Posts by Matthew Young35

Hey everyone, we completely overlooked Sergey Bubka.
The guy broke his own world record seven hundred times over.

Jessica Gonzalez said:Team Sports - Michael Jordan

Individual Sports - Lance Armstrong (I guess Usain Bolt is his only real competition)

If we're being honest, Carl Lewis is a much bigger deal than Usain Bolt when you look at the whole picture. It wasn't just about matching records in one discipline; he shattered the long jump record and dominated more events than Bolt ever did. Plus, he had incredible longevity, and unlike others, he never faced those doping allegations.

I’ll never forget that competition—I think it was a World Championship—where Lewis smashed a world record in the long jump that had stood for over twenty years. Then Mike Powell steps up and breaks it. Then Lewis goes back and breaks it again, only for Powell to take it back one last time to win.
By then, Lewis was already getting a bit older.
Look, maybe I'm slightly off on the exact sequence of the record breaks, but I know for a fact those two were trading world records at the very same meet.
At the end of the day, Carl Lewis is undoubtedly a far greater track and field icon than Ben Johnson.

Kyle Campbell4 said:Kyle Campbell4 says this:

Soccer—Maradona
Basketball—MJ23
Racing—Senna
Hockey—Gretzky
Water Polo—just a random sport without any true icons
Handball—just a random sport without any true icons

There are plenty of elite, world-class athletes who belong in the absolute upper echelon of their respective sports. However, a true icon can only be one or perhaps two people at most. I have listed the specific individuals who represent icons to me—the greatest of the great. If I were forced to choose just one single name above all others, it would undoubtedly be MJ23.

A few corrections...

Formula 1... there is a massive collection of icons there. Prost, Gerard Piqué, Niki Lauda, Nigel Mansell, that damn Michael Schumacher whom I can't stand and never have, Graham Hill, Emerson Fittipaldi, James Hunt... my apologies to anyone I missed. Ayrton Senna might be the biggest icon, but he isn't rightfully greater than the rest; at least three others were better drivers.

You forgot boxing... Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson.
In boxing, there truly are icons worth mentioning. I won't even get into the ones from before the seventies and eighties.

Chess... Bobby Fischer, José Raúl Capablanca, Mikhail Tal.
Then you have characters like that damn Ret with his insane openings (for that era). In chess, there are at least 20 icons.

Ski Jumping, Magnus Carlsen, Takeshi Koji.

One could find many more icons if they looked.

One thing really jumped out at me here.
Everyone seems to be counting only the fatalities. Honestly, if you asked me, I wouldn't mind being hooked up to a ventilator for two weeks if there was a guarantee I’d pull through.
It's not like everyone who catches this just breezes through it without a care; a significant number of those infected deal with serious symptoms, even if they don't end up dying.
And don't even get me started on the economic fallout from all the sick leave.
Sure, the immediate economic damage is massive, but if we can actually wipe this virus out, the long-term costs will be much lower.

darkseal9 said:man, no way... I keep hearing people on here claiming that once the temp hits 78, the virus just dies off immediately.
if it actually did that, I'd be totally fine whenever it hits my system!

Wait, where on earth did you hear that 79 degrees kills the virus?
You've definitely got that one wrong.

darkseal9 said:With this warmer weather, I haven't even been drinking much water, so my body temp is sitting somewhere around 97-98 degrees,

I’m not quite following—why aren't you drinking water?
If you're dealing with the flu, for instance, that's just a seasonal thing.
Nothing groundbreaking there.

Elizabeth Mendoza said:How much sense do these quarantine measures actually make, like what they're doing in Italy? Can someone please try to explain the logic to me? If the entire country is basically under house arrest, how on earth are they still seeing thousands of new cases every single day? How is it even spreading if the only people out and about are those who absolutely have to be? Sure, their daily numbers dropped from 3,000–4,000 down to somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500, but I still don't get it. If everyone is stuck at home, how does the transmission keep happening?

