KE @EllgrenK

🚨Este discurso de elon vale oro. En 2003, con 32 años, Elon Musk entró a una sala cerrada en Stanford y en 45 minutos destrozó todo lo que creías saber sobre startups. Vale más que 10 libros juntos. Desglosó, capa por capa, cómo llevó de cero a sobrevivir las 3 empresas que tenía en ese momento: Zip2 PayPal y SpaceX (que acababa de fundar un año antes) Cómo encontrar dirección cuando nadie cree en ti. Cómo controlar costos hasta el último centavo. Cómo mantenerte vivo cuando el dinero se está acabando. Cómo resolver cualquier problema con primeros principios. 20 años después… sigue siendo oro puro. Guárdalo. Vas a necesitarlo.

@MikeBenzCyber Why not strip him of his pension.

BREAKING: America is getting a new trade school built for the reindustrialization boom. @TryOpenX begins trials at Skill Factory #000 in Texas in early July, with plans to train 10,000+ skilled workers annually and build employer-backed production lines around real industrial demand.

I’m not a soccer fan but I am a fan of this! ❤️❤️❤️

Subcontractors say they’re owed millions, face financial ruin, after helping build Obama Presidential Center | Michael Dorgan, Fox News The Obama Presidential Center was billed as a lasting legacy to former President Barack Obama, and its construction was touted as an ambitious model built with aggressive goals for minority-owned and local businesses. But now, some of the very subcontractors who helped build the 19.3-acre campus on Chicago’s South Side say they are facing financial ruin as they race to recover millions of dollars they claim remain unpaid ahead of the center's grand opening Friday. Overall construction costs were reported to be $830 million in 2021, and have likely climbed past the $1 billion mark. A Fox News Digital investigation identified multiple construction firms claiming losses ranging from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions. The allegations cut against one of the Center's defining goals: helping minority-owned businesses and local contractors grow through one of Chicago's highest-profile construction projects. Several of the complaints reviewed by Fox News Digital come from firms that were supposed to benefit from that mission. Among them is Adamson Plumbing, whose owner Mike Owen says is nearly $4 million in the red after years of work on the project. "That is a hole that no subcontractor, small business can survive," Owen said. Subcontractor owners interviewed by Fox News Digital described what they characterized as a chaotic work environment marked by repeated design changes, rework, scheduling disruptions, extensive oversight and years-long compensation disputes that still remain unresolved. Several also described what they viewed as a wall of silence surrounding the project, with some declining to speak publicly or requesting anonymity because of confidentiality agreements or fears of professional retaliation. The allegations emerge days after a Fox News Digital investigation reported that the Obama Foundation’s reserve fund — originally promoted as a $470 million financial safeguard intended to help protect taxpayers if the project encountered financial trouble — remains funded at roughly $1 million. Nearly $4 million in the red Standing outside the center on a gloomy Friday afternoon, Owen flipped through spreadsheets and financial records that he said documented millions of dollars in losses tied to the project. Owen said the project stretched on for years longer than anticipated, forcing his company to absorb millions of dollars in labor and overhead costs as work demands changed and expanded. He said the losses have drained the company's reserves, created uncertainty for employees and could ultimately force layoffs. Owen also said the years-long effort to recover what he believes is money owed has taken a significant toll on his mental health. "I haven't had eight hours or six hours sleep in over a year," Owen said. "I'm cooked emotionally. I feel like an aluminum can that's been thrown in front of a steamroller. We're crushed. And I have to fight for my company and for my people." As the center prepares for a star-studded pre-opening celebration on Thursday featuring performers including Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and John Legend, Owen said it has been difficult to watch the buildup and soft-opening events take shape over the past few weeks while his company struggles financially. "It was kind of hard seeing some local and national celebrities high-fiving and back-slapping here about the work that's been done," Owen said. "The backdrop of a coming celebration is kind of hard to swallow for me and for some of my peers at the moment." Owen, whose company is not minority-owned, said he decided to speak publicly only after months of failed efforts to recover losses he attributes to the project. "As for me and my company, I’m at the end of my rope and I see no other choice than to have to tell my story," Owen said. "This is not to embarrass anybody, but this is just to make sure that the truth gets told out here of what has happened to the companies that poured their heart and soul into getting this job complete and operational." He said unnecessary rework, delays and more than 100 change-order requests left his company absorbing millions of dollars in additional costs. The Obama Foundation, Obama’s private nonprofit organization that oversees the construction, told Fox News Digital that it paid Lakeside Alliance as the project’s construction manager and that Lakeside was responsible for hiring, managing and paying subcontractors working on the center. The Obama Foundation also said it has no outstanding disputed charges with Lakeside Alliance -- a joint venture involving multiple construction companies — and no contractural relationship with Lakeside's subcontractors. Lakeside Alliance said projects of this scale are inherently complex and that outstanding project matters