One surprise actually is that Villa have only conceded 2 - both in that ridiculous Liverpool game. Their other three wins have all been clean sheets. Quite impressive given they had the worst defence in the league for most of last season. Looks like last season's signings have finally gelled, and this season's new defensive players (Cash and Martinez) have hit the ground running. I do think Europe would be a stretch, but on this early showing a top half finish looks achievable.

The rules do feel wrong. AFAIK the FA can only take retrospective action if the official's view was impeded at the time, or they just didn't see the incident. It seems bizarre that for anything where the ref did see it, they have to always just go with the 'in the moment' decision with no corrective action afterwards. I appreciate this may lead to teams saying 'he was banned afterwards, but not sent off during the match... so you're saying he should have been sent off during the match... but he wasn't, and we lost points as a result'... but surely it's better to be correct afterwards rather than persist in a wrong decision.

It certainly makes a difference. Not just psychologically, but also physically. There is a huge adrenaline surge from having tens of thousands of people roaring you on, which translates to differences in speed, anticipation and concentration.
A 'no fans' atmosphere can't compare... and indeed may put players into a 'training ground' mentality, where they always play with no fans, and there is just not the same urgency.

Whilst historical data on postal votes suggests there's no clear advantage to the Democrats, I do wonder whether it will be different this time around due to the differences between how Democrat voters and Republican voters view the pandemic. Generalising obviously, but the differences in mindset could play a crucial role, with Republicans placing more emphasis on personal freedoms, and so planning to turn up on polling day, whilst more cautious Dem voters mail-in ahead of time. The problem with leaving it to the last minute of course is the rising trajectory of the pandemic. You may plan to turn up on the day, but you could contract Covid, or be self-isolating, or you could get last minute jitters due to rapidly rising case numbers, and not vote at all. Not suggesting it will have a huge effect, but with tight margins in the swing states, it might not need to.

Empathy? A healthy person may suffer only mild symptoms, but can act as a carrier, and kill people.

It's quite offensive to suggest that everyone with health problems is stupid or weak-willed.

There's a difference between the barriers not being 100% effective, and the barriers not doing anything at all.

If someone with CV-19 is standing one metre away from you, and coughs, without a mask, in the direction of your face... then would you prefer that there's a plastic barrier there?
Same with masks. They may not be 100% effective, but anything that offers some protection is useful.

Sure. You may breathe in some of the particles. But you'll breathe in orders-of-magnitude fewer than if they coughed right in your face with no barrier.
Viral load is an indicator of symptom severity: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30354-4/fulltext

The barriers protect the checkout staff though. Staff who are in close proximity to hundreds of people each day (some of them maskless freedom-warriors). With no barriers, staff are more likely to get infected and then, with no barriers, we as shoppers are more likely to contract the virus from the infected staff.

Agree that air conditioning isn't great, though. It's all compromise solutions to keep the economy functioning, whilst keeping infection rate as low as possible given the economy is the government's overriding priority.

Economic turmoil due to the pandemic lags some way behind the pandemic itself. I do agree that government attempts to prop up Covid-struck economies will have a profound negative impact, but this will take time to manifest. I don't think your '3 days' is a good estimate. Societies are still functioning, even after the best part of a year of restrictions, and as we face a difficult winter and potentially further lockdowns. Economic hard times will come, but I imagine this will be more slowly than you envisage.

I think the problem is that we understand the universe only from our human reference frame. The concepts of space and time are the sensory framework within which human cognition works - through which we apprehend existence. Space (physical extent) can only be defined in relation to two objects (or two parts of an object). Time (temporal progression) can only be defined in relation to two events, something happening 'before' and something happening 'after'. This is how we understand reality. It is impossible to understand something objectively if you are situated within it. I would contend that we can only ever truly understand what reality is if we are able somehow to step outside it.

