- Half the country or more just doesn't work or do anything else when there's an important match anyway.
- There's a big intersection between "people that doesn't care about soccer" and "people that knows how to use a VPN"
- Matches are usually at night, past 7pm. It's well after the average citizen work hours.
- There's not really huge internet companies there that can lobby the other way around (e.g. infrastructure collapse because of the block).
So in short, the ruling is incredibly stupid because they're allowed to do so, save for the vocal minority, the vast majority of the population doesn't care: they're watching the match.
Is it actually worth fighting for principles to prevent slippery slopes? It seems most political battles in the US, especially the culture wars, are just about people's personal beliefs. It’s not that these issues affect them directly. It's they just want to make sure the other side doesn’t change their vision of the future.
That's exactly when I would want to work on a side project after my full time job. Seems really harmful if Spain wants to have the possibility of individuals with full time jobs developing ideas that can turn into startups that could become unicorns.
Another one that the Europeans like to this effect is unrealized capital gains tax, to make sure you never make it to the unicorn stage.
Isn't that part of the problem? Foot egg is so ingrained into the countrymen that nothing else matters.
There wouldn't be so much of a forced monopoly if more people would stop watching games and stand up to laliga.
They can easily get away with soccer because everyone is glued to the match. Tennis? Eh. Golf? No way.
> Regulation 2015/2120 also states that access providers “shall treat all traffic equally, when providing internet access services, without discrimination, restriction or interference, and irrespective of the sender and receiver, the content accessed or distributed, the applications or services used or provided, or the terminal equipment used,” although they are permitted to apply “reasonable traffic management measures.” In any case, those measures must be “transparent, non-discriminatory and proportionate, and shall not be based on commercial considerations but on objectively different technical quality of service requirements of specific categories of traffic” (Article 3.3) - https://www.cuatrecasas.com/en/global/intellectual-property/...
Remains to be seen if something/someone will put a stop to La Liga's shenanigans, judges have seem unwilling so far, and not a big enough problem for the average person to really care about it (yet?).
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
>The report makes 12 formal recommendations. The most significant is that IP-based blocking should be avoided altogether, due to its inherent tendency to block large numbers of legitimate service sites. DNS-level or URL-level blocking should be used instead.
https://torrentfreak.com/eu-pirate-site-blocking-is-broken-r...
for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
among other things this also means that if there is any country in the EU where these sports broadcasts are accessible legally, then spain would not be allowed to block them either.
As long as you’re not disadvantaged compared to a Spanish seller of goods or services or Spain’s law is specifically violating an EU one, I don’t think so.
> for example geo-blocking within the EU is also illegal. if you offer a service or product in any EU country, then anyone in the EU must be allowed to buy it.
Definitely not. You’re not automatically obliged to sell to other EU countries just because you’re selling in one. There are some categories where you have to, but that explicitly excludes video streaming.
There is another regulation for subscribers temporarily traveling to a different EU country not losing access to a service they subscribed to in their home country, but that’s also something else.
according to my understanding yes, you are:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/geoblockin...
i don't see mention of any exception for streaming there either. (maybe one exists, if you have a reference, i'd love to take a look)
> [...] services in sectors currently fully excluded such as transport and audio-visual
if you look at the actual report summary however it shows that they want to change that:
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-pub...
so even if not a reality in all sectors, removing geoblocking is in the interest of the EU.
going back to the original question:
Why should other EU members care what websites Spain allows their citizens to access? Does the "EU" even have authority for such a thing?
they do care, and they should, and yes, they have the authority.
personally, when i read the report, seeing how young people are more interested in viewing content from other countries, what first came to my mind is the increased integration of EU countries and cultures that comes from that. that's the why.
And Spain is not blocking access to Spain's citizens, it's blocking access people in Spain. These could be citizens of other EU members who need to access their government's website for reason or another (e.g. renewing passport) while they visit Spain or reside in Spain.
It's not strong enough to do that yet but a lot of people with cheap governments wish it was.
I don't think there is EU-level "regulation" in this specific thing. However there is something somewhat better: European Convention on Human Rights. It's just that challenging these kind of bans via that route is very slow (similar how slow it is to challenge the laws which go against the Constitution in the US via Supreme Court).
> and appointed by member countries [..] Also go vote during your next election
That's an important detail. I had no chance to vote against Zensursula.
There are so many indirections in that "democracy" that it's no longer a democracy at all. You don't get to vote on issues, you don't get to vote on people (they are just a proxy for a party). You just get to vote on 2-3 reasonable parties (if even that). There is nothing you can do in that system about a specific issue.
That in my view is what needs to be regulated and Cloudflare designated as a “gatekeeper” with all the responsibilities to go with that.
La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
This is the kind of manufacturing consent that would make some people be in favor of the government MITMing crypto so that they can verify that I'm not doing something naughty.
> La Liga would never be able to secure blanket bans if people and services were more decentralised
They technically haven't either. According to "ban-supporters", La Liga first reached out to Cloudflare asking them to shut down the pirate stream websites using Cloudflare. After Cloudflare rejected that, La Liga went to judges that approved forcing ISPs to ban specific IPs (related to the services) which happened to be Cloudflare IPs that other services uses too.
End result is the same, it fucking sucks sometimes when shit unexplicitly breaks before you remember there is a football game, but at least I think that's a bit more accurate to what's practically happening :)
I don't have experience with broadcast media (in Spain, especially) but I a little experience on the software side: I could not believe the lengths some people would go to in order to avoid paying even $5-10 for useful software. Hours of work, sketchy cracks, downloading things from websites likely to compromise their system. Some of them would become irate when the software was updated and broke their cracks, spending time complaining loudly on forums and social media or even trying to threaten developers. The strangest part is when they start posting from social media where you can see things like their $3,000 gaming PC build, but if they see a chance to avoid paying $10-20 for something they will take it.
It becomes culturally embedded in some bubbles: If it's possible to find a way to avoid paying and there are no consequences for trying, some people will go for it.
I don't even buy the "it's a service problem" argument either. I have a friend who loves to watch sports games but refused to pay for any services. He will spend 30 minutes jumping from one website to the next enduring crazy amounts of ads, pop-ups, and attempts to get him to install things on his computer until finally getting to a blocky stream that drops out every few minutes. He can easily afford to pay, but getting things without paying is basically a little game he likes to play.
