ks like it's time.

All right. Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. And if you'd like to take your experience up to levels that I don't even think you can understand, all you need for that is a mug or a glass or a tankard or a chalice or a can or a jug or a flask or vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Enjoy me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip and it's going to happen right now. Go.

Oh that was pretty good I got to admit. Excellent sip.

All right well we don't know what's going to happen today in this show because I'm using 5G off my phone to livestream. So far so good. I've got a solid three bars on my phone.

If you've ever tried to get anything repaired at your house lately you've probably run into what could be called the incompetence crisis. So I've got Xfinity internet service which goes out every few minutes and my account don't know why. I've had my equipment guy check all of the equipment and isolate it. Doesn't seem to be on my end. Xfinity keeps sending me messages to say oh the problem, there's a problem on our end, can we send a tech, followed by a message that says there's no problem on our end, do you want to cancel the tech, followed by the tech will be there soon, followed by there's no problem if you want to cancel it because there's nothing wrong with our network, followed by the tech arriving and saying oh there's plenty wrong with this network, nothing wrong with your side, but I'll change this wire.

So he changes a wiring somewhere in the external part of my home from the street to the house and then he says it's all working now. And then I say how do you know it's working? Well you can check for yourself it's working. And then I said you know the problem is intermittent outages right? So showing me that it's working is not actually showing me that it's working because the moment you drive away it's going to quit. Oh but I changed the thing that was the problem so you can see it's working. I told you I isolated the problem and fixed it so you're good to go.

So as he was driving away the internet failed completely and continues to be worse than it was when he showed up. So if you've worked with any technology companies you are aware of what happens next. Do I have to tell you what happens next? Easy. I will contact them. They'll say the problem must be with your internal wiring that we can't service or possibly your equipment. I'll call my equipment guy and my inside wiring guy and they'll say I don't see any problem it's got to be in the network.

And then you're going to say but why don't you look at Starlink? Well I have. It's a little too slow for my needs and I don't have any other terrestrial internet services that are fast enough so I can't get the good stuff anywhere else. So I'm going to use my usual technique which is I'm going to tweet Xfinity until it's their highest priority. That's right. Every single day I say Xfinity is failing and their internet is not working until they decide it's a high enough priority to get it fixed.

Now I don't know what else to do. I mean I could call them every day and have them tell me they can't find the problem which basically has been going on for years now. Do you think this is isolated to Xfinity? No. As I've said before I've put in maybe five different home theater setups you know with complicated AV. It's never worked once. Probably five different companies. I give up. And it never gets it never works even the moment they drive away every time. So no surprise.

Anyway enough about me. There's a new indication that according to Nature, a science journal, 10,000 studies were retracted in 2023. It's a new record. 10,000 studies that passed peer review done by actual scientists got retracted because they were not apparently credible. It's a new record.

So what do you make of that? Does that tell you that things are worse than ever? No. If there's one thing I want to teach you this year is that if somebody tells you a number without a percentage or a percentage without a number it's propaganda or it's BS or it's bad work.

So when they say that 10,000 studies were retracted and it's a new record is that bad? You don't know unless you know the percentage. If 10,000 is 1% of all the studies even if it was bigger than the year before because let's say there were just more studies that year that wouldn't be bad. 1% you'd think that was pretty good. If it's 75% that's really really bad.

So even though this is one of those stories that seems to agree with my preconceived notions that there's a lot of bad studies, hearing the number without the ratio and not knowing if that's a big or a small percentage is useless.

How many of you, this is just a little check for you, how many of you knew before I told you that when I said there are 10,000 retractions and it's a new record, how many of you immediately said that's not actually telling me anything? How many of you knew that the moment you heard it? Because that's what you should be doing. I'm trying to get you to the point that the moment you hear the raw number without the percentage or the percentage without the raw number you can't believe anything else that happens after that. Yeah so be alert.

There's also a study. Some researchers said that the after-school activities for kids, you know they're all packed up with tutoring and sports and music and clubs and stuff like that, they say that it's not really helping them because the kids are so basically filled with stuff all day that that last hour of stuff is not really helping them. They're basically full by the time they get done with school. Their heads are full.

Now did they need to do some research on this or could they have saved some money and just asked me? Because asking me would have gotten you the same result. Scott do you think that schools are organized in a way that's good for the children, good for their minds and their development and good for the families? I would say no. It seems to be organized for the opposite. School and all the activities appear to be organized to destroy family life and drive you into divorce.

Now I'm not saying that they planned it that way but there's a famous, well I guess it's getting more famous, saying that says that if a system gives you the same output time after time after time and nobody changes it that the output is the intention. You can't say well we didn't intend it to work out that way if year after year after year you keep doing the same thing and you know what you're getting.

Anybody who is a parent with the exception of people who are maybe parents for the top 2%, if you're a top two you could probably handle all this stuff. Yeah I got a plus. I got music. Got it all. I'm in this sport too. But for 98% of kids they just get overwhelmed and they don't have any family time. There's no family dinner because everybody's driving everybody around. The parents' lives are a living hell. When they get done with their own work they're just driving, driving, sitting, watching, driving and it basically just destroys all quality of life for no benefit whatsoever.

I knew that. How many of you knew that? How many of you were com