Beyond this, theoretical physics provides us with tantalising mathematical truths that afford us glimpses of a reality that we may never be able to comprehend. As our understanding of elementary particle physics and quantum physics progress, the level of abstraction increases as the reality is increasingly divergent from our everyday understanding. Quantum chromodynamics and the 'colour' force. Particle 'spin'. Indeed 'particles' themselves. Mass being a manifestation of an excitation of the Higgs field. The uncertainty principle. And on and on.

What I am saying is that we can't answer the question in the thread title because the word 'exist' is deeply subjective and problematic.

The problem is that governments are trying to define something new in terms of something old. Of course this creates conflict and uncertainty.

Cryptocurrencies are a new class of 'thing'. Lets not say asset, because that suggests conventionally-defined assets. Governments see that cryptocurrencies are becoming more popular, are increasing in value, and that their populations are being exposed to them and are interacting with them, this bringing with it exposure to scams and theft, as well as huge untaxed gains... all in a climate of quasi-anonymity and borderless transactions.

So governments want to legislate, and they want to do so quickly. Unfortunately, because crypto is new, there is no established framework, and no consensus on what crypto even is, and because governments are national but crypto is global, there are wild inconsistencies from country to country in how any solution is implemented.

I would view current legal definitions and frameworks as temporary sticking-plaster solutions, a set of emergency fixes put in place until proper definitions and regulatory frameworks can be agreed.

In theory it's good for bitcoin as government responses to the pandemic just highlight the deficiencies of fiat.

In practice however bitcoin is still viewed in large part as a highly speculative asset rather than a safe-haven. We may see bitcoin price appreciation in the short-term, or we may see price drops as the economic turmoil starts to hit people in the pocket and they cash in on their more speculative holdings. Long-term, yes, the case for bitcoin grows stronger... it's just that (as we all know by now) the upwards path may have a few sizeable bumps.

There are a few things to consider for matches played without crowds, and determining the answers to these questions might help when trying to predict results:

To what extent does it remove home advantage?
Does it affect bigger teams more than smaller teams?
Does it affect certain positions more than others (e.g. defenders not being warned that an attacker is closing on them)?
Does it mean that players lose concentration, so individual mistakes are more likely?
Does it remove the sense of urgency, so players take longer on the ball and get dispossessed more easily?
Does it affect certain types of player more than others - younger players? foreign players? seasoned veterans? more extroverted players?

They certainly had a disastrous summer. The Bayern Munich debacle brought everything to a head, and their response to this has been poor. They've got rid of good players for hardly any money, forced Messi to stay against his wishes, and not really brought in replacements for the lost stars. They are really entering a transition period now, and the chance is there for Athletico or others to break into the Spanish top two.

If we look at Athletico, they already had a good team, and now they also have Suarez who has a point to prove against his old team, and is no doubt out for revenge after the way he was forced out. I don't think this will end well for Barca. I'm quite surprised that we have (currently) 38.2% of respondents to the poll picking Barca as champions.

I do think that the most significant contributor to the weird results this season is the lack of a pre-season. Players aren't quite up-to-speed yet, and some teams seem better prepared than others. Having said that... the ridiculous loss of concentration by Spurs is likely due to the absence of a crowd as well. Nothing focuses the mind like tens of thousands of people yelling at you. All they had to do was go ten minutes without conceding 3 goals.. and they couldn't manage it! In a normal season, this isn't going to happen.

Villa is a strange case. They did buy well during the summer, but if we look back to the end of last season after the restart, they did really well. Their first season back in the prem, they bought huge numbers of players, and it obviously takes time for them to gel together. Add to that, they had a lot of injuries to some top stars. I think their position of just being good enough to survive was more reflective of this than anything else - the quality of the squad was better than it appeared, and once the season restarted, they were more of a cohesive unit, as exemplified by their much improved defence... from porous to rock-solid. So now, this season, they have fewer injuries, the squad has had time together, plus those new signings. I think we are looking at top 10 for them this time around.

