flowing-access link”
It’s clogged backup for me, requiring an email address.
Though it sounds contradictory tis true water pressure means less water…and don’t get me started on the dishwasher. I’m surrounded by righteous rubes who run hot water at the sink rinsing dishes instead of putting them in the modern dishwasher that uses very little water and makes everything cleaner. I wear the dishwasher dictator moniker as a badge of honor…
The lowcountry is notorious for low water pressure- not easy to pressurize the municipality when you can’t locate the water tower at the top of a hill…
Now do toilets, light bulbs and dishwashers.
I have an Obama EPA era POS washing machine. I swear when I take the load out it barely feels damp.
Basting in a soup of your own filth?
Shuddddddddddder
If in hotel or other short-term place, just remove the entire shower head and use the bare pipe from the wall.
I really didn’t believe Jeff Bezos when he said “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” so this WaPo piece comes as a pleasant surprise.
Typical. Who cares how much water AI coolers use if they’re located in places not experiencing a water shortage?
And to the other point—pretty much all green tech is a scam. It’s more expensive, doesn’t work as well as the old tech it’s replacing, and rarely provides the promised benefits.
I do live in the parched Southwest. My shower is part of our grey water system that drains on the acacia tree roots.
I have been hearing that the world is running out of water for fifty years, but the Great Lakes are still there. If AI will slurp up a trillion gallons of water, then AI will piss out a trillion gallons of water. The water isn't turning into something else.
Using more shower or toilet water doesn't change anything. The diluted waste water goes to the water treatment plant, gets processed and is dumped back in the lake.
Universal water-saving measures are a penance or shared suffering, not an objective environmental benefit.
As the article mentions about the "parched Southwest", the situation isn't the same everywhere.
Environmentalism is a progressive condition that progresses in conspiracy with government and industry coercion to garner new Green deals and profits.
let's consider Three cities
Cedar Falls
Cedar Rapids
Iowa City
a person in Cedar Falls, takes a shower
(with treated water that came out of the Cedar river)..
the water goes down the drain, and is treated
(and returned to the Cedar river, and then the water goes down stream)..
a person in Cedar Rapids, takes a shower
(with treated water that came out of the Cedar river)..
the water goes down the drain, and is treated
(and returned to the Cedar river, and then the water goes down stream).
a person in Iowa City, takes a shower
(with treated water that came out of the Cedar river*)..
HOW, EXACTLY; does a low head shower make ANY difference? The water Starts in the river, the water is treated, the water is used, the water is treated (again), the water is returned to the river, the water flows down to the next town and the process starts Again.
IF you don't live in a desert.. you DON'T use water
the Cedar river* The Cedar river is the MAJOR source of water for the Iowa river (which flows through Iowa City)
you know water REALLY uses up water?
Of COURSE you DO!
watering your yard REALLY uses up water.
The water comes out of the river, goes onto your yard..
EVAPORATES
and then floats over to Illinois (or Michigan, for you Wiscies)
STOP WATERING YOUR YARD.. It just encourages the grass!!
I have a 2gpm shower head, but it's high pressure. $8 on Amazon; best shower head I every bought. I don't care how much water I use, I care about the water coming out hard and fast.
Randomizer is right, the water is not consumed, nor is it made useless, but I would not want them dumping the heat into the Great Lakes, for example. It seems like what is likely to happen is that places like Northern Quebec, where they smelt aluminum due to the abundance of hydro power, they will use the hydro power to run these AI brains, instead, and use the naturally cold air to cool it. I can see AI data centers having cooling towers like Three Miles Island.
"Though it sounds contradictory tis true water pressure means less water…"
Controlling the amount of water getting through does produce more pressure, and there have been efforts to produce low flow and high pressure as the solution — it's discussed in the linked article — but as anyone with thick hair knows, it doesn't work. You need water AND pressure.
Renewable, unreliable wind and solar drivers could be used to recycle and sanitize water with little loss of natural resource and quality of life, albeit at the expense of the environment with the spread of the Green blight over brown land and blue sea.
I can see that if you live in a major city, with millions of residents, you can bump up agains the limits of available water. NYC takes it from Upstate, for example, and if you need to build another aqueduct, that's expensive, and treating it is expensive. Chicago, for example, will never run out of physical water, just look at it on a map, but treated water for each person? That's another mater. By framing the debate as "running out of water," the writer just shows themselves to be a not very deep thinker, of course maybe she does address it, I don't know, here I am spouting off without even reading the article.
