We need the food, we'll die without food, telling people to eat less of whatever food, so a few "tech bros" can build a new datacenter is outright evil.
edit: considering this is HN and the downvotes, people here prefer datacenters over food
The downvotes are probably about reasoning about your your conclusions instead of the things that led you to them. Though it'd be nice if that had been discussion instead of silent downvotes.
People need to eat, it's non negotiable. We do not need data centres.
Providing a fully vegetarian diet for everyone is kind of non-starter.
From an infrastructure point of view, providing everyone vegetarian food sources overnight would not be possible, but that's not a realistic scenario. With a gradual transition, the transition would reduce overall resource use on basically all fronts, so there's no reason to expect extraordinary problems.
Of course, this is all theoretical unless people care enough to change their lifestyles.
> A healthful vegetarian diet is not hard to achieve, at least no harder than a healthful non-vegetarian diet.
Might be true but isn't sufficient
It's still way easier to have an omnivore diet than a strictly vegetarian one. Partly that's due to how society is currently structured, but people still ate meat long before society was structured this way. Because it was easier.
The vast majority of agricultural water use is either tapped directly from groundwater, drawn directly from surface sources, or rain. The vast majority of datacenter water use is processed water from a municipal water utility. In other words, it is meaningless to compare the two, because only one is competing with residential use, and so only one is worth caring about.
That's not to detract from serious concerns about e.g. overutilization of the Colorado River, or the idiotic practice of irrigating deserts, but it is to say that comparing datacenters to agriculture makes very little sense.