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Comment by Marsymars | Hacker News Reader

One of the nice things about China is that they don't sell off naming rights to their stadiums to the highest bidding advertiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stadiums_in_China

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That's always bothered me about stadiums here in the US. There's one in Seattle with this joke of a name: "Climate Pledge Arena."

Climate Pledge, brought to you by SC Johnson, cleans and polishes your surfaces in more varied conditions for people who live in extreme climates. Makes sense they'd sponsor a hockey arena. /s

Similar but unrelated, the audacity to post-facto denote something a Netflix Original.

Considering Amazon is paying for that name, I find it far more appealing than "Amazon Prime 2-Day Delivery Arena".

Or "Bang Bros Arena": https://www.insider.com/porn-site-bangbros-bid-10-million-na...

It's the home of the Seattle Krakens. We call it the Krakhaus.

Except former Wukesong Arena in Bejing has been named "MasterCard Center", "LeSports Center" and is now "Cadillac Center". Then there's "Mercedes-Benz Arena" in Shanghai. Shaanxi Province Stadium was for a few years named "Coca-Cola Stadium".

Why is that nice? Shouldn't we want to encourage the rich to finance large projects of cultural benefit?

Not via naming right. It’s garish, feels dystopian, and leads to misplaced incentives, where the building of projects of cultural benefit is affected by how useful their naming rights are for advertisers. Should we also try to auction off names for other large public projects? Dams? Power plants? Schools? Highways?

If we want the rich to finance large projects of cultural benefit, the appropriate mechanism for doing so is via taxation.

Sounds like a good trade for concentration camps and organ harvesting.

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