Hey all you dinguses should probably check out northern European socialist democracies like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, which I’ve been hearing should theoretically collapse because of the flaws of socialism for my entire life.

Hey genius, the author literally wrote a book about fixing matches.

One difficult part of this is that as parents you are only one half of the equation. I understand and sympathize with the Scandinavian coolness with sleepovers, but I sure as hell don’t want my kid’s SO’s parents pissed at us because we’re acting like we live in Sweden when we don’t. Like, there’s a significant chance…

What’s kind of funny about putting Fold Your Hands Child on here is that the album prominently features songs by Isobel and Sarah.

You’d miss that human element if we just used auto landers.

Ok, except that cycling is pretty unique in the number of temporary alliances and scenarios where you’ll need to rely on other riders on other teams to attain your goals.

Nope, Aru was behind Froome when he put his hand up and dropped back.

Yeah, that could have been cool. But corruption in itself isn’t that interesting. Chinatown is great because John Huston was revealed to be not just a ruthless businessman, but an actual monster. It took all the real, historical events, compressed them, and made the rot manifest in Noah Cross.

He’s a phenomenal classics rider and pretty much the king of punchy stages in both one-week and grand tour stage races. In the US, the focus has always been on the grand tours, so that’s why it might seem weird that he’ll never be a Giro/Tour/Vuelta overall champion.

Yeah, and you’ve essentially outlined why true grand tour GC riders are very rare and kind of freaks of nature (and, well, bioscience). You have to be a time trialist who climbs well enough to not lose too much time in the mountains (like Dumoulin in this year’s Giro, and 180 pounds of Miguel Indurain during his…

Yeah, I just posted a comment with a link to some code where I modeled a shootout. I concede that the math doesn’t change, assuming that each shot is a discrete event, and the kicker performs the same regardless of context. Whether that’s accurate or not is a lot harder of a problem to figure out.

Ok, I modeled a shootout in Python and ran it a bunch. I concede that the order does not matter strictly by the math model.

Again, that’s not an interesting scenario because the other team wins every time. The most possible goals are 3 for Portugal.

Yeah, but that model doesn’t tell you anything. In that scenario, there’s literally no order that gives you a chance of winning, so who cares? In my model, Portugal has a chance of winning, and it absolutely makes a huge difference which players go first.

Well, I don’t think each shot is a discrete event. More shots against a goalie could reveal weaknesses, for example, sort of like the 3rd at-bat against a pitcher. Also, each made shot in the first 3 allows more of your players to get a chance at kicking, and improves the chances of you winning.

No, it’s not. By putting your best shooter in the top 3, you’re effectively increasing the odds that your 4th and 5th shooter will get a chance to shoot, even if they’re worse shooters. You absolutely can down-weight the chances of CR scoring in any particular shootout.

Putting your best shooter in the top 3 makes it more likely that your 4th and 5th players have a chance to shoot.

Nah, the rough equivalent would be to not pitch your best reliever in the 8th in a 1 run elimination game with the heart of the order coming up.

Here’s a good article about shootout order:

I think this might be the ur-definition of “survivor bias”.