often continue long after construction ends. The alliance said approximately 475 contractors worked on the project, generating significant opportunities for local tradespeople and businesses, and that it remains committed to working through outstanding matters to successfully close out the project. Neither Lakeside Alliance nor the Obama Foundation directly disputed allegations from some subcontractors that they incurred losses while working on the project. Fears of speaking out Advocates for Black subcontractor firms say those companies have been muzzled by a non-disclosure agreement and a reluctance to speak publicly because of the prestige surrounding the project in Obama’s adopted hometown, a Democratic stronghold, as well as concerns that speaking out could jeopardize payments. "They are scared to death about talking about it," Omar Shareef, the president of the African American Contractors Association, told Fox News Digital outside the center on a recent Saturday. The group advocates for Black-owned construction businesses and was founded by Shareef in 1989. "I've never seen this happen since I've been in business," Shareef said. "The building does look nice, but the fact doesn't matter that they're not paying our damn contractors." Fox News Digital independently interviewed several contractors who described similar concerns. Shareef said several Black subcontractor owners began privately approaching him about six months ago, claiming significant losses tied directly to the project. The concerns are particularly notable, he said, because the project was publicly promoted as an opportunity for minority-owned businesses and local workers. "The promise was that this project was going to uplift minority contractors and uplift the community," Shareef said. "What sense is celebrating Juneteenth if our Black contractors are not getting their money?" "Some of the people have put their mortgages up, they're going to lose their bonding... they are going to lose their relationship with their supplier as well as their banker." Shareef said that being in the red not only puts them at financial risk, but it also makes it harder for them to secure future projects. Shareef said his group plans on staging a protest outside the center on Thursday at 10 a.m. CT. "That's a bad signal to put out the fact that seven to eight to maybe 10 of our contractors in our community are going to be eliminated from doing business because of the debt that they incurred on this particular project," he said. "If they would have known it was a Trojan horse or a Pandora’s box, I don't know if they would have raced as much as they did to be a part of it." Fox News Digital has not independently corroborated the claim that these subcontractors will be forced out of business as a result of their work on the Obama Presidential Center project. Local companies on the brink One minority-owned subcontractor owner told Fox News Digital his company was up to $2.5 million in the red but declined to speak publicly, citing non-disclosure agreements and ongoing efforts to resolve disputes. The owner said the contract for the job was originally expected to last 24 months but ultimately stretched to about five years. Fox News Digital was unable to independently verify the company's claimed losses. Shareef said the owner told him the same story but the owner wouldn’t provide Shareef with documents due to the NDA. The largest publicly known dispute tied to the project involved II in One Concrete, a Black-owned firm that was part of the Concrete Collective — a joint venture that also included Trice Construction and W.E. O’Neil Construction -- that was responsible for major structural concrete work across the campus. The Concrete Collective filed claims exceeding $40 million, alleging it incurred substantial additional costs while working on the Center. The dispute later became entangled with a widely publicized racial racial discrimination lawsuit that brought national attention to diversity, equity and inclusion issues surrounding the project. McGee alleged the project’s structural engineer unfairly blamed his company for delays and cost overruns and that the criticism contributed to the rejection of Concrete Collective’s compensation claims. Defendants denied wrongdoing and disputed the allegations, arguing that portions of the concrete work had to be repaired or replaced because of cracking and other deficiencies. The owner of II in One Concrete declined to comment for this story. The case docket reflects that the case remains pending. Court records also show that at least two minority-owned subcontractors that worked on the project later sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to documents viewed by Fox News Digital. The filings do not establish that the Obama Presidential Center caused those financial difficulties. Glass Management Services, which supplied glass for the project, filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2024 and later told the bankruptcy court it was preparing litigation related to the Obama Presidential Center that it said could yield millions of dollars in damages. Fox News Digital is not aware that such litigation has been filed and the allegations have not been tested in court. Its owner declined to speak. Vision Painting & Decorating Services, another subcontractor that worked on the project, also filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2024 while listing the Obama Presidential Center contract in its bankruptcy schedules. Court filings reviewed by Fox News Digital do not state whether the company viewed the project as contributing to its financial difficulties. Fox News Digital was unable to get in touch with its owner. Another subcontractor owner who worked on the project, told Fox News Digital that the job caused significant financial strain on his company too and he described the experience as a "nightmare" and one of the most difficult projects