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infrastructure-bottleneck
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Britain's dairy farmers are pouring milk away
Britain built the world's most productive dairy herd: 2x output per cow since the 1970s via AI, robotic milkers, and precision breeding. Output hit 13 billion litres, up 5% year-on-year, but there aren't enough processing plants to convert the surplus into butter, cheese, or powder. Prices dropped 17% since September; farmers are selling below cost. Productivity outrunning infrastructure is a capital allocation failure, and it plays out the same way wherever production capability advances faster than the downstream system built to capture its value.
What will computer chips look like in 2045?
Intel's Ranade says process technology is within a few percent of TSMC, and the gap that matters is scale and on-time ramps. ASML builds fewer than 100 EUV machines a year, leading-edge output could reach about 2x with existing tool supply rather than 10x, and a tool ordered today lands in 2028. That timeline means 2030 supply is largely being decided by orders placed now, which is the constraint the Empires of AI piece and the CME contracts both sit on top of.