But they don't offer that, they offer difficult-to-cancel ad-laden plans that don't even get you access to the content you want to see reliably (edit: and as another commenters, signs you up to in some cases multiple mailing lists--thanks, The Athletic, for having a separate mailing list for every one of your terrible sub-orgs, I deeply regret paying you a dime). I'll be sailing the seven seas as long as it's viable.
I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.
This feels too much like a post-hoc rationalization. I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
I don't think it's worth discussing until we can be honest and admit that a lot of people pirate because they want free stuff. Every HN piracy conversation has a lot of words written to try to avoid admitting that "free stuff" is a big motivator for a lot of people
Well, see, the thing is you're right, but the "service problem" quote actually addressed that. There's a percentage of people who will never pay, it's true - and by never pay, it means never pay. You can't get them to pay by blocking or adding DRM or whatever.
But of the actually relevant group, people who are willing to pay for stuff, then some percentage of them will stop paying if it isn't convenient enough. Now it's a service problem. The trick is getting the full market potential and preventing them from jumping ship. But the service bit only ever applied to potential customers - the other group don't enter the discussion in the first place because they're hopeless.
But yeah usually this argument is at least in part misrepresented.
However however, no amount of blocking will stop that free stuff group, no amount of hoops will be too much, there is simply no way to extract blood from a stone the way that some media companies keep telling themselves is possible. So all the original blocking and shutting down of half the internet is completely counterproductive regardless.
This is also based on extrapolation on top of extrapolation covering only 86 games with "majority" surviving without cracks into week 12 — how significant is the effect if there are only a few games with cracks in early weeks (if it's 43 games across the first 12 weeks, it's less than 4 games per week on average)? How big are their revenues and copies sold in absolute numbers? (I do not have access to the full paper, perhaps it's answered there)
But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
Finally, let's not forget that game companies care about the profit (and revenue is only a proxy): looking at lost sales does not show how much a studio can save by not investing in DRM protection and thus having a higher gross margin or cheaper price to entice more customers.
> But to be precise, even if all of the above is covered, this is not proof that DRM increases sales, but that crack availability for Denuvo-protected games decreases sales depending on the timing — it is a subtle distinction, but perhaps publicity of a crack availability motivates more people to take that route?
The fact that crack availability leads people to pirate instead of buy is exactly the point. I guess it's more correct to say that DRM prevents lost sales rather than increasing sales, but that's effectively the same thing.
Specifically, the conditions this was tested under were always-DRM, always-Denuvo, crack-becomes-available, and conclusions cannot easily be extrapolated to other scenarios if we are trying to be really scientific.
If most games are cracked within days, that sounds like a much better sample set to draw conclusions from?
The analysis studies pre-crack and post-crack sales, and specifically observed the dip in sales after the crack. The dip was larger, the closer to release the game was cracked. A theoretical day 1 crack caused a 20% drop in sales.
I'm also not sure what you mean by games that are cracked almost immediately are a better sample. You can't measure sales before and after the crack was released because you only have the latter. Sure, if we could somehow measure how the game would have sold in an alternate universe where it wasn't cracked that would be a more robust finding. But obviously that's not possible.
The study focused on denuvo protected games because those are essentially the only games that go for extended periods of time without being cracked. They're the only games that actually offer any insight into how games sell without a crack available.
The point is DRM can get people to pay who would have otherwise not paid.
If a website offers me the choice between "accept cookies" and "more options", I'll manually edit the DOM to remove the popup from the offending website. Some sites disable scrolling while such a "We value your privacy" popup is shown, so I wrote a js bookmarklet to work around most common means of scroll hijacking.
Google is currently waging a war against adblockers, especially on youtube. I currently have a way around that too but should they start baking ads in the video bytes, I'll stop using youtube altogether (though I am willing to look the other way for content creators shouting out their curated sponsors).
There is simply no universe in which I pay for certain types of digital content, and while I can't stop the data collection that ultimately pays for it, I can at least make damn sure that it's unlawful.
With respect to Spain and sports, stadiums are littered with ads, players wear ads, the commentator stream itself has ads baked in and people buy tickets and tapas to watch the game live. If that's not enough, go fuck yourselves!
Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.
Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)
Even for music, I do spend time looking for DRM free options (eg. Apple only offers iTunes streaming in Serbia and I had to resort to options running a much smaller catalog like 7digital). I always try going first party first (eg. band's site for music), but it's increasingly not an option.
And if I want local Serbian/Croatian/... content, no provider has it at all. As an example, one of local publishers recently started releasing "eBooks" readable only in their own mobile app for Android or iOS: none of my Kindle, Remarkable or Kobo can read them. I did let them know about my willingness to jump on their service if they actually made their books work on my eBook devices, but they did not even honour me with a reply :)
For me at least, it is a service problem.
There were no movie-rental businesses in your country?
Now that you can just pay 10-20 euros for each of 124293507239841524352 services, one of which _might_ show what you want...
Fixed it for you.
The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is available but only on the special extra++ cost plan instead of the basic plan.
If you want to watch content legally, the workflow looks like this:
Search content -> go to aggregator site -> select streaming site -> enter electronic contact and payment info and physical address (for payment) -> confirm email account -> watch content -> dig around on site to find deliberately hidden unsubscribe workflow -> pass all the "are you sure you want to leave" screens -> monitor your card payment the next month to make sure you actually cancelled
The illegal workflow looks like this:
Search content -> click 1-3 sketchy sites, closing 15 pop up ads -> watch content -> forget about it
Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.
As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.
YT makes $40B/yr (revenue IIRC) across its 3B customers, or $1.11/mo. $16/mo seems high by comparison. It's very high with reasonable costs of $0.28/mo. Nearly every other industry on the planet is jealous of margins like that.
A normal counter-argument here is that they should be allowed to reap those profits till competition forces them to do otherwise. That's a little at odds with our normal view toward monopolies, especially when the monopoly engages in anti-competitive acts to preserve that edge, but whatever; now you're at least having a real debate about real facts and things you care about.