he had encountered. He filed a mechanic’s lien for around $145,000, documents show, which was eventually paid to him, but he said his company was still down $200,000 for the project. A mechanic’s lien is a legal tool that companies file when they say they are owed money for construction work they completed. "Literally, I've been doing this for 35 years, and it was the worst-run job I've ever been on," the subcontractor owner said. He described repeated delays, extensive oversight and what he considered unnecessary construction requirements that forced contractors to spend additional time and money completing work. "The stuff that they made everybody do was so over-the-top ridiculous," the owner said. That view was echoed by Owen, who said his company was forced to redo portions of the Center’s stormwater system at a cost of nearly $900,000, expenses he believes should have been reimbursed. Owen said the work was unnecessary and pointed to correspondence reviewed by Fox News Digital in which Chicago’s chief plumbing inspector later wrote that Adamson’s original method complied with city code requirements. Owen also provided records showing his firm submitted more than 100 change-order requests — requests for additional compensation for work performed beyond the original scope of the project — during construction. He said the unusually high number reflected constant revisions, rework and delays. Owen said the company has been trying to recover money it says it is owed from parties involved and has not filed a lawsuit. Fox News Digital reviewed correspondence showing that Adamson’s attorney wrote to project representatives regarding the dispute. Meanwhile, two additional companies filed mechanics’ liens for around $400,000 and $75,000 respectively. Fox News Digital was unable to contact company officials and it is not known if the liens have been paid. Promise vs. reality The concerns are particularly notable because the Obama Presidential Center was built around one of the most ambitious efforts to increase participation by minority-owned businesses and workers from historically underserved communities. The Obama Foundation committed to awarding 50% of subcontracting packages to diverse vendors — nearly double Chicago’s goals for minority- and women-owned businesses — while requiring 35% of workforce hours to come from targeted South and West Side communities. Foundation officials said the effort was intended to serve as a model for future development projects and help create a pipeline of workers and contractors for projects across Chicago. The Obama Foundation estimated the Center would generate as many as 5,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs during and after construction. To deliver the project, the foundation hired Lakeside Alliance — a consortium led by Turner Construction and four Black-owned firms: UJAMAA Construction, Powers & Sons Construction, Brown & Momen and Safeway Construction. The partnership was frequently highlighted by the Foundation as evidence of the project’s commitment to minority-owned businesses and local economic opportunity. Beneath that alliance sat dozens of subcontractors responsible for carrying out the actual work, from plumbing and HVAC systems to painting, insulation, glass installation and concrete construction. Many of the complaints reviewed by Fox News Digital came from firms operating at that subcontractor level. The foundation said many subcontractors used the project to grow their businesses and noted that it implemented accelerated payment schedules, advance payments and a 15-day payment cycle to help support smaller firms. The foundation also said it worked with Lakeside Alliance to identify subcontractors in need of financial assistance and, when appropriate, provide additional support. A landmark project Whatever the outcome of those disputes, the center itself is nearing completion and preparing to open its doors to the public. For many Chicago residents, the project remains a source of pride and a long-awaited investment in the city’s South Side. For some of the subcontractors who helped build it, however, the approaching opening date represents a shrinking window to resolve payment disputes they say have lingered for years. The subcontractor tension was largely absent from the excitement surrounding the center over a recent weekend, when local residents touring the campus told Fox News Digital they were impressed by the sprawling development and its 220-foot-tall granite-clad museum tower. Many posed with a statue of the former president and first lady and stopped to read slogans displayed on the perimeter fence, including "Bring Change Home" and "A Home For Action." Several described the project as a fitting tribute to Obama, who first rose to prominence as a community organizer before becoming the nation’s first Black president. The center sits in historic Jackson Park, one of Chicago’s most iconic public parks. The Obama Foundation secured the site through a 99-year lease with the city for a one-time fee of just $10. Once open, the campus will serve as the headquarters of the Obama Foundation and host leadership programs, community initiatives and public events. It will feature a branch of the Chicago Public Library, a digitized presidential library -- though it will not be a traditional presidential library with physical papers -- an auditorium, an indoor sports facility, a playground and expansive green outdoor spaces. Despite the financial losses, Owen said he still takes pride in the finished product. "I've heard the criticisms of the design out here and maybe from an outsider's perspective, it might not be your cup of tea, but I can tell you the interior of this presidential center is quite beautiful and it's something to be proud of," Owen said. "And we are still proud to have been part of this job. We just wish it would have gone a different way financially." foxnews.com/politics/subco…

