They like their chips well engineered in the USA. Long, straight and thin. Good looking. To get such handsome chips requires large, round, smooth potatoes, and to grow such potatoes requires soft, loamy, sandy soil. Such soil is thirsty. In such thirsty soil, water seeps through like a sieve. They could choose firmer soil and use half the water. The potatoes wouldn’t be as straight, though. They’d taste the same, have the same nutritional value. Not good enough. Must be straight and thin and well engineered, nice on the eye.
As some of the worst droughts on record gripped Minnesota in the 2020s, the chip farmers were not too worried. They cranked up their massive sprinkler equipment, hooked up to deep, deep wells and sprayed billions of gallons extra on their thirsty crop, blowing through limits that they knew would not be policed, in the land of the free water. Limits that were there to protect stressed aquifers that have been in constant decline.
Pumping water like there’s no tomorrow requires great engineering intelligence and innovation. Intelligence focused on designing the best sprinklers, wells, and water pumps. All this intelligence is quickly draining groundwater throughout the United States. “The practice threatens not only drinking water supplies for millions of Americans but also the nation’s status as a leading exporter of food,” Dionne Searcey and Mira Rojanasakul wrote for the New York Times. The land is literally sagging, as the drilling equipment drills deeper and the sprinklers rotate faster. It’s a race to the bottom in the pursuit of straight-looking chips and other such vanities. This is the story of the intelligent human.
It takes an awful lot of water to make straight, clean semiconductor chips, even though “a minimum of 40 per cent of all existing semiconductor manufacturing plants are located in watersheds that are anticipated to experience high or extremely high water stress risk by 2030,” according to scientist, Josh Lepawsky. Potato chips and semiconductor chips—very water intensive.
The only difference between Silicon Valley and Las Vegas is in the chips they use. Silicon Valley and Las Vegas are physically, philosophically and emotionally twins. They are both gambling meccas, full of grifters, scammers and con artists, betting chips in the hope of fast bucks. Silicon Valley is a financialized hype market gambling house, and in such markets of speculation it is imperative to move at the fastest speeds possible, cashing in while staying ahead of the curve of reality. The gullible must have their eyes fixed firmly on the next big thing. Otherwise, they might start thinking about the previous big thing and how it didn’t pan out the way the tech bro boy sun god grifters promised.