leicsmac

....pretty much everything regarding the phrase "collateral damage" when it has involved harm to innocent people.

Looking forward a bit, I do wonder how the England team are going to tour against this India team. The conditions and the quality of opposition have always made it the most difficult place to go (more so than Aus, I reckon), but this England team didn't look half bad when they went to Pakistan recently, so I think it could well be a rather well fought series.

Wilting against quality seam in the third innings. But Kohli showing why he's a class apart in such conditions.

Seth Efrica is one of the places where India travel the poorest, looking back at history. Perhaps it's a combination of the conditions (rather England-like) and the quality seam and swing bowling in those conditions that the Saffers consistently come up with.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67705812 "The loss of predictable weather patterns is "causing chaos" for nature, according to the National Trust. It warns climate change is upsetting the regular rhythm of the seasons, making plants and wildlife more susceptible to disease. The effects can be seen across the estates the National Trust manages. This seasonal "baseline shift" is disrupting the annual behaviours of animals in particular but also impacting trees and plants, it said. "The incremental shifts we're experiencing in terms of our seasons extending may not feel like much in a 12-month period, but over a decade the changes are extremely significant", said Ben McCarthy, head of Nature and Restoration Ecology at the National Trust." Yet another consequence.

All of the sliced loaf of bread apart from the ends.

Tragic. The South Korean state drug policy is solely responsible for this.

Fair arguments all. The system really needs to be better, but for me it's always going to be a case of reform and replace, rather than abandonment for some idealistic motive about what football "should be".

Fifteen years ago smartphones were a device either not yet conceived or only available to the superrich in the most primitive format. Thirty years ago the Internet was pretty much exclusively the province of computer nerds, academic institutions or the military. There are many other such examples, but the point is that "never" is a very long time in matters of tech. But yes, such decisions may well still be a significant distance away in terms of time, so for the time being it should only be goalline and the instant offside tech being implemented until the other stuff is proven to work much better, and I also agree that post-match citing would be a good idea too.

Tbh we shouldn't have to. If it's not better in terms of speed and accuracy than a human agency (which in terms of the former it certainly is not) then it shouldn't be implemented until it is. Edit: and yes, such systems will be a fast as a human agency one day. And that day will be soon. Tech advancement moves at a massive speed, often unexpectedly.

This. It is possible for such a system to improve to a point where such decisions are (at least near) instantaneous and therefore as fast as a human referee giving a decision and more accurate. We just haven't got there yet, which is why some Luddites are advocating for throwing out the baby with the bathwater rather than going back to the drawing board and sorting the system out (which is what should be done).

... anyone taking Christmas as seriously as this guy?

...well, apart from the corporate white-collar crime, the way big business is in bed with government over there, and the fact that nine months of the year it's either too hot, cold or smoggy to actually do much outside... ...but to be fair, my comparison wasn't just with that one country - it's with a lot of different countries in Western Europe and East Asia. The UK lags behind practically all of them on this particular matter - particularly in terms of customer cost, as opposed to efficient running.

Yep. Same with most of East Asia, too.

By comparison to practically every other nation of similar land area, population and level of development, public transportation in the UK (except perhaps in Greater London) is an absolute joke.

AFAIC the events of January 6th 2021 in Washington DC make any attempts at performative bothsidedness on the above matter utterly hollow by itself.

I believe we had a similar conversation to this on the main forum when that Spurs fan engaged in rather unwise behaviour in L1 and got himself a rather predictable response...

... sorry, must have missed the memo where the UK is a Christian nation embedded in its judiciary and legislature where this time is a festival exclusive to that religion and referred to exclusively by that name, then. As opposed to a secular nation where more than one nomenclature might apply.

Guess it depends. Based on popularity, it's Christmas. Based on precedent and oldest historical tradition, it's Yule. But of course there is no real right answer.

...some people like the nature of football to be tribal, antipathetic and (occasionally) violent, with all that entails. Because...well, "human nature" and apparently we can't help ourselves and it's a good way to vent negative emotions rather than learning how better to deal with them otherwise. Apparently.

Yeah, that's a possibility, though it follows that lack of understanding of a topic will lead to poor presentation of it anyway. I'm struggling to think of easily accessible platforms that do provide such information for everyone in a way easy to understand, though. Which is unfortunate when a large chunk of the voting (and therefore policymaking) public rely on them for points of view of matters they might not understand in the first instance. Or rely on even worse, possibly malicious, sources.

You see these kinds of issues in the scientific articles that the Beeb put out from time to time, too. I guess it's pretty difficult to communicate a (relatively) complex concept in a way that can be understood by as many people as possible while still making sure it retains all its original meaning. Especially in this digital age where it's so easy to subvert the very idea of truth anyway.

Good grief, that's a big total.

The whole discussion around "NHS funding" tends to be rather opaque and subjective - one person might say funding demands are never enough, another might say that there is a pretty clear difference between meeting funding demands and meeting the necessary amounts for a good baseline of care (which at the moment it might be argued the current government funding model is not). It's a tricky discussion to have.