As a former engineering manager: no, I don't want to have a discussion about the hypothetical emoji. I want the engineer to put a rocketship in their commit message to have a slightly brighter day, and I want to acknowledge that someone else made a positive comment about it.
If you are genuinely at the point in your life where "people saying they like things" is the same as ... what you're describing ... please be aware of the emotional impact you're having on the people around you.
I feel like this starts with an agreeable premise. Some fraud is egregious, costly, and/or easy to detect. These low-hanging or high-impact cases are most worth pursuing. At some point you reach diminishing returns, where the amount of time / effort / capital you're putting in to eliminating fraud outstrips the losses from the fraud itself.
I don't know that I agree with the ethical conclusion that the optimal amount of fraud is therefore non-zero. The leap from "anti-fraud efforts are expensive" to these sentences in the final paragraph was not, in my opinion, convincingly made here:
>We should, as a society, accept non-zero amounts of benefits fraud. We should accept non-zero amounts of cheating on taxes.
I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, but here goes: during this procedure did you experience anything that you feel you could not have experienced absent someone physically poking your brain?