Death to America
version
Well-known member
The West isn’t dying – its ideas live on in China
What the Western world confronts is not the threatening advance of alien civilisations, but its own dark shadows moving through China and Russia.
www.newstatesman.com
luka
Well-known member
Tokyo 2020 Olympics: final medal table
Find out who topped the leaderboard at the Olympic Games, and drill down to discover which events each country won medals for
www.theguardian.com
IdleRich
IdleRich
It is hilarious isn't it? They always used the ranking by golds system until one year they got knocked off the top and then they switched to this system without batting an eyelid.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
It is strange that the different medal tiers are weighted equally in that leaderboard. Seems to defeat the purpose of having different tiers.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
A nation with 50 bronze would appear superior to a nation with 49 gold.
Leo
Well-known member
wouldn't the proper way be to assign point values per medal: 5 for gold, 3 for silver, 1 for bronze (or whatever). winning a gold would rank higher than winning a few bronze medals.
but that raises the question: is being the world's best in one competition more of an accomplishment than being among the best in the world in a number of competitions?
but that raises the question: is being the world's best in one competition more of an accomplishment than being among the best in the world in a number of competitions?
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Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
IdleRich
IdleRich
Well I personally that a system such as that makes more sense. At the moment if you have two countries and the first has ten golds in total, but the other country has nine golds, eighty-three silvers and, four hundred and twenty five bronze ones, then the first one would rank higher in the table of ultimate athletic achievement, which to my mind is utterly ludicrous and makes a mockery of the whole thing from top to bottom, totally devaluing all of the medals and meaning that the event is a shocking disgrace and an insult to the word sport.
Whereas, what the Americans did in suddenly changing the system that they used to score it so that it was different from the one that everyone else was using but which had the crucial advantage of moving them back to the top, is an absolutely hilarious hissy-fit worthy of Trump himself, in fact it's more like the Reagan administration reclassifying tomato sauce as a vegetable - apparently if they can't win under the new system they are looking at either reclassifying fourth places as medals or possibly reclassifying Chinese athletes as American, whatever it will take to stop the steal. Either way the US has disgraced itself in the most embarrassing of ways, making a mockery of every ideal they wee supposed to stand for and reducing every single person from that country to worthless scum I'm sorry to say Leo, nothing personal I am sure you understand.
Leo
Well-known member
https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/olympic-games/en/results/all-sports/medal-standings.htm
the official olympics count defaults to ranking by Gold, but can also be sorted to "rank by total"
the official olympics count defaults to ranking by Gold, but can also be sorted to "rank by total"
IdleRich
IdleRich
I wonder when was the first time that someone came up with that idea - the thing i am calling "reclassifying" above. When something wasn't how you wanted it, or how it was supposed to be, who was the first evil genius who realised that, although the obvious and mundane solution was to go to the thing that wasn't right and change it so that it was right, you could in fact save yourself a lot of time and effort by counting things differently, with that different way of counting things specifically designed to ensure that the thing that was causing you a problem by failing to pass muster in the ugly obsolete old system would pass in the sexy new one. And you would have solve the problem!
You know there is a saying which is something like... it was a terrible day when someone first realised that spotting that something was undervalued was just as profitable as creating value... not a very catchy saying admittedly. But it seems that inventing the wheeze above was similarly catastrophic and tends to go unmentioned.
You know there is a saying which is something like... it was a terrible day when someone first realised that spotting that something was undervalued was just as profitable as creating value... not a very catchy saying admittedly. But it seems that inventing the wheeze above was similarly catastrophic and tends to go unmentioned.