Given U.S. military budgets, this seems like a rounding error. Especially as the article claims that this was over a five year period. Four mil a year in procurement fraud is probably a drop in the ocean.
A lot of the really popular shooters out there now are collaborative, or have a strong collaborative element. For example, Destiny 2 can be solo, but really encourages you to group up with a couple friends to run 3 person strikes and other activities. Overwatch is a 6v6 game that is unwinnable without teamwork, and similarly R6 Siege requires advanced team collaboration. PUBG (2.2 million current active players at this minute) and Fortnite both derive a large part of their appeal from their very popular duo and 4 person squad modes. If you look at what people are actually playing right now, a huge chunk of it is largely collaborative games.
I have an aunt and uncle who do this, but they aren't desperate, they're retired. They travel around the country, visiting places they'd like to see, and taking seasonal jobs as something to do and to help defray expenses. They still own their own house, but they choose not to live there, renting it out to their kids / their kid's friends. They've worked as lighthouse keepers, Amazon warehouse pickers, and as bookkeeping/maintenance for a sugar-beet picking operation (they're a little old for field work). Currently they're wintering over at the Grand Canyon while working at the general store in an rv park.
The point is not all of these nomads are forced into it by desperation or financial necessity; some of them just want to spend their retirement traveling and don't mind a little work along the way.
On the other hand, don't be ashamed of using a tool that works for the job, even if it isn't the latest or coolest thing. jQuery is no longer the best choice for a lot or circumstances, but if it is for yours, go for it.
Just anecdotally, I've found that the second round trip overwhelms any performance gains from not rendering on the server, especially if you have to boot up a heavy framework such as e.g. angular before even starting it.
The isomorphic model is that the first page load happens on the server (1 round trip), and that any additional page loads hit the api directly and re-render the page in the browser (also 1 round trip).
I think the point is that he didn't know there was a lock. His closing argument seems to be that when you're writing muli-threaded code, you have to not only think about what your own code is doing, but also about what all the library and system calls you use are doing. Which is one of the many reasons multi-threaded code is harder to write than single threaded.
They're not just supposed to be a payments provider. They're going to ask people to actually link their bank accounts so that the merchants don't have to pay credit card fees.
I do this manually sometimes, with chrome dev tools. The whole issue actually has a pretty profound effect on which sites I read. For example, I won't follow a link to usa today unless it's something really interesting, whereas I'll read almost anything from the la times, just because I enjoy their bullshit free layout.