Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.
the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation)
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You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.
Ah. Those are exactly what I was worried about. It’s not able to just happen entirely in the background the same way Google’s feature does, then? Kind of automagically?
But not exactly how the app works. If it’s a Strava-like app you have to remember to run in the foreground, the value is a lot lower to me than something that either uses or replicates GPS’ automatic background behaviour.
How exactly does it work from your phone’s perspective? Does it hook into Google Play Services location data? Do you need to install a different low-level application that replicates that functionality? (If so, what’s the battery life impact like?) Does it need a foregrounded app?
I’m really interested in this, because like the author I’m really upset at Google killing yet another incredibly useful feature. But the article is a little light on details.
Yeah I don’t really want to ban gambling itself. It’s completely impractical, but even if you could do it successfully, I don’t want to police people’s vices. What I have a problem with is how normalised it is and how much it has become a part of the culture of sport. Children should not be exposed to the idea that gambling is completely normal just because they want to watch their favourite pros playing their favourite game.
That’s basically the system hockey 🏑 uses, and it’s pretty good. Personally, while I far prefer it to the current soccer shootouts, it still has the feeling of being a “minigame” to me; a little too divorced from the main game to be ideal.
Can I interest you in twelve ball?
True, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a HEMA tournament that allowed non-buckler shields.
We study rodella as one of the offhands at my school, but if you’re competitively-minded you’re not going to get much chance to actually use it.
Banning betting itself is likely impossible, but a good start would be to ban teams or grounds from being sponsored by betting companies, and ban players from being involved with betting companies’ advertising campaigns.
Well first of all I’d like to just scrap Odis, they no longer serve a purpose in the sport. T20s have replaced them.
Ha. Interesting. Personally, I mostly only care for tests anyway. The ODI World Cup is far superior to the T20 World Cup though. I’d keep ODIs around for that reason if no other.
I actually wouldn’t mind banning T20i entirely. If T20 has to exist, let it stay domestic.
Your stuff about scheduling and pathways reminded me of something. ICC already has rules for full membership and test-playing status. One of those rules is that a country must have a women’s team to qualify. They need to enforce this rule. It’s ridiculous that the Taliban gets to sports-wash via the ICC just because the government they overthrew was making genuine progress.
Agree strongly that BCCI’s influence over the ICC is detrimental to the game, and your ideas around revenue sharing and other management stuff are good ones.
Eliminate stupid NOC requirements
As long as it is never allowed for players to choose to play a T20 rather than a test match.
Who do you want enforcing the rules?
The EPL would enforce it for the EPL. La Liga would enforce it for La Liga, etc.
The unusual stratification of soccer leagues lends itself some difficulty in obtaining consistency, but that is not a good enough reason not to try. Especially for EPL, which really is professional (non-international) soccer for most of the world. People in Vietnam or Namibia know about and often pick a side in the Liverpool–ManU feud. Far fewer could tell you about Bundesliga teams.
Relegation also causes difficulty, but again, shouldn’t be insurmountable. A sort of “grandfather” clause to allow players in teams that get relegated to not have to immediately take a big pay cut (assuming lower leagues would have a lower salary cap), similar to how BBL allows international players exemptions and A-league already allows each team one player who can simply ignore the salary cap entirely.
I’m not pretending it’s simple. Just that the problems a salary cap is designed to fix are huge problems with the integrity of the sport, and the difficulty of implementing it is far outweighed by the benefit that would be obtained.
BBL has some rules regarding players expected to miss a significant amount of time due to international tours. I don’t know the details of them, and maybe some tweaking of those rules would help. I don’t think it’s an obstacle so terrible the idea of salary caps should be thrown out.
NRL has a similar problem, on a lesser scale. Three weeks every year is State of Origin, where many teams lose their best players to an inter-state competition. And there’s the occasional international test, but that’s much less common (and less commonly during the league season).
NRL does not have a draft in the style of American sports. Instead, players usually graduate up from playing in lesser state and regional leagues through the junior system.
AFL does have a draft, with a bunch of carve-outs like the “father-son” rule, and priority access to local players especially for teams in places where AFL is less popular.
It makes absolutely no sense.
It does seem strange, but there’s some possible rationale behind it. If the rule is not currently being enforced, it could be because refs feel the level of the rule breaking is not proportionate with the level of the punishment. Decreasing the punishment, as well as increasing the severity of the rule breaking required to incur it might induce refs to be more inclined to enforce the punishment.
We’ve seen something similar recently in another type of football. A few years ago, the NRL changed the punishment for minor ruck infringements and defensive offsides in their defensive half from a penalty—which requires the ref to stop the game entirely* and gives an immediate opportunity for a goal kick worth 2 points—to a reset of the tackle count. If that would have been the fifth tackle of their possession (and thus the next one is their last), a ruck infringement resets it to the first. It used to be the case that teams would get away unpunished with all but the most egregious of offences. Now it gets used quite a lot, because the minor offences are met with a comparatively minor punishment.