Another is that YT's expenses in practice are way higher than that because they need to hire a bunch of ML people or whatever to extract even more ad money out of you, and that's a point I disagree with pretty firmly. I'm not sure why my subscription needs to subsidize a company's other predatory tendencies.
sure those who refuse to pay anything will likely always do so but there is a big part of the market who are priced out/fed up with needing multiple sports packages
I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things because I find they're overpriced.
> I know I'll never win this argument on Hacker News because every piracy conversation turns into an infinite game of moving goalposts, where there's always a new rationalization at every turn.
What argument are you referring to, out of curiosity? That some people pirate things 'cause they're poor and make nice-sounding rationalizations about it? Okay, that definitely happens, you win. But I don't think that really takes away from the other valid arguments for piracy?
And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.
If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
Convenience is not a valid reason to violate others' rights.
> there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.
There is a real loss: The owner isn’t getting paid when people consume their product for free and without their permission.
The entire point of copyright is to protect the time investment of and opportunity cost borne by the author when marginal reproduction cost is zero, or close to zero. This is because we as a society value intellectual labor. We want people to invent things and produce entertainment, and we incentivize it via the profit motive.
You can’t write software for a living and not understand this. It’s what puts food on your own table. Don’t try to rationalize it.
I've also worked on complex web applications/systems, where operation of the web site is ultimately the cost that needs to be continuously borne to extract profit from software itself. Yes, someone else can optimize and do operation better than you (eg. see Amazon vs Elastic and numerous other cases of open-source companies being overtaken by their SW being run by well funded teams), but there is low risk of illegal use in this case.
Today I am paid to write software that the business believes will provide them profit that will pay for my services. The software I write is tied to a physical product being sold and is effectively the enabler and mostly useless without the physical product itself.
Other engineers at the company I am at are building software that requires a lot of support to operate as it manages critical infrastructure country-sized systems, and ultimately, even if someone could get this software without paying a license, they'd probably have no idea how to operate it effectively.
Most of the internet infrastructure works on open and free software, where at "worst", copyright protections are turned upside down to make them copyleft if software is not available under more permissive licenses like MIT, BSD or even put into public domain.
Companies that used to pay best SW engineering salaries like Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked: SW is a tool for them to provide an ad platform or cloud infrastructure service.
> Google, Meta and Amazon would likely not face any significant business loss if all of their software (source code included) was publicly leaked
You don't know that. Granted, there are other barriers to entry in some markets, but stealing others' control and data planes would go a long way towards building viable competitors without having to expend the same level of investment.
You're cherry-picking the relatively small number of companies that support your argument. Besides all the software they've built, each of these companies has filed for and been issued mountains of patents (though not copyright, it's another IP protection scheme) and will enforce them if necessary to protect their business. I bet yours might have some, too.
I don’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty as you. I wanted to watch the Olympics so I reactivated my Peacock account, paid for a month, then immediately canceled it. I’ve never had consistent issues finding where I could watch a particular game. It is aggravating that my MLBTV subscription doesn’t work when my team plays on an Apple TV broadcast but that’s 1-2 times a year.
Maybe I was not good at piracy but it took just about the same effort to find the right links, deal with constant buffering, etc. But I find it pretty phenomenal that I can easily watch just about any sporting event now with little difficulty
Wait til you hear of this concept called "Dead Zones". The NBA has them.
What's that? It's where you live in the streaming blackout zone and get a nice message saying "watch this on your regional sporting affiliate", but you don't live in the TV zone for that team, so "your regional sporting affiliate" doesn't cover the game. So you get to watch... national games... and you can watch your team's games, on 24 or 72 hour delay.
And the NBA will tell you they can't refund your League Pass subscription because of that - you can watch the game, just not when it's happening. You can watch it after you've almost certainly heard the results. "But you'll get to see it with no breaks because we clip the commercial breaks!" Yayyyyy.
Take Steam, for instance. You get fast downloads, cloud saves, mod support, etc. Yet games released on steam are still pirated. Because people are willing to forego good service in order to avoid paying.
I'm sure for some people piracy is a service problem. The example Gabe Newell gave when he said that quote is Russian localization. If the only way to get a Russian localization of a game is to pirate it, then sure that lack of service incentivizes piracy.
But there will always people who want to consume media without paying, regardless of the convenience of legitimate options.
What OP describes is still very prevalent in eastern EU/Europe too, people pirate and do stupid stuff just to save few bucks. But then if you earn <1000€ monthly you start looking at prices in very different optics. Mindset comes from the past and doesnt feel the need to change for 2026.
I come from such an environment, partially still affected by it. I would blame it on communism and russian influence but then Spain never had one so there goes my cheap and usual way to push blame.
Currently on vacation in Dominican republic and I can see hints of same mentality here and there... maybe its just 'undeveloped societies', for the lack of better term.
In any case, in Spain the level of penetration of streaming services seems high. Although you will always find people who pirate (it was very common when Canal+ existed, etc., then it decreased with the arrival of Netflix, HBO, Spotify and Prime) and now with prices continuously rising I hear a lot about IPTV and pirate decoders.
Although I believe that in the specific case of LaLiga, much of the fault lies with the prices imposed. The dominant and more traditional operator (also the most trillero) only offers you the service through convergent Megapacks with attractive prices when hiring and crazy when renewing. The arrival of DAZN has softened it but I don't think it will improve the situation in the medium term. It is very curious that they then reach agreements in emerging markets to offer the price-drawn product (China) and in no case the income is reflected in a more competitive League.
Radically changing area, in the field of software there is the culture of paying the minimum. If it can be zero better, even if it means visiting dubious sites and risking your data and credit cards.
My vision may be biased. In fact it is ;-)
I used to pirate video games, but Steam basically ended that for me. The sales no longer make it worth it for me to pirate a $60 game, instead, I can buy it for $12 on sale.
For software, I used to pirate Adobe products and Sony Vegas, but there are alternatives for those now.
For something like sports, I think the cost can be hundreds of dollars per season. I watch the NFL and NHL, and to watch every game that I'd like to watch, it would cost me something like $600+ per year. There aren't really viable alternatives. I'd have to get three services to watch all of the NHL games I want to watch, and I don't even know how many services I need for the NFL. Amazon Prime, Sunday Ticket, CBS, Fox? Or cable/YouTubeTV with additional packages?
