It's almost as if... as if... people like different things and have different opinions, isn't it?

Millions of people around the world care. That's why we have the Olympic Games.

Who cares what some author or poet decided to write? Who cares what some scientist found? Who cares what food tastes like? Who cares what article someone posted on Hacker News? Who cares about the bug you fixed? Who cares what software exists?

We can all live without any of this, but why?

Not really comparable, art and code are generally original. Transposing competitive sports to software would be as if everybody competed year after year to see who implemented the best and fastest quicksort in C in the shortest amount of time for instance. It's not usually about expression, it's about perfecting something until you're the best at it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that although like the parent I can't say that I find that particularly interesting myself.

Oh I don't find sports interesting at all either, though I would argue that people do in fact try those sorts of competitions in coding. My beef with parent is the notion that this stuff is objectively pointless somehow just because _we_ don't find it interesting.

Damn, questioning the utility of pan-european institutions is dangerous around here.