• Lophostemon@aussie.zone
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    1 year ago

    The original game as invented by bored semi-drunk Scots was, I’m sure, a good laugh several hundred years ago with wee sticks and a random round thing.

    The modern game and all its hideous capitalist/ classist cultural connotations is fucked.

  • Krotz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well, I recently learned of the existence of Excel competitions, so I’m not sure about the ‘most boring’ part.

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Not just that, but I found a few golf courses in my city where natural habitats used to be. These place could have easily been changed into nature parks for the local residents to go wind down a bit, but noooOOOooo. Some rich assholes had to buy the land and destroy the ecosystem so they could whack a ball around some fucking grass into a little hole.

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Mini-golf is actually kind of fun.

      It’s a lot of fun, and you don’t need any nukes to enjoy it either.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Maybe not need…

          True enough.

          There’s always that one hole where you have to hit the ball hard enough so it goes around the vertical loop ramp but not too hard so that it then bounces at the right angle to get anywhere near the area of the hole that’s blocked by a whole bunch of strategically placed pieces of wood.

          On that hole I would consider using a nuke.

    • Cringe2793@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Mini golf is superior and should be the default golf. As in, it shouldn’t have a descriptor. It should just be called golf.

      And what is called golf now should be called big golf or field golf or something like that to show how nonsensical it is.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Most of the times I played it, my group is enjoying themselves on holes 1-5, is getting tired of being held up by the group in front of us for holes 6-12, and is getting noticeably bored by hole 13, but feel like we have to finish it. It’s a game that starts fun and becomes obligation.

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    The golf course near me has spent the last month about a foot underwater.

    I have never been so smug. I hope it’s ruined.

  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    every golf course could be a lovely botanical garden/park or arboretum, with little paths every which way and carefully crafted scenery to make you feel like you’re inside a disney movie

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      wpid-dgladeau_0113_0748

      You see this?

      I used to hike along the coast there quite regularly but someone decided it was much better to turn the whole thing into a gulf course and to illegally block access to locals.

      Edit: Of course they also chose the driest part of the island.

      • v_krishna@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Where is this? California has strict regulations about the actual beach access. So e.g. Pebble Beach is in one of the most beautiful locations in all of Northern California, ridiculously expensive and nearly impossible to play as a mortal, but you can still go drive around 17 mile drive through the course and walk along the coastal trails for free.

        • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          It’s in st Lucia in the Caribbean.

          There is regulations for beach access too here where all the coastline need to be accessible to the public.

          So far with this particular resort they are doing everything they can to discourage people from coming in and showed a strong disdain for the local community.

      • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Maybe they should be on the lookout for people pouring cement into the golf holes.

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      AND AFFORDABLE HOUSING ON EACH SIDE. Seattle estimated they could solve the housing crisis by closing a handful of their muni courses (leaving multiple municipal and a dozen private courses in the area) and building medium density housing there. Solving a critical need by getting rid of a few locations for a dying sport:

      https://www.theurbanist.org/2019/06/12/unlike-seattle-golf-really-is-dying/

      It’s a waste of space otherwise.

    • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
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      Most of the golf courses near me are pretty much this - densely forested areas with meticulously landscaped little gardens, which happens to have some holes built in.

      • Striker@lemmy.worldOPM
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        Please. For the love of God don’t let this lazy comment cliché migrate to here.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m always interested in this take. By definition,.it’s clearly a sport.

      How do you define sport and how does it not meet the definition? It’s a game of physical skill, mental concentration, and competition.

      • Kalothar@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I have always viewed it as a sport involves and active defensive player and an overall greater level of physical movement

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          What about non-team sports, like running, cycling, surfing, skiing, etc. maybe there’s a defensive strategy but there’s no active defensive player. Are those also not sports?

          • Kalothar@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            Interesting point, i know they are definitely sports so it kinda throws my point away haha

            • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Not really. They meet your qualifier of greater amount of physical activity/movement.

              Sport has connotations of fast paced physical activity.

