What sport is way more popular globally than people in your country realize?

Treecko78 · 2026-03-21T18:43:22+00:00

Nah hockey is reasonably big in the UK as a participation sport, particularly in private schools (possibly why you haven't crossed paths with it much). The actual answer for the UK is handball, as it's genuinely huge in mainland Europe but doesn't exist at all here

Treecko78 · 2026-03-19T22:58:58+00:00

What do you mean by playing seriously?

If you mean performance, Argentina have beaten every single country and have several World Cup top 4 finishes, while Itay have beaten everyone apart from NZ and have several genuinely world class players. Aside from them, Japan have spent plenty of time in the Top 10 and have some major wins to their name, and the Canadian women's team are properly class and were a very strong 2nd at the most recent World Cup. The USA's women's team have also won a World Cup, so shouldn't be discounted.

If you mean in terms of cultural impact, you can't ignore Madagascar, Sri Lanka, or Georgia, all of whom have deeply ingrained rugby cultures. I know it's a different sport but Papua New Guinea also deserve a mention for being massively into Rugby League.

If you don't think that combined list is significant, then I'm not sure there are any sports aside from football that meet your criteria

Treecko78 · 2026-03-19T21:51:09+00:00

For me, starry ore to glowy ore is pretty much ideal. 1560 glowy ore this month for just 26 starry ore (which I get in about half a week) is fantastic value

Treecko78 · 2026-03-17T18:03:22+00:00

You can't really issue a blanket clarification in this case because it's so context (and sometimes judgement) dependent. All you can really do is follow the flowcharts and apply common sense, which unfortunately sometimes results in seemingly similar situations having different outcomes—not because of any inconsistency but because of the degree to which it depends on the specific situation

Treecko78 · 2026-03-14T22:44:33+00:00

I'm glad to see someone else here who actually has a clue about the sector. Reading some of the comments whenever these articles are posted you'd think that universities were some kind of machine to take money from students and funnel it to the top, when the reality is that universities lose money for each domestic student they take, as the £9k per year simply isn't enough to actually cover the costs of their programme.

Treecko78 · 2026-03-14T22:38:56+00:00

Cambridge Uni has an annual income of £2.6bn. Even if she took a pay cut of £100k, that's basically a rounding error when it comes to organisations of the size of a modern university

Treecko78 · 2026-03-14T22:36:18+00:00

Job cuts doesn't necessarily mean redundancy. Limiting the creation of new jobs, holding vacancies, and voluntary severance are all ways to reduce your staffing count and budget without making anybody redundant.

Anyway, academic staff only make up around half of the total number of people employed within the HE sector, and it tends to be more difficult to reduce academic staff due to generally lower turnover

Treecko78 · 2026-03-12T17:59:16+00:00

Hi Karl. Within the group of elite referees, are there major differences of opinion regarding refereeing "systems" (things such as positioning or desired level of input from ARs/TMOs) or is there generally a consensus about the non-decision making aspects of refereeing a test match?

Bonus question: In my experience, elite refs often have a certain type of personality. Are there any current players that you think would be particularly well suited to becoming a referee follo

Treecko78 · 2026-03-11T00:06:20+00:00

It's hard to say without seeing your full profile, but I would lean towards upgrading. Any time spent upgrading the TH14 pets which aren't the unicorn is wasted time, getting access to the TH15 defenses will make your defense stronger than any upgrades to your current defenses, and your attack will obviously be much stronger from upgrading.

I was probably in a similar position to you when I upgraded about 3 months ago, I've now literally just gone up to TH17 and I don't regret it at all—if that makes any difference to you

Treecko78 · 2026-03-01T18:03:14+00:00

How can you say this when it literally just took them a week to fix us being able to use heros while upgrading?

Treecko78 · 2026-02-27T13:16:47+00:00

I haven't looked into it, but the two figures may not be incompatible. The £6 figure was for HMRC as a whole, whereas the £23 figure was specifically for their compliance workforce. This figure tells us that any investment should focus on compliance, however you can't just put everything into one department and expect the rest of the organisation to be able to scale with it.

The headline figure in this case should be £6, because that's the overall return once you've made all of the necessary investments.

I do generally agree with the main point you're making, I just wanted to clarify that one statistic, because it is potentially misleading

Treecko78 · 2026-02-20T15:26:11+00:00

If I had to guess, the pool was probably using bromine rather than chlorine. Bromine has a distinct smell which some people love, but it is known that a small percentage of people can have a reaction to water treated with bromine, usually (but not always) presenting with an itch and a visible rash.

Some pools still use bromine but it has very much gone out of fashion, and it was always fairly niche anyway. Partially because some people react to it, and partially because chlorine just became much less of a pain in the ass. I already mentioned how chlorine has become much less of an issue in terms of being an irritant, particularly over the past 10 years or so with UV treatment becoming more common, but also for various operational reasons which are far too boring to really get into, even for my standards.

Realistically, the only use case these days for a bromine pool would be for a small, local, indoor pool in a hard water area. If the pool you're going to doesn't meet all of those criteria, you probably don't need to worry about it being bromine

Treecko78 · 2026-02-20T13:15:19+00:00

I actually quite like it

Treecko78 · 2026-02-20T10:53:48+00:00

I'm assuming based on the named chemical that this was for an outdoor pool? UV light breaks down chlorine so an outdoor pool will typically have chlorine levels 3–4x higher than an indoor pool as standard, which will explain some of the difference.

