stopping

After reading this comment a little more deeply, I've come to believe your views on methods of written communication are subtly, fundamentally wrong in a way which generally causes more harm than good.

If a sentence has multiple "valid" interpretations, then it doesn't matter what the "correct" interpretation is. If someone says that a sentence is confusing or hard to read, you 100% must believe them and fix it. Dismissing concerns about clarity and ambiguity as merely "pedantic" is one reason why people fail to develop written communication skills. I have been burned many, many times in my career by making charitable assumptions about another engineer's ambiguous language, only to realize much later, after significant cost has been paid, that they had a completely different (and often wrong) idea.

Teaching people to be better writers is a hill I will gladly die on. I don't care if you defend your point or not, just read my comment and try to understand why someone would care deeply about this sort of thing.

The extra "than" in front of "safe Rust" is superfluous and reads like an error, as if there's a comparative adjective missing ahead of it. I don't see any situation where "and than" should ever appear in any non-contrived English sentence.

You have completely missed the point of my comment. What do you think I am trying to communicate to you?

You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.

In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).

Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:

"You can always present a case history of one".

Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".

Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".

In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.

You said:

> To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.

You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.

Are you saying that it's impossible for a company to become a monopoly purely under its own power?

I think you have it completely backwards. A smaller genome makes small tweaks much more likely to produce measurable effects, which means your data quality is much better. A larger genome with more gene interaction is more likely to produce non-measurable or non-subtle effects with perturbations of a single parameter. If a positive effect can only be measured by simultaneously mutating multiple inter-dependent genes, and you don't have a data point with those mutations, the effect can never be predicted. The model may even predict the exact opposite: if you have a bunch of data points showing that varying one gene at a time causes the organism to die, the model will predict that the sum of those mutations also causes death. With larger genomes you need exponentially more data points to discover subtle effects.

In my old org the policy was to flag every change, not just new features and behaviors. I'd even argue that refactoring is often a higher risk than adding a new feature path, because the scope of a refactor can touch nearly every user journey. So I can understand why the policy applies to refactoring. I'm just lamenting that this doesn't seem to be well-trodden ground, and being a person who cares deeply about reducing system complexity makes this whole thing kind of a bummer.

I never found a great way to incorporate feature flags into my workflow without inducing significant mental churn managing 12-step rollouts over a dozen independent active flags. The changes I tend to make are sweeping, non-trivial refactors of base libraries with hundreds or possibly thousands of callers. These sorts of changes are exceptionally hard to flag (especially API changes), and it's stupidly easy for another developer to fat-finger a merge conflict resolution and drop one of my flag gates.

To this day I've never found any good guidelines for flagging changes like this without resorting to widespread file duplication, abuse of OOP, or an ad-hoc versioning system. It comes as no surprise that nobody in my organization was willing to do this sort of work.

Why are you asking? My hope is that you are asking this genuinely from a place of curiosity to better advance this discussion, as there is apparent confusion from people working from different definitions of the same word.

The term you're looking for is "surplus". The consumer sees a surplus of value because the price they paid is below the maximum they're willing to pay, and the producer sees a surplus because the price they charged was more than the cost to produce the good. In this economic system both parties benefit. Economic surplus is the thing that is "created" with every transaction. "Surplus accumulation" as a concept doesn't make any sense, and is isomorphic to what you think people are saying when they use the phrase "wealth accumulation." You should update your definition of "wealth".

Is anyone else having trouble parsing this comment or is it just me?

If the top 10% of people suddenly had their wealth double overnight, it would have absolutely disastrous effects for the lower 90% of people. Prices for scarce goods (e.g. housing) would increase dramatically. The price increase dampens the overall demand for housing since a large fraction of the 90% are now priced out. The wealthy homeowners have an incentive to maintain that scarcity, and freely use their resources to preserve the status quo by preventing desperately-needed housing from being built.

Those with wealth will tend to steer the economic system more towards their own interests in a runaway feedback loop, often in ways which create no overall net welfare for society.