Part of this always makes me uneasy. I grew up knowing a lot of kids from rough backgrounds who loved sports but also went to a private school where a lot of folks looked down at stupid sports fans. To me, there’s always been an unpleasant whiff of classism to these anti sports takes. While sports finds fans at every strata, it’s hard to deny that the poorer one is the more likely you are to be into sports. (Go to any working man’s bar during a game night.) And it just has this taint of “sportsball is a waste of time for stupid poor people do and there are such better uses for the time and money!” And I just think back a couple months ago when I caught a playoff game in a veterans bar, watched as we scored and the whole bar waited patiently as an older Indigenous lady “ran” up and down the aisles draped in her Canucks cape to wild applause from the crowd. It’s moments of joy shared by complete strangers who might have nothing else in common but come together for these magical moments.

Edit: I don’t mean to imply or say that opposing sports is inherently classist or that you are being so.

I get where you’re coming from on the use of space. But, at least in my hometown, our arena is used almost every night; it hosts I think three or four different sports leagues (well, a few sports leagues plus, ugh, e-sports) as well as all concerts, comedians and expos. (To the point where our local team often has to do ridiculous road trips because of the arena scheduling.) Or you could look at Paris for the Olympics which used the opportunity to clean the Seine as well as put a literally world class swimming facility in a run down neighbourhood as part of a revitalization. (Or, back to my city, Vancouver, we used it to add a mass transit train line which has spurred a bunch of lower cost housing around stops, put in a few popular facilities in underserved areas.)

Some fields are much less multipurpose but the parking lots, that’s just a consequence of American transit etc. And while I think it’s ridiculous how much some local governments pay for stadiums and I wouldn’t want my government to do s but, they do it because those teams are incredibly popular. To blame their popularity and the poor decisions of governments on the sports though seems a little like getting angry at journalism because Russia, Hungary and others use it for nefarious ends.

fans fanaticism can utterly destroy local towns after a bad kick or pass or whatever.

I mean, I don’t think any town has been burned to the ground. We had two of the worst North American sports riots twice in the last 30 years (yay) but the destruction was pretty limited to a small section of downtown and it was more just embarrassing than anything else. And frankly, any city that has a fanbase large and passionate enough to riot is probably a city that really loves that sports team. Even though we’ve rioted twice, every time the playoffs come around, the city is awash in Canucks gear, little flags, towels etc.

I don’t really have a problem with youth sports. But it shouldn’t be a “profession”.

I don’t think you get youth sports without professional sports. We have lacrosse leagues (technically our national sport) but almost no one plays, it’s not the same without your heroes whom you’ve watched growing up. Watch even young kids practicing or fooling around, a good number of them will have their favourite player’s jersey on.

On the finances or advancement, okay, let’s consider a simple one, pets. Americans spend more than 180 billion on their pets every year! They provide some psychological benefits but so do sports. That money could feed every hungry person in America maybe 6 or 7 times over. That’s not to mention the environmental damage etc. But, rich people are as likely if not more to have pets and everyone basically finds them cute so, they aren’t referred to as a waste of resources.

Yeah, you might want to look into current Catholic doctrine:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_homosexuality#:~:text=The Church teaches that same,%2C compassion%2C and sensitivity".

Youngling, she’s a hard Catholic. If you can’t imagine why a lifestyle would offend a hard Catholic, well, that’s on you.

Afd just won a third of the vote.

You would like control of some industry ti maybe just go the far right?

Okay, would you rather the Germans who voted AFD? Or the rise of the French National Party? Or Fidesz in Hungary? Or PPV in Denmark?

Shit, you’d better tell that to my aunt who told me how my lifestyle hurts her.

Half of America wants to vote for trump and you want to trust in random people? That seems like a wild leap of faith.

In theory, democracy produces satisfactory outcomes…

Or, as has happened in capitalism, people will find ways to bend the system to benefit themselves. Except this time without boards so much as bribable officials and whatnot.

But it’s not like companies or business entities won’t have folks in charge of them under communism… Someone has to run the whatevers…

This is what I always find amusing about the Communist argument.

Like, the elected politicians and bureaucracy can’t be trusted enough to regulate industry under capitalism so we’ll centralize things and then trust them to regulate industry under Communism?

Edit: whoof, should’ve thought about human nature when I dared to criticize communism. Almost lime there is another lesson somehwere there.

so, it’s the goddamn weekend. How does everyone have so much free time this late on a Saturday? I’ll do my best to get back to y’all on a dirty capitalist’s time slot.

I really hate the “non productive” argument as you only see it with sports, not say, the video game or movie/tv industries. Just has this real whiff of “I don’t like this activity and I don’t see why anyone else should!”

Of all the non productive uses of money and time, at least sports has a bunch of ancillary benefits, especially for youth. I don’t imagine youth sports leagues, which keep kids in shape, keeps them doing something positive instead of the usual juvenile delinquent stuff we’d have been doing, teaching them to be a part of a team etc. And then those stadiums tend to get used for a bunch of cultural/musical events.

Perjorative term for all sports.

Mostly internet and I would imagine strongly correlated with those who are still angry they had an unpleasant high school experience.

I think you’re missing two large parts; escapism and booze.

From the sportsball moniker, I imagine you aren’t a fan. Sometime, it’s worth it to go to a bar that supporters of whatever team go to. There’s something magic about hooting, hollering and cheering with a crowd of complete strangers about this one thing. And in that brief couple of hours, it becomes larger and more magic. And some folks chasing that feeling get drunk and go too far when it goes wrong.

To paraphrase the Beatles “they get high with a little help from their friends”

Check at the state level. A few states have introduced ranked choice, your state may have someone in the mix trying to make it a thing where you live!

If people vote in the primaries for candidates who support ranked choice voting, then yes.

Why could it not replace an engineer?

The previous limits of technology exploded less than half a decade ago, seems wild to assume that’s the end of that kind of growth.

Why?

A half decade ago we would’ve laughed at a machine passing the Turing test…

I wish I could opt out of those messages. On streaming platforms that should be doable! (I really hate spoilers.)