Can you not feel it’s growing presence?

Ya but the same would be true no matter what kind of industrial facility was across the street.

I live very near to two industrial facilities, but they deal with agricultural products instead of high-value GPU farms. They've got some lights outside and they're not bothersome.

Are corn ethanol and feedstock alfalfa (the two largest agricultural consumers of water) essential for the survival of the species?

It's essential for the united states to be able to feed it's population. Keeping land fertile for farming and all the necessary supply chain intact is a national security issue.

Corn ethanol is a weird carbon subsidy that shouldn't exist.

It's a weird carbon offset for the fuel industry that isn't effective and it diverts huge amounts of farm land away from food crop usage. It ties farms to industry rather than supplying food, binding their profitability to the price of oil far more and that only exists because the US Gov mandates the ethanol blend.

It's supposed to be because it's renewable/sustainable using a biological product, but the industry is heavily dependent on synthetic fertilisers which come from refineries.

There are a great many reasons to get rid of the ethanol mix. Lower food costs being the biggest. Now that EVs are practical the need for trying to whitewash combustion fuel is overbaked.

It's pork barrel spending for farming heavy states.

27% of crops grown in the US are used to feed humans.

So are data centers, in the modern economy. You think all those trucks manage their own logistics in their carburetors?

Nope. So much of that goes to corn because of silly subsidies or to feed cattle. Not really a matter of national security.

Or if people can easily move. Or if you want the next generation of startups to operate in your state.

The pace of change is accelerating! If this is an S curve, we are still near the bottom…

Doesn’t seem to be the case as the price per token is not increasing…

The critical back end step for HBM is thermal compression bonding - where they actually compress 13 very thin die separated by solder balls. Cracking is a major issue.

We are getting so many technologies like this that are so insanely specialized and require such deep knowledge of physical processes that some event like a 1918 flu that kills 10% of the population could take out enough people that we'd be unable to make things like this for years as we fill in the missing knowledge workers.

It's just crazy how far down the scale we're tickling atoms these days.

Maybe Covid killed a smaller but nonzero amount of technologies?

Surely we'd have had the same issue during the Spanish flu? Any examples?

Not really at all. Between those dates and now the world has become fully global and concentration of knowledge has massively occurred. The past world was much more highly distributed, far less technical, and far more redundant.