151–160 of 180 posts
I am not sure how it is in USA but in my country golf courses are abuse of public resources for (almost) private use. For a very few who can lobby enough for renewal of these leases and these are kept out of reach of the normal public, either by rule or by cost, sometimes both. Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world, but I do believe they should not be kept exclusive. Also, this comes…
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In the USA as elsewhere golf courses are incredible wastes of water and false green spaces that would function better as green spaces were they actually parks open to the public they serve the wealthy. What is different is that in the US there is very little real (operational) worry about waste of water (or other resources) - at least compared to other places - and there is lots of space compared to other places.
Where I live the municipal courses are actually a part of our water retention and drainage systems that are provided at cost (or discounted cost, sometimes free) to members of the community. Basically we found a good way to create green spaces for recreation out of flood plains and drainage ditches. During heavy rain they provide important buffers that protect the nearby homes from flooding, and reduce the urban heat…
This is supercool. But I have a tangential question. I see projects like this built on top of OSM for different use cases. Does this data gets contributed back to OSM. A lot of them seems hobby projects, so it's hard to maintain long term, but the data is quite useful and could be used beyond the lifetime of these projects if they can be contributed back to OSM somehow.
OSM probably has the best data on golf courses because for many courses, people have mapped each 'golf=hole' as a way, and mapped other golf course features such as 'golf=bunker', 'golf=green', etc. OSM knows of almost 40k golf courses around the world.[2] This compares to 38k golf courses known to the R&A Golf Around the World Fourth Edition (2021) report and 37.6k courses listed in the NGF course database as of Jul…
You have hidden greens in Solon springs Wisconsin but you have it on the wrong side of the lake. It's like a 25-minute drive around the lake to get to it. I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
I think the corrections are better filed in the linked web app. ;)
So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped. It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out. I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands. https://en.wiki…
There's already one club I can see on there that doesn't actually exist. Is a running gag in the area where I grew up, and made it on this list somehow. So that's weird.
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Nice! Someone shared thAT wiki with me recently on reddit. I had not been aware of it before. Great stuff! I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc. I cross reference against other sourc…
Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha... ). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that. Just so we're clear, I'm effect…
Golfnow offers a service that courses must value, otherwise why would they list with them? And golfers get good deals.
It's not clear to me what's so bad about this.
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Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha... ). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that. Just so we're clear, I'm effect…
> Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses Golfnow offers a service that courses must value, otherwise why would they list with them? And golfers get good deals. It's not clear to me what's so bad about this.
Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
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> Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses Golfnow offers a service that courses must value, otherwise why would they list with them? And golfers get good deals. It's not clear to me what's so bad about this.
>Golfnow offers a service that courses must value Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do. Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site…
I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient.
Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link directly to any golf course to book.
I'm not saying you're wrong about some courses not liking them but I have a hard time understanding why it's so hard for courses to just not deal with Golfnow and take bookings another way if they think it's so harmful.
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>Golfnow offers a service that courses must value Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do. Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site…
> Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient. Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link d…
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Malcolm Gladwell did a great podcast on golf courses in prime urban spaces https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/a-good-w... In some parts of the US it is certainly the case that golf courses are private and as a citizen you notice there are v. Few parks but lots of good courses. Many of the courses pay little in taxes so they’re also feels that there is a disparity between how the rest of society funct…
Malcolm is not much more than a pop physicologist who is a very good writer. It looks like he is going to get his way with that golf course in LA that has some sort of vote happinging soon. Here is what will happen.. "the public interest" will win, and for a while it will be a park of some sort, then there will be a slow but inexorable push by the city council to reduce the size of the park by selling the land to dev…