Some comments from managers of other clubs have shown a different picture here. Ronaldo seems to have been brought into discussion by his own manager at other clubs, but all of them immediately declined because they said there is no way they can handle the salary. Saying that it wasn't about the money for Ronaldo really goes a bit too far. If that was the case I am sure there could have been a solution where he buys himself out of his own contract. As far as I know that has happened before with other players, although I can't recall exactly.

What's great about Di Maria's current shape is that he functions very well along with Messi. They both know each other in and out, Di Maria still has great speed and great precision in his passing and seeking the free space. I am sure we are going to see some great moves by the Argentinian offense. They are for sure a great name again and I hope they'll make it far in this tournament as it it always great to see Messi perform for a long time throughout the tournament. He is thrilled beyond imagination I guess.

But assuming that happens and energy companies build like sort of a cartel and centralize mining significantly, would there be any reasonable solution to counter that and update the protocol to prevent dangerous degrees of centralization from happening (especially when it were to happen out of a sudden and energy companies fire up their rigs in concert)?

Though I would still wonder what the overall availability of mining equipment is? Chips are rare these days anyway and producing an amount of hash power like out of nowhere even with old equipment could perhaps be less of a threat than one would think.

Regardless of the outcome, I would still say that it is also kind of a legitimization that can have a positive influence and be protective in favor of Bitcoin when it comes to regulation or even soft ban considerations by the respective governments.

Although I also believe that they will make it through relatively easily, there are lots of examples when teams played a perfect qualification and still got kicked out during the group stage at the World Cup. There is no guarantee as you put it saying that there is no chance either of them could fail to make it. The odds are clear here, but look back at several World Cups, check the qualifiers and then see how teams got busted during the final group stage. You can get under pressure very quickly by losing the first game in an unlucky way. That is how soccer works and that's great because it is more fun to watch that way.

I really hope that this is not your line of reasoning... There is a certain level of respect every human being on this planet owes every other human being. It is a question of character. Not a question of achievements and money. Achievements and money can actually evoke your true character in a special way and this is what's happening to Ronaldo.

I don't care about him anyway. I love players who perform well and this is what the true GOAT is doing, namely Messi! There is an exciting time ahead of us to see how he will do at the cup now, but also in the other tournaments especially against Bayern. I really would like to know for how long he can keep going and whether there will be one more transfer in his life.

Let Ronaldo keep going nuts and destroy his legacy at least in regards to his reputation. All he wants is a transfer because he is afraid that Messi keeps scoring and might be overtaking him in the all time goal scorer ranking in the Champions League. Let's soon find out whether he can successfully blackmail Manchester United and force a transfer to a club that is playing in the Champions League...

Ronaldo did have two choices, he could have behaved as a real team player for Manchester United, accepting to be sitting on the bench at times, or behave like a king, but then I suggest you better score two goals per game on average. The way this played out shed some negative light on his career overall. Nobody can take away his successes, his goals and trophies, but this is just not acceptable for someone playing a game where the is a huge number of teammates and staff involved. He is also going at ad hominem when he indirectly calls Rooney an ugly person.

The interview is 90 minutes long and I think the full version will be published on Nov. 16th.

The timing for the interview is also clever because he has nothing to lose anymore. If he becomes a shining star at the cup now, Manchester United is still in a complicated situation. He still wants to go to a club that gives him the chance to win the Champions League. I just can't convince myself of any idea concerning a club who might sign him unless he played an outstanding cup in Qatar because then signing him would also be a smart PR stunt.

His parody interview also is about how much he loves his fans. I don't know what anything he did at Manchester United has to do with loving his fans. He is egoistic. Slapping a mobile phone out of the hands of a 14 year old fan doesn't come across as if he truly loved his fans.

Reading that Crypto.com has of its reserves in Shiba Inu Coin and guess what, they are into trouble right now because of some other meme or trash token (GALA). There was an arbitrage opportunity between exchanges and some people went for it and made lots of money with it. Now Crypto.com froze a ton of accounts, asking customers to pay more than they actually have in their accounts in order to get access to whatever is in their accounts. Worse than that, they are individually negotiating with people about the amounts they need to pay back and sometimes even admit they seem to have wrong numbers in their accounting systems.

