Salt

ghastlymess's post about salt shortage and excess reminded me of an incident in my youth. Back in the 70's Britain suffered all kinds of artificial shortages caused by panic buying based on rumours that that there was going to be a shortage of something vital like toilet paper. Some friends and I decided to see if we could engineer a salt shortage in the small market town where we lived. Thus was created the Siberian Salt Miners' Strike and, rather sadly, it pretty much worked. Sales of salt at local stores experienced a brief boom before the absurdity of the rumour sank in. Remembering things like that makes it easier to understand how Bush got reelected. Remember folks, half the population has below average intelligence!

Surprisingly sparse

For reasons that baffle even myself I got to thinking about a really silly set theory problem. I was trying to figure out pairs of sets of countries with no shared "major sports".

For the purposes of the exercise, a sport is a major sport in country x if either (a) it is played by a reasonable proportion of the population, or (b) the national team plays in the top level of international competition or (c) it is popular enough as a spectator sport to feature regularly on network TV.

Similarly, a sport is a major sport if it qualifies as a major sport in country x for at least six values of x.

Thus NFL football is a major sport in the USA but not a major sport.

So far the only mutually exclusive pair relationships I can think of are:

Ice Hockey and/or Baseball vs. Field Hockey and/or Cricket

Any more for any more?

ETA: I realise I am being slightly sloppy with notation. When I say, for example, polo, I am using it as shortghand for the set of countries where polo is a major sport