              Games like Solitaire and Golf can be done by yourself and for most people won’t be spiking your heart levels to a runners high.

        • HenryWong327@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Motorsports have no defensive player and do not involve much physical movement (unless you count the car’s movement).

          Giving a cat a bath involves a defensive player (the cat) and significant physical movement (depends on the cat’s mood).

          • zeppo@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Part of the definition of a sport is that it accomplishes absolutely nothing useful at all, other than entertainment, thought about it and perhaps fitness. Bathing a cat is not a sport because it actually has a useful goal, I.e. cleaning a cat.

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Fishing has entered the chat.

          Definitely a defensive participant and an offensive participant, but way less physical activity like 90% of the time.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Oh that just made him angry, I always added that no sport has the winner of a major tournament in their mid 40s.

          • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            I mean… Tom Brady was a super bowl MVP in his 40s.

            Chris Chelios won a Stanley Cup in his 40s.

            But your point is well taken nonetheless.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            Sports that are more based on endurance than sprinting tend to have older people who do well. Mid-40s is pushing it for championship level, but you can still be competitive at that stage, and still participate well into old age if you don’t have any major health/injury issues.

    • I actually get exhausted playing golf - but that’s because I’m BAD at it. Apparently I put too much force into my swing. Every time I’ve tried to play I get told to relax and “let the club to the work”.

      So they literally have these weighted sticks to reduce the amount of frickin effort required to hit the ball.

      It’s not a sport. It’s an ANTI-sport. The less you try the better you’ll be.

      Can you imagine if we had an Olympic running sport to see who the slowest runner was? That’s what golf is. Get the weakest, limpest, vitamin-defficient humans and see how accurately they can hit a tiny ball into a hole.

      It was invented by the Scots as a joke against the English while they all go and compete in proper sports like caber tossing and hammer throwing.

  • Fraylor@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Wait until you hear about the laws in place that guarantee them access to water their fields no matter the drought. Nobody has heard of an unkempt golf course.

  • Alterecho@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As an environmentalist, fuck Kentucky bluegrass, fuck golf, and fuck lawns while we’re at it

    • Jazsta@lemmy.world
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      I agree lawns are dumb but from an environmental perspective they can be net carbon sinks, which I found surprising. Though they are still bad for other environmental reasons.

      • Fraylor@lemm.ee
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        Hey fuck environmental diversity, we’ve got carbon sinks. What a fucking joke.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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        Nothing can sink any more carbon than its weight plus any bits that fall or get taken and don’t rot. Worse, for most plants most of the weight is water, not carbon-containing organic compounds.

        So lawns might be “net” carbon sinks only when compared to the extreme case of leaving the ground bare (or worse, asphalted), but only whilst they’re growing (they don’t really retain any additional carbon after grown and any grass mowned will just return the carbon back to the air when it rots and a lot of it will be Methane, a worse greehouse gas than CO2) and they’re a lot worse at it per unit of area than, say, trees or even just the natural ground cover in just about any land environment but desert.

        • nBodyProblem@lemmy.world
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          That’s why I dig up my lawn every year and bury it underground inside sealed plastic bags

          I’m doing my part!

      • Alterecho@lemmy.world
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        I mean if you want to talk about sequestering carbon, there’s all sorts of natural lawn options that aren’t actively planting an invasive species that has proven to be really bad at doing any sort of water filtration or absorption. In fact, I’d wager that planting (and letting grow) prairie or whatever your native biome supports probably sequesters more carbon, assuming your native ecosystems aren’t straight up desert. If they are, you’re now using so much less water that it’s a huge net win there.

  • Renacles@discuss.tchncs.de
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    I just don’t understand the need for so many courses, I played golf as a kid on the same one for 10 years, the local environment allowed it to maintain itself for the most part.

  • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
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    I don’t care for golf and wish golf courses were better used spaces, but the thing about golf that makes it interesting is the meditative practice of being able to swing the club in just the right way to make the ball go where it needs to.