British tourist has a Second Amendment awakening.

This should also apply to robots.

David Sacks @DavidSacks

2 months ago

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right. The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will

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While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right. The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations. Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book. Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy. Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax. There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior. We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid). That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior. America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control. Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders

2 months ago

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America. This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.

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US-bound 787 Dreamliner collapses at airport gate, injuring several crew trib.al/JWyetrT

The visual persuasion is next level goo.

jay plemons @jayplemons

2 months ago

@EndWokeness Nithya wants them in front of the school.

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This computer game cuts risk of dementia by 25% - and it's free! | Will Stoddart, Daily Mail It may not sound much like medicine, but playing a computer game could cut your risk of dementia by 25 per cent, a new study found. The game, Double Decision, is designed to improve the brain’s processing speed – which controls how quickly we take in and react to information. This is a skill that tends to slow with age, but is also a key marker for cognitive decline that can indicate an increased risk of dementia. In the game, a vehicle flashes up on screen for a split second while a road sign appears at the edge, surrounded by distracting images. The player has to identify both. It was developed in the 1990s by US researchers to improve processing speed in older drivers: a 2010 study involving 908 drivers and published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found just ten hours of practice using Double Decision cut their crash rate in half over the next six years. In a landmark new study, almost 3,000 participants aged over 65 were split into three groups, each training a different brain skill – memory, reasoning or processing speed (i.e. playing Double Decision). All three groups trained for around an hour, twice a week, for five to six weeks. About half of each group then had four booster sessions 11 and 35 months later. Researchers analysed participants’ medical records 20 years after the brain training ended. The findings, recently published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, show those in the Double Decision group with booster sessions were 25 per cent less likely to have been diagnosed with dementia than any other group. Professor Marilyn Albert, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Johns Hopkins Medicine in the US, who led the study, says one reason the speed training worked so well is that the game got harder as a player improved. Images appeared and vanished faster – and more distracting signs were added, so the brain was always being stretched. Meanwhile, the groups doing memory tasks (involving remembering items on a list) and reasoning (interpreting patterns in order to make predictions of what comes next) did not adapt and get harder. D ouble Decision, says Professor Albert, helped boost ‘brain plasticity’ i.e. its ability to rewire itself in response to experience and learning. ‘This can strengthen existing connections between brain cells, create new ones and thicken myelin – the fatty coating around nerve fibres that helps messages travel quickly through the brain. ‘The result is faster, more accurate neural processing and strengthened brain networks that resist the effects of developing dementia,’ she says. Speed training specifically may also help preserve acetylcholine, a chemical messenger crucial for attention, learning and memory that drops sharply in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, she says. Previous research, published in JMIR Serious Games in 2025, using specialised brain scans found that speed-training boosted acetylcholine activity in areas responsible for memory and attention – reversing the equivalent of roughly a decade of age-related decline. However, other experts stress that these benefits are not necessarily unique to Double Decision (which is free on the BrainHQ app, available on App Store for iPhone or Google Play for Android). ‘Any form of activity that challenges the brain can help make it more resilient to dementia,’ says Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge. Indeed, she was involved in research, published in 2017, for a game called Wizard – where players have to recall where patterns appeared on screen, with the game becoming harder as they improve. It’s designed to target the hippocampus, the brain memory area that is hit earliest by Alzheimer’s. P atients with early cognitive decline (a precursor to Alzheimer’s) who played for eight hours over four weeks boosted their memory scores by around 40 per cent and made a third fewer errors, reported the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. Another brain-boosting game is Decoder, also developed by Professor Sahakian, which is said to train the brain’s frontal-parietal network – the area responsible for focus and problem-solving – by asking players to decode number sequences against the clock. A 2019 study of healthy young adults found those who played it for eight hours over a month showed significantly improved attention and concentration. And Lumosity, made up of dozens of short games targeting memory, attention and processing speed, was studied in 2015. Adults who used it for ten weeks improved more on standard cognitive tests than a control group doing crosswords. (However, in 2016, the firm behind Lumosity agreed to pay $2 million (£1.6 million) to settle US regulatory claims it had misled customers by suggesting its games could delay cognitive decline.) All of these brain-boosting games are available to download on App Store or Google Play for free, or require a small subscription. Gill Livingston, a professor of psychiatry of older people at University College London, says all brain-training games could be part of a broader approach to brain health, alongside hearing and eyesight checks, blood pressure control, exercise and social activity – but are not a standalone fix. ‘It is the same verdict for all of them – they should be used as part of a strategy for a healthier brain.’ As for the latest research, she notes that only 105 of the 512 originally assigned to play Double Decision completed the booster sessions – a relatively small number, which makes it hard to rule out that those who stuck with it were simply more health conscious which might also have lowered their dementia risk. dailymail.com/health/article…