I'd happily pay $100 or $200 per year to watch all games in a league for a year if it was through a single service. Or a lump sum for all sports. But in the same amount of time to enter my payment information, create an account, etc. I could have easily found a stream and have it on any TV in my house.
That time was well spent for the knowledge I gained, even if it wasn't worth it to save a few bucks.
Sigh, fine, I'll pay for NBA Leaguepass. I don't live in your country... great, random blackouts. Fine, I'll try and use a VPN (hell, I literally used tailscale to a friend's house for a bit).. but then those games are blacked out too, at random?
I'm literally paying you for the service. So yeah, giving some insanely sketchy crypto website $5/month for unlimited whatever that just always works, is worth it. 10/10 will definitely do again. I'm sick and tired of fighting with the NBA, the CFL, or G-D only knows what just to try to watch the things I'm paying for.
I live in an NBA "dead zone". I'm in the streaming blackout zone. But not in the TV zone (even if I did pay for TV, which I'd almost consider).[1] And then I VPNed to Canada for international LP, but that wasn't much better. Then Mexico. And then ...
Then I found a site that had an actual Roku app (at least) that took payment in Crypto or Amazon GC but was absolutely uninfested, no ads, no garbage, probably at times more reliable than even the NBA's app. But they got shut down.
Not to mention LP refused to refund me though my subscription was effectively useless because I "could still watch the games, and without commercial or timeout breaks, even!" - yeah, 24 to 72 hours after it was played. Yay. Lucky me.
As soon as they shut the api down I uninstalled the app. The fun bit was the challenge.
Remember when a directtv subscriber bought the annual sports pack because they wanted to watch their team's matches, and just when the game was about to start the transmission was interrupted showing "not availabe in your area", and they called support to ask and were told for the first time by the rep that someone else has the airing rights, and to read TOS?
It is the same thing you are going towards.
Your friend exists, and he is not alone. But the vast mayority of people just want to watch what they were told they paid for, and not paying 10 different people either.
A common phrase used to be "I pirate the software so I can afford the hardware". There's a tangibility to hardware that's not present for software and media, which means many people simply don't feel it's worth what is being charged, especially media intended to be consumed once and forgotten about (e.g. a sports match). Computer hardware is a durable good.
That said, I pretty much stopped pirating things when Steam got decently good and I was working a normal professional job. Prior to that, I really did have to choose what I was willing to pay for, and I really did get a better experience using pirated software vs buying the legit thing. At this point though, I get a better than average experience through Steam on Linux (I just avoid any games with Denuvo or other kernel-level bullshit), and I can easily afford both the hardware and the software, so the convenience and quality of experience + my better purchasing power makes it pointless to even engage in piracy anymore.
I'd like to think I'm a rational actor, sort of, and so are a lot of other people. Paying 79-115 EUR/mo to watch a few matches, in a country where the average monthly take-home pay is around 1700 EUR, you're talking about asking for nearly 7% of the average take-home pay /just/ to watch soccer. To put this into context, the common wisdom is to spend 30% on housing, so La Liga is saying its reasonable to ask a Spaniard to spend 1/4th what they do on housing on just the ability to watch soccer matches. No wonder people would rather find pirated streams.
Spaniards attitudes can be quite different from the American ones, Americans just pay for everything for convenience, in Spain you probably need to match the price of the IPTV to steal their customers.
Apparently IPTV costs 20 to 60 Euros per year, the legal option is over 100 euros per month.
To match the IPTV they need 20x price reduction. This would mean that they need sign in 20x more Spaniards to break even with the current situation. Are there 20x more Spaniards pirating the LaLiga than paying? Even in Spain I don’t think so.
Is it possible the product just isn’t worth the price they want to charge? Entirely likely.
On average at population scale, people are shockingly good at voting with their wallets.
Uh... Huh? How is EUR 20 * 20 approximately EUR 100?
(100*12 months) = 1200 euros/year
1200/60 = 20
so 20x difference between the most expensive IPTV and the cheapest legal option. You can go with the 20 EUR IPTV vs the 200 EUR legal option and it would be 120x difference but probably the quality would be the same so let’s stick with the 20x.
They also sell "business access", so pubs can show the match, since going to the bar for a beer is the go-to choice for those who can't afford to watch at home.
I guess the question I'd have then is the economics of the pirate providers; I'm assuming that they have their own infrastructure costs to provide the streams at any level of reliability. Do they charge some nominal amount for access so that people who aren't willing to pay the full 200 euros for the top-tier official package can get just the sports games a la carte?
The ones I've seen in wide use literally are "load page, click on Stream 1, it starts, if it breaks/looks shit, click on Stream 2 and repeat until good stream found", and also filled with ads, so I'm guessing they mostly run on ad-money. Most visitors aren't really technically inclined, I think I've lost count how many times I've helped people install ad-blockers once they try to get a stream running while a group of people are waiting.
Not usually, it's more like a 90's porn website setup, where you're going to click in a ton of fake links and close popups for a while until you reach a 720p stream.
Think that it's usually a bunch of very temporary services that popup and are taken down quickly, as well as a bunch of not-technically-pirate-themselves hubs that link to the former. There's not enough stability to set up payments, which are also traceable.
Anti piracy measures are crazy though. La liga has gone as far as to listen in microphones on user's apps in the hopes of catching hidden audio tones that, crossed with geolocation, allow them to detect streaming spots.
It's like gamers with anti cheat, a situation where the measures are both technically impressive and absurd overreach in a legal/moral sense.
I never buy into this. If copyright law doesn't exist, pirate sites will eventually always provide better service than the official channels.
One example is scanlation manga. Chinese scanlation sites have reached the theoretical ceiling of service: just serve images fast with a little nonintrusive ad. No login required. No way the official Japanese apps can provide significant better service than that.
I don't watch sports, but my father watches soccer. He really only cares about 1 team and the national games from our home country. He was spending over $100/month to be able to watch the games, and they werent even in his native language. Now he pays $80/year for a pirate IPTV service and not only can he watch the games anywhere he wants, he also gets native language commentary for the games, national tv channels like news, etc.
