A systems-thinking essay arguing that most optimization quietly trades away buffers, slack, and resilience to make present metrics look better. It reframes efficiency as borrowing stability from the future, and shows how education, workforce, infrastructure, markets, and hardware all get optimized into fragility.

An interpretable battery health engine that detects hidden points of no return instead of just predicting health %. It models stress, buffer, and degradation intensity, discovers Stable/Drifting/Irreversible regimes via GMM, and learns simple Decision Tree thresholds, with a Streamlit app for diagnostics and what-if scenarios.