Memes

Chemists are wizards?

Yep. You wouldn't have adventurous magicians going out and casting spells against dragons. The variety of spells known by D&D type wizards wouldn't even be a thing. You'd have a guy who was a specialist in ritual-casting flame spells whose job consisted of continuously heating up cauldrons of metal ore so it could be smelted. If he was jumped on his commute home, he couldn't fight the attackers off with "fireball" or something. Maybe that was covered in school decades ago, but he's spent his entire career doing nothing but that one smelting spell Or, you'd have the "Gate" wizard whose entire job was to keep up a portal for their entire 8 hour shift, so that tourists could pass back and forth.

Stop, I can only get so depressed!

This comment made me sad.

And if anything qualifies as esoteric, arcane knowledge, it's embedded systems programming

This makes me feel so much better after spending a morning banging my head against some wild pointer arithmetic, thank you much much! (Ultimately the pointer incantations were successful, praise be!)

If explosion magic doesn't solve your problems then you're clearly not using enough explosion magic.

*I didn't ask how close those buildings are, I said "I cast FIREBALL" *

-Megumin, if they played D&D

Expulooooshon

Right, so literally computer security

Ponder Stibbons inserts another punch card into Hex. Ants flow through tubes and gears begin turning.

I've been slowly reading through rimworld and honestly I love how Pratchett balanced out the existence of magic by making it such a pointless persuit that wizards are basically just beurocrats

Oh great wizards finasteride and dutasteride, give me back my hair!

Imagine thinking that PhD's and postdocs aren't exploited by capitalism.

That one kind of magic would be capitalism. I mean the situation from OP post is the current state of liberal economics.