I’m sure Gavin Newsom doesn’t use a low flow shower head-his hair is too valuable.
Now do toilets, light bulbs and dishwashers.
… and clothes washers that leave clothes dirty. I think Greens are actually 1960s and 1970s era hippies who don’t flush and like to smell bad and wear dirty clothing.
I have an Obama EPA era POS washing machine. I swear when I take the load out it barely feels damp
Well if your clothes aren’t clean that’s one thing but modern HE machines spin the clothes at higher rpms to remove most of the water and lower drying times, which means less energy use from your dryer. I found a nHE set up I really like, mostly because it’s gentler on clothes…
When you do the math, hydraulic horsepower is the rate at which work is done, and the calculation uses both pressure and flow rate. You can't do work without both; decrease one, and the rate of work suffers.
As with all Green New Deal topics, the control of resources is not about resources - it's about control. It becomes evident when you start to see how consistently the 'value' decisions fall, and to whose benefit.
"I don't care how much water I use, I care about the water coming out hard and fast."
Are you a person of unthick hair.
The bald and balding understandably have no sympathy for us thick-hair people, but we can't rinse our hair on high pressure alone. I'm forced to fill a huge bathtub with water to be able to wash my hair (and for those who think this isn't clean enough, I do use the shower head to do a final rinse).
Also, I don't want to be pummeled in an effort to drive shampoo out of my hair. Water is needed.
"Speaking truth to shower"
Best line ever from a WaPo article.
If it weren’t for my detachable shower head, I’d be walking around with soap suds under my ballbag.
As Maynard said, "Speaking truth to shower" is my favorite line in quite awhile. Credit where credit is due, that's a good article blurb.
I travel routinely for work and I built a house from scratch 3 years ago including selecting all my appliances and faucets carefully. Some notes:
1. Reducing water usage, to my understanding, is about reducing the energy needs of the house (to heat that water) and burden on local water treatment resources. As a conservative, I'm a big fan of operating more efficiently when productivity doesn't suffer and of stewarding my resources - so no issues there for me in concept.
2. My Bosch dishwasher is the best I've ever used, bar none. Operates in about 2 hours (plus a drying cycle of my choosing, or no drying cycle), low water usage, super clean dishes.
3. My LG front-load washing machine is very good - clean clothes (including for my kids), low water utilization, low energy consumption.
4. My Delta shower faucets have an internal design that pulses water flow to maximize pressure and results. I'm quite happy with 1 of them, while another is dissapointing (different heads). Similarly, my delta kitchen sink faucet is fantastic while some of my bathroom sinks are so-so.
5. My Toto toilets are 2-option button design and basically never get clogged, so the water flow design itself is great for low water utilization But the porcelain quality sucks and thus they are perpetually dirty (i.e. the porcelain apparently does not want to clean itself easily with water flow alone). And thus I hate them. Supposedly Kohler does this just fine. IDK.
....
Overall, as of say 2022, I find the current crop of faucets, toilets, shower heads, and appliances to have successfully been able to use less water - and less heated water in particular - to accomplish their jobs very well. Great.
Just don't force it on me - I should want to buy these things because they save me money. Why is that so hard to understand for government?
Delta and Kohler make legitimate low
P.s. Ann, shockingly you haven't mentioned the hardness/softness of water. While I am ashamed to be a lowly non-thick hair person, I find a VAST difference in the ability to remove shampoo/conditioner dependent upon water minerality. A lower flow/less water design can work with hard water, but you absolutely need power and volume to remove those victuals in a soft water environment.
"As the article mentions about the "parched Southwest", the situation isn't the same everywhere."
Recognizing that everybody isn't the same is a problem for the left. Admitting that where one lives makes a difference in how much water is available for use and that one person's use is not necessarily relevant to another's can lead to other... inconvenient thoughts about how people ought to related to as individuals, and not members of a group.
"As with all Green New Deal topics, the control of resources is not about resources - it's about control."
And there it is.
The quoted paragraph certainly covers a vast swath of subject matter - virtue signaling (I wouldn't have done it if I lived in a parched area), anti-technology/big business (those cursed data centers that, among other things, allow me to write for WaPo and have my writings disseminated instantaneously around the world), blind trusting reliance on "experts" (citing researchers predicting data center water usage in the future), unquestioning praise of China (accepting any of that country's claims about DeepSeek, despite most of China's claims about it having been proven untrue), and a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards enslavement of minority populations (Uyghurs).