🇻🇳 Vietnam built a 6-barrel anti-drone system that skips radar completely and uses old-school visual tracking instead. Cheap, loud, and made to delete drone swarms on a budget. Source: Indo-Pacific Defense Forum

A Major Paper Claiming AI Is Good for Students Just Got Retracted, Which Is Very Bad News for Advocates of AI in the Classroom | Frank Landymore, Futurism The jury’s still out on AI’s effectiveness as a learning tool, but research so far paints a grim picture. Using AI chatbots can impair critical thinking, result in lower brain activity during cognitive tasks, and has been linked to memory loss. There was one prominent study, however, that provided a glimmer of hope for AI advocates. Published in the journal Nature, it purported to show that using AI like OpenAI’s ChatGPT can have a “large positive impact on improving learning performance” and a “moderately positive impact on enhancing learning perception and fostering higher-order thinking.” The takeaway to the authors was clear: “ChatGPT should be actively integrated into different learning modes to enhance student learning, especially in problem-based learning,” they enthused. But nearly a year after the study was first published, it’s now been unceremoniously retracted. Springer Nature, the journal’s publisher, cited “concerns regarding discrepancies” for why it pulled the paper, in a retraction note published late last month, which “ultimately undermine the confidence the Editor can place in the validity of the analysis and resulting conclusions.” Needless to say, it’s a blow to advocates of AI in education. “The paper’s authors made some very attention-grabbing claims about the benefits of ChatGPT on learning outcomes,” Ben Williamson, a senior lecturer at the Centre for Research in Digital Education and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, told Ars Technica. “It was treated by many on social media as one of the first pieces of hard, gold standard evidence that ChatGPT, and generative AI more broadly, benefits learners.” The paper was not an experimental study, but a meta analysis that synthesized the findings of 51 existing studies on the subject, comparing the cognitive effects of participants who used ChatGPT and those that didn’t. This, as many commentators and experts have noted, already put the study on shaky ground, since ChatGPT was still a novel phenomenon and scientists were only just beginning to research its cognitive effects. “It is not feasible that dozens of high-quality studies about ChatGPT and learning performance could have been conducted, reviewed, and published in that time,” Williamson told Ars. “In some cases it appears it was synthesizing very poor quality studies, or mixing together findings from studies that simply cannot be accurately compared due to very different methods, populations, and samples,” he added. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.” The retraction comes as the AI industry continues to make a heavy push into the classroom. Companies like OpenAI have partnered with colleges and schools to provide students with free access to their AI tools, and even versions of their chatbots that are tailor-made for specific schools. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft have poured millions into teachers unions to train them how to use AI models. Ohio State University now requires all students in every major to enroll in an “AI fluency” course. That’s despite widespread complaints from teachers about AI being used for rampant cheating, and pushback from parents who are concerned about letting their children be unwitting test subjects in a large scale AI experiment. Williamson called the retracted study “hugely frustrating for those of us trying hard to make sense of what AI means for learning, teaching, and education more generally.” “We have had several years of hype about AI in education, but what we have really needed is high-quality research that can actually show us what kinds of impacts AI is having in classrooms and learning practices,” he told Ars. This isn’t Springer Nature’s first AI-related controversy. Last year, it began approaching study authors and offering to sell them AI-generated “Media Kits” that that summarized their papers. Like many academic journals, it’s also struggled to weed out shoddy AI-generated content. futurism.com/artificial-int…