The interesting question is actually, why would an exchange complain about customers making arbitrage gains? There aren't many good reasons, but one is that the exchange itself loaded up heavily on that token without disclosing it, intended to manipulate its price and then didn't react quickly enough to sudden arbitrage opportunities when dumps happened elsewhere. Huobi is also involved.

Thank god that Crypto.com has Shiba Coin as part of their reservers, that means we are all safe!

There is probably a lot more to come over the next weeks and months.

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Union Berlin has a little crisis and I think this is a much needed break for them. Additional to the bad results are now coming unlucky situations like the early red card. When you get two penalties against you and a red card in the 19th minute, it's probably close to impossible for any team to make a comeback. This shouldn't lower the achievements of Freiburg so far.

That's one reasonable way to look at it. The more obvious high quality games are exciting to look forward to, but I wouldn't say that the Netherlands will easily beat Senegal either. It reminds me of the Cup in 2014 and Argentina in group F. They won against Bosnia-Herzgowina 2:1, against Iran 1:0 in the 90th+1 minute, and against Nigeria in a sweat with 3:2. Most people would think that the team, which then made it to the final, should have won the group with ease, but those games could have gone either way. I think that almost every group is also set up such that there might be very surprising results waiting for us. Germany didn't pass the group stage at the 2018 Cup in a seemingly doable group. I look forward to a lot of those games.

There is a nice video series created on Youtube. It's quite nuts what was going on at FTX. He is even said to have had special accounting software that made sure no warnings are triggered when he makes transactions out of the system and others weren't supposed to get aware of it. He transferred out about $10 billion to Alameda, and did lots of shady stuff here and there.

Now this Tweet is quite interesting and I believe that other exchanges also have a lot of borderline stuff going on for themselves. I'd be surprised if no others fail because of the current market conditions and over leveraged positions. But the video is a real popcorn video. The FTX corporate structure is more complex than the one of Lehman Brothers used to be. He shows a graphic in the video.  

I would by no means underestimate Frankfurt such as they will be beaten easily by Napoli. I think it is obvious at this point who does have a slight advantage in this match, but still they have shown in international games that they can be very hard to beat. I doubt that this will be an easy dance for Napoli particularly in the away game when Frankfurt has its fans who haven't been able to support their own team in the UEFA Champions League ever before. We have all seen the pictures what those fans are able to pull off. They are among the most supportive fans out there. That can set free quite some strength within the team.

As you can see in the FIFA ranking posted below, Senegal has a very good standing right now, also because of winning the African Cup of course. I am not entirely sure how the ranking works and I found some sources stating it is inaccurate for several reasons. Hence I tried to find out when they played against teams from that ranking that are not from Africa and that was the World Cup 2018:

Poland vs. Senegal ended 1:2
Japan vs. Senegal ended 2:2
Senegal vs. Columbia ended 0:1


I'd say that these results do lend some credibility to the ranking as you can see. Columbia hasn't lost games against Brazil or Argentina by more than one goal difference in quite a while. I think Senegal will have its moments at this World Cup and they might be a harder challenge to the Netherlands than many would expect.

This is well said. He won't be scoring 50 goals and more in a season anymore, but the way he reads the game and serves his mates is still genius. He turned into a real selfless player. I doubt his role with Argentina will be to score the most goals. It is more about putting his guys into the best position possible. He is still a free kick master. He can still score amazing goals. Whether he wins the championship or not doesn't change his status as the GOAT in my opinion.

