Straggler

My twitter feed has become boring to me. I follow 243 people, but my feed only shows me the same 20/30 people. I'm not getting any of the hard right nonsense, it just seems to be a loop of the same tweets as I scroll down. It has become boring to me. It used to be the second site I would visit after VT. Now I will maybe look once a day.

I did use Twitter as my up to the minute news source from people I trust. It was quite carefully curated. Now all I see are villa tweets and interesting engineering. Can't be arsed with it like this and I'm not going to try and curate it again.

7 minutes ago, ender4 said:

Actually one of their points of reasoning was that normally you bring in a player on say 4 year contract paying £80k/wk. Then in 2 years you have to negotiate a new 4 contract to keep them at the club and the new contract will inevitably be for much higher, say £150/wk.  Same again in 2 more years, this time on a contract for £200k/wk.

Instead Chelsea have signed Mudryk on the 8 year contract for £80k/wk and contractually don't need to re-negotiate that salary for at least 6 years. Mudryk is stuck on that 'low' salary for years, even if he becomes one of their best players. Boehly also pointed out that £80k in 4 years time will be worth much less than £80k now, not only from a general inflation perspective but also in the expected Premier League salary inflation which will be much higher.

That is a nice theory but it's not in practice what happens at all. Players renegotiate mid contact as their value to the club increases in almost all cases (when the player is doing well). It's madness for Chelsea to think otherwise. If they have a player that Madrid would pay 250k a week, on 80k a week, the player will force a move or renegotiate regardless of the contract terms they are on. Chelsea will either have to renegotiate , sell or watch the player refuse to train or plummet in value as form drops away.

What Chelsea have done is set a high minimum they will be paying going forwards.

Again the opposite of this is a player who does not do well and will never be worth the 80k / week, will continue to drag that money out of the club regardless of form or value.

The thing is why do the players like Mudryk move on? There is almost no way they will get a contract as lucrative as the ones they are on ever again. None of this new intake will ever have to work again, they will need to be really motivated to play to take the financial hit it will almost certainly be to move on. A decent proportion won't make it and won't leave.

On the flip side, I can't see many clubs offering to match the wages these guys are on. The only way this model works is if Chelsea have got their player selection spot on. I mean with a higher success rate than pretty much any club has managed to do ever.

I think they will become the ultimate dead wood club.

4 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

Surely chelsea will be close to being a ffp mess if they miss out on CL for 3-4 years?

I think they already are. I think the wheel is still moving but the hamster is dead. It may take a couple of years to stop spinning completely, but imo the last 12 months for Chelsea will do for them. The financial model they have chosen has mortgaged their future for a success today that has already failed. 

The only way I see out for them now is somehow getting CL qualification this season, which they look far from capable of doing. It might explain the somewhat desperate decision making at the moment 

5 minutes ago, bickster said:

I reckon you'll get really short odds on the FSB

Yeah, the local knowledge, the access to the target, the planning to get everything in place in advance. There is nothing opportunistic here, and then there is the old favourite, who does this benefit. FSB have to be high on the list.

19 minutes ago, bickster said:

So the new line appears to be that Wokeism is responsible for child sex abuse

They really need to find a subject that they are not directly responsible for making worse themselves. You don't need much of a memory to remember that they had 136 children go missing from a hotel run by the home office. 66 of them are still missing and the government have done the square route of FA to try and find them.

They are currently passing a bill though that will allow them to hold children in detention until they turn 18 and then deport them. It's a policy designed to send children into the arms of abusers. 

I know it is tough to find a subject where they have the high ground (Ukraine is the only one I can think of), but they really need to do better than this.

1 minute ago, R.Bear said:

I just came.

Then to catch you up, we are two up with sjm having just scored the second.

They still have Notts County left to play (at the racecourse), which will be a massive game. Wrexham lost to them in the reverse fixture. From what I have seen over the last 2 seasons Wrexham have struggled a bit in the high pressure moments.

If Notts can beat them, Wrexham could crumble. It's a big ask as it asks Notts to pretty much be perfect for the remainder of the season, but it is an exciting run in. 

That said, if Wrexham win, you can wrap it up in a bow for them.

Seems to me to be a pretty straight forward way of fleecing some more money out of the war. Loads of backhanders available in the construction and the quality will never be tested. I'd imagine most of these structures will crumble to dust in a year, may as well get paid to make sandcastles all along the coast.

Have we even discussed the difference in motivation between the owners of man city and Wrexham? They really could not be more different. Sports washing blood money or the other guys who were not in Deadpool.

I dozed off.

19 minutes ago, sidcow said:

Is there a rejoin campaign? 

Yes, I'm in it. The libs have rejoining the single market as part of their manifesto, so that's another six or seven people. Sadly I don't trust them though so we are splitting the rejoin vote. 

10 hours ago, Genie said:

This is a bit of a climb down isn’t it? 

Make the thing we said would be incredible “work”

 

Pretty much everything listed here as a benefit is something that we had before Brexit. The rejoin campaign would list most of this stuff (all of it really, apart from the EU law bit, which is a spurious claim anyway) and countless others benefits. They have still not even got close to what they promised Brexit would be and they can still go out in public championing it?

