this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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Because salt is corrosive, and the real estate is expensive.
Why not build in the cold north? Snow, ice breaking stuff, more expensive construction and work.
There’s a common misconception that these data centers are so big to literally suck up all resources… that’s not it.
It’s just corpos cheaping out.
Why the desert? Because evaporative cooling is cheap as heck, and low power, and works best in dry air. And the land is cheap. And grid energy is cheap.
Why local power plants and generators? Because it’s cheaper than grid energy; it cuts out the middle man. And it increases reliability. Not because there’s literally not grid capacity.
Hence, you are onto a thermodynamically interesting idea. The waste heat could be a “preheater” for desalination.
But of course they are not going to do that: it would cost more money.
Nor would they hook up the waste heat to local communities. Why would they pay to do that and extend construction time?
Also, as a counterpoint, osmotic desalination (which requires no heat) tends to be cheaper anyway, but is still a very, very expensive water source.
Speaking of the north, the answer is yes. You totally can, and should, use the heat for something like district heating.
https://www.removepaywall.com/search?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bloomberg.com%2Fnews%2Ffeatures%2F2025-05-14%2Ffinland-s-data-centers-are-heating-cities-too
The answer, as always, is profit.
Short term gain, specifically.
They want the data center up and cheaply built to make next quarter look good, not lower their costs long term.
Fuck man... I'm so over capitalism. Shits just exhausting...
The boiling method is used when there are industrial processes that generate a lot of waste heat. You can make it reasonably efficient by taking the heat away on the cooling side and recirculating it back to the hot end.
But yes, datacenters don't really generate enough heat for that to work without heat pumps concentrating it. All your other points stand.