reporterpenguin

The cynic in me thinks that now Newcastle are minted they’re getting the rub of the green more. Their first goal was the sort that you do see ruled out, the Newcastle player both backs into the keeper and pushes the Wolves defender into the keeper. Might have been soft, but it was a hell of a lot more of a foul than the penalty was. But both decisions go their way…

Never in a million years. I’m a fan of the idea of VAR, but the way it’s used is farcical.

I get why people are saying it’s harsh, but look at the difference between his arms. His right arm is swinging back away from his body, while he’s kept his left right in the line of where the ball was always likely to go. I don’t know how you go about defining unnatural position, but your arms being in different directions when jumping is probably a good starting point.

That was absolutely dreadful. Can't believe I stayed up late to watch that rubbish.

That’s rough to hear, take it steady and be kind to yourself. I’m also in the “clinically extremely vulnerable” category and have managed to avoid it so far, reading your experience makes me hope I can keep that up. As an aside, “clinically extremely vulnerable” is a fvcking terrifying label to have put on you at the start of a pandemic!

How're you doing now @Izzy?

They've now appealed the red card for Curtis Jones. If that gets overturned it'll be pure appeasement towards them. It may be accidental, it may be on the soft side, but countless players have been sent off for similar tackles (Perez against West Ham during the Covid season springs to mind?). If you go in with any force, accidental or not, and end up planting your studs that high on the shin it's going to be a red these days.

GB News have suspended Laurence Fox for those comments about Ava Santina. You know you deserve to be in the Absolute Cvnts thread when even GB News think you’ve gone too far.

Oh I completely agree. But when there’s such low hanging fruit like organisations not spending money just for the sake of it it’s an easy stick to beat them with. I won’t pretend I have the answer, but trusting organisations to know where investment is needed and not having it dictated from above seems a good place to start. Along with not cutting budgets because an area of the previous budget wasn’t fully spent the previous year.

I’ve never worked for the NHS but I do work for a public sector organisation and I believe some of the issues with the funding model are shared between them. The one that always gets me is the need to spend budget during the year, but the parts of the budget being ring fenced for certain areas. I know we’ve put contracts out to tender for things just for the sake of it, and the most expensive quote chosen, just to use that bit of budget so it isn’t cut the following year. When it gets towards the end of the financial year there’s always a massive splurge on things that aren’t needed while other areas in desperate need of funding are left crumbling, all to make sure as much of the budget is used as possible. It’s a system that literally incentivises waste while also keeping funding from areas that need it.

It was like the greatest hits of FoxesTalk with the "China emit more, why should we try". Him talking about how we'll still hit our targets, which we may well do, really irked me too. So we're just going for the bare minimum?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66857551

I love thinking about this, I’d argue it’s as much a philosophical question as it is scientific. It seems unimaginable to me that the only life in the universe is on Earth. The numbers already discussed here are to unimaginably large for it to be conceivable that this is the sole planet life has appeared on. It’s the nature of that potential life that is most intriguing to me. If results like those from JWST this week are confirmed, the universe must surely be teeming with life. But that would tell us nothing about the intelligence elsewhere. Once life arises somewhere is it then inevitable that, given enough time, intelligent life will develop? Or is that the bit that is vanishingly rare? Or are there intelligent life forms all across the galaxy and beyond, but they have no chance of developing an understanding their place in the wider cosmos, and will never even dream of leaving their own planet? My feeling is that intelligence is fairly common, and a significant number of those life forms reach a level to where humanity is at now, but intelligence at that level is considerably more fleeting. From that, the chance of two separate space faring civilisations ever becoming aware of each other, let alone meeting, would seem extremely unlikely. Assuming evolution works similarly universe wide it seems the things that have made us successful here are likely needed elsewhere. Unfortunately the aggression and violence of humans has significantly contributed to get us to the point where we are now, and our use of technology now has great destructive potential in its own right. From weapons, climate change, pandemics, and possibly AI, we have a lot of things of our own making that could be our downfall. And despite the billions of year of Earth to this point, it’s only the last hundred years or so we’ve been leaking radio telltales of our technologically advanced civilisation, with those signals reaching a few dozen stars. Assuming a similar pattern elsewhere, how long do these visible signs last before something, be it an asteroid hit or created by life itself, puts an end to these beacons? I wouldn’t fancy a bet that humans will be here in a thousand years time, let alone a million years. Even a million years would still be only 0.0002% of the age of Earth. The odds of another 0.0002% overlapping with us and reaching out? Not great I’d imagine. The other argument against intelligent life being common I quite like is that the universe just isn’t old enough yet, we may be among the first. Clearly evolution itself needs a long time, but the conditions to even get to that point need time as well. It takes a few generations of stars to seed the galaxy with the abundances of elements we’re made of, and a long time for those to condense out and eventually become a planet that life can begin doing its thing on. Sorry for the long post, it’s something I love to consider very much! Tldr; Life might be common, it might be rare, it might take ages, it might wipe itself out if an asteroid doesn’t beat it to it, and we have no idea whatsoever.