After the earthquake, Bloke nearby ran out of his house and blamed the builders at the next house, and the builder replied, “I’m fucking painting a wall”
We are officially in World Cup month. Please leave your xG charts, pressing percentages, and defensive metrics in the club season. International tournament football is strictly decided by pure vibes, individual brilliance, tactical survival, and a random goalkeeper turning into prime Lev Yashin for two weeks. Enjoy the entertainment and put the spreadsheets away.
Tim Cahill wondergoal vs the Netherlands in the 2014 World Cup 🇼🇸
- One of the memorable Samoan sporting moments. A Samoan in the pinnacle of a sport Samoans aren’t known for.
- Natural right-footed, scoring with his weak foot.
- One of the best World Cup goals ever.
Wrote about The Simpson's soccer parody and it's legendary writer, John Swartzwelder. Yes it's paywalled, but do the free seven day trial, then forget to cancel and pay me $8 a month for the rest of my life.
https://t.co/eW1Kuzmrcg
Wrote about The Simpson's soccer parody and it's legendary writer, John Swartzwelder. Yes it's paywalled, but do the free seven day trial, then forget to cancel and pay me $8 a month for the rest of my life.
https://t.co/eW1Kuzmrcg
A well-argued rejoinder to the bilious tide of saint-claiming going on right now. From a business owner/originator who clearly knows what he’s talking about. Bravo
Feels strange to watch this unfold.
On one hand, James Hird was my footy idol growing up. There would absolutely be a sense of romance in seeing the prodigal son return and lead Essendon back to greatness.
But on the other hand, what has Hird actually done since leaving Essendon to prove he is committed to becoming an elite AFL head coach?
Since departing in 2015, he spent six years entirely out of the sport to focus on his health. He then took on a part-time 'leadership mentoring' role at GWS, unsuccessfully applied for the Essendon coaching job in 2022, and later accepted a Director of Coaching role at Port Melbourne in 2024.
That is not the CV of someone relentlessly committed to honing their craft. If he truly wanted to build his coaching credentials, I am sure there would have been ample opportunity to do so. A state league club or a private school program im sure would have gladly taken him.
But those jobs are not glamorous. They are hard work, low profile, and miles away from the spotlight. It is far easier to carve out a comfortable career in television and then reappear when the Essendon job becomes available.
There is a significant element of entitlement in all of this.
Hird’s pitch seems to rest heavily on sentiment: Essendon is in his blood, he understands the club, he loves the club, his family legacy runs deep etc etc.
It feels as though Hird wants access to one of the biggest coaching jobs in the country without having done the unglamorous apprenticeship that almost everyone else is expected to do. He should not get to bypass the queue because of nostalgia.
Essendon must run a rigorous process to find the best available head coach. Past playing history at the club should be irrelevant. The only thing that should matter is coaching quality. The idea that the best available candidate could be someone who has not held an on field coaching role for 11 years is laughable.
If, after missing out in 2022, Hird had gone away, coached his own team, developed his craft, and built a compelling body of work, I would have no issue with his application.
But simply putting your hand up every four or five years when the Essendon job becomes available, while spending the intervening years working in TV is not it.
Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it.
Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying.
Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence."
Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."
Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter.
They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created.
One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility."
Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies.
That's the metered intelligence business model.
And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.
Firstly, If it was a just a dum mistake…
Why leave it in? Why not think after, that’s fucking gross and let’s edit it out?
Secondly, every joke, every laugh, contains a seed of truth, and reveals something about the teller & the laugher
@CarltonFC#afl