LostKnightsRPG.org

[Liquidprism]

I would turn japanese for her.

[Liquidprism]

Introducing the world's first doggy anti-hero....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100507/ ... ews_ts1963

[Rusty]

[Liquidprism]

This is intriguing in a meta-cultural sense. It is essentially an advertising campaign focused toward a single individual. One of the most interesting aspects is that a single person has actually been employed to oversee this process. This says interesting things about our culture, and more specifically our sports culture.

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_d ... nba,240014

[rydi]

sports make me soooo angry. I don't understand how we can pay people that much money, and go to such effort for them, when they contribute so very little to the world via the thing they're getting paid for.

Doctors, engineers, and the hundreds of other careers out there requiring years and years of education and arduous effort don't get even a fraction of that. Hell, even movie stars usually make less than sport stars. And for what? So they can toss around a ball for 3-10 years?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the athleticism and effort that goes into sports. It is hard work. But not several million dollars a year of hard work. Further, if it were a question of pure athleticism, there are a great many olympians that are far more impressive athletically, but they don't make that kind of money... It's just stupid imo. Ridiculously stupid.

[Liquidprism]

I agree pretty much across the board. I will say that of the sports played in this country, basketball is one of the most intensive. I would say that those players are probably pretty well rounded athletically, and at the peak of fitness. While olympians are probably better in their specific events, they probably aren't as athletically balanced. It's kind of a specialists vs. generalist comparison. Still the point stands, that pro athletes make entirely to much money.

[rydi]

On some events, but the track and fielders are crazy fit awesome. I'd give more pics but they're hard to find.

http://www.google.com/images?q=heptathl ... h%3A1&sa=2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decathlon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptathlon

http://www.iaaf.org/mm/photo/competitio ... ll-lnd.jpg
http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_ ... /oly34.jpg

[Jennifer]

Perhaps I'm a bit biased because my career field is also considered a luxury....

I'm too much of a capitalist to say that they offer little to society. People pay what they pay for their own reasons. If entertainment at all has a value, sports is one of the most universal types and certainly offers far more beneficial aspirations to the everyman. Also, keep in mind that these people are at the tops of their fields...and not like top 20 percent, like top 20.

Sports provide a unifying cultural experience, both in the displays themselves and as common conversational topics. Team sports provide a way for people to experience competition through another; in this case, not a single person, but as the entity of "the team", something that in some way encompasses the fan base as well, alla "We won the game last night!"

Plus, games are fun to attend. I'm not into sports really, but I still like seeing live games. The atmosphere is so worth it!

As such, people are willing to pay.

The better the experience, the more they will pay.

The better/more infamous the players, the better the experience for many people.

It's not like their salaries are coming out of the mouths of poor children. People would pay that much anyways, it would just go into the pockets of the marketeers/agents/owners/franchise dealers.

Thus, players are commodities. If they bring in that huge a profit for the teams they play for, they should be compensated. Through excelling in their field, they have created a brand for themselves and they have the right to benefit from that brand.

Also, most of the excellent athletes I've known have been training for the majority of their lives for their fields. It involves huge amounts of man-hours on their own time as well as in group activities. It involves commitment of the entire lifestyle. On top of that, if they want to play for a college (which a huge portion of professional athletes do) they have to get a degree while still keeping up a hectic practice/touring schedule. That's nothing to sneeze at, regardless of what program they chose to study.

On another note, travel gets old fast when it's constant, hurried and you have to be in good shape during it. It's not like an actor who goes on location at most a few times a year, a rock star who can booze it up and then do a show the next day, or a businessman who goes to a conference and spends half his time playing tourist. Travel and odd/varied hours also complicates and limits romance/family options. They also have to deal with the "always on parade" aspect of fame, both individually and in how their behavior represents a team.

Also, and this is a biggie, it's a performance lifestyle. You're "damned if you do and damned if you don't". Every time a player goes out there, he risks his professional reputation in a very public way. The public is not forgiving of mistakes and failures. A few bad games can kill a career. Again, this is something I empathize with heavily - it's a big anxiety for me when I perform. For sports players, you have the added threat of injury; you get injured during a game badly enough, you can't do the main thing you've trained for most of your life anymore. Also, in order to keep the kind of power that you need to be able to command that type of salary, you have to keep yourself publicly relevant - you have to constantly put and keep yourself out there. That requires yet more time and energy and creates even more limitations.

On top of that, not only are we a culture that prizes youth, their very field depends on it. Humans get older, and as we do we lose our physical edge. If you spent most of your focus and time on a field from, say, middle school on and then could only reap the benefit for a span of 10 years after college before you are no longer competitive in your field, it would make sense that in order to encourage people to make that sort of commitment the compensation potential should be decent.

The lifestyle also carries with it a lot of future health risks. Old injuries suck, and you can really screw up your body (not to mention your brain - they are finding that retired football players are several times more likely to be diagnosed with some sort of dementia). Most engineers I know don't have much in the way of physical hazards in their careers.

And again...the money has to go somewhere. Might as well be the guy/gal actually doing the work.

