admin
Water main bursts in the UK
T
Thames Water be like: “Welp, due to higher demand we must increase your bill yet again. Sorry, not sorry.”
C
And pay our CEO a huge bonus for being a part of this journey on fixing this pipe.
Q
*Oh, and can you please delete some more precious memories. We need more water now.*
[
Totally not because they’re paying all their profits to other companies they own, so they can reward their shareholders.
S
I used to be under the impression that a company had to make profit in a financial year to pay dividends to shareholders, but no, they can pay them from profit in previous years, even if red now. So if they made profit ten years ago and none since, they can still dip into that profit from ten years ago. This is insane and must be changed, because it allows the draining of funds from dying companies.
F
Why would they change it? It’s working exactly as intended, to keep the rich getting richer.
F
Dividends are paid when there is free cash and has little to do when the profits were made. To be fair, free cash generally and usually happens after profits. If they have not made profit in 10 years then generally something is wrong. Either they are inefficient or they need to raise their prices.
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[deleted]
P
My heart bleeds
N
Neither does mine, but theres too many idiots on reddit making claims without actually understanding shareholder / CEO dynamics in corporates.
[
Yeah if they invested in Thames Water, but I’ll hazard a guess they’ve been shifting their profits elsewhere so they can’t meet commitments to improve infrastructure. The water industry in the UK is fucked, particularly in England.
C
And Thames Water have destroyed the wildlife in many waterways, fuck the shareholders
A
Could you delete old pictures and emails to make up for the lost water please?
F
Is this referring to something?
K
https://www.theverge.com/science/758275/drought-delete-files-email-data-center-water-uk
F
Hahaha. Man. Her heart is in the right place but consumer email habits are not the problem. This is just poor planning by corporations and then having us foot the bill. Tax them.
A
Residents or “customers” be like: ‘Don’t worry TW, this one’s on me’
H
Legit happened to me. I reported a leaky water main near my flat, didn’t hear anything and it got worse over a month. Eventually got fixed and my reward was a £30k water bill. Thanks cunts!
P
30,000 pounds bill? Im guessing you refused to pay that ? lol
S
That’s just the UK every couple of months. Loved there for 30 years and over the years all of my bills, phone bill, internet, etc would slowly just go up every couple of months under the guide of “bringing You the best service possible” So that’s why every single one of my bills would go from 10 quid a month, to 11..to 12..to 13…to 15 to 18 to 23 to 26. When I left that shit hole country I was paying upwards of £60 for my internet, £60 for my phone, £60 for the TV license we never paid for (fuck you TV laws) My point being is that legitimately these companies will bump up their price every couple of months and change NOTHING, hell half the time they make the service worse Fuck these companies.
T
Tell me the utopia that you live in where this *doesn’t* happen. Cause it sure as shit happens in the US, the UK, Ireland, Australia and several European countries where I’ve lived. It’s the reward for being born on modern society. “Hello. Welcome. **Pay us.**”
C
“…that shit hole country…” What a wanker. You’re absolutely right that it’s everywhere. It’s not right, and it’s not okay. But to call the UK that as a whole is vile. I’d *also* like to know what ideal country he’s moved to so we can watch and learn what a paradise looks like.
F
You can get around it by being *really* annoying, as my mother can attest. I call it ‘using her Karen powers for good.’
V
£60p/m for internet? I pay £30 for 500mbps. £60p/m for phone? I pay £12. £60p/m for TV licence? It’s £174.50 PER YEAR. No wonder you think it’d a shit hole lol. You just did everything wrong 🤣
S
It was more of the fact that every 3-6 months I’d get a letter from these dickhead companies saying that they’re raising the prices to make it a better service for the user (it never is) and the first few times they did it called up, argued, etc they gave me a few months cheaper and this is how it went for like 2 years and after that I just couldn’t be fucked bothered anymore. So I just stopped phoning them to complain, didn’t wanna switch providers because that’s also a huge hassle and yeah you could say its laziness on my part which is true, however I shouldn’t have to fucking argue and complain every few months cause virgin wants to raise their price by 3 quid a month every fucking 6 months It’s fucking MADDENING. Ive been in the US now for a few years, you know how much my fucking phone costs? 50 dollars a month. You know how much it costed day 1? 50 fucking dollars a month Same with my internet. The UK is the only country where every couple of months you just LET companies fuck you over for free and THEY GET AWAY WITH IT. ALL THE TIME. So yeah. It was my fault, because I didn’t wanna spend hours if not weeks or my collective life on the phone, on hold so I’m I can talk to Rajesh in India who has no idea what the fuck is going on.
D
> It was more of the fact that every 3-6 months I’d get a letter from these dickhead companies saying that they’re raising the prices to make it a better service for the user (it never is) and the first few times they did it called up, argued, etc they gave me a few months cheaper and this is how it went for like 2 years and after that I just couldn’t be fucked bothered anymore. So I just stopped phoning them to complain, didn’t wanna switch providers because that’s also a huge hassle and yeah you could say its laziness on my part which is true, however I shouldn’t have to fucking argue and complain every few months cause virgin wants to raise their price by 3 quid a month every fucking 6 months Hahahah reading through this I was like “mans describing virgin to a tee” used to enjoy watching my freind go that rigamarole every six month lol.
S
Absolute insanity. Meanwhile Richard cuntface is making trillions off of lazy shitters like me who don’t have it in them to either rip out the old line and install a brand new one every 3-6 months or complain to get a “discount” every 6 months. I can’t wait till they make a law against this shit. I guarantee when it happens everyone will be saying “why the wasn’t this in place 20 years ago”
O
Really have no idea why you’ve been downvoted here, and someone is incredulous that you were paying £60 a month for internet. Virgin Media are notorious for only giving good prices to brand new customers, and hiking prices up for loyal customers. After nearly 20 years with Virgin Media (due to ADSL being terrible where I live), we were more than ready to jump to BT’s recently rolled out Fibre To The Property.