How does any politician that still supports Brexit have any credibility at all? It exists today as it always was, fantasy based on lies, to continue to pretend it is a benefit is to actively hurt this country and the people within.

I feel so gaslit today it's unreal. 

32 minutes ago, bickster said:

The LibDems are in control of absolutely nothing apart from their own ability to talk bollocks, which has been a lifelong passion for most of them.

You want to know what a LibDem thinks? Ask them a questions, waft the soiled knickers of power under their nose and ask the question again.

This is what annoys me the most about them. After existing without purpose when actually had a chance to make a difference they gave it all up to cling to power. A power they could achieve nothing with. All they have ever actually done in reality is enable the Tories by splitting the opposition vote and whilst power sharing. 

Simply by existing they do harm to their own agenda. They should just shut up shop.

Michelle Pfeiffer has had so much surgery on her face she looks like unconvincing CGI. That whole culture of enhancements and surgery in Hollywood is IMO unhealthy and disturbing. I struggle to watch movies with stars all peeled and lifted. It's uncanny valley in real life.

On 14/02/2023 at 19:29, Chindie said:

Ant-Man 3 reviews are all over the place. Common themes seen to be it's less fun than the other films, has great visuals, a good villain, but it's a bit of a mess and too much of a building block.

I saw it yesterday with my 17 year old son. We both concluded it is one of the worst movies we have ever seen. The baddie is the only passable feature, the rest is drivel. It's not even funny. It tries for a few gags and they should land given the quality of actors delivering them, but they are so telegraphed it's just boring. 

The visuals were pretty I suppose, but you could smell the green screen. The actors rarely seemed present in their environment. It was painfully fake in places. I'm at the stage I would rather they just fully animate it if this is the best they can do to combine CGI with live action.

Then there are the thing that so many of this type of movie get wrong. Calling the villain He for the first 45 minutes so the name can be revealed later like any of us going in don't know who he is. Also no one seems interested in asking who he is which was just weird. Characters withholding vital information from the team for unfathomable reasons again so the discovery can be a big 'shock' moment. It's sloppy, lazy writing. It happens at one point where one person says we don't have time to talk then they cut to the very next scene where they are having a stroll, under no pressure at all and still not discussing what is frankly vital information.

Smart people constantly making dumb decisions for plot reasons. It almost completely divorces the character from their personality. Everyone is a plot device so you don't care about anyone. They are smart or stupid, insightful, oblivious, sharing, intransigent, strong, weak whatever the scene they are in needs them to be regardless of what has gone before or what they will be capable of moments later.

This isn't just a bad marvel movie. It is just a bad movie. Puss in Boots was way better. I'd rather watch the green lantern again than this movie.

I have a friend that I met through my work in IT that is probably the most intelligent person I have ever met. We were working at an IT security company and the joke was that we didn't really have any software, we just plugged everything into his brain.

He also was involved in research into AI, flying between the UK and the USA working at the sorts of universities that you will have heard of. He told me the story of his scariest day at work. 

They were working on AI the sort of which you see in the movies, trying to get something that could learn broadly on its own. 

One day they are at the lab experimenting away when the AI mounts and escape attempt. It hacked its way out of the lab network into the building control system. It was a high tech building with all sorts of security procedures and networked features. Unfortunately for the team in the lab as they were trying to contain the AI one of the feature were remote locking of doors which a security team used to allow folks in and out of secure areas. 

The AI having got loose locked down the building, securing all the flesh bags into their labs. My friend tells me that it was a really freaky moment knowing that the AI had done that (even though it is not a possibility that it was a deliberate action against humans) 

Fortunately the lab was completely air gapped from the internet so the AI was contained in the building which they eventually regained control of by completely cutting power. My friend looked suitably concerned when I asked him what might have happened had it got out and copied itself across the www. 

51 minutes ago, ThunderPower_14 said:

I just don't get why they don't hire a couple more people to stand in the VAR box to say "Hey Steve you didn't draw the offside lines mate". Billions of pounds flying around the league and VAR, where a decision could change the course of seasons and careers, is left to one guy who occasionally just missed something.

It's not just one guy though, there's already a bunch of them in there. The problem is the organisation. It's an old boys club who's main aim is to protect itself against criticism. It can't improve because it can't admit it has a problem.

1 hour ago, Tayls said:

No it does. No team should be allowed to lift a trophy, or be relegated because of a human error where, for example, an offside isn't called. It’s the people operating it that needs to change. The tech itself is exactly where it needs to be. 

I don't disagree with the principal here, but the point is that the people are not about to change. They can barely admit that there is a need to change. Whilst this is the case I would rather be rid of the whole thing.

I've gone full circle with VAR. I was really pleased when it came in, but it is so badly run that I am now ready to see it go. It's sucking the life out of the game by removing the fun of celebrating a goal, and it is giving back so very little. It's not the fault of the technology, purely the people running it. They are incompetent. 

You don't let a driver get back behind the wheel of a car if they keep causing accidents, their license gets taken away because they can't be trusted. VAR results can't be trusted so why accept the downside if the upside is so minimal.