Yes, that's how I read it. I do think that a lot of the interest in low cap altcoins is from people who are new to crypto and feel they've 'missed the boat' on bitcoin, because it has already increased in dollar value so much since its inception. However this viewpoint does I feel overlook bitcoin's true potential. Cryptocurrencies can be truly revolutionary. Although marketcap is to an extent a flawed indicator, and tends to overstate true value, Bitcoin's current marketcap is almost infinitesimally tiny compared to the total money in the world. We are heading into an area of abstraction, so figures are of course approximate, but if we assume they are correct to an order of magnitude, then the table below does give some context. This is a few months out of date (May 2020), but as I say we can take it as an order of magnitude illustration.

If bitcoin does go on to fulfill its promise, then now is by no means too late to buy in.


         
_{https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2020/}

Another issue is that by addressing transactions, we are penalising the free flow of capital. The more times it's moved, the more it gets taxed. This disincentivises spending, and encourages hoarding. It also creates issues for large companies where money may flow between different departments or sub-companies, getting taxed again at every step.

The fundamental issue I believe is that income tax does not work effectively as a reducer of inequality, partly because the rich have (legal) tax avoidance schemes, but more so because the rich have existing assets that are earning them money that is not taxed as income. It has been argued, by Thomas Piketty amongst others, that in order to address inequality we need to start taxing wealth as well as income. It's a truism that the distribution wealth across a population is much more unequal than is the distribution of income. This issue worsens when - as now - the rate of return on capital exceeds the GDP growth rate. The rich get richer faster than workers, because their investments give them a higher annual % yield than the annual % increase in worker pay. This is exacerbated by the fact that the richer you are, the better the investment opportunities available to you.

Taxation of transactions won't address this. Taxation of wealth will - however this is obviously beset by practical issues such as how such a scheme could be implemented on a global scale, because the people we need to tax are to a large extent the same people who determine how those economies function. Convincing billionaires to vote against their own self-interest is always difficult, but perhaps this may be viable if inequality reaches such a level that it provokes widespread civil unrest.

Username : cnut237
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I do think Federer is the greatest, and as others have said this can't be determined purely on number of grand slam wins.

But Nadal is certainly greatest on clay... so if we are talking about greatest overall tennis player, it can't be Nadal because his record on other surfaces doesn't match Federer or Djokovic.

We need to make the clay/all surfaces distinction... because even if Federer is the greatest overall tennis player, he still wouldn't be favourite against Nadal on clay.

Indeed. This was my point above.

Travelling at his normal everyday speed, the BADecker effectively obeys classical Newtonian laws... but as he increases speed, the relativistic nature of the universe becomes apparent. Let's visualise (please) a lean, muscular BADecker, a perfect physical specimen... but even then, his mass is high enough to cause a problem.
Basically due to mass-energy equivalence, any object with non-zero mass travelling sufficiently close to light-speed has inconceivably vast kinetic energy and can wreak untold destruction. To accelerate any object with mass to light-speed requires infinite energy... which is why it is impossible (image below: special relativity in red, the classical approximation in pink).


https://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/images/totalenergy2.gif

Light 'particles' (photons) aren't really particles at all, that's just an everyday convenience. Wave-particle duality does not mean that light is both a wave and a particle, rather light (and indeed everything) is a manifestation of the complex interplay of underlying quantum fields... in certain circumstances this appears as 'wave-like' behaviour, in others, 'particle-like'. Indeed mass itself, and its manifestation (the Higgs boson) is simply a field perturbation. Light is massless because photons do not interact with the Higgs field. The only way we can make you massless is to remove your interaction with it. If the Higgs field knocks on your door or calls you on the phone, my advice would be to not answer.

The oncoming second wave doesn't look great. First time around, we had (Northern hemisphere) summer coming, when everyone would be outside and transmission lower. This time around we have winter coming, when people will be spending more time indoors and so higher transmission rates. If we add to this that we've already had one lockdown and governments are reluctant to implement a second because of the economic damage caused by the first, and then we add in the lockdown-fatigue in the general population... everything points to the second wave being worst than the first. I think it's unlikely that governments will have learned any lessons, they're just acting as they did before... it's all about short-term decisions made too late, and about their position in the opinion polls.

(edit for spelling. tsk.)