Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

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I work for Twitch but I'll put it in old man terms: I have a subscription to MLB.tv. I watch EVERY SINGLE game of my team each year, that's 162*3 = 486 hours a year. That's 27% of a 1800 hour work year. If you go in season, that's 54%. It's on all day every day that I'm at my work desk. I watch Twitch the rest of the year.

Do I watch it intently? No. Do I know the score and what's going on? Generally. Do I feel I followed the season, YES. Though I have noticed that since I DVR (I watched the world series DURING spring training) a lot I don't keep up with the day to day discussions I actually know less about the team than my brother who watches few games but reads bleacher report constantly.

Why do I do it? Well for 8 years I worked in a heavily paired environment, then went to a job with private offices and felt under stimulated. Started watching baseball / twitch just so it felt like others were in the room. Also I have ADD so these things likely help keep me at neutral input levels.

I'm sure you have some garbage ass tv you just toss on as well. Home remodel shows, golf, blatheringly repetitive cable news. These things are mildly connected to your interest and are either there to be in the background or they're there to let you just zone out and decompress.

When working with amazon I often have to have this conversation with people... it usually goes like this:

55 year old business lead of some VP vertical: It's really wierd to me that people watch hours of other people play video games. It's got to be incredibly boring.

Me: I notice you have a "Masters" hat on. Do you watch that?

55: Yes.

Me: You realize that like 99% of people think golf puts them to sleep.

55: Touche, how much revenue can we make?

Me: XXXXYY

55: I'm interested.

I imagine many here would kill for some peace and quiet at work. The idea that I'd want to add noise and conversation into it is horrifying to me personally.

Even at home, I would never want to have some random thing blaring in the background. I only watch things that are worth my full attention.

With my ADD I find I concentrate more when some amount of background noise. Some things distract me, others like baseball not really, or they distract JUST enough. One of my old coworkers would just put the same song on repeat all day long.

Good point - revenue rules.

By the way, golf and baseball help me take naps.

Cheers

It is really regrettable that humans have this incredibly illogical, subconscious algorithm for making otherwise logical decisions.

Most of the money and capital in this world are held by the older generations rather than the younger generations. The younger generations have to then spend their time "pitching" the older generations on ideas that, in a vacuum, are logical but not evident to the older generations.

As a result, anyone in the younger generations who has a personal relationship with the older generations (such as yourself) will become disproportionately wealthy if their pitch is accepted, compared to say the 27 year old single mother + person of color.

There's an argument in the middle of this muddled statement that's valid, but this seems excessively combative.

The problem is not people with good connections, it's a system that rewards those connections.

As a person of color, the last time I checked, there are also old people of color. It's not like we just sprung up fully formed 10 years ago or something, okay?

There's no need to accuse me (an ally) of allegedly forgeting your existence when I was merely trying to give an example of someone who is statistically extremely underprivileged.

The entire idea of 'allyship' is racist, tbh. There are >3 billion non-white people. The idea that you can somehow promote all their interests is ridiculous. The only way you can believe that is if you actually think we are all the same. Last time I checked, we don't all share one group mind.

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