Obesity is a problem in lots of countries.

Patient outcomes should provide reasonably hard data for comparisons. Life expectancy at least is not vastly better in the US, how about other metrics?

Human well-being should reduce medical expenses, so at least in theory it should be a goal of insurance companies.

Ten years from now the people making these decisions have moved on to different companies and cashed their quarterly bonuses.

How much higher would the energy cost be without evaporative cooling? It doesn’t seem that hard to use water-air heat pumps to get rid of the heat without any water use, so the reasons it’s not used are probably economic. I suppose you could just make water more expensive?

Vertiv published a 10-year TCO analysis for a 3 MW facility that found waterless systems actually achieved lower overall cost despite higher energy draw, because water treatment, legionella testing, RO filtration, and cooling tower maintenance add up fast.

The PUE penalty is typically +0.1 to +0.4, so roughly 10-25% more energy for a hyperscaler currently at PUE ~1.1.

Microsoft announced all new builds from late 2027 onward will use zero water for cooling via closed-loop liquid cooling, which suggests the economics have already tipped for new construction.

Evaporative cooling gives you a COP beyond 20 in good conditions. It can be 4-5x more efficient than a heat pump.

Indirect evaporative systems average around COP 17.5 and dew-point systems can hit ~30, so your numbers check out for the best cases. Worth noting that direct liquid cooling with dry heat rejection is now achieving PUE 1.03-1.06 with near-zero water, which narrows the effective gap considerably for the high-density AI racks that are driving most new builds.

It turned out to be pretty hard to take out Germany’s factories in ww2.

Of course it did. War is hard, and lots of people die in it. The parent comment said always. I am saying that always is not true. I made no suggestions it was easy.

Most people don't really care about rent seeking middle men though, so why should they put in effort into doing things themselves?

Maybe it's ok to create something that isn't for most people. That's how the internet started out. It's only gotten worse the more accessible it became to most people. Maybe it's a good thing to create a split based on capabilities and technical know-how.

But we already have a bunch of social networks that are not for everybody. The problem is that social networks are pretty much a winner-takes-all market due to network effects.

We do and many of us prefer it that way. I’m not on any major social media because I personally consider it asocial — you can’t have that many actual friends or acquaintances. My «social media» is a handful of smaller discord servers and an irc channel, and an extensive webring of personal websites.

There is historic precedent: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/lecontesalt/leconte.html, but we probably want to collect cattle pee, since that is available in greater quantities.

Sooner rather than later we need to decarbonize fertilizer production. Maybe this will speed the process up a bit.

We have known how to do it for a long time, the problem is the energy cost. It takes 10x as much electrical power to produce fertilizer without fossil fuels as an input, and fertilizer production already consumes 1% of total world energy output. So to decarbonize it we need to increase worldwide electrical output by atleast 10% to cover the energy requirements, and it has to be all done with clean energy. Because otherwise you lose 70% of that energy in the fuel-electricity conversion, while the direct fossil fuel to fertilizer conversion is much more efficient.

It does need to be done, but to me it seems like it should be a second priority after not just cleaning up electrical production but increasing electrical production overall.

There are probably some efficiency gains to be made in synthesizing fertilizer from the air, but as far as I can tell there is limited room for improvements because creating nitrogen from air is basically the same thing as creating fuel from the air and that energy has to come from somewhere.

Indeed, I did some work on that with regards to renewable ammonia production, interesting field to look into if you're curious

Resources on the topic you would recommend?

I am rather pessimistic. Unless petroleum prices go really bonkers, efuels are in for a rough few years. The synthesized fuels required cheap energy and benefited from subsidies while they are still optimizing the technology.

Energy use in the country has been basically flat for decades, so the increasing glut of renewables seemed well timed to allow for siphoning off that free mid-day power. Cue massive data center build out, and prices have massively shot up and blown the economics of efuels apart.

You additionally have an administration which hates anything done by Biden and/or alternative energies, so the bountiful incentives for such programs are/will be neutered.

There is no stopping the ultimate carbon free transition, but the stars really need to align to see any meaningful amount of synthetic generation to happen soon.

It's debatable whether biofuels reduce CO2. I think it's better to understand them as subsidies for agriculture.

Could you elaborate?

Very simplified: farming and distillation is so extremely energy intensive, it's not clear whether producing one ton of bio ethanol fuel consumes more or less than one ton of diesel (or equivalent).

So producing bio ethanol is not a sustainability/ecology thing, it mostly gives farmers something to do.

If you wanted to save CO2 you'd slap solar panels on the fields instead of growing corn or whatever. Plants are rather bad at capturing solar energy and they need fertilizer and pesticides to grow and diesel to be planted and harvested. Then you lose a good part of the energy the plant captured until you have a product that you can burn in an engine.

With solar panels you get like 20x the energy out and you can have a meadow with high biodiversity around the panels. Growing a nice little forest, maybe with a couple of wind turbines in it if the location is windy, would probably also save more CO2.