Michael BaconAug 12, 2025

The UK government saying "delete old emails" to save water. 🤦‍♂️

Most emails average about 50k of storage even for someone who gets a lot of attachments, and will have exactly zero effect on data center consumption.

"Don't use cryptocurrency" and "don't use generative AI" would of course be thousands of times more effective.

Show threadavatastic  Aug 12, 2025

@MichaelTBacon Ah but Google and Microsoft are using the water when training their AIs on your old e-mails.

That's about the only way I can justify it.

Show threadMichael Bacon
@avatastic LOL now that's a legit comeback. "Delete your emails so they don't get used to train AI" might actually cut water use by a tad.
Aug 12, 2025 at 10:58pmWeb
Show threadMarjorieRAug 13, 2025
@MichaelTBacon @avatastic of My own old emails are only on my PC (and local backups) so not visible to AI, ditto most of my old photos.
The only copies of emails accessible to AI are the ones I sent to Gmail and Microsoft addresses and I can't delete those.
But yes, my phone photos are backed up by Google but I don't keep them on the phone indefinitly.