When pirates can charge you money and offer a superior service, it absolutely is a service problem. You can claim that the realities of licensing and whatnot don't allow official channels to provide the best service they can, but that's not true in this case. When the same provider is splitting game broadcast from one team into different packages you know they're just trying to extract the most amount of money possible.
IDK the deal with scanlator sites nowadays, but I assume the official sites can provide more timely translations for manga since they can access the source material before anyone has seen it. I know most popular manga gets translated within hours of release, but if you're following some more niche stuff it can be several days. I also know a lot of scanlators have patreon pages so it's not like the demand from paying customers for translated media isn't there.
People save money to buy expensive stuff. Or take out loans. One cannot assume that everyone doesn't care about spending < X dollars, where X is = 1% of the most expensive asset they own (see e.g. $3000 gaming PC vs. $30 software, elsewhere in the thread).
> own an aircraft, doesn't mean you have a budget to pay random EUR 10/month subscriptions.
Still, if you can't afford a €10/mo subscription necessary to operate the airplane safely, when hanger fees are well in excess of that, then perhaps you can't actually afford to own an airplane? Airplanes aren't cheap to own, nevermind the aircraft itself.
Put it another way. I like driving BMWs, but, y'know what, I hate having to pay insurance, and I can't afford to pay that after the monthly BMW lease payment, so I just don't pay it, cause fuck that noise.
I don't think most people's response to someone saying that would be "eh, sounds fine, BMWs are expensive". "So don't drive a BMW." seems like more likely reaction to me.
However, that doesn't mean that if you plug all the holes that they will pay. No. They'll just not use your service.
In the long run it's better to keep these types of people around because they at least advertise your service. But getting any money out of them is a pipe dream.
People often frame piracy as "oh 5% pirated instead of paying!" Well... the "instead of" part is doing the heavy lifting there. The options arent pirate or pay. They're pirate, pay, or not use.
Otoh, maybe Netflix and other streaming video services will start their own sports leagues in order to vertically integrate and own everything end-to-end just like what they did with TV and movie production. It would be tough and expensive but maybe not impossible?
Plus signers and bands earn pennis from Spotify. Practically Spotify did vanished music privacy - by proving how bad a business it is to sell music and pushing the whole industry to personal branding (tours+ad revenue).
Why not? Provide same experience but for logged in users with extra benefits that they feel like it's worth paying for, behind-the-scenes content, WIP, whatever.
There is always a way to stand out and provide a better experience, the very least because all people in the world don't want the same thing, and you can always find somewhat of a niche somehow.
Candycrush (CrunchyRoll of course) had gained the love of the anime crowd. Until they started to "optimise" bandwidth. It wasn't a pricing error as subscription price didn't increase.
They claim the degradation was perceptible. Except that it was.
It was many years ago, and since then candycrush lost subscribers. It won't because illegal streaming platforms got better, simply because the illegal platform provided the choice to go all the way to lossless quality.
For football, imo that's a pricing issue as well as a distribution issue. Basically I need to subscribe to a lock in plan even if I just desire to watch, say, the quarter to finals. Or simply the champions league.
As the other commenter, I also confirm the sub got worse.
Might as well abandon the law.
The worse they make it for legitimate users the more likely they are to just buy the necessary device and move on. The technical battle is not some limitless option that IP owners get to use, it eventually impinges on their core interests.
See old school satellite piracy for a clear example of where this is headed.
I don't know much about them but it seems like part of the problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer? e.g. Universal Music Group might be among the RIAA members, but that doesn't stop UMG from having a distribution relationship with Spotify if it benefits them more to capture those sales directly vs. depending on the RIAA to be a legal watchdog. If all LaLiga has to do is lean on existing infrastructure to block sites that bother them, they'd seem to have no similar incentive to provide better paid service.
Which, just to add some context, is exactly how people/groups who want to watch football at home does with football streams today in 2026 in Spain, except now also with a VPN of course. Regular football fans who have no idea how/why these streams work or where they're coming from and couldn't tell you the difference between a website and a desktop application, know the website addresses and the know-to about how to access them. Which is why you're seeing the reaction from La Liga and the courts.
> problem might be that LaLiga is acting both as the distributor and enforcer?
Isn't this true in movies and other areas too? HBO and other distributors send DMCA requests left and right like everyone else, as far as I can tell, aren't they too then "the distributor and enforcer" or is that different somehow?
> Isn't this true in movies and other areas too?
That's a good point, though now I wonder if there's something particular to the content being live vs. VOD. By the time a DMCA request or equivalent pulls through for live content it might be too late to prevent the primary "theft" of the stream's value, vs. a movie distributed by HBO that has a longer tail of interest.
+ Most people are not savy enough to pirate/are unwilling to do it for fear.
+ The more fear they instil, the keener those people are to pay.
+ Most bars where it is available will rise prices to sustain their loss. It starts at 300Eu/(month screen) (notice the product in the denominator), and having.
+ Woe to you if you own a bar and the police get you pirating. Woe indeed, the fine will be unimaginable...
Monopoly does this to the markets. Movistar (Telefonica) is the de-facto owner of high-stakes sports in Spain. This means Football (Spanish league, Champions League), Tennis (all the Masters and Grand Slams), Basketball, you name it.
They are also the main telco in Spain, so they own the service and the channel.
Some people are pushed to pirate on account of bad service, sure. But plenty of others are more than willing to tolerate worse service to receive a product for free.
But they are fringe, an anomaly. Most people will happily pay for stuff if it's confortable enough. Don't focus on the tail end of the human behavior distribution. Steam makes a lot of money, the devs publishing there, too. Spotify makes a lot of money. Netflix makes a lot of money...
Piracy is easily reduced to anecdotical as soon as you don't offer absolute shit service for a lot of money, as LaLiga does.
Good service is still hard to compete with zero cost.
Wondering which of the 8 providers has your show is lame.
Yep, but there is a solution. Buy physical media and rip it. You get basically the best quality available _and_ a backup at the same time. You don't have to resort to piracy to avoid streaming services.
I expect this will only get worse in the future - physical media is an increasingly niche product.