    I like archery and you have the same sort of thing going on there. You have to have your positioning, movements, focus, and smoothness of action to hit the target. You can tell how you failed before the arrow hits the target. Working on fine tuning your actions is enjoyable.

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      archery

      archery doesn’t carry a racist history and waste giant tracts of land. they can putt-putt or get fucked.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      I shot in highschool and it was the same thing. I loved it. You get into this extreme zen state and.become hyper aware of your own body. It was a lot of fun.

  • arc@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Las Vegas has something like 70 golf courses wasting inordinate amounts of water. Of course most houses also have outside private swimming pools tool.

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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      Vegas actually is a poor example, they have excellent water management policy even in spite of what is typically considered wasteful. Being so far down the Colorado River Basin kinda made being experts on the subject a necessity.

      • arc@lemm.ee
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        Of course it has excellent water management because otherwise they’d run out. Doesn’t mean that everyone having pools and so many golf courses is anyway defensible, or doesn’t put insane stress on the supply.

        • Ranvier@sopuli.xyz
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          I don’t think they’re saying golf courses in the desert are defensible. I think they’re saying that Nevada does better water conservation job than other nearby states (I believe Utah is the worst per capita) and has not nearly as much impact on the colorado river, so there’s probably bigger fish to go after in terms of saving water than Las Vegas. When you get down to it like >80% of the water use out west is agriculture. If you’re going to make significant savings you have to tackle agriculture practices. Not that you shouldn’t clamp down on the golf courses too (I totally think they should, just deal with the artificial turf golfers if you want to golf in the middle of an arid desert and go golf in the scottish highlands if you want real grass), it just probably wouldn’t help all that much in the grand scheme of things even if golf courses didn’t exist at all. Surprisingly the best thing to do to conserve water would be to reduce meat consumption, most of what’s grown is for livestock feed not human consumption.

          https://web.archive.org/web/20231030112319/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/22/climate/colorado-river-water.html

        • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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          Lake mead is being drained from the other direction into Utah and you’d have known that before commenting if you’d actually looked that shit up before going to say something that spectacularly unaware of what’s going on.

          Vegas actually net zeros their allotment of the water share every year, as far as Mead is considered, Vegas almost doesn’t exist.

            • MammyWhammy@lemmy.ml
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              The other commenter’s point is that Las Vegas returns almost all of the water it consumes cleaned and back to Lake Meade. As a municipality their net water consumption is close to zero.

              It’s other municipalities and agricultural ventures that are draining Lake Meade not Las Vegas. Vegas pulls water from Meade, treats it and then returns it back to the reservoir.

              If you’re going to pick on water wasters Vegas isn’t where you want to start. There’s plenty of other reasons to pick on Vegas, water isn’t one of them.

              https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-water-conservation-grass/

              That’s the first search result when I searched “Vegas water conversation” it wasn’t hard to find.

              • zeppo@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                How is that possible, due to evaporation?

                Elimiating lawns is a great idea, seeing as they live in a massive desert. I approve of that, for everyone who cares.

                the famed fountains at the Bellagio Hotel use water from a private well — not the Colorado River. He also said the water that evaporates into the hot desert air is replaced with recycled water from a 1.5 million gallon pool.

                so… they just drain groundwater?

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world
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      The one near me got turned into 500 houses. The water infra couldn’t cope and everywhere now floods when it rains.

    • 44Harmony@lemmy.world
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      I wish they would at least let you walk on the cart paths before /after hours. I’ve seen one course that did that - allowed walkers once the sprinklers turned on in the evenings (signaling the end of play as well), but the majority don’t.

  • greedytacothief@lemmy.world
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    I live in upstate New York, just about every town has a golf course. I personally love the game, but I honestly don’t think their that bad for the environment up here. For many people it’s their third place.

    Like we get plenty of rain, and most I’ve been to are nestled near the edge of the forests. The APA regulates the shit out of what you can do. And it’s really not much of a waste of land. If I want to go for a hike or trail run, I have dozens within biking distance and maybe even 100 within 30 minutes of driving.