I can't get that old joke by Markoticke out of my head—the one where people in medical circles jokingly call COVID a "family" virus because most of the transmission happens within close-knit family circles.

The whole situation has hit countries way less hard if they reacted early and stopped that initial massive spike. Now, they can pretty much start winding things down without any hesitation because the pool of infection has shrunk and we aren't looking at a massive surge. It makes zero sense to keep a country like Germany under lockdown when they’re only seeing maybe 300 or 400 cases across 80 million people.

The only logical explanation is that people are simply ignoring quarantine.
There are plenty of other explanations out there, but frankly, most of them aren't even remotely sane. We're talking about 5G conspiracies and all that other nonsense.

The entire situation has hit countries that acted decisively much less hard. By stepping up early and preventing that initial explosion of cases, they’ve managed to shrink the pool of infection. Now, they can start dismantling restrictions without hesitation because the threat of a massive surge has been neutralized. Does it really make sense to keep a nation like Germany under lockdown when they're looking at only 300 or 400 cases across a population of 80 million? It just doesn't add up.

Was this virus unleashed by a single individual, or was it the work of a small group?
What do you think? Would these 300 to 400 cases spread even further without a quarantine?

Honestly, I can't help but feel that the rise in infection numbers is slowing down because this whole mess is starting to show some seasonal patterns. But then again, what do I know? I’d much rather leave those calls to the actual experts.

restlesssurfer97 said:restlesssurfer97, man, you really gotta sit back and think about this for a second—like, seriously consider why things didn't just absolutely explode over in Sweden, you know? Doesn't that tell you something, even just a little bit, about how much of an actual necessity or how effective those quarantine measures really were in the grand scheme of things?

How on earth am I supposed to know that?
I can only speculate.
Sure, one possibility is that this whole thing is a hoax and we're just dealing with a slightly more aggressive strain of the flu.
But that isn't the only option on the table.

At first glance, my gut feeling is that the countries hit hardest were the ones with high population density, massive cities, and heavy international transit. But again, that’s just an uneducated guess.

It seems almost unbelievable to me that the entire world is filled with idiots who decided to wreck their economies for absolutely no reason (aside from Sweden and Belarus).
I find it hard to wrap my head around.

wiredrider9 said:What are you even basing that on? Just because fewer people are dying from it than the flu right now? Can we talk about something else? Like, how many people die in car accidents globally every single year?

I’m not making the claim; the epidemiologists are.

Paul Sanders5 said:You're seriously messing with us right now 😁

The virus has been floating around for five months, maybe longer, and you're asking me what we're basing our denial of an apocalyptic scenario on? Seriously?

I don't know, man. To me, an apocalyptic scenario looks like this or this.

The virus is spreading despite massive restrictions; who knows how bad it would be without them?
Beyond that, we still have no idea if this is seasonal or not, nor do we know what kind of mutations are coming our way.
The potential for a total mess is quite significant.
I'm not saying an apocalypse is inevitable, just that the potential for one is definitely there.

Jacob Kern2 said:The situations in Sweden and Belarus serve as perfect evidence that there is absolutely nothing apocalyptic happening here.

And which specific group of scientists are you referring to when you claim there is a consensus regarding this apocalyptic potential?

Are you planning to just ignore Italy, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the USA? In those places, the consequences of the virus were quite wild despite extremely drastic measures. Why are you so certain that an apocalyptic scenario wouldn't occur without isolation?
Look at the USA and the UK—they decided to ignore the epidemic, and once things took a sudden turn, they quickly changed their minds.

darkseal9 said:So basically, you're trusting some random IT guy's computer models more than your own damn intuition
jes, have you ever actually had pneumonia before?

Of course I trusted the experts over my own gut feeling.
Dealing with viruses isn't exactly my life's work; I just have a general idea of what they actually are.
I know plenty of instances where intuition leads a person completely astray. To start with, look at optical illusions.

