Just an aside, this question reminded me of an interview I watched with a former CIA agent speaking about how when he worked overseas he varied his routine randomly every day. Woke up, left the house at different times, drove different routes to work, etc to avoid being targeted. He had a colleague from a different nation who regularly accused him of being paranoid. Then his colleague got assassinated.

I can see from your comment you want to better understand queer people and feel that supporting them as equals is the right thing to do. Your lack of insight into the historical and ongoing persecution your in-group has had toward this minority is a issue and will limit your ability to support queer people at this time.

Christianity as a whole has spent literally centuries persecuting sexual minorities and reinforcing the belief that people who are not cisgendered and heteronormative are living inherently sinful lives and are morally bankrupt people who should be ostracized from society or worse. People have been imprisoned, castrated, and murdered by state and state-like actors because of Christianity’s beliefs. People have spent their lives hiding who they love because they would literally be beaten by their neighbors, had their careers ruined, or run out of town if it came to light they were homosexual.

Has this gotten better in recent years? Mostly

Does this mean people who are Christian inherently hold this belief or are themselves bad people? No.

But your lack of introspection and/or knowledge of the historical context for which queer people have distrust of Christians as a whole is evidence that you don’t really understand the problem.

Your comment that you feel like you’re being looked down upon by people is also interesting. Many people now look back upon the centuries by which Christians sought to impose their belief system on others often through state-imposed violence, and how some groups continue to do so, as barbaric and directly confrontational to modern concepts of freedom and liberty. But Christianity is still the most populous religion in the world, and conservative Christian ideals are seeing large political victories in many western counties over the last 1-2 decades, often directly at the expense of the rights of women and minorities. This argues that you really aren’t the persecuted minority that is sometimes brought up in modern propaganda such as the laughable concept of the “War on Christmas”.

If you want to support queer people, I think that’s great. If your idea of support is “I don’t care what they do as long as it’s not forced on me” you should recognize the historical irony in this statement as Christianity has spent literal millennia forcing its ideals on others and continues to attempt to do so. I would encourage you to reflect on your beliefs, if you truly accept queer people as legitimate equals, and obtain some historical perspective on this issue.

All of my encounters with individuals who feel liberal arts are useless and STEM is the way seem to, at their core, feel that way because of earning potential, and I’ve never heard one of them bash Econ/finance/investment as a career path. But 🤷‍♂️

Then no, I don’t agree with this specific implementation of the system, at least the second half. I do think more productive/effective workers should be compensated more. But being a good engineer does not make you a good manager, and the issues associated with promoting an excelling worker into management (a job requiring a substantially different skill set) are so common there’s a name for their inevitable failure, The Peter Principle

I didn’t say it did, but I am a citizen of the USA and the vast majority of my cultural experience and knowledge, and therefore what I can intelligently comment on, are centered on the US.

Well you need to clarify further then. Are you saying we should make the best scientist the president, or the person with the most aptitude for politics and rule to be president? I don’t see how this is functionally different than what I said.

If I was guessing, in general, I think people who advocate for a pure meritocracy in the USA feel the world should be evaluated in more black and white, objective terms. The financial impact and analytic nature of STEM and finance make it much easier to stratify practitioners “objectively” in comparison to finding, for instance, the “best” photographer. I think there is also a subset of US culture that thinks that STEM is the only “real” academic group of fields worth pursuing, and knowledge in liberal arts is pointless -> not contributing to society -> not a meaningful part of the meritocracy. But I’m no expert.

As a general rule, yes. People who are able to better perform a task should be preferentially allocated towards those tasks. That being said, I think this should be a guiding rule, not a law upon which a society is built.

For one, there should be some accounting for personal preference. No one should be forced to do something by society just because they’re adept at something. I think there is also space within the acceptable performance level of a society for initiatives to relax a meritocracy to some degree to help account for/make up for socioeconomic influences and historical/ongoing systemic discrimination. Meritocracy’s also have to make sure they avoid the application of standardized evaluations at a young age completely determining an individual’s future career prospects. Lastly, and I think this is one of common meritocracy retorhic’s biggest flaws, a person’s intrinsic value and overall value to society is not determined by their contributions to STEM fields and finance, which is where I think a lot of people who advocate for a more meritocracy-based society stand.

You’re generalizing a specific phenomenon, and incorrect. Acid-base reactions only very rarely produce gases. The reactions produce heat and water, only in the case of bicarbonate being a base is a gas produced. This is because carbonic acid forms, which spontaneously decays into carbon dioxide. This is not a universal acid-base phenomenon. Soaps should not cause fizzing with vinegar.

There is an OTF version, it’s just not bundled w/ anything by default as far as I’m aware.

Available here: https://ctan.org/pkg/kpfonts-otf?lang=en

Personally I’m a huge fan of the Kepler Project font. I got hooked on it when I started writing papers in LaTeX.

http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-47327.html

AI, especially as it relates to completing daily tasks. I cannot wait until an AI can efficiently sort, delete, and categorize my email so I don’t have to deal with all the junk and FYI emails.