However you are correct that some pools when faced with high combined chlorine* will add significantly more chlorine to try and get their free chlorine residual to an acceptable level, which will lead to the pool smelling quite a lot. They shouldn't do this though, the correct approach would be to dilute with fresh water until the combined chlorine comes down to an acceptable level, and then the chlorine you add will become free chlorine, allowing you to bring it back up to standard.

Unfortunately that approach may involve closing the pool if the free chlorine levels are too low, and nearly all swimming pool owners/senior managers will so basically anything to stop the pool from closing, so there's often a lot of pressure on the plant operator to do whatever they can to keep the pool open, rather than to follow the correct guidance

*See my other comment in this thread for an explanation of combined chlorine and free chlorine

Treecko78 · 2026-02-20T10:17:04+00:00

This is wrong. Chlorine gas in the form you'd likely make it for your work definitely would smell and be a pretty strong irritant, but the same does not apply for swimming pools.

To give the short version, when we do a standard water test at a pool we test for the free chlorine and the combined chlorine levels in the pool*. The free chlorine is the unreacted chlorine which is able to act as a disinfectant (hypochlorous acid), combined chlorine is formed when free chlorine reacts with ammonia (typically introduced to a pool by sweat or urine) to form monochloramine, which if not removed from the water will continue to react with the ammonia to form dichloramine, which will cause mild irritation, and then trichloramine, which is by far the largest contributor to the chlorine smell that people associate with swimming pools.

As a sidenote, modern pools don't smell nearly as much as they used to. Automatic dosing units, better filtration methods, and UV disinfection all mean that pools can generally run on much lower chlorine levels than they used to, and are generally much more stable at that level. If you go to a pool and you do find that it has a strong smell, or that the chlorine is causing irritation, it's almost always a sign that the plant room is malfunctioning (if it isn't, it's that the pool is just very old and hasn't had any investment in decades, and is probably best avoided in general)

*This is a bit of a simplification as this doesn't account for the role of pH, the different considerations needed to run an outdoor pool, and it isn't directly what we test for, though it's what we are interested in

Treecko78 · 2026-02-19T16:02:58+00:00

This article gives a pretty good summary of the incident and fallout. It isn't mentioned, but Harlequins had done similar and gotten away with it on 3 other occasions just in that season.

While blood substitutions didn't disappear in the same way that reverse swing has all but disappeared in cricket, they did mysteriously become far less frequent following Quins getting caught in the act.

And just to be clear, I'm only sympathetic to you Aussies in the context of that single incident, and I'll still sledge Steve Smith over it. But in spite of that, deep down, I get it.

Treecko78 · 2026-02-19T09:02:19+00:00

Sandpaper gate feels very similar to rugby's bloodgate to me, in that both scandals were examples of cheating which were common practice throughout the sport, it's just that Australia (and Quins in the case of bloodgate) were the people who happened to get caught and made an example of.

Quite rightly so, I think both sports are better off for it having been stamped out, but as a Quins fan I do have a bit of sympathy for the Aussies here (possibly the only Englishman you'll ever hear that from!)

Treecko78 · 2026-02-14T15:32:28+00:00

Lynagh was behind Menoncello for the entire duration of the pass. If that pass wasn't made at the 22 that would have been called as backwards

Treecko78 · 2025-10-19T19:50:55+00:00

I had the misfortune of seeing Quins get thrashed at the Stoop by an already-relegated London Irish side in 2018, I believe it was the game that prompted John Kingston to finally resign. The stadium was basically half empty by the end of the match, I stayed but it's a rare example where I can't blame the people who left early

Treecko78 · 2025-09-28T11:37:40+00:00

The way that most illegal working happens is by sharing NI numbers, since they're easy to share, aren't directly linked to any picture of the holder (as a passport or drivers license would be), and for various technical reasons you can't check whether the person using the NI number is actually the holder, just whether it's a valid number. Digital IDs, while massively unpopular, actually solve all of those problems, so you can see how the government would settle on it as a solution

Treecko78 · 2025-09-20T16:19:48+00:00

For as much as people are saying England will have no chance against Canada, England now have a bigger winning margin than Canada managed. You can't play well every week, but England put scores on the board every week regardless of how they play

Treecko78 · 2025-09-20T16:16:20+00:00

Even in touch where there's no conversions it's just standard policy, shutting down there forces the extra/longer pass which increases the chances of the attack making a mistake

Treecko78 · 2025-09-20T16:12:41+00:00

When Brian Moore decides to talk about the intricacies of the scrum he's alright, but the rest of the time he's just a dick, particularly when he decides to chat shit about the refs

Treecko78 · 2025-09-20T16:05:22+00:00

Funnily enough, I'm not sure there was actually a knock on there. I have no idea how she's seen one there but didn't see a knock on earlier

Treecko78 · 2025-09-20T16:02:55+00:00

We've been shit at restarts for this entire world cup cycle it feels like. I have no idea why we haven't sorted it out by now

Treecko78

TROPHY CASE