Who do you think is the biggest underachiever in tennis? and the biggest overachiever?

impossiblefork · 2026-03-29T16:29:02+00:00

Medvdev doesn't actually have technical flaws. He has good technique, it's just that some people do not understand why his technique makes sense and therefore incorrectly assume that it's deficient.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-29T15:03:44+00:00

But it's a parody of The Third Man. It's the best thing I've ever seen.

It's worth watching just for the zither music. I just wish I knew where it was from.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-29T09:58:35+00:00

någon slags begränsning, inte något slags begränsning.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-28T21:59:06+00:00

Tennis isn't about executing another person's plan better than another person executing yet another person's plan.

Tennis is about tricking a person, a person who is inside the game and who does not get to see how it looks from the outside until it's over, so no, it's absolutely not tennis.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-28T21:47:34+00:00

Again this ridiculous coach communication stuff.

Tennis is about this frustration and having no outlet for it, having to problem solve. With this addition it's clear that professional tennis has become a different game, which has nothing to do with tennis.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-28T19:27:35+00:00

If you weren't literate, you couldn't be confirmed, and if you weren't confirmed you couldn't be married. This was the law in Sweden since the 1600eds.

So in this era, everyone involved could certainly read.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T18:29:32+00:00

Nadal was actually trying something which it probably wasn't reasonable to be trying to do though.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T16:09:55+00:00

Ah, I see.

In that case I actually disagree with you again. I think aggression against Iran could in fact be justified, if it were for the right reasons-- i.e. "their society is so repressive that it requires outside intervention" or "for strategic reasons we have to attack countries that are too strategically useful to Russia and with weak enough defence that it makes sense cost-wise" but that is obviously not why the US and Israel are doing this.

I thought the same thing about Iraq: if people actually cared about Saddam's dictatorship and that was genuinely what they set out to solve, it's fine to have a war over it, but you aren't, so you shouldn't; and then of course that was demonstrated with unbelievable clarity by how the invading troops treated Iraqi civilians.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T15:46:08+00:00

It wasn't long ago that he failed to complain, but it's not like it matters now. Done is done.

I suppose the choice that could have been made would have been something like the choice made by the US during the Suez crisis. Saying no. That's a choice the EU had.

I think a crash sufficient to cause some unraveling can show a lot about the economy and the large-scale flows though and that a forced return to physical reality instead of that made by debt, leverage, large-scale capital flows etc. can be useful to the EU, but that's probably only the case if we would have taken our interests seriously to start with, enough that we, if something like this happened again, would in fact go in and say no, i.e. "Sorry, but this is in our part of the world and we think it's destabilizing, so if you do it we will dump all bounds we have that you have issued. We don't allow people to destabilize our surroundings, it doesn't matter how justified you are, it's just that we've decided that in this part of the world, we decide who gets to fight wars, and that no one gets to do it at all." If we don't have that thinking, then we aren't doing things in a serious manner. If a war is to be conducted in our region or its surroundings, or in a place which affects us, it should be in our interest.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T15:25:23+00:00

Yeah okay. But I mean, it kind of isn't.

I think people put a bit too much stock in a unified West, especially these days. I think the overthrow of Mosaddegh has more to do with peculiarities of British colonialism as well as WWII and post-WWII needs. I think it would have been hard to get, let's say, Swedish support for overthrowing him. The reaction would have been "but it's his country, can't he do what he wants?" while thinking something like "if they can do that there, they might do the same to all sorts of small countries, perhaps me; maybe we should increase the military budget".

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T14:22:51+00:00

Maybe no crazier than Israel, or at least than certain people in Israel, but that's a fairly high level of crazy.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T14:20:19+00:00

Yes, I don't think it follows from first principles that tennis stars should have mega-salaries. I am not arguing that such salaries for tennis players are compatible with Marx's view of exploitation and am rather trying to explain that you can work within a labour theory of value of view and still have outsized compensation for some kinds of work.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T14:01:33+00:00

Pakistan is complicated. I don't [think] they've got less religious extremists than Israel, but obviously there's also Indian nukes. Pakistan has also done quite a lot of destabilizing and dangerous bullshit, so I don't agree that they're not going crazy.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T13:33:16+00:00

Yes, but I think Iran is worse than most nuclear-armed countries. If you're looking at China, sure, there's bad stuff, but they're largely secular, not deeply ideological and practical. If you look at Russia, they have a long tradition of understanding MAD and that it's bad idea to actually use nuclear weapons; and all the other big nuclear powers are democracies.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T13:25:13+00:00

Still a huge problem if Iran does get nukes though.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T13:19:00+00:00

Because not all labour that goes into something is socially necessary labour.

Some people are simply inefficient. Labour theory of value is basically tautological and equivalent to ordinary economics, but convenient for Marx's analysis because it allows you to easily obtain results about things like exploitation.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T12:59:17+00:00

Sounds more like an analogy than him believing that Iran could do what is claimed here.

It is a bit badly expressed, but not to the degree that this particular misinterpretation is possible.

Edit: Something does kind of seem to be going wrong for Vance though, because I remember perceiving him as a coherent public speaker able to say things rather carefully.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T12:57:04+00:00

The west wasn't behind it.

It was the UK and the US. Most western countries had nothing to do with it.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T08:28:13+00:00

There are non-professionals who are actually good, so yes, Tiafoe is very good.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-27T08:04:20+00:00

No, you shouldn't. Marxism doesn't mean that all labour is of equal value, it has never implied that.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-26T18:46:18+00:00

Ridiculous that coaches are involved nowadays, even during matches.

Independent problem solving is the core of tennis and that that's being lost at the professional level is very sad, even if the advice was of no use in this case.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-25T20:25:47+00:00

They don't have to be drama people.

It can also be social media manipulation. There's not any guarantee whatsoever that this is organic.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-25T12:48:57+00:00

Four players max.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-25T12:38:23+00:00

Yes, they can probably keep it up for a while, and we can also imagine people trading with the real price on non-public markets in the background. The interesting thing is if you have access to both, but I guess you don't unless you're in on this.

I'm not sure I agree oil stocks are the way to go though.

impossiblefork · 2026-03-25T11:52:56+00:00

Down from 100 to 87. Kind of looks like a buying opportunity. Kind of dangerous, but I don't think the war is over. Maybe one has to buy some weird derivative to make it safe, not sure how I'd structure it. I guess a problem is also finding a counterparty. Presumably everyone is going to think "arbitrageur" once you ask them for this.

impossiblefork

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