I agree, except with the word "slightly". It can be so significant that this increased cost/friction is the very mechanism of the sanctions' effectiveness. Is it possible to police the Russian oil shadow fleet to extinction? Maybe, but even without doing so you can impose a decent haircut on their profits by issuing scary-sounding press releases and leaving it at that.

Increased costs might be a factor in a competing commercial market, but for military purposes, you buy the components no matter the price or search for an alternative (China is now making lot of components - for example, resistors, transistors, logic chips - I have several 74HC chips of Chinese origin, and they are very cheap). Also, there are thousands ships and no legal basis for "policing" them in open sea.

Attention economy, the algorithm, rage-bait, maximizing engagement, doomscrolling - pick your buzzword. Individual people care about all sorts of weird things, but on average, this and no other reason is why a person in Idaho suddenly finds themselves caring about Manhattan congestion pricing. It's easy to point a finger and laugh/marvel when it's something so obviously absurd to you, but of course you and I both have entirely different blind spots where our attention is marshalled and our opinion is formed by the rage-bait engine. Ours must seem preposterous to those on the outside looking in, too.

It's all dependent entirely on scale. If a bajillion customers have major problems (whether actually major or in their mind), you have to triage and the first tier won't be experts with excellent command of English. Support is fucking expensive. Everyone wants bespoke service, but if you are not a customer, or if the amount of business you bring does not justify the expense, the support level you want cannot be provided in the long run.

One thing I've never understood though: if you have a bajillion customers, you presumably have a bajillion dollars to pay customer support, no?

Yes but that's a bajillion dollars you could, instead, pocket.

Walmart seems to have no problem staffing their stores with employees who can answer questions, among other things. And they actually sell real hard goods, in meat space.

Scale is a lame excuse. Yes your labor will have to scale with your customer base, that's just how a business works. That's a good thing, actually, because that's how we keep society from crumbling.

If someone takes a lot of money off me, then yes, I do need customer support. I had an energy company try and charge me four times what I was owing.

GitLab CI is pretty close to being actually good. Certainly less brittle than GitHub Actions from the looks of it...

It's really not. I've used Gitlab CI extensively and the number of issues we had...

I mean, what exactly are phrases like "strictly limited in population viability" and "never going to see a massive population" euphemisms for, exactly? High mortality, intense resource competition and survival of the fittest. Not what we normally associate with "exceptionally high standards of life". The higher the standard of life, the more procreation happens, the more demand there is for a constant supply of resources, and then starvation and warfare turns that supposedly noble savage into quite a vicious competitor.

Studies show a chaotic predator/prey relationship over time. When the ratio is small, it's fat times for the predators, and the predator population soars. Then they overhunt, and the prey diminishes, and the predator population crashes.

It's not stable.

There are no euphemisms. The issue I think you're having is viewing things in a an artificially binary fashion. In reality it's all a lot fuzzier. If you don't have enough resources in one area it doesn't mean everybody just starves, it instead means you work a bit more, or just make do with a bit less. And that creates a voluntary pressure against fertility. Nature even has relatively tame 'stop-loss' measures here that further reinforce this like the fact that malnutrition directly reduces fertility. So if we graph population vs time, there's going to be a trend, but it'll look a lot like a relatively low amplitude sine wave. You'd only see sharps shifts after something like a plague.

> Or, you can remove yourself from the investment/ownership vehicle during the term you serve as a congressperson.

The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge. It's quite hard to police a veritable horde of Congressmen who pinky-swear to never pass information along to friends, relatives and various other associates, employed by them or otherwise.

Which can be solved with insider trading enforcement of political figures and their associates. This SEC already does this to 'normal' people.

It can be. But it's quite hard. And frequently unsuccessful. The concept of "insider trading" sounds great and unambiguous until some examination, but becomes quite ripe for loophole-finding exercises afterwards.

I honestly don't know how you put a cone of silence around congresspeople such that insider trading anywhere in their sphere of influence is impossible. My intent would be to make it difficult for the congressperson to directly benefit from passing along insider info and compensate them enough such that it isn't a practical path. Sure, they could still tell friends to buy/sell, but if the friend *does* act on that, it's sure going to raise eyebrows when they try to wire $1M worth of proceeds to the congressperson for "movie & pizza night".

And I know that the next stone to be cast is "yeah, but if they help friends/business associates beat the market, congresspeople can still benefit with board seats and jobs when they're done with congressional terms". That's totally valid, and I have no idea how to combat that.

Forget pizza night IOUs. Lots of very smart people have come up with lots of clever ways to pay someone for a service, ways that don't even register when it comes to public awareness. I could have bought this house from you for 1.5 million, but I'm going to buy it for 2.5 million because I simply must have it. Man, what a sucker, eh?

> The problem with "blind trusts" is that even blind men wink and nudge.

They should only be allowed to invest in a fund that is open to public participation. This should also be public information. You should be able to pick a congresperson and invest in the exact same funds that they do.

To what end? Most congressional actions that could conceivably lead to insider trading benefit aren’t directed at single companies anyway. They’re directed at sectors or policies which impact many companies, which is easily captured by ETFs.

If Congress is acting on singular companies, the congress people are usually smart enough to avoid obviously trading that singular stock.

> They’re directed at sectors or policies which impact many companies, which is easily captured by ETFs.

The abstract doesn't seem to agree. The use of "firms" and "corporate" implies individual companies.

"purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms."

People also started using vi edit mode inside IDEs. I've personally encountered that much more often.

Probably for one of the reasons graphql was created in the first place - accomplish a set of fairly complex operations using one rather than a multitude of API calls. The set can be "everything" or it can be "this well-defined subset".

You could be right, but that's really just "Our API makes multiple calls to itself in the background"

I could be wrong but I thought GraphQL's point of difference from a blind proxy was that it was flexible.

It is flexible, but you don’t have to let it be infinitely flexible. There’s no practical use case for that. (Well, until LLMs, perhaps!)

I guess that I'm reading your initial post a little more strictly than you're meaning

I think they mean something like (or what I think of as) “RPC calls, but with the flexibility to select a granular subset of the result based on one or more schemas”. This is how I’ve used graphql in the past at least.

Specifically when it comes to children, lots of jurisdictions are enacting actual non-bullshit age verification to ensure children aren't on social media. In my opinion this is real, substantive change.