[rydi]

(edit: For those not intending to read this long reply, please read my donation for the day to the soup: http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesameri ... ealth.html
It is a great article, great stats on wealth and it's social functions... read it for your own edification.)

See, I realize all that, I really do. And I don't begrudge them their money any more than I begrudge lottery winners; less even, since they had to work damned hard for their money.
Top sports stars have:
1.Consuming lifestyle that limits leisure/family time
2.Dangerous job/training
3.Stressful lifestyle (career demands + performance/public demands)
4.Huge buy in (years to hone their skills, and a great deal of sacrifice for potentially no reward)
5.Limited money making years (though secondary markets are available)

Further, they provide a great deal of entertainment to the masses, and provide fun to a great many people.

But you know who else that describes? Hookers. But do they get top dollar? Nope. They get a pittance and do a horrible job for a shitty clientele and make little money. In fact, there are a bunch of jobs at the bottom of society that meet the above description, aside perhaps from #4. Even higher up in the social strata you get stressful, demanding, dangerous, life consuming jobs that require years of training... but they don't get paid $25 million for a year of work.

The real issue at hand here has more to do with supply/demand than any danger or unpleasantness that is a part of the worker's job. Top athletes are rare, not simply because of the hard work they put in, but because of a host of other factors, such as genetics, environment, etc. that come together to create the perfect match for the sport in question. The capitalist system rewards rarity/scarcity, it doesn't take equity or difficulty into account. If there are a million foreign laborers willing to farm your fields for 80hrs a week at less than minimum wage, then the pay for that job is low, despite the danger and misery of the work (and as a tangential aside, even at equal pay, I'd much rather be a pro athlete than a pesticide drenched, sun scorched, broken backed field hand working long hours at a monotonous task that shows little direct reward; life expectancy for such individuals is vastly reduced, while the chance of having diseases such as cancer increases greatly).

My point is merely that the capitalist system isn't an equitable system. It works to a degree, but it crushes a great many under the wheel of labor, while elevating a golden few to positions that are, by most standards of "fairness", ridiculously rewarding. Whether that is a correct or incorrect way for society to function likely depends on value system of the one making the judgement.

For my part, I believe society's function is to make it so every one can be as happy and as prosperous as possible; to this end we give up freedoms (to kill each other, take one another's things, etc.) to gain "rights" to live as we like within those constraints in relative safety from harm (both from hostile conspecifics, as well as environmental catastrophe that could destroy us without the cushion of society).

It is my personal belief that this social contract should extend to wealth as well. One entity, from a societal standpoint, does not need (and seldom can even use) that amount of money. A society in which an executive makes 100x more than their lowest paid employee, and 50x more than their median employee, for the same amount of man hours, is not equitable (and actually, that is the low end of compensation; much greater disparity exists in the most successful companies). Further, when wealth is concentrated to that degree, it provides the potential to violate the social contract in much the same way as physical violence, except it is more subtle. Wealth to that degree allows for the subjugation of others to the will of the wealthy, and for the wealthy to set themselves apart from the society that sustains them while still drawing resources from it. Through the arcane arts of the financier, they are able to avoid contributing to society entirely, and slowly accrue greater and greater shares of a society's wealth. The more unregulated the market, the more the inequality (South American and Middle Eastern economies are often the poster children for this, but we are in competition for the prize as well; like most "bad" things, we rank very high on inequality of pay).

This site, though long, shows some interesting figures, and explains a bit of theory. As regulation went down, the wealthy stepped in and took a greater share of the wealth. (edit: reading through this, there is a lot of good info here, though I initially posted it only for a couple of numbers. I recommend people read through it just for self-edification).

Edit: An Aside (I'm bored today)
The best way to summarize how I view capitalist societies and the wealthy is with an animal metaphor. Imagine all the tiger, lions, and bears get together and form a society. They agree not to fight, and to kick the ass of the wolves and the cougars, and the jaguars living around their territory. Everything is great, and the TLB Alliance is running smoothly. They set up a nice cushy life, they start trading using an economy of sheep; all is well. Then, one bear makes a few shrewd deals, and gets a bunch of sheep. In nature, he'd lose most of them to other predators, but not in the grand society he's a part of. Instead, he makes sure the police protect his interests as he goes about accruing more and more of the sheep in circulation, and putting them behind a big fence. A few others catch on and do the same. Eventually there are a few Bears with a huge number of sheep, while the other animals make due with less and less of the total percentage of sheep. Though total sheep increased due to the efficient social infrastructure, the actual sheep in the hands/bellies of the poor animals remained the same, or was even reduced, while all the excess sheep went to the wealthy Bears.

Time passed, and the wealthy Bears got old. Some of the other animals looked forward to their death, thinking the sheep would go back into circulation. But no, in the end the old Bears passed their money on to a new generation of wealthy Bears, who were even less responsible than their parents, and created a great deal of resentment for all Bear-kind through their frivolous spending and disregard for the lives of the other animals (sheep aren't animals, but merely commodities in the minds of predators, just so we're clear). Eventually, Tigers and Lions came to hate all bears, even the innocent Bears that were no better off than they, and everyone began to lose faith in the system. But no matter how much everyone but the wealthy bears hated the system, everyone was powerless to change things. The wealthy Bears controlled all the officials (a lot of the officials actually WERE wealthy Bears by then), and owned the sheep production, the communications system, and even the caves the other animals lived in.

