Flutterby™! : More on how pro sports cost everybody

NY Times: Paying a ‘Sports Tax,’ Even if You Don’t Watch:

Although “sports” never shows up as a line item on a cable or satellite bill, American television subscribers pay, on average, about $100 a year for sports programming — no matter how many games they watch. A sizable portion goes to the National Football League, which dominates sports on television and which struck an extraordinary deal this week with the major networks — $27 billion over nine years — that most likely means the average cable bill will rise again soon.

So not only are you paying out the nose for local tax breaks, additional policing costs, peak-load traffic, and other externalities to host their stadiums in your town, if you pay for TV you're also funnelling money into the giant economic sink that is professional sports.

I got to that via JWZ's rant about DirecTV's "deceptive business practices", which is also interesting because his reasoning for wanting to pay for television is the timeliness of the delivery of the product: To be watching what other people are watching.

The "something for the water cooler conversation" effect is part of what drives my bandwidth bet with TC, something I really need to dig deeper on the stats of.