I would say that maintaining legacy systems as a software engineer is effectively "using bugs to make money" and very much an "economically legitimate activity".
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
Actually, the fact that you have to cite official registrar docs is exactly the problem. There are 200+ country TLDs, and by now probably thousands of other self-governed TLDs like .name.
For instance, in Serbia, there is a similar scheme to UK: .gov.rs, .co.rs, edu.rs, but also in.rs (for individuals) and top-level .rs. So someone has registered "iz.rs" and offers free subdomains to individuals.
The fact that there is implied hierarchical trust is what the problem is, and keeping track of individual rules for each TLD is prone to errors.
I just did a similar test with Kagi image search using "person on a bicycle", and this actually favours left-pointing bikes (12 left to 3 right to 4 front/back). Maybe so the mechanism does not overwhelm the person?
A search for "bicycle" actually matches your experience with 12 being to the right and 3 being to the left.
As a counterpoint, I did a quick image search on Kagi with "person on a bicycle", and I ended up with 12-left-pointed bicycles, only 3-right-pointed bicycles, 3 facing the camera, and 1 facing away from the camera — looking at photos above the fold (first screen). Even looking below, the pattern seems to continue, though not as prominently (I'd say 3:2 in favour of left-pointing bikes).
Obviously, not scientific.
All the left-pointing bicycles did not look weird to me either.
How familiar are you with Serbian co.rs, org.rs, in.rs (individuals) and top-level .rs too? Will you confuse it with iz.rs giving free subdomains to individuals too ("iz" means from in Serbian)?
How about all the other 200+ country TLDs and rules for non-country TLDs?
Ads, in general, have one main purpose: to make the public, and especially your prospective customers, aware of your product and how it fits and solves problems for them.
By their nature, they should be a positive.
However, media in general (from classical like newspapers, magazines, radio and TV to more modern like news sites and streaming platforms) has been leveraging sound psychological research to influence people to start holding views the editorial policy wants them to. And translated to ads, to them wanting and paying for things they do not need and have not originally even wanted. Back when Windows 95 came out, there was an urban legend how people waited in lines in front of stores to buy it even if they did not have a computer — I never cared enough to check if this was true, but even back then it was acknowledged how you could influence people to simply spend money where it does not bring them any value.
Tech industry had a large problem to enter the market and sustain itself on what was largely volunteer, non-profit environment of the early Internet and web days. The dot-com boom was over (and crashed), people were starting to build real products, but sustaining them was hard. And enter ad-tech, with profiling and targeting enriching the already existing psychological research about how you get people to spend when they don't really have a need or problem to address.
So I believe you are complaining more about the state of media today — I was actually hoping guerilla journalism through personal blogs gets us the real thing back, but oh boy was I wrong :) — than ads or ad-tech directly.
Now let's be honest: short men clothing is basically modern, "slim fit" clothing; you get that fashionable bare-ankles look with short pants.
And again, who does not want to drive a tractor in their city when they hit the pothole? Or at least to re-plow half of the city just because of the stupid buildings they put in there?
If old systems had no bugs/issues, companies could do without the maintenance burden altogether (which includes even systems not being evolved/extended).
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