100€ for leisure and entertainment is already a huge sum of money when filing the tank of their cars to earn their salary cost them 2 to 3x 80€ already.
And for that, there are three options: piracy, pay many services, constantly juggle sign ins and sign outs.
I’d gladly pay money for it, but that’s not actually possible. The main cost of not pirating would be time, which is unacceptable because I’m neither a teenager nor poor.
Similarly, as a rich person who travels a lot, official sports streams just aren’t available for me.
Just for fun, I tried to Google and find an official site to watch LaLiga games:
“DAZN ISN'T AVAILABLE IN THIS COUNTRY”
“The request is blocked.” -https://www.laliga.com/en-GB/where-to-watch-laliga-easports
Movistar plus is in Spanish, probably not for me
But yeah, even fucking googling “laliga official stream” brings zero working paid alternatives for very very rich me.
Sports have gotten way out of hand, even without the betting aspect. People criticize gambling, porn, and other less desirable forms of entertainment while giving (commercialized) sports a free pass. It's not that different when you really get into it at this point.
And the buyer wants to pay as little as they possibly can. That's not greed. That's called a market and it's functioning as it should.
La Liga is not a commodity as I can not equally make a La Liga.
This is the basis for antitrust regulations.
So no, there is not market. And as such there is no markets that functions as it should.
Anyone who genuinely likes kickball because they derive exquisite pleasure from watching balls being kicked, can go watch it live. But no, it just has to reach right into people's living rooms, at the cost of disrupting productive activity. Imagine if people paid such enthusiastic attention to things that were not about "winning" and "losing" some completely imaginary competition. Imagine how much better their lives would've been!
Telefonica has a business branch that offer some services similar to cloudflares ones like CDN, DDOS Protection, etc...There is a huge conflict of interest here to use copyright law to make cloudflare and other competitors customer's life as crappy and unusable as they can.
My question is - as someone on a sibling thread pointed out - it just showed "NO" while the champions league Madrid game was on. And that match is particularly mentioned in the above news article as to be the first match where these new changes come into effect. So were there no blocks, or did they change blocking scope? Or is it just a measuring issue, perhaps?
> La información habla tanto de bloqueos de dominios, URLs y de direcciones IP, caso este último que, cuando se produce, afecta a servicios legítimos si se trata de direcciones pertenecientes a servicios CDN como Cloudflare.
Another casualty of the centralized internet of our time
Spain were left with two choices if Cloudflare refuse to act. Either accept it (oh well, too big to fail), or block them.
I dislike what is happening but I kind of like that Spain don't care about the size of Cloudflare and hold them as accountable as they would a small hosting company in Belarus. Blocking entire ranges due to illegal content isn't exactly new, the scale is new.
Again though, I really dislike that it isn't going through the legal system
To what degree is it feasible for a startup to move around in Europe? This is the sort of heavy-handed, tech-illiterate, authoritarian activity that might make me seriously consider moving my infrastructure or headquarters if I was a Spanish startup.
Totally agree with this, it's ridiculous and a shame.
I personally don't use any infrastructure provider from Spain, but you wouldn't solve any problem moving out, and also those providers are not the ones to blame or punish. Only customer connecting from Spain are affected where is the infrastructure does not solve the problem.
Also, it takes 10 minutes to find a valid football stream, even without a VPN. Such is life.
- [1]https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/team-and-re...
It's frankly ridiculous because it's very easy to use a VPN and stream w/e anyway. I don't watch football, tennis or golf but I use VPN regularly to watch Australian TV.
I would happily watch my football team play on the telly if I could watch all the games for a reasonable price. However, you can't pay to watch all the games from a single service and you generally have to sign up for a prolonged period or pay significantly more than I'm willing to pay to watch the game if I've got the time.
The reality is that the value that the media companies place on watching a game on telly is significantly higher than the value I get from watching a game. I understand that others place a higher value on being able to watch a match or any other sport. I don't.
Paying hundreds of euro or pounds per season to attend a match is one thing. I accept that paying for police stewards and ambulances cost a lot of money. Paying the same to watch some games across multiple companies is of no interest to me.
Let me watch all my teams games for a tenth the cost of a season ticket and I'll probably pay.
Sadly, an alien viewing our behavior would deduce a rule such as: as long as the voter is the same tribe as the candidate, the voter must vote for candidate no matter how corrupt.
* not everyone can be an expert on everything;
* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;
* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;
* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;
* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;
* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;
* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;
* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;
* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).
If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.
The idea is basically that you give a politician a mandate to use your vote. Whatever your chosen politician votes for will count as their and your vote. If you happen to disagree with your chosen politician on a given question, you can manually vote in that question. Your chosen representatives vote in that question will then be worth one vote less, since you've effectively used it yourself.
In the end we get the best of both worlds: voters don't have to vote in every single issue, but they can should they choose to. When they don't vote themselves, a politician they've chosen gets to use their vote, in a representative-like manner.
Even a slightly higher threshold than majority vote would be good for direct democracy. And constitutional amendments should either have a higher bar, or should automatically expire after X years unless there's a second vote to verify that the change should actually stay in effect.
I tend to vote no on all ballot propositions automatically due to the bad effects of permanent changes being far too easy with too little substantive information provide to voters.
(Weed legalization in many states, Abortion protection in Missouri I believe)
You could also argue Brexit. Ultimately, most of the UK was okay with shooting themselves in the foot to feel more independent like the good olds days. Maybe was wrong long-term, but if it’s what the people wanted, then maybe it’s good. Politicians never would have done it despite the people wanting it.
You'd need most of the people to understand why 60 or 66.(6)% of people are needed to decide something and really believe in this threshold. And Y% of the populace is different psychologically than Y% of elected officials (in cases where a supermajority of officials are needed to pass Z in a forum like parliament/house/senate).
No new law was enacted. The ISPs are enforcing a court order.
It seems vastly inproportionate. And is likely severe overstepping.
The issue is that spain does not have a backstop. It is a completely institutional failure.
That's why you can laugh at them. Because this level of instutional failure should not happen where I come from.
"hate the sin, love the sinner", or something
This isn't stupidity. It's corruption.
Those two go hands in hands.
His wife, right hand man, etc
What's that saying about the company you keep...
