jayacheess

Now if only they could get housing under control.

The regional races are as hype as ever. UCI is just full of bungling morons. Give the coverage to someone else who actually cares about it and centre it around long-form recaps with a lots of nearly full-run POV coverage, and you've got a great product. I keep saying, but if they treat it like Rally racing instead of F1, I think it'll come roaring back.

The top performing XC riders over the last few years seem to be more technically gifted than in the past - though there were always top level outliers like Schurter. And there's no denying that courses have gotten more technical. In years past, there were certainly an over abundance of courses that favoured pure fitness over technical riding chops.

The course looked amazing in the POV previews, but I agree, the coverage didn't seem to do it justice.

@TwoNGlenn: "by your logic, then capitalism has never been properly implemented" - no, by my logic, capitalism has been implemented 'successfully'(at least in as much as it hasn't resulted in terrible living conditions) in most developed countries. I never suggested that the test for whether an economic system is working is that its implementation needs to be in a country with ZERO corruption. I said that the test should be in a country that isn't already overwhelmed with systemic corruption, as places like Russia are. You seem to be either ignoring or misunderstanding the points I'm trying to make here, so I'll just end this discussion.

@TwoNGlenn: There are degrees of corruption, depending on the society we're talking about. I honestly don't expect socialism to ever be properly implemented for the reasons I just outlined above, but I also think it's silly to dismiss it outright when we don't have an example of it being implemented under the best possible circumstances for its success. Put another way, capitalism implemented in countries where 'socialism' was previously tried would have still caused the countries to have poor outcomes due to endemic corruption. Look at Russia right now, for example.

@SchalkMarais: Dismissing an economic system as 'pure evil' isn't a logical take. There are economic systems that work well and some that don't. Socialism has only been truly attempted in countries that have already have major cultural/societal problems with corruption. Corruption, as we know, can cause any system of government or economic system to fail. These countries, given these endemic issues with corruption, were ripe for the kind of total revolution needed for the implementation of a new economic system, hence why we have seen socialism pop up in countries that are already unstable due to corruption. The real test of socialism would be to see how it functions when implemented by a relatively stable, non-corruption prone society. That said, no one really wants to be a test-bed for a radical systemic change. And as long as a large portion of the population isn't starving in the street, large scale revolutions like that are unlikely.

@SchalkMarais: Unchecked capitalism promotes monopolies, not competition. Capitalism only works for the greater good of a society with significant guard rails put in place by the state. The neo-liberal economic style that has been prevalent in the last 30 years has been bad for regular people and great for the ultra wealthy. No one is suggesting full-on socialism, but we should definitely be slapping the shit out of these corporate leaders for how they manage their companies, and should be trying to reduce the perverse incentives that drive short term stock price growth and quarterly-profit seeking behavior.