If we're shipping the alfalfa to China, I assume that means it's supporting some Chinese person's food source, whether they are directly eating the alfalfa, or some animal is eating it that later becomes food.

If someone is flooding a field unproductively just to use up their quota of water, that is a bad thing that should be addressed. But even if you excluded that unproductive usage and compared AI water use to legitimate agriculture use, that would still be an unfair comparison. If you were to compare AI water use to the amount of water that people are wasting just for legal reasons, then I honestly think that would be a pretty apt comparison.

Yes, and now please cut the non-essential philosophical discussion, the server hosting this site doesn't run on thought experiments alone either.

This comment could have been someone's hamburger!

Don't be disingenuous. They already were dividing things out by type of usage, like talking about water park usage vs. the usage of an entire city for all purposes. They are already admitting that "water usage of a city" isn't only about quenching thirst and maintaining hygiene, it's not a stretch to assume that they also realize that they can be water wastage in agriculture as well. They can't split out every instance of wastage that could be eliminated, and it's ridiculous to expect them to.

My wife works with farmers professionally as part of a conservation district and just responded "THIS PERSON KNOWS FARMING" when showing her the discussion. I genuinely have no idea what you guys are talking about but she immediately got heated.

Based in Colorado.

There was massive controversy about that so I don't know how good counterexample it's that. Unless the argument is "we already waste a lot why would you care about wasting more??" Which is not a great argument.