Zealously mistook malice for stupidity.
(The whole joke about the site is trying to detect football happening via internet blocks, as otherwise myself personally I wouldn't know at all otherwise about matches happening)
Probably just a matter of time. The article mentions:
"Lo bloqueos aplicarán "todos los días de emisión de eventos deportivos en directo", arrancando por primera vez con el partido de eliminatoria de la Champions League entre el Atlético de Madrid y el Barcelona que se celebra hoy martes 14 de abril."
A grim reminder that google does track you all over the internet.
Not that you should have to find a new ISP due to soccer being pirated too much, just wondering really
Edit: Oh...seems VPNs work. That's probably much easier as a work-around
The shitty part about what Spain is doing is that it punishes its own residents who have nothing to do with piracy.
Sports piracy is fundamentally different than music or movie piracy. The Spotify analogy that gets tossed around is wrong. Steam is less wrong but still wrong. Music piracy got "solved" because the labels decided that some revenue was better than no revenue, and the math works when you have a bunch of product in your back pocket that cost you nothing to distribute; gaben made piracy slightly less convenient to those in developed countries.
Sports rights are valuable because they're exclusive and because they're live. In the US, there are blackouts around sports: if you're physically located in New York (at least, according to whatever IP address data vendor a platform is using), you're unable to watch the New York Knicks using league-sanctioned products. That's the US version of this—restricting access to the content itself to protect the rights holder's revenue. It's internal logic and fundamentally sound (though infuriating) if you're one of them.
This is without a doubt categorically worse. A blackout says "you can't watch this game" and Spain is saying "you can't access the internet while this game is on, whether you're interested in the game or not." It's as if the NBA convinced the DOJ to shut down half the internet every time a game was on, just in case.
Before it was DMCA notices (useless) -> lawsuits (whack-a-mole, check TorrentFreak) -> ??? -> infrastructure-level blocking. (I'm an outlier for many reasons but we won't go into those.) Each step is more destructive and less effective than the one preceding it. Spain has reached the end of the playbook, thanks to political interests: ban the internet!
Fans are the product. La Liga's real customer is Movistar, who pays roughly a billion euros a year for exclusivity so they can bundle it into packages nobody would pay for otherwise. The IP blocking isn't an anti-piracy measure—I'd argue there is no such thing as anti-piracy but that's a different thread. The IP blocking is a signal to the next bidder: the government will protect your exclusivity at any cost, even if that cost is the country's internet.
And the blast radius often is the entire devstack. Last weekend they blocked Cloudflare and GitHub simultaneously.
So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor...
These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it!
Good job Spain.
Forcing piracy consumers to use Tor or other proxies is unlikely to be popular. They’ll still be used, for sure, but so long as CF makes pirated content easily accessible over the Internet, this is just going to keep happening. It’s just too damned convenient.
I don’t believe CF is going to win here, long term. If Spain and other countries block their ASNs, enough of their legitimate paying customers may start abandoning ship, and CF will have to get serious about unplugging notorious proxy configurations for piracy origin servers.
I also don't support these organizations that destroy the sports that people love, force you to subscribe to different services as each game and "liga" has made their own deals to make as much money as possible. Until we remove the stupid amount of money that is involved in these sport events nothing will change. And now they are talking about other events like movies, series and live entertainment show. Hopefully they come for the VPNs next and break every business VPN tunnel whenever they want. Hopefully that will cause enough backlash that they finally fix this BS once and for all.
And every time they are sued for facilitating piracy, instead of letting the case to proceed to trial, they settle out of court.
https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/abuse-approach/
Other than that, the legal situation on Spain is pretty dire for LaLiga. The Supreme Court already ruled in Spain that, as per the current writing of the law, football transmissions are _not_ works subject to copyright as they're not works of "art, literature and science": https://www.poderjudicial.es/cgpj/ca/Poder-Judicial/Tribunal...
So it's likely that, if LaLiga sued Cloudflare or they made them party on any actual litigation, Cloudflare would defend themselves and possibly win. Therefore... they just don't sue them, only sue ISPs that have an incentive to just comply to any LaLiga request (as.. legal compliance and collaboration is one of the requirements for being able to buy rights to LaLiga matches in Spain. Yeah, no kidding, you can look it up in their public documentation).
Well, I lie. In a legal twist, they ended up suing Cloudflare for "participation in criminal activities", but not through the same avenue they sued the ISPs on (penal vs commerce court), with some interesting twists as accusations of "facilitating services to avoid the execution of a court order" - which doesn't make a lot of sense, as they're not even direct parties to that court order and they were denied taking part on it. https://okdiario.com/economia/empresas/justicia-imputa-ceo-c...
Correction: they use the pirate excuse to make life of clients choosing competitors (like cloudflare) impossible. There is an overlap between some Cloudflare and Telefónica services.
When I watch an American movie, I want to hear it the way the director intended it to be. I don't want every villain in every movie have the same voice. If I want to hear Dutch in a movie, I watch a Dutch movie. It's not that deep.
The fact that it helps kids learn a different language is a very nice fringe benefit.
I remember watching an English movie with an incorrect subtitle in school when I was 12, well before my first English class. The whole auditorium laughed because everyone caught the error.
Sounds like your problem is with crappy, cheap dubbing, not dubbing in general.
Look at Disney animation for dubbing done right (and more so in the 20th century - these days I’m not so sure).
It is a massive disadvantage. It means that we’re always late with new stuff because the Dutch market is so small no one wants to make the effort of building Dutch versions.
The place read as Shang-hai in Mandarin is apparently read Zan-he in the local "dialect" spoken there. I think one could say Koln and Cologne sound closer together.
I don't think as many did 20 years ago, but China is consciously Mandarinizing, and English has lost its spot as the standard second language with the vastly increasing hostility from the West.
Countries make no sense to me. Look at the current situation in Iran. Everyone on the planet is affected by the actions of a president we didn’t vote for. Earth should be a single country.
I also want one big world for all but definitely not a single culture or language
And you missed the part I said about how different human concepts don't exist in all languages, do we just not have those? Language is an integral part of different cultures, not the only one, but a pretty big one. Can't believe I'm having to defend this.