Eventually there was a tiger that had enough of the hegemony of the bears, and being an independent minded sort, he decided to make a fuss. He wrote a book, yowled outside the fence of the wealthy Bears, and generally made himself a nuisance. The tiger didn't get too much credit, and was eventually "disappeared" under suspicious circumstances. But he did change the mind of a more socially minded lion...

Aslan liked the ideas of the tiger, and respected his bravery (not enough to give him credit or even mention his name, but still, respect). He slowly built upon the ideas the tiger had introduced, and inflamed the passions of the poor animals. His efforts culminated in the overthrow of the TLB Alliance. Aslan led a purge that destroyed all the wealthy Bears, but didn't stop there; he rounded up all the Bears, even the poor and homeless Bears still living in the woods and barbecued them to feed the hungry Tigers and Lions (an act that was later referred to as the bearacaust by traitorous revisionist historians). Finally, Aslan formed the Tiger and Lion People's Commonwealth, in which Lions were seen, rightfully, as the dominant predator and afforded great luxuries which they passed on to their children, while making damned sure that Tigers were so oppressed that they could never even think of changing the system. The lions took control of all the sheep, and eventually a few Lions controlled all the sheep. The poor Lions were pissed, but at least they had it better than the Tigers (and certainly better than the Bears, the last few of whom were confined in special "wildlife reserves"), so they didn't do much, and were pretty complacent.

Recently, lions from the disaffected "generation Z" (they paint themselves with stripes, to represent their identification with Zebra and other game animals, because they are "hunted" and "oppressed" by the other lions) have taken a sympathetic stance toward the issues of Tigers and Bears. But as the GZers become a lucrative industry all their own, and their leadership abandons their ideals in the face of potential profit, the movement loses any hope it had of real change (not that it had much anyway, since all the GZers were a bunch of pansy ass, wanna-be game animals emulating weakness as a form of countercultural solidarity, but whatever).

The end.

I think that illustrates my feelings pretty well, though I may have waxed a bit loquacious and gotten a tad off topic in places.

My preference is a much more highly regulated system, similar to the military. There is still inequality in pay, but it is controlled, and provides incentive while limiting the disparity between individuals. It also provides less... Random rewards, and a more balanced structure of advancement (part of the problem our society has with poverty is the lack of easy methods to gain social capital, the knowledge and resources that people use to climb up into the higher echelons of society).

Ironically however, considering the trend of my argument, sports actually is a vehicle for many poor and socially disadvantaged individuals to "move up" in the world. A large percentage of the professional team athletics are comprised of people from very limiting backgrounds. And I do appreciate the opportunity that sports represents... But ultimately, while that is good for the few that get in, it ruins a lot of lives too. It isn't quite as unlikely as winning the lottery... but the odds are pretty long that sports will provide a big payoff, and historically, even the college education that athletes get doesn't go very far due to the pressure to focus on their sport over their academics. There are a great many (though I won't claim a majority... perhaps a significant minority?) young and naive athletes that are used up by the system and then spat out to go back to the life they came from.
(edit: and like so many of these arguments I've had online before, anyone reading this that was positively impacted by sports opportunities will likely protest "But it helped me!" Well, this argument concerns society, not individuals; while I'm extremely happy for you, it still is likely the case that society as a whole may not be benefiting from the system as-is. I'm also not arguing against sports in general, or even against paying people for playing; I'm merely stating that salaries in excess of 1000x higher than the poverty line, where so many in our country live, is pretty unfair distribution of wealth.)

In summary, I want military socialism, and my values are in enough opposition with our society that, while I can appreciate (from a structural functional perspective) the way sports play into our society, I feel that they are just another symptom of a vast system of inequitable resource distribution, and often another vehicle for inequality of race/class to be perpetuated.

Edit: I agree it is better for the players to get the lion's share of the profits... though they don't... the owners and marketers still make a shit ton of money. ESPN, there's an evil empire to take down. One of the largest entertainment industries in the world, it has money poured into it's bottomless gullet like the Amazon into the ocean.

And someone please remind me if I ever run for office to DELETE THIS.

[rydi]

Updated the above post, with a heartwarming tale of happy animal friends in beautiful olive tones!

[Amseriah]

Dude, I freaking hate bears! What a bunch of pricks. I'm happy that bearacaust happened serves them right hoarding sheep like that.

[Liquidprism]

Well, BearBearBear will be sure to keep your feelings in mind Paul. BearBearBear is a part of the metagame, and he is not forgiving.

[Jennifer]

They just need to get their butts in gear and invent the replicator already. Relative equality of access to most goods (both needs and luxuries) would solve a lot.

[Amseriah]

You fool...Charlie does not fear BearBearBear...Charlie only fears those pink and purple fuckers....in the void.......................for eternity........

[adam]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Nc8RCLy1s&feature=fvst
He-man Sings