A Generation of Kids Thinks They Have No Future. Science Just Admitted Why. | Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That? For nearly two decades, a single climate model scenario haunted virtually every apocalyptic headline you read about our planet’s future. Vanishing coastlines, catastrophic droughts, mass extinctions, cities underwater — almost all of it was built on a scenario called RCP 8.5. And now, in a development that climate scientist Roger Pielke Jr. is calling the “most significant development in climate research in decades,” the international committee responsible for producing the official scenarios that feed into IPCC climate assessments has formally eliminated RCP 8.5 — and its successor SSP5-8.5 — from the new framework, classifying them as implausible. Let that sink in for a moment. Implausible. That’s a weasel word for Impossible. That’s the word the scientists themselves are now using to describe the scenario that dominated two full IPCC assessment cycles, generated tens of thousands of research papers, and provided the raw material for an estimated hundreds of thousands of media stories that told the public — and their children — that the world as we know it was coming to an end. It’s a good day for science. It’s a terrible indictment of what was done in science’s name. What Was RCP 8.5, Anyway? RCP stands for Representative Concentration Pathway. It was one of a family of scenarios developed to give climate modelers a range of possible futures to work with, from aggressive decarbonization at the low end to a worst-case ‘burn everything’ trajectory at the high end. That high end was RCP 8.5 — a scenario requiring atmospheric CO₂ concentrations exceeding 1,000 parts per million by 2100, roughly two and a half times today’s levels. A helpful technical overview of how the scenario was constructed can be found at Carbon Brief, who by the way, swallowed that forecast hook, line, and sinker. To get there, RCP 8.5 assumed a world that would massively and continuously expand coal consumption for the rest of the century, with coal use eventually exceeding the planet’s estimated recoverable reserves. It assumed population growth far above any credible demographic projection, minimal technological progress, and essentially no energy transition whatsoever. It described a world that, even at its creation, existed more in the realm of dystopian fiction than serious energy analysis. Researchers knew this early on. As far back as 2017, serious academic work was questioning the scenario’s foundations. By 2020, climate scientists Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters published a widely-read commentary warning that RCP 8.5 was ‘misleading’ as a business-as-usual scenario and that it ‘becomes increasingly implausible with every passing year.’ That paper has been cited over 1,300 times. But the machine kept running anyway. The Scale of the Damage: By the Numbers Here is what makes this moment so extraordinary — and so damning. According to data compiled by Roger Pielke Jr. using Google Scholar, between 2018 and 2021 alone, approximately 17,000 academic papers were published using RCP 8.5. Another 16,900 followed in the subsequent three-year period — meaning the usage of the scenario barely slowed even as its flaws became widely known inside the scientific community. Those academic papers did not stay in journals. Science “journalism” amplified them. Each alarming study generated news articles, television segments, radio reports, social media posts, and classroom curricula. Conservative estimates suggest that the total number of media articles worldwide referencing RCP 8.5 projections — directly or through the studies that used it — runs into the hundreds of thousands, possibly approaching a million pieces of content over the scenario’s two-decade lifespan. Every one of them carried some version of the same message: this is where we are headed. Pielke Jr. put it plainly: “Tens of thousands of research papers have been — and continue to be — published using these scenarios, a similar number of media headlines have amplified their findings, and governments and international organizations have built these implausible scenarios into policy and regulation. We now know that all of this is built on a foundation of sand.” A foundation of sand. That is not a skeptic talking. That is one of the most widely cited climate researchers in the world — writing at The American Enterprise Institute — describing what happened on the scientific establishment’s watch. The policy consequences of that foundation of sand cannot be overstated. RCP 8.5 provided the scientific cover for policies that, by any honest description, amount to government seizure of the energy economy — the kind of top-down control over production, consumption, and individual choice that previous generations would have recognized as socialism by another name. Mandated vehicle eliminations, forced retirement of power plants, prohibitions on gas appliances, trillion-dollar ‘transition’ spending programs — all of it justified, ultimately, by impact studies running a scenario the scientific community has now declared impossible. A Generation Robbed of Hope The numbers about research papers and media articles are significant. But the damage I find most troubling — the damage that doesn’t show up in a policy document or a retracted study — is what this scenario did to children. For the past fifteen to twenty years, millions of schoolchildren around the world have been educated in classrooms where RCP 8.5 was not presented as a worst-case outlier or a modeling exercise. It was presented as the future. Teachers showed its projections. Textbooks cited its outcomes. Documentary films dramatized its consequences. And the children listening absorbed a message that no child should be handed as established fact: the world is ending, and there may be nothing anyone can do. The psychological evidence for the resulting damage is now substantial. A landmark global survey published in the Lancet Planetary Health in 2021, covering 10,000 young people aged 16 to 25 across ten countries, found that 59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45% said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily life and functioning. Three-quarters said they believe the future is frightening. More than half reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, or guilty about climate change on a regular basis. A separate Australian survey of children aged 10 to 14 found that 44% worried