• Cosmic Cleric
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    62 years ago

    No need to worry. As soon as real estate prices go up those golf courses will be repurposed for other needs.

    • @[email protected]
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      32 years ago

      Yeah, I’ve watched two golf courses within 30 minutes of me make way for multifamily residential, some for age restricted residential.

      The majority of courses in my area are built on old farms, though.

    • @[email protected]
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      272 years ago

      Don’t underestimate the capacity of rich people to flaunt their excesses, while the people are suffering in scarcity.

      • Cosmic Cleric
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        22 years ago

        No need to worry. As soon as real estate prices go up those golf courses will be repurposed for other needs.

        Don’t underestimate the capacity of rich people to flaunt their excesses, while the people are suffering in scarcity.

        Nothing to do about the rich.

        Though my comment was made moreso as a tongue-in-cheek type of comment, I’m also just stating facts that I’ve actually seen with my own eyes.

        I live on a part in the planet that used to have plenty of golf courses (and movie drive-ins for that matter), and now they’re all gone, because as more population moved into the area, more real estate was needed for housing.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 years ago

          This is interesting. Out of curiosity, did the golf courses use to be more affordable back then?

          • Cosmic Cleric
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            12 years ago

            Out of curiosity, did the golf courses use to be more affordable back then?

            I couldn’t tell you if land back then was less expensive, or that land today is worth so much that you make more money selling it to build houses on it versus running the golf course.

    • @[email protected]
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      252 years ago

      I’m always interested in this take. By definition,.it’s clearly a sport.

      How do you define sport and how does it not meet the definition? It’s a game of physical skill, mental concentration, and competition.

      • @[email protected]
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        122 years ago

        I have always viewed it as a sport involves and active defensive player and an overall greater level of physical movement

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          You haven’t played golf with me. Better watch your balls as you have your legs open to swing.

        • @[email protected]
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          372 years ago

          What about non-team sports, like running, cycling, surfing, skiing, etc. maybe there’s a defensive strategy but there’s no active defensive player. Are those also not sports?

            • BlanketsWithSmallpox
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              42 years ago

              Not really. They meet your qualifier of greater amount of physical activity/movement.

              Sport has connotations of fast paced physical activity.

              Games like Solitaire and Golf can be done by yourself and for most people won’t be spiking your heart levels to a runners high.

        • @[email protected]
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          182 years ago

          Motorsports have no defensive player and do not involve much physical movement (unless you count the car’s movement).

          Giving a cat a bath involves a defensive player (the cat) and significant physical movement (depends on the cat’s mood).

          • @[email protected]
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            22 years ago

            Part of the definition of a sport is that it accomplishes absolutely nothing useful at all, other than entertainment, thought about it and perhaps fitness. Bathing a cat is not a sport because it actually has a useful goal, I.e. cleaning a cat.

            • @[email protected]
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              32 years ago

              I would say that getting healthier and fitter is absolutely useful, and so is entertainment.

              But anyways, some sports can be useful for training purposes (Ever heard of the Firefighter Olympics? It’s really cool).

              Also there’s also stuff like people jogging/biking to go places, and sailing maybe can also fall into this category though I don’t think it’s a thing anymore. (IIRC in the 1700s there was a sort of sport where ships would race each other across the Atlantic to deliver stuff as fast as possible. Not sure though, take with grain of salt.)

              • @[email protected]
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                32 years ago

                There’s still people who sail to get to a destination. It’s a bit of a rich person thing, though. Even without a motor, boats are holes in the water that you sink money into. More so if it has to be ocean-going.

          • @[email protected]
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            92 years ago

            Giving the cat a bath (other than the weird one I had that loved water) is classified as a blood sport.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 years ago

          Fishing has entered the chat.

          Definitely a defensive participant and an offensive participant, but way less physical activity like 90% of the time.

    • @[email protected]
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      162 years ago

      Where do you draw the line between sports and games? Are sports competitive where games are fun? Is poker a sport? Are video games capable of being sports? What could be done to golf that would make it a sport? Are all sports games if not all games are sports?

      These are the questions that keep me up at night.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          Oh that just made him angry, I always added that no sport has the winner of a major tournament in their mid 40s.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            I mean… Tom Brady was a super bowl MVP in his 40s.

            Chris Chelios won a Stanley Cup in his 40s.

            But your point is well taken nonetheless.

            • @[email protected]
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              22 years ago

              But that’s a team sport though. If we compare that to tennis the oldest tournament winner is Rosewall in the 70s at 37 years old and more recently Federer in 2018 at 36 years old.

          • @[email protected]
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            32 years ago

            Sports that are more based on endurance than sprinting tend to have older people who do well. Mid-40s is pushing it for championship level, but you can still be competitive at that stage, and still participate well into old age if you don’t have any major health/injury issues.

    • I actually get exhausted playing golf - but that’s because I’m BAD at it. Apparently I put too much force into my swing. Every time I’ve tried to play I get told to relax and “let the club to the work”.

