It’s the best time of the calendar year for sports: we’re in the meat of the World Series, both college and professional football are in full swing, and the NBA season has officially begun. There’s no shortage of something to see on TV if you’re into the general idea of, well, anything sport-related.

However, now that means you see more gambling ads than ever. The NBA just announced an official partnership with two major ‘prediction market’ apps. (Prediction market has to be the dumbest ‘just make sure we don’t call it gambling’ workaround ever.)

Even if there weren’t so many disgusting celebrity-packed advertisements for this shit, and even if every broadcast of any sporting event wasn’t filled with sponsored, real-time betting lines, the fact remains that gambling addiction is a real thing that is being treated like nothing at all. The media in the United States has laws in regards to marketing alcohol and cigarettes, but when it comes to gambling, it’s not only unregulated, but these companies are allowed to sponsor sporting events that people bet on.

I don’t know anyone who likes sports who supports any of this—most people I talk to find it all infuriating. But I do feel for the people who have a gambling problem out there, because this can’t be easy. I know a guy who goes to GA (Gamblers Anonymous) and watched him go through a six-month relapse a couple years ago. Every day it was hours and hours at the tables, up thousands, down thousands, wild swings of financial fortune and loss in rapid succession.

It just feels like these companies are counting on people like this, waiting to take their money, regardless of the consequences, and the leagues and broadcast networks are all-in.

Defector has the right tone when talking about Tom Dundon and his recent acquisition of the Portland Trail Blazers:

Fans of the Portland Trail Blazers should prepare themselves for a very unpleasant time. Tom Dundon, the team’s new owner, is digging in. Arena renovations would improve the value of his property, and so he wants arena renovations. He is simply and resolutely refusing to commit any of his own money to the project. If Portland refuses to pay for stadium renovations, and the stadium thus goes un-renovated, Dundon will have an ironclad pretext for packing the team into a U-Haul and moving it to Las Vegas, or Nashville, or—the monkey’s paw finally directing a shriveled middle finger at the world—Seattle. That’s how investor ownership works, and why it is fucked: The franchise has been in Portland for almost 60 years; Dundon bought it four months ago, and it is entirely and irrevocably his.

…

There’s a handy lesson in class solidarity. Dundon, wielding Hankins like a sock puppet, is putting tax dollars on one side of the scale and private investor wealth on the other, and arguing that because private wealth was previously spent by a member of Dundon’s billionaire class, the class has already contributed its share to the pot. It is now time for the tax-paying public to pitch money back at the billionaires, goes this argument. Dundon will simply collect this payment on behalf of his tribe.

The great irony about the rich is that they demean socialism, or honestly anything to the left of fascism, but expect taxpayers to foot the bill as a collective class for what is owned by private investment. ‘Socialism for me, not for thee,’ is basically the motto of the rich. (See also: Elected officials receiving healthcare benefits that amount to federal subsidies covering 72% of costs.)

Billionaires like Dundon should be driven out of places like Portland with pitchforks and vats of tar and the team reclaimed by the city with force, and given how much Portland loves the Blazers, I could almost imagine something like that happening. John Fisher notoriously moved the beloved Athletics out of Oakland instead of selling the team so they could stay in the East Bay.

The rich care nothing about culture or what things mean to the people who create and support it; they see only numbers, bottom lines, and profit margins in everything. Capitalism is a cancer on humanity—and I mean that in the most literal sense. It destroys what we are able to create with our minds and bodies for the sole purpose of money (another invention) to a select few beneficiaries and will eventually lead to the destruction of the planet. These people are barely human—grotesque obsessives hoarding wealth and we’d all be better for it if they were collectively disposed of.