The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.
The thing is that the US team sports you can think of such Baseball or American Football, have nearly no popularity outside of the US. Maybe Baseball in places like Japan or Venezuela.
Maybe the only parallel to soccer I can think of is sports like Rugby in UK and some English-speaking countries, Cricket in India, and some sports endemic to countries (such as GAA in Ireland).
The best way to compare the US to other countries in a sport that is similar in terms of interest among other countries is something like Volleyball. Which the US tends to be very good at, with many major competitors. I can't think of anywhere that volleyball is a #1 sport that sees a lot of unstructured play.
Baseball obviously has high popularity in a substantial number of non-US countries, though the main ones that feed the MLB (the DR, Venezuela, and Cuba) aren't often top-of-mind countries for many. The Japan/Korea interest is obviously non-trivial too.
Basketball is the obvious one you're leaving out that's about the same age as Volleyball (itself a US team sport), and probably has the most international popularity -- especially if just going by people-counting since China alone is an enormous market.
Funny thing, though: US players make up about 73% of the MLB but about 78% of the NBA, despite the NBA having more international popularity, and the current best players in both being from non-US countries.
The thing about basketball is that it is typically not a sport where it's a primary interest.
Go to places where you find good Basketball players. Germany, former Yugoslavian countries, Spain, Argentina... All those places are primarily Football countries.
You will find a few people interested in the sport, some youngster might be playing it for fun, but still very much behind football.
Aren’t the ideal bodies pretty different for basketball and soccer? Are 6’6” guys a good size for soccer? How about taller? I’m sure European basketball players grow up playing soccer but at some point they end up playing to their strengths.
That's... very American of it, still? The idea of a single sport in a country is weird and silly from a US point of view. I'm more interested in hockey, why would anyone think that would make me not a fan of basketall or football or baseball?
But... so? I thought we were talking about if these sports had "nearly no popularity"? Not if they were displacing soccer entirely. "Nearly no popularity" is pretty obviously false based on eyeballs and sales, even if soccer is more popular... And there's a lot more countries and people in the world than just Europe. (But also very American of you to ignore them ;) .) How much would it even matter to the NBA if China is or isn't primarily a basketball country, or just a country with hundreds of millions of fans that also have another sport above it in their personal rankings, if they're making money either way?
EDIT: and of course the name "soccer" originated in England because there were multiple foot-related games and so people made a more specific name. So maybe the weird countries are the ones that lost a fun multi-sport ecosystem and ended up a monoculture...
I can’t speak to its actual popularity, but when I visit Europe and local folks hear I’m from the US, I’m surprised how often they are interested in talking about the NBA. Maybe it’s more pronounced in Eastern Europe where a lot of basketball talent has made it to the NBA over the years.
Well, if you are from the US, and I was talking to you about sports... Yeah, I would try to find a middle ground so that a conversation could happen. NBA is likely a reasonable thing to try.
Why would I bother talking to you about Bundesliga, Champions League, Libertadores Cup or whatever else?
Also, I worked with many people from Eastern Europe. Apart from Lithuania, I think all other countries are interested in Football more than in Basketball.
Baseball appeal in a country is always a history lesson. You can measure how a country was fucked up by USA based in their love of baseball:
- Cuba
- Japan
- Panama
- Venezuela
Korea, Dominican Republic, Mexico all have pro leagues as well. There are more leagues growing in places like the UK and Australia as well though fully amateur at this point I think. Suffice it to say fans across all of these countries find it thrilling enough to play and watch.
I don’t understand the casual sniping against baseball. There are plenty of sports I have no interest in but I don’t call them out because nobody cares what I think of them.
I feel this in my own life. From well before my working years I had a message ingrained into me: “Do not count on social security to be around when you retire.”
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.
As genX this was my experience too. The numbers have been clear for decades, SS is unlikely to be a great option by the time anyone working today gets it. (including people who retire in a month). Generally I think there will be SS when I'm old - but it will barely be enough to live on. I'm trying to save money so I can not only eat but also do other things I enjoy [that cost money] when I retire.
Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.
It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.
Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
Housing is all messed up because land is a limited resource and regulation artificially limits it even further.
I live in a high demand area. A perfectly cromulent house on a particularly good lot will sell for $1.5 million as a teardown. The new house will be 6,000+ sqft and be inhabited by a family of four. Builders won’t build smaller because the land price sets a hard floor. The most profitable and economically productive thing would be to split the lot and build several smaller houses, or build a small apartment building, housing several times more people for the same cost. But this isn’t legal. Construction costs don’t make a difference. If construction costs doubled, the new houses would just get smaller. Some of these teardowns would stop being torn down. The cost of living in the area would stay about the same.
I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.
(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)
Fellow Googler here. I'm the exception that proves the rule. After 7 years of Macbook and Linux devices, I needed Windows for a special project, so I got a "gWindows" device and found it very well supported.
Aside from the specific Windows-only software I needed, I would still just ssh into a Linux workstation, but gWindows can do basically everything my Mac can. I was pleasantly surprised.
It's just easier to iterate and improve on a coding specialist AI when that is also the skill required to iterate on said AI.
Products that build on general LLM tech are already being used in other fields. For example, my lawyer friend has started using one by LexisNexis[0] and is duly impressed by how it works. It's only a matter of time before models like that get increasingly specialized for that kind of work, it's just harder for lawyers to drive that kind of change alone. Plus, there's a lot more resistance in 'legacy' professions to any kind of change, much less one that is perceived to threaten the livelihoods of established professionals.
Current LLMs are already not bad at a lot of things, but lawyer bots, accountant bots and more are likely coming.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.
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