G
> knows exactly how much the tv licence costs lol stop paying, ya goomba. I aint paying for them to pay terfs to talk shit on the radio without risk of being questioned at drivetime.
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You got some pretty bad deals then, I pay £30 for internet and £12 for mobile and nothing for TV. But yeah Thames Water sucks. I’m paying £45/month just for water…
P
No you weren’t lmao, internet is literally £22 a month today for gigabit. You can get much cheaper than that. Phone is £10 a month for me and I get 20gb. If you have a contract, you were paying for the phone. It would only be £60 a month if you have got an expensive phone on loan. It has never been as expensive has you say and actually we have some of the best prices in the developed world. The UK doesn’t let companies fuck you over anywhere near as much as the USA. We have so much more consumer protection that prevents them raising a bill more than the consumer price index. So the bills would’ve been raised like 1%.
O
> £60 for my phone That’s your fault.
E
Remember that suggestion they sent out that we should delete some of our old emails to help reduce data centers water needs? 🤣😂 Complete tossers.
S
How does storing old emails on a server somewhere use up water? It’s computation/processing that makes computers hot, not passively storing data.
E
Its data centers using water to cool their systems down, which is true. But the amount of water they lose for is so fucking tiny. We are talking 15ml A YEAR! And they are asking us to help them save that tiny fucking pittance. But what is really funny is they didn’t mention anything about the AI data centers in their press release. AI data centers loose 15ml – 50ml of water **per fucking prompt!** Of course the UK just gave out a shit ton in AI grants so they aren’t gonna shit anything to them. ETA: In a layman’s sense its not “passive”. They need to maintain high availability and that means constant indexing and other methods to keep that data instantly accessible to the user. That does require power. There are cold storage methods out there but you will find they don’t offer high availability or the other features most users online require day to day.
F
That’s the thing with all those ‘do your part’ eco-washing, like, there is more than enough for all of us to go to the well and get a glass of water. It’s these corporations and ultra-rich folks who are coming in with giant tanker trucks and sucking up as much as they can, spilling gallons everywhere because they just don’t care. Then some asshole comes in and tells us we must not care about the environment or reversing the damage we’ve done to the planet because we refuse to give up our one glass of water a day. Motherfucker.
I
Completely someone worked this out the other day. It’s like delete 8,100,000 to save 39L.
C
That’s like 7% of what the average human urinates in a year.
R
> We are talking 15ml A YEAR! Per what? Data center (if so, how big)? Stored email? GB? Just the number isn’t saying much.
G
They use a collosal amount of water through evaporative cooling of their datacenter air conditionings external heat exchanger. They use a collosal amount more boiliung water to drive the powerstation that powers it in the first place. Datacenters consume hella water. Chip fabs even more so, and they need ultra-pure reverse-osmosis plants too.
R
Who are “they”? Again: I want to know what exactly they are talking about when they say “15ml a year” — a single server? A whole center? If so, how many servers are in it and how much work do they produce? Because if your data center is twice as big / has twice as many servers I assume it does not have the same water usage. My question has nothing to do with *how* or *why*, but *what*. /edit: Grammar.
G
Absurd datacenters is the “they”. Also, you’re the one throwing around this 15 milliter bs. Being obtuse is unbecoming. Also AI-smelling.
R
Huh? The “15 milliter bs” was brought up in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/s/04EbUMbmqk) and I am asking what the poster means by it, as “15ml per year” doesn’t mean anything without any reference. It’s like saying “*Coca Cola has ~1g sugar*” — which is true if you are referring to 10ml of it, but way too little when it comes to any relevant serving. That’s why I am asking for context as just the measure alone doesn’t convey anything. You seem confused. And quite a bit so.
J
Per data center. The loops are closed like the heating loop in a house is, only to a much better standard so they lose hardly any water from that loop over the year.
R
I know how it works which is why I am surprised about such an accurate but context-lacking number. “Per data center” is also a weird answer, as some are over ten million square feet big while there are also some who occupy less than a hundred square feet (and of course the amount of data they store/process varies accordingly, so does the amount of water they need). Plus cooling solutions vary regarding architecture and material, thus likely effectiveness of water containment. What kind/size of data center are these measurements for? /edit: It’s like saying “a car uses 8.434 litres of fuel per ten thousand kilometers”.
J
Average of all data centers? I wouldnt read too much in to the actual number. It’s basically shorthand for “not very much”. The bit you should be taking issue with is that they have a number for how much water is lost “per AI prompt”. That is total bullshit. AI prompts run on GPU’s. The same GPU’s you’d use for any other general purpose compute task, like 3D rendering or simulations. An AI task is just different code running on the same hardware.
P
Per DC is a hilarious metric. Most big DCs I’ve worked with do some kind of heat transfer with municipal sources…at least one of which had something to do with water treatment. To be honest I tuned out that discussion,. The cooling requirements for high end storage are trivial compared to compute needs. (And when using spinning disk you often want much higher ambient temperature than the compute side wants)
A
How is water even being lost? Computer water cooling is a closed loop circuit.
M
Yeah. Furthermore, it’s possible to design data centres such that the warm water is used for district heating.
P
You need to put the heat you took away from the cpu/GPU somewhere. Big DCs like to do heat transfer with wastewater or find some way to capture the energy. And I’ve never seen a closed loop system that doesn’t need small top ups occasionally. Mind you, your email, hell, everybody’s email, requires so little to deal with that it’s below the noise floor.
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