There are a ton of other potential issues that come to my mind: negative interest rates, which typically get sold as a positive thing stimulating the economy, could not be circumvented anymore by people who choose cash over other investments. With the application of negative interest rates people would feel forced to switch into other assets or accelerate consumption. That could be played out in a very tricky way. I would bet that banks are sitting on exactly those assets that are then the escape for people trying to avoid negative interest rates, thereby driving up those other assets' prices. I'd say it's similar to quantitative easing, but this time it is not the banks pumping money into the markets, but the people who are kind of left without a choice.
There is lots of stuff you can do with CBDCs. Among the range of possibilities is certainly also the ability to create a perfect, fully transparent profile about people, which is not unlikely to end up in exacerbating social control.

This is an incomplete list of billionaires owning important media. Musk has reacted outrageously various times over the last couple of weeks and months. He has been an interesting guy to me for a while and his entrepreneurial success is crazy, no doubt. But is the way he achieved success a great way? He has been brutal and he often has been lying.

Here he calls one of the Thai cave rescuers a pedo. I really wonder if someone who loses control over his wording in such a way is the right person to judge in the future what can be said on his Twitter platform and what can't be.

He is also dominating space with his satellites and some sources state that it is close to impossible to compete with him because in that sphere around planet Earth there is only so much space for satellites to be placed. He already "owns" the majority of it. So how far is that guy going to go?

One real problem I see is that with so much power, most people can't keep themselves under control even if they wanted to. He can implicitly blackmail authorities who are dependent on the satellites like NASA and the Pentagon. He is polarizing so hard, and I am not against polarization per se because sometimes that is a helpful tool to get hurt, but I feel he is crossing many lines at that is a type of polarization our society doesn't need. If the guy stays healthy, he has tens and tens of years to increase his empire and exert more and more pressure. Doesn't feel right to me.

Another quote:

"But by April, Mr. Musk made it clear that his help would go only so far. On Twitter, he said that as a “free speech absolutist,” he would not use Starlink to block Russian state media outlets that spread propaganda and misinformation on the war in Ukraine."

Allowing for spreading misinformation specifically, like proven misinformation: is this guy bipolar?

Maybe you are a bit too harsh on Barcelona here because the first game between Bayern and Barcelona could have gone either way. It ended with a bit of luck in favor of Bayern.

It is hard to judge yet whether Barcelona has a chance to win the La Liga title. I think they can for as long as they keep their players healthy, but it will be a close head to head race with Real Madrid until the very last moment I can imagine. At times Madrid also loses some points here and there, but probably not very often. That is when Barcelona has to score their points for certain.

What is absolutely impressive at the moment is Barcelona's defense. They just had their 10th! game with a clean sheet. That is probably a record in Spain after 12 games? I would think so, but didn't look into the history regarding clean sheets. Nevertheless, that is an impressive achievement and if they can keep up that quality defense they will necessarily be a candidate to win the La Liga title.

This was certainly an interesting game for the audience with that spectacular ending. I haven't looked into the circumstances yet why there was so much overtime, but Union finished that one in quite a dramatic way. All the favorites from the upper part of the table won their games besides there more exciting game between Frankfurt and Dortmund who were both set out to take the three points, but with a more lucky ending for Borussia Dortmund from what I understand so far.

Bayern has done their job as expected, but it is good to see that the other clubs are also collecting their points. All the next games will be rather easy ones for Bayern, so I don't expect them to drop any points before the World Cup starts. We have to wait until January 20th before the next big match happens between a stronger team, namely Leipzig, and Bayern.

Given that Bayern plays with very high focus and dedication the last couple of weeks, and given that they play a home game, I doubt that Mainz will have a chance. A lot of things would have to be in their favor, including a lot of luck. Under normal circumstances I would say that Bayern is going to clearly win this game by a margin of perhaps two or three goals. I don't expect Bayern to leave any points on the table until the World Cup break is going to start.

A very interesting game this weekend is Frankfurt against Dortmund. I think in the current situation they are meeting on equal footing. Both are in pretty good shape and had their successful games in the CL. If Dortmund wants to underpin their ambitions for the Bundesliga title, the only thing that counts is winning this game. Frankfurt is in a more relaxed situation as they are after international qualifiers but not the championship (yet ).