How is deleting locally-stored files on your home PC going to save water, when your hardware sips resources vs. any AI datacenter in existence?

A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate.

So pass a law banning evaporative cooling systems from all industrial and commercial applications (or single out data centers), give them 6 months to comply and start handing out fines every day past the deadline.

Most people save these thing in some sort of cloud storage solution.

I suggest spitting to lose weight

I hope the Department that released this guidance is being absolutely pilloried in UK media. What an absolutely worthless, dishonest pile of crap.

Absolute farce of a country

Nice analogy. I used this one in the past: "you can't fix a full disk by deleting word documents", but I like yours more

What are you, some kind of nerd?

No, most people do not store their files in a cloud storage solution.

straight up not feasible for many serious and necessary facilities like powerplants and refineries, unless you prefer very warm lake or river nearby (which also cools down by evaporation later)

So where does this water go after evaporating or leaking from your toilet? Is it flying into deep space and being lost for our planet forever?

I’m not sure that’s true any more. Microsoft all but forces you to use OneDrive by default these days.

Always used to amaze me as a kid I had to pay 20p to inflate my bike tyre from, air.

Boggled my mind since I had a hand pump.

Which is why I mentioned limiting it to data centers as an option

Raining over the ocean where it is no longer in the stores of freshwater these systems are pulling from

Yeah they do, it has absolutely become the norm and has been for several years. It may not be the norm among Lemmy users, but general public absolutely do use cloud storage for especially pictures.

straight up not feasible

It's very feasible to create the law, collect the fine, and raise the price on energy sources or industrial process that require the cooling.

It's a formality, you could do it in an afternoon. Costs a bit of ink and a piece of paper.

"But then it gets more expensive!" and "This might push corporations out of the city/country." is the consequence the people / the government / the country have to have the balls to endure, if they want to stand by things like "having enough water" or "living on earth in the 22nd century".

If the free market is something you believe in, you should love this, because it makes water a more scarce resource and the market will be able to find another optimal solution to that new scarcity problem.

So this doesn't sound like a big deal after all. Maybe just stop pulling water from those "stores of freshwater" for cooling purposes and get your own from the ocean.

Corrosion issues, marine life clogging, too expensive, etcetc.