Althouse, have you tried lavender Epsom salts in your bath? Mmm-hmm!
I suppose bathing results in being adequately clean but I'd love some bath-taker to explain how one can feel (be, actually) really clean after sloshing around in the runoff from your body cleansing.
You don't need a 15 minute shower. the first burst of water washes off all the dirt. The rest is just making you feel better. I doubt i spend more than 5 minutes. My wife, like Althouse likes baths. Long baths.
As always, I take my life advice from Kramer
I just took a bath, Jerry, a bath! It's disgusting. I'm sitting there in a tepid pool of my own filth. All kinds of microscopic parasite and organisms having sex all around me.
https://youtu.be/QC5Rri_85Dw?si=hC_raLfYS5-IqhY8
John Henry
Adequately clean is quite sufficient for me. Americans have a weird obsession with cleanliness. You are an animal. You will never be cleansed of that.
Yeesh, the last 'bath' I took was an actual bubble bath in our big spa tub (third or fourth use in six years) and only then because I wanted to test whether the jets still worked. Before that. . . .Lawdy. . . . .probably 1988 when the London hotel I was staying only had bath tubs. I can be in and out of a shower in the time it takes to fill the tub.
I wonder how much water these AI centers actually consume?
If they have radiators, once the system is full, they should use no water at all. The water circulates in a closed loop.
If they use cooling towers, about 75% of the water is recirculated. The other 25% is evaporated to cool the 75% and falls back to earth as rain or snow.
It is not really consumed in either case.
John Henry
About 3 weeks ago I had to replace my shower head. I went to HoDe, bought one then had to fix it before installing. Remove the screen and restrictor plate from the head, drill out some internal structure. Then drill out the ball to about 7/16"
Works nicely now.
But I should not have to do this. Glad President Trump realizes this.
Re WaPo, Jeff Bezos back in the 90s and really up til he bought the paper, seemed pretty liberal (as in classical liberal, libertarian, minicrat, minarchist).
When he got big the govt had all sorts of ways to make his life hard. He had to buy the paper to influence them but I think it turned out that this gave govt even more power over him via CIA embeds.
"Free at last, free at last" to quote a great man, he may be reverting publicly to his liberal self.
John Henry
Somebody probably already pointed this out but the pressure is higher when the flow is restricted. The release of pressure creates flow. I remember the early conservation kits California distributed included a restrictor plate that you would install yourself in the shower head.
Not only do the data centers need to be cooled but the new power plants need cooling as well. According to the Google AI, the US uses about 5% of our total water supply for industrial cooling with the majority of that being used at thermoelectric power plants.
This is why the overuse of groundwater from the ogallala aquifer stretching from Canada to Mexico is a huge national security threat.
"One day, damp and desperate" reminds me of the "midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary" from Poe's "The Raven."
Quoth the Greenies, "Nevermore" will you have appliances that work!
JSM
The shower head is just a teeny tiny example of how government regulation can restrict flow. More importantly, the over-regulation of our society and economy is seriously restricting technological development growth and wealth needed to lift billions out of poverty.
The good thing is I've been hearing noise on the left via the New York times podcasts that some intellectuals and politicians on the left recognize this great administrative bottleneck that is resulting in a failure to thrive.
Great Bond-like start to a rather ho-hum article.
Because studies show that people use less water when they're not struggling with low water pressure.
Just as studies show that reserved high-occupancy vehicle lanes cause more pollution and energy wastage than they save, and recycling of any material but aluminum cans is a fool's errand, and windmills will never generate enough energy to replace the resources that went into their manufacture, and mRNA "vaccines" have risks that have been systematically and deliberately minimized and benefits that have been systematically and deliberately exaggerated, and DDT applied locally inside of dwellings can save millions of lives from insect-borne illness while having absolutely no effect on wildlife, and removing the genitals of mentally ill children and ensuring that they will never experience orgasm or parenthood does nothing to improve their mental health or suicide rate, and so on and so on and so on.
Donald Trump's war on the smug, arrogant little petty-tyrant leftists of the managerial nanny state is the great cause of our time. Their misery is my delight. May he enjoy victory over them comparable to that of Henry V at Agincourt.
This subject has been around for a long time. I think that explains why the only way we are going to get anybody to try and fix it as you need a madman promoter like Trump and an evil genius engineer like Musk to actually take it on.
