alt Hacker NewsThis is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
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The ones who pirate the sports broadcasts are in the right. Spectator sports are literally brainwashing: they hook into vestigial tribal instincts, reinforce them, and channel them for political goals - such as norm-setting, or extrajudicial violence.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
>This is how greed works. The players want as much money as they can get. The owners want to charge as much as they can for everything while paying the least possible amount. The networks that buy the broadcasting and other rights want to most they can charge for them.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.