about the future impact of climate change,and that one in four children worried that the world would end before they got older. One in four. These are elementary-school children carrying an existential fear in their backpacks. Research in East London found that approximately half of primary school-aged children were worried about global warming. A 2024 CBS News report quoted a psychology professor at Suffolk University who described how children struggling with climate anxiety often perceive that they have no future or that humanity is simply doomed. Young people are increasingly telling researchers that they believe their lives will be worse than their parents’ lives; not because of economic conditions, but because of the planet they believe they’ve inherited. This is eco-anxiety. It is real, it is measurable, and it has been quietly building in our children for years while adults argued about climate policy. And a very significant portion of it was seeded not by the observed climate record, but by projections derived from a scenario that the scientific establishment has now officially declared to be implausible. Let that land where it should. Children were frightened, genuinely, measurably, psychologically harmed, by projections that the scientists who built the framework now say described an impossible future. The curriculum didn’t distinguish between a worst-case modeling exercise and a forecast. The media didn’t either. And so a generation of young people grew up believing they had been handed a dying world. The Broader Public: A Steady Diet of ‘Climate Porn’ The harm to children is acute, but the harm to the general public has been broader and subtler. Pielke Jr. coined the phrase ‘climate porn’ to describe the genre of alarming content that RCP 8.5 reliably generated — headlines about regions becoming uninhabitable, species wiped out by the millions, agricultural systems collapsing, cities swallowed by the sea. These stories were not fabrications. They were based on real published research. But they were research that had loaded an extreme, implausible scenario into a model and reported the output as though it described something likely. The result was that the public’s mental map of the future became systematically distorted. Survey after survey showed that ordinary citizens consistently overestimated the speed and severity of projected climate impacts. They had been told, repeatedly and authoritatively, that the worst-case scenario was the expected case. Many adjusted their life expectations accordingly — choices about where to live, whether to have children, how to invest, what to teach their own kids — all shaped in part by projections that rested on a foundation of sand. Meanwhile, as Pielke Jr. has also documented, the actual trends in weather-related economic losses — adjusted for growth in wealth and exposure — have not been spiraling upward the way RCP 8.5-based projections suggested they would. People who learned that were often shocked, because the narrative they’d been fed for twenty years pointed in exactly the opposite direction. Give Credit Where It’s Due — Then Ask the Hard Questions Scientists who pushed back on RCP 8.5 deserve real credit. Hausfather, Peters, Pielke Jr., Justin Ritchie, and others challenged the dominant scenario at professional cost. Questioning the worst-case benchmark was not a popular position in climate science circles, and some of these researchers faced significant friction for saying what needed to be said. They were right, and they persevered. Science is self-correcting. In this case, after nine years of institutional resistance, the correction has arrived. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project — CMIP — working under the World Climate Research Programme, has published a new generation of scenarios for IPCC AR7. RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5 are gone. The new high-end scenario sits roughly 0.9°C cooler by 2100 than its predecessor. The new medium scenario, which most closely represents the actual trajectory of the world under current policies, overlaps with the International Energy Agency’s baseline projection and implies roughly 2.5°C of warming by late century — a meaningful figure that warrants serious attention, but a world away from the five-plus degrees that generated most of the apocalyptic headlines of the past two decades. But self-correction this slow, this reluctant, and this consequential demands more than a quiet update to a scenario framework. It demands a reckoning. The institutions that elevated RCP 8.5 to the center of two IPCC assessment cycles need to seriously examine how it got there and why it stayed so long after its flaws were documented. The journals that published thousands of studies using it without requiring disclosure that they were modeling an implausible extreme need to examine their standards. The media outlets that turned those studies into scare headlines without explaining the scenario’s basis need to reckon with their role. And the educators who incorporated RCP 8.5-derived projections into school curricula as though they were forecasts rather than worst-case modeling exercises owe the children in those classrooms something — at minimum, a correction. What Comes Next None of this means the climate debate is over, or that warming is not a legitimate subject of concern and policy attention. The new CMIP7 medium scenario still projects meaningful warming under a business-as-usual trajectory. That warrants serious scientific work and honest public discussion. What is over, or should be, is the practice of generating research and headlines based on the most extreme, least plausible scenario available and presenting it to the public, and to schoolchildren, as the expected future. That practice was misleading when it started. It was known to be misleading by at least 2017. It continued for years afterward. And now the very committee responsible for producing these scenarios has officially confirmed what critics, including me, had been saying all along. RCP 8.5 has been given its official death certificate. The generation of children who grew up in its shadow, who were told the world was ending before they’d turn thirty, who carry that weight every day — they deserve to know the truth. The scenario that haunted them was always a worst-case fiction. The future they have been handed is not as dark as they were led to believe. That message is long overdue. Let’s make sure it reaches them. wattsupwiththat.com/2026/05/09/a-g…

