⚡️The American university system is the largest wealth transfer from the young to the old in human history and nobody frames it that way because the people who benefit from it control the framing. Eighteen year olds who can’t legally buy a beer are signing six figure debt obligations to institutions that face zero accountability for outcomes. The loan is non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. The university gets paid regardless of whether the student gets a job. The incentive structure is pure extraction. Get them in. Get the money. What happens after is their problem. 43% underemployment isn’t a failure of the students. These kids did exactly what they were told. Study hard. Get good grades. Go to college. Get the degree. They followed the script perfectly and the script was a lie. Not a lie that anyone intended maliciously at first. But a lie that became profitable enough that nobody corrected it even after the data made it obvious. The people who designed this system, the administrators pulling $500k salaries, the tenured professors teaching subjects with zero market application, the loan servicers collecting interest on degrees in fields that haven’t produced a living wage in twenty years. None of them are underemployed. They’re doing fine. The 43% is subsidizing their comfort. Now add AI. The entry level professional jobs that justified the debt are the first ones being compressed. Not blue collar work. Not trades. The exact white collar knowledge work positions that the degree was supposed to unlock. Legal research. Financial analysis. Consulting grunt work. Content production. The 43% who are already underemployed are about to be joined by a significant chunk of the 57% who thought they made it. The people who will come through this are the ones who figured out early that the credential was a trap. The ones who built skills instead of collecting letters after their name. The ones who found asymmetric paths. The ones who created value directly instead of waiting for an institution to certify them as valuable. The university system had a real function once. It produced genuine education and genuine opportunity. That function has been hollowed out by decades of misaligned incentives until what remains is mostly a financing operation that happens to have classrooms attached. And 43% of its recent customers just confirmed with their own lives that the product doesn’t work.

If you're under 53 years old, you have never once been alive while a human was farther than 250 miles from Earth. Tonight, four astronauts are heading 252,000 miles out. That's a thousand times farther than any person has gone in your lifetime. The 250-mile ceiling is where the International Space Station floats. Every astronaut since December 1972 has been stuck in that zone. Spacewalks, science experiments, cool photos from orbit, sure. But nobody left the neighborhood. The last crew to go farther was Apollo 17. December 1972. Nixon was president. The internet didn't exist. Cell phones were 11 years away. The youngest member of that crew is now 90 years old. The farthest any human has ever been from Earth is 248,655 miles. The Apollo 13 crew set that number in 1970, and they didn't mean to. Their oxygen tank blew up, and the emergency route home took them farther out than anyone before or since. Tonight's crew will break that record on purpose. And the crew itself. Victor Glover becomes the first Black astronaut to leave Earth's neighborhood. Christina Koch becomes the first woman. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian fighter pilot, becomes the first non-American to do so. When they come home, they'll slam into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph, faster than any human has ever traveled. The Moon's south pole has ice. Water ice, sitting in craters so deep that sunlight hasn't hit them in billions of years. A 2024 NASA study found way more of it than anyone expected. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which gives you rocket fuel, breathable air, and drinking water, all made on the Moon instead of hauled up from Earth. George Sowers at Colorado School of Mines calculated that Moon-made fuel could shave $12 billion off a single trip to Mars. The Moon is a gas station on the road to Mars. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week a $20 billion plan to build a permanent base at the South Pole over the next seven years, with landings every six months. China is developing its own lunar lander and spacesuit, aiming for a crewed landing by 2030. The Artemis program has burned through $93 billion so far, and the first actual surface landing is penciled in for 2028. There's a real question of who gets there first this time around. Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon in December 1972 as part of Apollo 17. He's 90. Asked about it this week, he sounded pretty relaxed. "Mars is attainable," he said. "We're humans. That's what we've always done."