"The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America is a book by Philip K. Howard (no relation)that was published in 1995 by Random House. The book is a manifesto that argues that excessive government regulations are harming America.
Key points
The book shows how regulations have replaced thinking and created overbureaucratization.
Howard argues that law should be a framework for people to make choices, not a replacement for free choice.
He also argues that rights are being used as a form of subsidy, rather than as protections against coercion by the state.
Howard suggests that law should articulate goals, allocate subsidies, and provide mechanisms for resolving disagreements, but should not provide the final answer.
The book is filled with examples of bureaucratic overreach, including the labeling of window cleaner as a toxic substance. "
If it weren’t for my detachable shower head, I’d be walking around with soap suds under my ballbag.
I left the flow restrictor in my fixed shower head, and removed it from my hand-held. I seldom shampoo my short hair, so a quick low pressure rinse of it is just fine, and I apply soap only to underarms and nether regions, so a quick blast with the high pressure detachable shower head gets them sparkly clean. If I had to use the fixed low-flow head to get the soap off the naughty bits, my shower would take 50% longer.
Not only do the data centers need to be cooled but the new power plants need cooling as well.
Just think how bad it will be when we go to all electric vehicles!
Serious Question, for all you bath people..
Don't you have to take a second bath? to rinse the soap off?
or do you take a shower after your soak?
or do you just Not care about having soapy skin?
i'm Really asking.. i haven't taken a bath since 1992*
1992* when i found out, that taking a bath with your girlfriend is Crowded, Not romatic
i found out, that taking a bath with your girlfriend is Crowded, Not romatic
Wifey and I once had a house with a big bathtub installed by a previous owner for the express purpose of taking baths together. We did it a couple of times, but meh. Even with the extra room it was not remotely worth it. A quick shower together is far better, because when I'm naked with my wife I don't want to soak in hot water for twenty minutes, I want to get clean pronto and move on to other things that can't be done in a bathtub without making an awful mess of the bathroom floor.
Hmm, starting to look like this information highway has a very wide 'Too Much Information' shoulder, if you know what I mean. Anyway, it seems to me that nuke-driven ocean desalination is the solution to much of this, starting with California. If they were to mostly supply their tremendous population water requirements with this, the upstream issues might solve themselves: Colorado's flow might be eased and the big lakes (Powell & Mead) upstream might actually start to refill a little. Who knows? California might actually be able to export water to the desert states.
Howard @ 9:42am,
*Some* on the left are starting to recognize that, but on the other hand for those like Gates, "failure to thrive" is the *goal* he has for 95% of us.
We will need more water and more energy (electricity) to power the data servers than we currently have. And far, far more than wind turbines or solar paneling entire swaths of America can produce.
Best get used to using fossil fuels or get to finding a new and better alternative.
“Controlling the amount of water getting through does produce more pressure, and there have been efforts to produce low flow and high pressure as the solution — it's discussed in the linked article — but as anyone with thick hair knows, it doesn't work.”
Thick hair or a basic knowledge of physics. A flow restrictor cannot increase flow pressure.
First thing I did when I got a new shower head was Google how to remove the flow restrictor. It’s just a little plastic piece the manufacturer adds to a regular shower head to comply with U.S. law. The unrestricted shower heads are shipped for sale in free countries.
Water used to cool data center equipment can be reused once it had dumped the heat into the ground or the surrounding air. If data centers aren't doing this already, it is because the costs of the water itself are lower than buiding the infrastructure for cooling on site and reusing.
Now I'm worried about sharp objects inside my showerhead.
I bought a Kohler kitchen faucet c. 2018 specifically because it advertised 1.8 gpm, but only 1.0 gpm came out of the two-way aerator. The nice Kohler lady sent me two replacement heads with no change. I ruined one trying to reduce the restriction with a drill as it was impossible to disassemble. Now I just take big pots to the nearby bathtub. At least with this faucet, there's very little delay in temperature changes because there's no tubing after the valve under the counter. That drove me crazy with my old one.
Some super-luxury homes I see on youtube must have long pipes between the valve and the 85 showerheads. Some you can't get to the controls without getting wet. Do they have remotes and temp. sensors?
"It is not really consumed in either case."
Water is never consumed, it just circulates, as others have pointed out. The obvious solution is just to charge an appropriate price and let people make their own choices. Obvious, but never done, because that would mean a surrender of power by the government.
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