My understanding is that the Memphis bid collapsed and the Winnipeg bid was put together, not in opposition to Memphis, but as a replacement that was put together in a hurry (which is one reason it lost - they assumed no-one would actually vote for Chengdu, so they only had to do the minimum and tell everyone “trust…

Yeah, I think the point is that the Sads are (mostly) SF fans and writers who like 1950s/1960s SF - some are literally the same people who didn’t like the original New Wave before I was born in the 1970s - and think that most SF fans agree with them and couldn’t understand why these other books that aren’t their sort…

Men’s World Cup games used to have lots of blowouts until some point in the 1980s (the record win in a men’s is 10-1, and that was 1982). Eventually, the top Asian and North American and African sides got good enough not to be routinely shipping four or five goals. But the only way they got that good was by playing…

Previous record total number of goals in a single World Cup Finals game: 12 (Austria 7 - 5 Switzerland in 1954).

We didn’t send you Piers Moron. Y’all picked him up out of the dumpster we’d left him in.

How about six fouls but you get one less if you fouled out the previous game?  I don’t know how that would work, but it sounds interesting.

Soccer’s advantage rule isn’t as good as rugby’s. Rugby’s advantage rule is that the ref signals that there’s a foul, but doesn’t whistle. Play then continues until there’s a score or a turnover or the ball goes out of bounds, at which point the whistle blows.

Amateur sport should be amateur. If the players aren’t allowed to get paid, then the coaches shouldn’t either.

Yep, what this does is good for pro teams, because they do what they need to do to create pro players at 18-20. But it’s terrible for the (vast majority of) players who get cut, because it hollows out amateur competition and no-one cares which high school wins the state (well, it’s Europe, so provincial or regional or…

If they did that properly, they could award degrees in it and require players to have one to play in the NFL.  Bet the NCAA wouldn’t have low graduation rates then.

Agreed. The teams with the most money are the ones with the most fans, so why shouldn’t having more fans be an advantage?

More people are made happy by this team winning, why shouldn’t they win a bit more often?

Even if MLS retains its franchising system, it would definitely be healthy to have pro-rel in USL.

The point of the R1 loser paycheck is to cover the flight and accomodation; if they’ve flown out and then got ill or injured before playing, what they’ve previously had to do to cover their costs is play one point and then retire, preventing a “lucky loser” from the qualies from getting into the main draw.

Now, they…

I ended up buying a cheap bluetooth receiver to plug my headphones into and they’re a much better solution than bluetooth headphones - the battery lasts ages, they’re cheap so you don’t mind buying a spare just in case the battery dies or you forget to charge one, you can use any headphones you like (if you use…

Pay-to-win is something that gamers really object to, and is more the sort of thing that scammy freemium mobile games to, not AAA games.

The English pyramid is unusual, in that there are five national levels. Most countries have many fewer - Italy and Spain have just two, France and Germany have three. The USA should probably only have two: MLS and USL Championship. USL Championship is divided into conferences (like MLS), so the sensible thing is to…

I agree completely that promotion and relegation would be a really bad idea for MLS. It would be a great idea for USL, though. Set up a proper pyramid (ie more divisions at lower levels. I’d only have one national USL level, then have an East/West split for a couple of levels and then divide it up a lot. A couple more…

The answer to that is the same as in countries that have actual promotion and relegation - the pyramid.

It’s called a pyramid because it’s narrower at the top. There are five national divisions in England (EPL, EFL Championship, EFL League One, EFL League Two, National League). Level six has two divisions, one in the…

The project, whose only investor is The Boring Company, promises to have no above-ground disruption for the estimated 14 months it will take to build the 3.6-mile tunnel

Indeed, but ‘faggot’ doesn’t, only the abbreviated form ‘fag’ is a cigarette (at a guess, for the same reasons that cigarette is a diminutive).

And no-one calls a person “fag” in the sense of cigarette as an insult. You can tell, because no-one uses “cigarette” as an insult.