Post #3682071

I'm all for metric, but the ignorance of the post currently circulating smugly making fun of acre feet as a unit of measure is annoying. We measure land in acres. In the western and central us, we flood irrigate our crops. You generally build a one foot or so berm around your fields to hold the water in when you irrigate. So an acre foot is in direct correspondence with the number of irrigations you can do per acre. It's a measure of volume that farmers understand viscerally, so they hear about how many acre feet of water used by a data center and they *know* what that means to them and their crops. They know how many acre feet they've had to skip this year because of drought water restrictions and what that means for their fields. So, yes, it's good to be angry about water theft for data centers. But to turn that into some smug bullshit about units of measure is just fucking ignorant. (And reply guys stay away from this - i grew up on a farm in the western us and helped my family irrigate fields every summer, and I developed data analysis tools and coauthored papers for agriculture water conservation, so just don't)