* as a side note, this should be a goal of all rules and enforcement in all football sports apart from maybe gridiron. And in other similar field sports. Keep the game flowing where possible. It’s a huge problem with rugby union at the top level IMO. That sport is supposed to flow quite freely, but the level of refereeing results in extremely frequent stoppages, which makes for very poor viewing. My experience has been that the game works much better at a lower level where refs let things flow more.
For example, in the NRL, since 2004, there have been 11 or 12 winners (depending on whether you count the Eels winning after the Storm were found to have broken the salary cap, and had their Premiership taken from them retroactively). In the AFL it’s 10. BBL has only existed since 2011, and it already surpasses EPL’s 2004 total with 6 unique winners, despite also only having 9 teams compared to EPL’s 20.
I don’t know if you’re talking soccer, Aussie rules, gridiron, rugby (league or union), Gaelic football, or something else. But this is amusing whichever you pick.
Important: unlike variants of sports designed to be accessible to blind and low-vision players, this football is completely regular. Regular size, regular colour, no rattles or anything to make it easier to find the ball.
Wouldn’t your rule incentivise slower play from the fielding team? I don’t follow baseball, but I imagine the longer an innings goes (in terms of number of plays), the more points the batting team can score. If you can artificially reduce the number of plays because there’s a time limit and you just slow-play it, you gain an advantage.
Cricket addresses its timing issues through a few means, but one is finding the bowling team if over rates drop too low. This has its own problems (the assumption behind that rule is that low over rates are the fault of the bowling team, but this is not always true, especially with batsmen who have weird habits like regularly changing gloves, and with the use of player reviews), and I think it’s better addressed at more fundamental levels, but I think it probably looks at it from a better place. Identify the culprit and do something that penalises them, rather than their opponent.
All sports: ban gambling sponsorships. Ban teams from wearing gambling company logos or otherwise promoting gambling companies. Ban leagues and networks from incorporating gambling sponsorships into the programming.
I would also say ban gambling advertising entirely, but that’s a government law, not a sports one. With the sports rule change, gambling companies could still buy ad spots during as breaks. Just no commentators going “and now over to Lad Brokes so the punters can know the odds in this game”.
A salary cap can’t work in sports
Uhh, wrong? Like, provably, obviously wrong, from all the sports that do successfully implement it. There isn’t a single Australian league of note without a salary cap, including the soccer A League and T20 cricket Big Bash. American sports also largely have salary caps.
You’re not wrong that there are problems and loopholes that need to be carefully addressed, but that is not a reason not to do it at all. It’s a reason to look to examples elsewhere and learn from their successes and mistakes, and improve upon them.
It’s a matter of fairness and good competition. A team with huge pockets being able to win half the time is grossly unfair and against the spirit of sport. And it’s not fun as a fan or spectator when the same few teams win over and over again.
People dislike oil money but is it worse than other sources? Worse than old money?
I don’t think this is necessarily relevant to a salary cap discussion. Maybe a team gets its funding from Old Money. Maybe it gets them from oil. But with a salary cap, the impact of either of those is much less, since a much higher percentage of funding will be directly from revenue generated by the team itself, and the league more generally.
Fwiw though my answer is yes. Old Money did crimes decades and centuries ago. And that’s obviously less bad than ongoing crimes today. By analogy: if you had to pick, which is better: to put someone in gaol for a murder they committed 40 years ago, or prevent someone else from being able to commit murder later this year? For me the answer is obvious.
“scoring more goals” is not a skill. It’s an outcome.
Your first argument against stopped clocks is utter nonsense. It’s an argument from tradition. “We’ve always done it this way, so we should continue to do so” is bullshit reasoning. Defend it if you genuinely think it’s better, but explain the actual reasons it’s better. “Because we always have” is not a valid argument.
Stopped clocks would just lead to commercial breaks.
This is, in principle, a better argument. It presents itself as an actual disadvantage of the changed rule.
The problem is that it doesn’t make any sense. It wouldn’t change the game itself at all. The refs in soccer already stop their stopwatches. They just don’t communicate this back to production. And then when the game is supposed to be over (because the clock reads “90”), the ref says “actually we’re doing another 12 minutes”. The amount of time played would be the same. The amount of time spent with the game stopped due to injuries, corners, etc. would be the same. The only difference is that the number you see on the screen would be the correct time, not made up nonsense.
Re 1, are you suggesting salary cap? Because I seriously find it insane that there’s no salary cap on soccer. It makes the highest levels of the sport a complete joke. Only 5 teams have won the EPL since 2004, and if you go to 6 teams you get to 1995. That’s not a healthy competitive environment.
IMO offside should use running photo finish rules. The forward most part of one player’s torso needs to be behind the forward most part of the other player’s torso. It’s the most simple and intuitive method, IMO.
Happy cake day, banana!