Lots of countries would disagree with this. Do you not think Peru and Spain has distinct cultures for example? Why/why not?
Though for you, I understand you might have been peeved if people kept switching to English when you just wanted to practice Dutch.
Go out and pay attention to your surroundings. Read everything. Make dutch friends. Spend some time outside the large cities.
Dutch is already like half English just spelled and pronounced way differently.
Being objective, both sides of the pond have produced many shitty Spanish dubs and some good ones, and unless there's too much difference for a given series we all just prefer our native dub.
But dubbed live action media is such a horrid experience for me.
So you were already reading. What about younger children?
That said - I fully agree, I’m surprised I don’t speak with a Star Trek accent given where I had most of my early exposure to English.
My experience has been the opposite :) but hey.
There's no reason not to be dubbing cartoons for kids. That's a dorky debate for grown-ass adults playing animu purists.
Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.
‘Rotten’ isn’t a strong enough insult.
Basically, to combat pirate streaming of football matches, La Liga (the Spanish football association) can compel Spanish ISPs to block wide ranges of IP blocks that are suspected of hosting those streams.
This includes Cloudflare, which - due to lots of websites depending on them (see what happened when they went down last year: https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/ ) feels like half of the internet is unusable. This happens weekly when football is on.
Now it looks like those bans are going to become even more frequent, which will have all kinds of unintended consequences.
If you're on a residential connection, during play of the matches, you can't access any of the Cloudflare IPs, but everything else keeps working as-is. Most businesses already migrated away from Cloudflare once these blocks started happening, so most of the affected people are the ones using services that rely on Cloudflare.
As mentioned elsewhere, don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I wish it went away, and I'll keep complaining to the ones I can about it, but "they're cut off from half the internet" isn't accurate unless somehow half the services you use happen to rely on Cloudflare (which, at least for me, isn't true, maybe 10% of what I use daily is affected by this).
It's not a stretch for small businesses to be reliant on residential connections either.
At any rate, this behavior isn't befitting a serious country like Spain.
Tell HN: Docker pull fails in Spain due to football Cloudflare block
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47738883
AFAIK, I don't think it's "A LOT of CDNs", it's only Cloudflare, at least personally Cloudflare is the only CDN I can verify I lose access to during the football matches.
Whatever can be lapped up by any given nation as an excuse, will be used as such to advocate the crackdown on that nation's right to access the information freely.
Think about children, grandma, national security, sovereignity, economy, minorities, tennis, golf, copyright, solar flares, aliens, Keter-class objects, climate change, CO₂, fill your goto excuse in.
Perhaps the frog is being boiled but the frog will learn to jump.
Don't give up so easily.
We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer.
We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance.
GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.
Net neutrality used to be a pillar of the EU internet. 2026; the mind fucking boggles.
When it comes to piracy and anti-piracy, there is greed and stupidity on all sides.
Don't get me wrong, it sucks, makes no sense and I hate the responsible people for it, but in the grand scheme of things, Spain does have a higher quality of life than so many other places out in the world, most important, way higher than the country you're comparing it to, on almost any useful metric.
Spain is lucky that it gets around 20% of its economy because of nice weather (tourism + foreign real estate buyers) but I don't think it's enough to sustain the quality of life if there are no reforms.
When I first came here I literally spent 2 days sleeping outside as I couldn't afford housing, and had very rough 4-5 years before I even got my first programming job. Today I'm financially independent though, and it's probably all thanks the type of environment Spain has fostered together with my own willpower, compared to the environment in the country I'm from where it'd be short of impossible to do what I did, with zero education.
I think it depends on what you compare it to. Plenty of places are way worse, and many other places are surely better. It's definitively possible to achieve amazing quality of life even if you aren't "already set", even outside of government jobs (that don't even pay that well anyways).
Isn't this applicable to pretty much everywhere now?
As for healthcare... that's a mixed bag... you can go to the ER and you will be treated, but the bill afterwards may or may not be impactful... There have been some improvements, but the healthcare lobby is massive, and pretty much stops most reasonable and some unreasonable improvements.
On public transportation, it varies... you need to realize that the main part of the US is by itself about the size of Europe... I would assume there are plenty of areas of Europe where public transit is likely limited. Not even getting into Alaska, which is by itself massive and largely unpopulated. It's probably better to compare individual US States to EU nations in terms of transit.
I definitely couldn't handle working that much today. I've also got some serious health issues that aren't being addressed. That said, I don't feel that the US can handle socialized medicine well, and the best that we could do is take the spend that is already in place with the govt and establish a first party option to compete with commercial providers that anyone can buy a plan from. I also think that there are single-payer approaches and fiduciary requirements for insurance carriers could go a long way combined with such an approach as opposed to a whole sale socialist takeover.
Yes, the US healthcare system is insane/dumb. But the stupidity of it can just be stated matter-of-factly without inventing falsehoods like "life ending $1,000,000 debt for the uninsured."
US does have some perks for sure. But there are so many issues of its own and those issues are almost always pushed downwards to the most vulnerable groups. Which means, on average, you do end up with a better quality of life outside the US.
I see that you have never had to deal with the US government.
As a citizen of a Nordic country I would never want to live in America, except maybe if I was rich. Especially for people with children my country offers a superior quality of life in many ways.
Now Spain have their own issues - there are a lot of very light leaning people around still... there was no revolution when the dictator died. A lot of judges and military police officers that had murdered people under Franco continued in service. And of course, lets not forget how the countries plays everyone against Catalunya and Pais Vasco, everything is our fault if you ask people in the south and just like i mentioned above, all we hear about is the Vox and other ultra right people talking crap.
I think one of the few good things we still have down here in Spain is that there is still a memory of Franco, of the dictatorship. If not you, then one of your parents or grandparents lived it.
The US has no willingness to try move the bar and bring up the average.
I got mine!
> provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?
You are literally insisting here that aggregate data conceals differences between groups of people. The end of your sentence angrily argues against the beginning of your sentence.
edit: the reason we need to disaggregate is because we need to talk about Mississippi. We need to talk about black America. We need to talk about Chicagoland separately from downstate Illinois. We need to talk about black Chicago separately from white Chicago. Aggregation helps us avoid things.
Yeah, you live in the paradise...