No, people just keep reposting the same shit over and over instead. But the end effect is very similar, dang even links to old posts almost every time.
I follow dozens of subs through RSS and that’s pretty good. You just need a reader which has features to filter out certain users and words (like Newsblur what I use)
Yep, if you haven't lost the will to put a bit of curation work upfront, RSS never stopped being the right answer.
Substack has been a pretty good addition to the landscape, bringing lots of people into blogging (without calling it that). But for the skimming/reading interface, RSS beats the app.
What you describe is pretty much true for every single american sport too
>unprecedented levels of gambling
Welcome to FanDuel and DraftKings
>insane amount of efforts from the youth chasing the dream of professional football
Look at college sports, it's actually even more insane than anything else in Europe
>corruption where magnate owners of sports clubs use their popularity to influence politics
Look at how public money spent by universities on sports (especially in the South) or how pro teams' funded by local taxes. And when the rich doesn't get a deal they just move the team away. The Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles where there are no lakes. The Oilers moved to Tennessee where there is no oil. The Jazz moved to Salt Lake City where they don't allow music.
>fan violence inside and outside the stadiums
This is the only thing you might be right about it... but hey it's US, land of the free guns you don't need fan violence for that
OK I 've never been to the US, so I believe you. Then the problems are more widespread: not only soccer, but professional sports in general are harmful in my opinion.
I really have to disagree with you there. Football's damage to society, which I no doubt does exist, much less than the damage due to class divide and capitalism as a whole.
Football in England is sometimes demonized by the media, but specifically footballers. Footballers have historically been the punching bag of the low brow media. "Rio Ferdinand on 150k a week does something bad". "Wayne Rooney caught in latest scandal, 200k a week ace in shambles" etc etc. They love to mention how much they earn, but they never talk about how football is one of the very remaining professions which are purely meritocratic. The few professions where talent is enough and offers social mobility. Most footballers are working class and yet they're blamed, and football is blamed too.
But what's so bad about something that brings people together to bond over a game? Hooligan violence isn't really a thing anymore. Gambling is a separate issue. It's not football's fault that people like to gamble. The politicians could make it illegal.
I do think the professional players earn too much, including from gambling. Gambling and football go hand-in-hand. More than half the ads during the game advertise betting. This is obviously a huge part of their business. Politicians could not make it illegal, this is the whole point, because football has control over them.
I know it's an American article but I think it's far more interesting that 4 out of the 5 most populous countries (China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia), representing 3.3 billion people and 40% of the Earth’s population, has a combined total of 2 appearances at the World Cup (1938 Indonesia as Dutch East Indies and 2002 China). It’s a huge untapped market and not that people don’t love or care about football in those countries either.
Meanwhile relatively small countries like Uruguay, Portugal, and Croatia has a long history of great teams and producing insane talents.
All I know to write about here is China: school is one massive obstacle for professional sports. Lots of kids in China try out tons of different hobbies and sports, and any sport or activity you can think of likely has a number of clubs in bigger cities, enough to create a community of people with a serious interest. I'm thinking of Chinese kids I know personally who are into football, breakdancing, archery, ballet, drama, all kinds of stuff.
And then, right at a child's age where European scouts are noticing kids over there, in China parents are hit with massive, massive pressure to help their kids academically as best they can. Good middle school -> good high school -> good university -> good job. Unless your kid is far and away a natural talent easily exceeding their peers, you're going to hesitate to let them devote more time to professionally developing athletic ability. Athletic competition at the highest levels in China is intense due to the number of natural talents you get in a large population, and with every year that goes by without your kid quite making it into the professional-athlete track, the pressure gets higher to abandon that track and focus on academics.
So the athletic practice, even for a quite promising kid, gets sidelined for more study time and after-school classes. And this happens even for kids with parents who want them to have a balanced life without the insane pressure for academics the Chinese school system is known for. For those families it just takes the shape of cutting back the athletic practice instead of nurturing it to a possibly professional level.
One other factor that I can think of is just a culture of family interest. I don't know any Chinese men older than 45 who are into watching sports at all, whereas in the West (and also India, I think?) it's common for a family interest in sports to have already existed for generations. I do know Chinese men my age (31) who are into basketball and have young kids who might grow up with that interest. That's all anecdotal, I know, but my sample is big enough for it to be surprising to me in comparison to other places.
