I feel sorry for those who already incurred lasting damage, but for the rest... it only depends on them to stop.
I wrote that out of curiosity about why such an article would end up on the front page of HN. Yes, I understand that HN isn't just business and tech, it's "interesting things" - but why is this article interesting? Since I don't find it interesting, maybe some people found this an important issue, I thought?
(a) It's a well written and interesting article on a sports issue that most don't know about.
(b) Its TBI implications are generalizable to a lot of popular activities.
Even if we are generous and define importance loosely as reward divided by needed investment (aka ROI) we just end up with the current system. It's still not perfect because it doesn't account for time and corruption. People will optimize for the short term and powerful corporations can create feedback loops by lobbying the government to declare their business as "important" which makes the corporation more powerful and that additional power can be used for lobbying again. However, despite all the shortcomings we still have yet to find a better system.
I just realized that this comment was mostly aimed at doublesCs. Feel free to ignore it.