Monthly Archives: July 2026

Worker in protective gear pouring molten metal into mold in foundry

The Struggle to Catch Up with the Great Industrial Superpower-It’s Real

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In 2026, the U.S. Army is leasing land on bases across the country to companies that will build and operate critical mineral processing plants. The Army awarded long-term leases to mining and extraction companies Titan Mining Corporation, EnergyX, Ioneer and REalloys for processing and refining critical minerals that are essential to American defense, but the production of which China dominates.

The military has been seeking ways to make better use of its 15 million acres of property, including opening them up to data center construction…The critical minerals processing plants will be located on Army depots that are already heavy industrial sites…EnergyX has already acquired more than 50,000 acres of mineral rights for lithium deposits near the Red River Army Depot on the border between Texas and Arkansas….“It’s a pretty cool situation, because the lithium that can go into those batteries can come from right underneath the ground in which they stand,” said Teague Egan, the founder and CEO of EnergyX.

China controls around 90% of the processing of many rare-earth elements…[As a result] the margins [of processing and refining] critical minerals are so low and the startup costs for these plants, without government subsidies, are so high that they often don’t make financial sense. “The reason it works in China is because it is the global industrial superpower,” according to Alvin Camba, scientist at the defense company Lyvi.

Excerpt from Heather Somerville et al., Army Will Lease Land on Bases for Critical Mineral Production, June 25, 2026

The Insatiable Appetite for USA Killer Drones

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The U.S. market for first-person-view drones (FPVs) has long been dominated by Chinese models made by SZ DJI Technology, which were recently banned by a Federal Communications Commission order. American companies have struggled to build FPVs in large numbers and cheaply enough so the military can afford to lose them in attacks. Neros, as US start-up, might have cracked the code on both fronts. The company said it is now building 1,200 drones a week at its facility in Southern California and has a plan to reach one million drones a year by 2028. Neros’s drones, called Archer, cost about $2,000 each and about $5,000 once the warhead and related equipment are added. This makes Archer potentially the only U.S. drone that has price parity with the DJI models used in the the Ukraine war and by Iranian-backed militias against U.S. assets in the Middle East. The U.S. Army contract with Neros, if executed at or near its full $500 million, would be the service’s largest-ever contract for small FPV drones.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in 2025 announced Drone Dominance, a $1.1 billion initiative to amass around 300,000 low-cost attack drones by 2026. He gave more authority to lower-ranked military officials to buy the drones they want and called for every squad to have low-cost expendable drones by 2026.

Heather SomervilleStartup Mass-Producing Cheap Killer Drones Wins $500 Million Army Contract, WSJ, July 14, 2026

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Close-up of cracked and peeling black, yellow, and brown paint on wood surface

Who Knew We Painted with PFAS?

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According to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), PFAS are widely used, long lasting chemicals, components of which break down very slowly over time. Because of their widespread use and their persistence in the environment, many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world and are present at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment. PFAS are found in water, air, fish, and soil at locations across the nation and the globe. Scientific studies have shown that exposure to some PFAS in the environment may be linked to harmful health effects in humans and animals.

In 2026, Daqian Jiang and his colleagues has created a model that has quantified PFAS retention and emissions associated with paints in the US starting from 2000 with projections up to 2060…Results revealed that in 2020, around 565 tonnes of PFAS were stored in in-use paint in the US…. By 2060, the model predicted that around 486 tonnes of these retained PFAS would accumulate in landfill sites, emitting 25 times more PFAS into the environment than in 2020, with hotspots driven by demolition activity and waste routing. ‘So even if PFAS use in paints were reduced or phased out today, substantial future emissions could still occur from the large quantities already present in existing buildings.’

Excerpt from James Urquhar, Paint in buildings a huge reservoir of PFAS waiting to enter the environment, Chemistry World, June 30, 2026

Can Bosses Fight Back Hordes of Replaceables?

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In 2026, mounting opposition to AI has given rise to a surge of violent rhetoric, threats against people and property, and a serious attempt at harm. The phenomenon has executives at tech companies large and small reconsidering their personal-security arrangements and how they talk about their products to a public that is increasingly wary of the technology and the societal changes it is ushering in…n May 2026, Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht was spotted in Seattle. Meta Platforms had just announced around 1,400 layoffs, in the midst of an AI pivot, in Washington state. Online commenters said they wished someone would light it ablaze, blow it up or sink it. Meta declined to comment…Americans concerned about AI outnumber those who aren’t by more than a 4 to 1 margin, according to a March survey of about 1,400 U.S. adults by Quinnipiac University.

Bonnie Kate Wolf, 34 years old, a Pinterest designer, was laid off as the company embraced AI in operations. Before her accounts were deactivated, she posted to an office Slack channel: “PLS DO NOT FORGET ALL OF US WHO ARE BEING LEFT BEHIND AND REPLACED BY THE AI. RESIST.” Hundreds responded with emojis of hearts or raised fists…Wolf, of Seattle, said it seems executives accept that job loss is reasonable because the potential to make money with AI is so great. “That’s why people are setting warehouses on fire,” she said. “You can’t go back to serfdom. It really feels like the people in power want to be kings. Historically, that doesn’t work out for kings.”

Excerpt from Lindsay Ellis et al, The AI Backlash Has Tech Executives Fearing for Their Lives, WSJ, July 15, 2026

Libraries Are Not Dead Yet: The Anti-AI Movement

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A new priesthood has emerged in Silicon Valley. Its members are extraordinarily intelligent, fabulously wealthy and—increasingly—ideologically possessed. They speak of extinction and salvation. Of a coming Singularity that will transform human existence beyond recognition. Of the urgent need to build Artificial General Intelligence before the wrong people do, or to prevent it from being built before the right safeguards are in place. Of the existential risk of machines that will either save humanity or destroy it…

The question is not who can browse the web. It is who controls what the Ai is trained to say, who shapes the models, who decides which truths get amplified and which get marginalized and who captures the economic and political power that flows from those decisions. A handful of companies and their investors hold that power. The transformations they are engineering will touch every human being; the decisions about how to engineer them will be made by very few. That asymmetry is not incidental. It is structural…

We are the only animal whose survival depends not just on instinct but on an elaborate, invisible infrastructure of trust. Every day, each of us outsources vast portions of our knowledge about the world to other people, other institutions, other authorities. The question has never been whether to believe. It has always been: What deserves to be believed?

For centuries, Western civilization built an architecture to answer that question. We called it the library. Whatever the discipline—medicine, law, astronomy, theology—knowledge had to be sought. You went looking for it. You chose your sources, compared one account against another, checked who stood behind each claim. The library was not merely storage. It was a system for making the origins of knowledge visible and therefore contestable. It let you ask: By what right does this claim my belief?.

Today with AI, a screen that tells you things. A voice that sounds like it knows. How do you evaluate a source that cannot show its work?–a process so opaque that even its creators cannot fully explain why it said what it said. We have traded the library for an oracle. And we have done it almost without noticing…

Excerpt from Paolo Benanti, What the Tech Gods Should Learn From the Church, WSJ, May 29, 2026