The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.

This is why I keep landing on moderation-before-inclusion as the standard. Review systems that flag bad content means that bad content still gets seen, and often still has enough of an effect to make it worthwhile for bad actors to churn out. IMO that's part of explanation of why there's 100 years of videos uploaded to YouTube every day. Even videos that get taken down get some exposure; increasing the volume of crap is a solution for their short life span. It seems like a self-reinforcing problem there, even if there were an honest attempt at moderation.

The old content doesn't go away, but YouTube is incredibly bad at making it effectively searchable. They don't want you to find the highest quality videos on a topic, they want you to plug in to the endless new stream of slop which just recapitulates things which were done better before.

This isn't really an "old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn" take that everything older is better. Instead I'm saying that the Wikipedia approach to help users find and collaborate on good content to make it even better or more comprehensive is preferable to the approach that the only way to be seen is to endlessly publish new content, which is meant to obscure what came before it on a topic. It's like if you walked into a library, but the only thing visible was a "new releases" shelf and searching the stacks was nearly impossible. That would make it basically a matter of luck if you found anything relevant, and makes deep research impossible.

Google, Facebook and others will never do this because it's expensive. Their cost savings is our toxic waste.

So what does a viable solution look like? I'm not sure. Maybe a system with distributed, volunteer moderators like Wikipedia. It's not perfect, but that model has held up remarkably well over its lifespan and has seemed to mostly hold its own against increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.

Does it work because you're taking advantage of a group of people who are extremely vulnerable to manipulation? People who already struggle with impulse control, who are prone to making bad financial decisions? The elderly, kids?

We have to escape this mentality that anything that makes money is valid, that the money itself is the validation of "rightness".

Some of us, just some think that maybe enterprises that prey on the vulnerable just don't deserve to be in business. Otherwise everything might as well be payday loans and online gambling. I'm not saying OP is definitely in that category, but I would encourage them to think long and hard about weather or not using dark patterns to goose their sales is really the kind of world we want to be fostering.

Hollywood moves have little to do with art or even entrainment for that matter. They are simply revenue generating machines. Rich people invest in a movie production and expect a return. Hollywood moves don't take artistic risks anymore which is why franchises have become such a big thing. If it make money before, it will probably make money again. Even if it's bad, fans of the last movie will buy a ticket just to see. If it's bad, well, you have their money already!

It's pretty similar to Silicon valley these days. The technology is just a vehicle to produce a return on VC money.

I certainly wouldn't mind if modern servers had something similar to make sure programs could stop gracefully. But then that doesn't help if you have a hardware failure...

An unresolved promise that causes other code to be skipped while program execution continues after the block is, well, unintuitive to say the least.

At the core it's even more of an economic barrier which isn't even unique to capitalism.

I recall an article talking about why the Romans didn't invent steam engines and things like railroads considering people were aware that steam could be used to do work. The answer was largely that slave labor was so cheap that nobody really cared about finding more efficiency. It didn't solve any problem they had at the time.

The analogy transfers to the tech industry today, economics tend to drive most decisions. While I love technology and think research and innovation is important for its own sake -- particularly because we might not know what we're missing out on unless we explore -- but those controlling the purse strings have other priorities.

Others might point out that the economic cost of the bugs and failure cases in programming languages without memory safety might actually be greater than the cost of developing alternatives or accepting less performance in exchange for correctness. They're probably right! But unless you can measure it and present it on a spreadsheet to the management class, they won't acknowledge or understand it. It's really difficult to measure "incidents you didn't have". In any case it still might be cheaper to work on the next big startup idea, hype it & sell equity -- that strategy has produced trillion-dollar valuations recently. However correctly or incorrectly that may be, the benefit to an elite few is very real.