Morning - a few subjects I found interesting this past week which have the potential of effecting our future.

A concerning trend showing up in the segment of higher education US has traditionally selected high level bureaucrats and industry leaders.

Gaming The System: Huge Proportion Of 'Elite' University Students Claiming Disabilities ZeroHedge Dec 11, 2025

We're not talking about people in wheelchairs, but rather students snagging diagnoses for ADHD, anxiety and depression from indulgent doctors.
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The numbers are jarring. Harvard and Brown's undergraduate student body is 20% "disabled." Amherst has hit 34%, while Stanford's disability rate is a head-shaking 38%. At one unidentified law school, 45% of students have been awarded academic accommodations. In stark contrast, only 3 to 4% of students at public two-year colleges get disability accommodations.
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Plenty of these students are likely motivated by a cut-throat desire to gain advantage. However, equally bad, it's possible a majority of these students sincerely consider themselves disabled. "Over the past few years, there's been a rising push to see mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions as not just a medical fact, but an identity marker," writes Reason's Camp, who notes that social media and other factors foster a rush to attribute common human fallibilities as some kind of medical condition. "The result is a deeply distorted view of 'normal,'" says Camp. "If ever struggling to focus or experiencing boredom is a sign you have ADHD, the implication is that a 'normal,' nondisabled person has essentially no problems."

The disability rush isn't limited to elite college campuses. High school students are using disability designations to score extra time on SAT and ACT tests.

Lost generational competence?

'We have lost a lot of time.' Former NASA chief says US needs to start over with moon landing plans or risk losing to China Space Dec 5, 2025

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin pulled no punches about where he sees America's current Artemis moon landing program in Congressional testimony today.
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And according to Griffin and the witnesses at the hearing, that dominance might soon cede to China due to policy decisions that continue to plague the Artemis program, NASA's current planned campaign of moon missions. "Sticking to a plan is important when the plan makes sense. China is sticking to a plan that makes sense. It looks a lot, in fact, like what the United States did for Apollo," Griffin said. "We have stuck to a plan that does not make sense."

Identified one of the major concerns.

NASA, meanwhile, has been in a period of turmoil that has seen key science facilities lose capabilities, many flagship science missions put at risk of cancellation due to budget cuts, and thousands of personnel lost due to federal workforce reductions.

But whether or not the United States returns to the moon before China, former NASA chief Griffin said that the real risk is "failing to commit to what winning really means in the long run." Many U.S. government officials have stressed that whichever nation is able to establish a sustained presence on the moon first will have the privilege of establishing norms for how other nations can access and use lunar resources. If China manages to get a foothold on the moon ahead of the United States, it may be able to dictate who uses certain areas of the moon going forward, and how.

Thinking outside the box. Decentralizing location and scale of super computers.

hina activates 1,240-mile-wide ‘giant computer’, offers 98% efficiency of single data centre Interesting Engineering Dec 10, 2025

Known as the Future Network Test Facility (FNTF), the system began operations on December 3. The large-scale, distributed AI-computing network links data centres spread across roughly 1,243-mile using a high-speed optical network, allowing them to operate almost like a single supercomputer.
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Project leaders report that the network achieves around 98 percent of the efficiency of a unified data-centre cluster, enabling it to support demanding workloads such as training large AI models, real-time industrial applications, and telemedicine.
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The step also fits into China’s broader strategy to build a nationwide computing-power platform, complementing other efforts to deploy data centres in energy-rich regions and invest in emerging technologies like photonic and quantum-enhanced chips. While the system promises significant advantages, its long-term performance under sustained load, energy demands, and security considerations will determine how transformative it ultimately becomes

The system is reportedly positioned to serve the national ‘East Data West Computing’ project.

Follow-up on last weeks discussion of poverty level and household costs.

Affordability Crisis: Challenging The Poverty LineZeroHedge Dec 11, 2025

Hedonics is a statistical method used by the BLS in the CPI report to distinguish pure price changes from changes in product quality and how those changes impact value.

For example, if a new laptop offers twice the performance at the same sticker price as an old one, hedonics treats that as a quality improvement and will record an effective price decline. Supporters say it prevents overstating inflation as products improve. In contrast, critics argue that it can understate inflation and relies on modeling choices that are impossible to validate.
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Green states that food prices, not hedonics, are the only primary factors used to compute the CPI for food. In his calculations, the rate of inflation across many other CPI items greatly exceeded the CPI’s reported rate, in part due to faulty hedonics.