This Needs to Be Said

ONCE IN A BLUE MOON! 🌕💙 We have not one, but *two* full moons this month. The first is TONIGHT called the "Flower Moon" and the other on May 31st is a "Blue Moon"...because it's the 2nd full moon of the month. Although it won't actually turn blue, that one will be what's called a "micromoon", which will be the most distant full moon of 2026 and visually smallest as a result. Get your cameras ready!

Jonny Quest was unique in many ways, and it's truly one of a kind in Saturday morning TV. It was twice the budget of The Flintstones, and every other cartoon, full orchestra, characters died violently, the art was more nuanced. Sponsors hated it, and it lost money.

Scott Adams on the SPLC: “So you can’t trust anybody who gets paid by the amount of hate they identify…they’re gonna find some hate.” Boy is this man missed.

🚨 BREAKING… This is not propaganda… this is operational reality. U.S. Navy warships just transited the Strait of Hormuz… openly… without coordinating with Iran. Let that sink in. This is the FIRST confirmed freedom-of-navigation transit through the strait since the conflict began. No permission. No acknowledgment of Iranian control. No compromise. Just movement… on America’s terms. Here’s what that means… Iran mined the waterway… and now can’t even clear what they deployed. Their own strategy just choked their access and exposed their limitations. Meanwhile… the U.S. steps in, begins clearing lanes, and reasserts control over one of the most critical chokepoints on Earth. That’s not symbolism… that’s dominance. And timing matters… This happens days after a fragile ceasefire… right as diplomatic talks are being staged. This is pressure… not negotiation from weakness. Message received globally: The Strait of Hormuz is not Iran’s to control. And when global trade is threatened… the U.S. Navy answers. This is what enforcement looks like in real time. #SilentMajoritySpeaks #AStoneGroove

Great father/daughter bonding moment.

aka @akafaceUS

4 months ago

A Navy SEAL brought his daughter along for Take Your Daughter to Work Day, giving her a glimpse into his unique profession.

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