    It’s farms and their cow shit fertilizer releasing gass and it’s runoff polluting the watershed that’s doing the most damage around here. But like I say, the APA does a pretty good job most of the time.

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      lol this moron thinks they don’t fertilize the NEON GREEN grass that makes up almost every course.

      goddamn that’s dumb

      • greedytacothief@lemmy.world
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        I don’t think you’ve seen how NEON GREEN the Adirondacks are. I get that they fertilize it. But really I don’t think the environmental impact is particularly great around me.

        What environmental impacts are there that I’m not thinking of for my area? And how severe are they? The way I see it, this area is one that can afford to have golf courses.

        • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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          Yeah, I KNOW HOW NEON GREEN YOUR LAKES GET WHEN THE ALGAE BLOOMS COME IN.

          https://www.adirondackexplorer.org/stories/a-lake-in-crisis

          Because of nitrogen and phosphorus runoff, you fucking ignorant dolt. This is a REAL FUCKING PROBLEM even for you fortunate assholes up in the mountains.

          https://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/67239.html

          https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/4/357/250240

          https://harvardforest1.fas.harvard.edu/publications/pdfs/Driscoll_Environment_2003.pdf

          The fertilizers still run down stream into the Raritan Bay watershed, LIS, hell every fucking waterway in the northeast.

          Some of these fertilizers are critical to growing our fucking crops to feed people, so set aside your FUCKING INANE AND STUPID HOBBY for a moment and realize we gotta keep using them, we simply can’t keep spraying them on putting greens so it runs down to the creek, into river, on into the bay or lake.

          • greedytacothief@lemmy.world
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            Look, I get it it’s the Internet, but why all the insults?

            I read the links and it seems to me that I was entirely correct. Runoff from farms is the primary source of nitrogen and other fertilizers in the waterways. I drive through Addison Vermont every day for work. You can smell the putrid rotting shit they spray on the fields. Vermont has rules around when you can spray shit, so that’s why it smells worse than New York farms. Because it ferments in a pit or tank for a while before use.

            I also did a preliminary search and it seems that golf courses have been reducing the amount of fertilizer used over the past couple of decades.

            Source:

            https://gcmonline.com/course/environment/news/nutrient-use-and-management-on-u.s.-golf-courses

            So yes fertilizer is a problem. Farms need to figure out a way to reduce the runoff they produce. I probably just didn’t read hard enough but how much of a problem are golf courses? How do they compare to other polluters?

            • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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              So you’re completely aware of the harm being done to play a fool’s game, the waste of space and resources, the impact to the watershed, and your response is “yeah well how does it compare to other pollution” - FOR A FUCKING GAME?

              AND YOU WONDER WHY I INSULT YOU?

              if we have any descendents that live through the next millennium, they’re going to wonder why it was so hard to just stop killing the planet, and one of the biggest reasons will be fuckwits like you who stood in the way. for fucking games.

              • greedytacothief@lemmy.world
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                I am asking, how bad is it?

                The environment has a capacity to handle some pollution. If the pollution caused by golf courses is negligible then why should I care about something that pales in comparison to that which is causing real and apparent harm.

                I see a couple of acres of grass that makes people happy. I see thousands of acres that are clearly damaging the environment that i love. Why should I care about the little bit that gets people outside enjoying the outdoors? Why do you sling insults instead of changing my mind? I’m open to change my mind, just have a conversation with me.

                Are you a conservationist or a preservationist? Do you believe humans should enjoy the land we protect, or should humans be kept away from the natural world to protect it?

                • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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                  I’m a fucking rationalist and a realist. You’re a delusionist apparently.

                  there’s so many resources, we can spend them foolishly on bullshit that benefits few, or we can devote our energy, space and production to saving our own asses.

                  do the fucking math, and please, stop trying to convince me your milquetoast excuses are anything but “fuck you, I don’t care” - because your indifference and petty justifications communicate loud and clear dipstick.