A documentary, maybe it was China Heavyweight (which is maybe 15yo at this point, so it might be out of date today), suggested that kids are trained for many years for specific Olympic sports (and nothing else) based on their rough physical attributes. This shotgun approach has success at finding great individual athletes, and will probably ensure they have a reasonable chance at qualifying someone at as many events as possible. Maybe this is just how the boxing program is run though...
I can’t speak for other countries but in India cricket eclipses all other sports and drains talent. But soccer is gaining popularity recently but still long way to go.
What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.
If you think about it, India and China already have other very popular sports. Soccer is kind of somewhat of a niche there.
Croatia is really in Europe and Europe was always solid on soccer. Same with Portugal. Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina. It is much easier to establish soccer in South America than in North America. Canadians much prefer ice hockey.
> Uruguay is more interesting, but Brasil was always happy with soccer, as was Argentina.
Back in high school, due to a dearth of places to play and ubiquitous NO BALL GAMES signs we would joke that surely it must be entirely flipped in Brazil, and the elderly there scold the youth for not playing ball at any given moment.
Basketball is hugely popular in China, though it's more famous for ping-pong. In the evenings you can see pickup basketball games at every park and every public court, of which there are many.
You'll find an unobfuscated version (kind-of) there too. This the the one I actually worked on then I had a program squash all the variable names and squeeze it into the gameboy shape
The size limit for the entry was the killer. You are allowed 2503 non white space characters (a simplification - the rules are complicated) in IOCCC entries and 4K total code size. This isn't a lot to fit a Z80 processor and a GameBoy hardware emulator in!
I first wrote a full Gameboy emulator in C. It started out at about 6000 non white space characters. I then spent about about 100 hours work trying to get it to fit into the 2503 limit. For a long time I wasn't sure it was going to fit.
I decided making the emulator play Tetris (which is a fairly simple game) was the target so I stripped out features like the half carry flag in the Z80 emulator and the windowing system in the Gameboy emulation which Tetris didn't need. I also abused the C code terribly doing things with implicit int I can never un-see. I also got creative with the IOCCC rules which are implemented in a C program which checks your source and I spent some time reverse engineering that looking for loopholes! I discovered that the operators defined in <iso646.h> only count for one token which was very useful.
Once I had it small enough I had to supply some games to run with it. I created 4, a test program written in z80 assembler, a pi calculator (written in assembler), a 3d tic tac toe game (written in C with gbdk-2020) and a chess program also written in C. I discovered that quite a few open source games ran on the emulator too so I added a downloader for those where I could. Apparently not many games use BCD arithmetic - who would have thought!
Very cool! Clearly I had a long way to go with mine to get it under the IOCCC requirements :) Though my goal was specifically Pokémon... curious how much more you would need to be able to run that.
That is correct. It is cheating, but the judges let a small amount of it slide, especially if you come up with an amusing enough justification. I could not get it to fit otherwise!
I'm not a judge or a competitor, but I feel like a little bit of cheating on the rules is within the spirit of the game. Especially if it a) it makes it more obfuscated and b) it wouldn't have fit otherwise.
Considering that one historical entry (winner maybe?) consisted of a source file that simply contained the character ‘c’, plus a makefile, I’d say it’s in the ball park.
I also see that and I'd say around Covid / past-Covid. More people became terminally online in those 6-12 months, like another eternal September.
Funnily you will always see some people waving the HN guidelines [1] flag: nooooo, don’t compare this site to Reddit. Yet there is another „rule” in the guidelines about politics being off-topic… which is the biggest symptom of HN turning into Reddit: General, especially US domestic, politics became excessively acceptable to be posted here. That wasn’t the case 10 years ago or more. Of course if you point that out then the „everything is politics” crowd will show up and the „should we close our eyes and ears to all the tragedies happening in the world”. Rinse and repeat.
That’s the problem with ambigous rules and to some extent why I still prefer Reddit. If you don’t like it you make a new sub, find another one etc. At least the bias is clearly known
Reddit has a high rate of global bans btw, you can't just find another subreddit if any of the power mods disagrees with you because you are supercookie-shadowbanned then. You'll think you're not banned but nobody will see your posts.
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