[chefandy]

A far more direct consequence of the current situation is that these executives just do whatever the hell they want to maximize their profits at everybody else's expense. Without punishment enough to make it unprofitable, dishonesty only has incentives, on both business and personal level.

I just don't see that twice-removed latent effect having worse consequences for society than the base problem. Not by a long shot.

As a kid, I grew up playing in a marsh that turned out to be the illegal, unmarked, non-access-controlled chemical waste dump for a large specialty chemical plant nearby that had operated there since the late 19th century. Those executives knew what they were doing was wrong— it was the 90s, not the 60s— but spent decades telling bald-faced lies to everyone involved, and when the writing was on the wall for regulatory action, they just dumped the company onto a shell company so the large international parent corporation wouldn't be in the news, and retired happily in huge mansions while the parent company dumped probably 2 years profits into the superfund project to remove the most dangerous stuff and cap/fence of the entire area. I could certainly never know for sure how much that exposure affected my cancer, but the chance of it being zero is pretty slim. Nobody even told me or anyone else around there— I only knew about it because I dug up some old EPA document scans. You're goddamned right they deserve to be in jail and not taking 4 month yacht trips. On a moral level, I think they deserve worse. It was not a sparsely populated area.

[zo1]

This is the kind of thing I expect and want investigative journalists to write about and quiz politicians about non-stop, all the time. Instead they interview them about vacuous things like "ice cream", non-committal questions about policies, "initiatives" like DEI and corporate governance, and stuff so far removed from any concrete instance (like yours) that they can answer in vague non-answers that sound like answers but answer nothing. And of course, never a follow-up, unless it's a politician they don't like, in which case the journalist gets visibly annoyed and angry (wtf?) and tries to call them out on "misinformation". The entire thing is a farce, whilst real-world people on the ground suffer.

[chefandy]

Well Jimminy Crispix! Think about the consequences of what you're suggesting.

A) Reporting on serious topics takes a lot more effort than recycling news wire coverage and rehashing political argument trends on Twitter. That means having to collect more analytics data to sell, and charging more than a few dollars per month for subscriptions. Sheesh.

B) People find serious topics depressing: reporting on important things that might be uncomfortable or gross can only lead to lost clicks, subscriptions, and viewers.

C) Upper-management couldn't even try to replace such reporters with web-scraping LLMs. Think about the dozens of starving would-be prompt engineers who won't get hired to replace thousands of journalists. They have families to feed too, you know.

D) There's a good chance that someone in the C suite or someone they know will be put in a very uncomfortable situation because of this! Unacceptable.

What sort of dystopian business hellscape are you trying to lead us into?