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If countries freely choose to pay the bill in exchange for the prestige, who cares about the waste?
by mathattack 10y ago
If countries freely choose to pay the bill in exchange for the prestige, who cares about the waste?
- YokoZar 10y agoBecause these countries are made up of humans who are not freely choosing to waste scarce resources on such waste.
- baddox 10y agoCitizens of every country have virtually no control over how their tax revenue is spent.
- mathattack 10y agoBrazil is a Democracy, and the Olympics had broad public support when Rio won the right to host them.
- wjoe 10y agoThe citizens of those countries. There are many better things Brazil should be spending their money on, and many people living in terrible conditions who they should be helping. Many countries and cities who have actually asked their people whether they want an Olympics in the last few years have voted no, for example Oslo in Norway and Stockholm in Sweden.
- mathattack 10y agoYou can make the argument at a lot of places, but Brazil is a democracy. They voted for the candidates who pitched the idea of hosting the Olympics, and it had a mass of popular support. If the IOC runs out of countries willing to host it, then perhaps the host cities will be able to temper how much they want to spend on it. The Olympics don't have to be so elaborate.
- vkou 10y agoBe it in a democracy or a dictatorship, consent for a special interest is relatively easy to manufacture.
- the_watcher 10y agoThe IOC won't run out of countries who want to host it so long as countries with rampant corruption exist. The timeline of the Olympics is a corrupt developers wet dream.
- cmurf 10y agoI did not down vote this or the other comment, but I disagree that Brazil is a democracy. It's at best a polyarchy, and is probably just an oligarchy. The voting component is a veneer of democracy to make enough of the citizenry seem essentially complicit with the bad ideas of the leaders.
- tajen 10y agoIOC would make a fortune if citizen could bribe to avoid hosting the Olympics.
- cmurf 10y agoYou think these countries freely chose this? The rampant bribery involved in the olympics is the one sure sport that'll not go away any time soon, despite being illegal. At this point it's become the necessary lubricant to keep the machination of this particular scam going. Not for one moment do I think the Russian people freely chose to host the recent winter Olympics at a summer beach resort, where metric tons of ice and snow were trucked in, creating the Olympics equivalent of Kleenex in the most obvious one time use venue in recent memory. And the IOC went in on this total scam artistry too instead of having a WTF moment, so they are not just implicated, they're the ones who facilitate this nonsense. I refuse to believe Russians are proud of the abject stupidity that was the Sochi Olympics, even setting aside the rampant bribery and cheating.