      So they literally have these weighted sticks to reduce the amount of frickin effort required to hit the ball.

      It’s not a sport. It’s an ANTI-sport. The less you try the better you’ll be.

      Can you imagine if we had an Olympic running sport to see who the slowest runner was? That’s what golf is. Get the weakest, limpest, vitamin-defficient humans and see how accurately they can hit a tiny ball into a hole.

      It was invented by the Scots as a joke against the English while they all go and compete in proper sports like caber tossing and hammer throwing.

      • @[email protected]
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        2 years ago

        Or to keep it short, know that John Daly is one of the greats of the sport. Look up a picture of John Daly dated any time in the last 30 years, and you’ll know how hilarious that is.

        And people complain that Starcraft isn’t a sport.

  • @[email protected]
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    62 years ago

    There’s other sports that are just as bad. the NFL is terrible for the environment and for the players’ neurology.

  • Xero
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    172 years ago

    Americans: What the fuck is “kilometers”?

  • Cyborganism
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    612 years ago

    Not just that, but I found a few golf courses in my city where natural habitats used to be. These place could have easily been changed into nature parks for the local residents to go wind down a bit, but noooOOOooo. Some rich assholes had to buy the land and destroy the ecosystem so they could whack a ball around some fucking grass into a little hole.

    • @[email protected]
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      12 years ago

      Would there be a difference to the sport if a part of the land was just left natural? I expect it would make the sport more interesting, atleast to the spectators.

      • Cyborganism
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        32 years ago

        It was invented in Scotland. Where there’s grass everywhere and almost no trees. Why not just play in natural landscapes that are suited for the game?

  • Clot
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    102 years ago

    They dont level tho, I saw some of them playing with pond in between💀

  • @[email protected]
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    612 years ago

    Wait until you hear about the laws in place that guarantee them access to water their fields no matter the drought. Nobody has heard of an unkempt golf course.

  • @[email protected]
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    11 month ago

    True, it’s wild how a virtual game can have such a real-world carbon footprint—servers, mining, endless energy use. Digital doesn’t always mean clean.

  • Flying SquidM
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    312 years ago

    I live in Indiana, so there’s (generally) no shortage of rain. The golf courses in this town still water the entire grass of the course every day. Even if it rained the day before. Even if it’s raining right then and there. There aren’t water shortages here, but what a waste.

    • @[email protected]
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      372 years ago

      Most courses use man made ponds as both hazards and as retention ponds so they can use that rain water.

      You know what uses three times the amount of water per acre? Corn. And almonds use about ten times more water than corn. And people have only just started caring about lawns, that use two orders of magnitude more water, fertilizer, and land than golf courses.

      Golf courses really aren’t that bad from an ecological point of view when compared acre per acre to other large man made structures. They’re generally pretty small when compared to other large landscaping projects at 30-80 acres. The issue is when a city has like twenty courses just for the purpose of driving up housing prices.

      Would that land be better as a park? Probably, but this is the US, someone would see an unprofitable “empty” plot of land and throw million dollar houses on it.

      • Flying SquidM
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        52 years ago

        Well I admit I haven’t seen the entirety of those courses, but based on what I’ve seen, and considering they’re surrounded by either businesses, houses or, in one case, a hospital, I don’t know where those retention ponds would be. The hazards they have absolutely wouldn’t be big enough to cover the amount of water I see sprayed on them.

        • @[email protected]
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          52 years ago

          I have never seen a golf course next to a hospital… Maybe it’s regional, but near me, most courses have many made ponds that hold rain water and you can smell the pond water when the sprinklers come on. The ponds can hold several Olympic swimming pools worth of water.

      • @[email protected]
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        392 years ago

        You know what uses three times the amount of water per acre? Corn. And almonds use about ten times more water than corn.

        And we get food out of that input, unlike a golf course where you get nothing of value.

        And people have only just started caring about lawns, that use two orders of magnitude more water, fertilizer, and land than golf courses.

        Have you seen a golf course before? They’re literally lawns.

        • @[email protected]
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          72 years ago

          Most of the US corn crop goes to animal feed, so no you don’t get food from it. At least not directly. If you totaled up all of the land used by golf courses, you’d be at .1% of just the amount of land used for animal feed. And about 1% of the land used by home lawns.

          They’re not that bad, there are much worse enemies than golf courses in general. Again, courses that are in the middle of a city that do nothing but increase property value are terrible, but most are perfectly fine and use way less water than you think.

        • @[email protected]
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          172 years ago

          You get nothing of value from golf. I don’t play either so neither do I, but this very much comes off as “stop liking things I don’t like” rather than something that is actually important.

          • @[email protected]
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            12 years ago

            At least in the southwestern US most of them are a moot point. The vast majority of golf courses are being redeveloped because the course went bankrupt over the last decade or so. A few are managing to stick around, but I wouldn’t be surprised if over 90% of the historical courses are gone in the next few years.