Jessica Gonzalez said:Even though he tends to go wherever the wind blows (though he did handle himself pretty well during this crisis), he’s provided a really solid overview of the whole situation. I found the second half of his piece particularly interesting, especially how he places this virus within the broader context of other health threats—things that are more about lifestyle choices than just being an illness.

I guess I should point out that a few of us were saying much the same thing right at the start. It's not that anyone is denying that Corona exists as a disease; rather, we seem to be questioning its historical significance for public health and the socio-economic landscape. Maybe we're just questioning if the apocalyptic scale of it all is justified, given the unprecedented fear that swept the globe. It feels like just another new threat that might eventually be forgotten or ignored by the general public. If we accept the millions of annual deaths caused by other infectious diseases, smoking, obesity, car accidents, or even extreme sports (basically anything that could be slowed down by similar quarantines or government mandates), then I suppose we'll eventually accept Corona too. And maybe we'll accept it because, after only a month, it seems clear that the cost of certain socio-economic experiments is just too high. I suspect the disease isn't quite dangerous enough to justify all the hype, and if measures are truly needed, then it's up to the government to find a way to let daily life continue in parallel. That's why we pay them, I guess—to find solutions that benefit everyone.

What exactly are you basing this denial of apocalyptic potential on? Is it just a feeling, or actual scientific research? Among scientists, there is almost a consensus that this apocalyptic potential exists. Of course, there are those who think differently, but they are a tiny minority.
You claim this disease isn't that dangerous, but the truth is, nobody actually knows how dangerous it is yet. We'll likely have a much clearer picture by next winter.

The most defeating thing for America is realizing that almost nothing depends on our own reactions. We could have carried on without any restrictions, but the economy would have gone to hell regardless. For instance, where I work—and it's a mess—we haven't seen any goods from China since the start of the year. And we aren't the only ones. Don't even get me started on the impact on tourism.

Elizabeth Mendoza said:There are actually more Splitters in Washington, D.C. than there are in Miami, and the same goes for the Duke crowd.

You're spot on—and that applies to the Duke guys too. You'll find more of them in Washington, D.C. than you will in Miami.

George Soros is basically just Madar.
Enough for the smart ones.

If she were a man, he’d be out there walking through a construction site in a mini skirt.

Elizabeth Mendoza said:The people at the start of that sentence would be absolutely losing their minds.

I disagree.
Personally, I wouldn't be raising any objections—far from it. But make no mistake, there would be plenty of people who would.

It's a mess. These political appointees are organized into unions, making them one of the most powerful groups out there.
Imagine announcing a reduction in the number of bureaucrats in the education system. And I don't mean actual teachers; I mean the administrative bloat. Take some tiny school in the middle of nowhere: you might have two teachers, but then you've got a principal, two secretaries, an accountant, a PR rep, two janitors, and two security guards. If you cut those positions, you'd have 100,000 people protesting in Times Square instantly.
The same logic applies to various utility companies, the railroads, and everything else.

Everyone claims to be against cronyism and wants to trim down the bloated administrative overhead, yet the moment you suggest consolidating a single town or county, you’re met with a full-blown populist revolt from the locals.
Good grief, the US has thousands of municipalities, while Germany has around 79 and the United Kingdom has 69. We certainly aren't being efficient here at 3PM.

restlesssurfer97 said:What do you mean, "part of the official protocol"? I'm asking seriously now.

Well, someone laid a wreath with that inscription. The guy in the t-shirt was there following protocol.

Noah Roberts46 said:If you ask me, the smartest move would have been to ignore them entirely and then later tell the press that we shouldn't be giving any oxygen to such a tiny fringe group. He should make it clear that his stance on the matter is obvious, but that the best way to handle it is total silence. Once that handful of losers fades out of the news cycle, they become irrelevant. If we don't give them a platform to wave their fascist nonsense around, they lose all their clout. The less attention they get, the less impact they actually have.

So, we should just ignore ZDS, even though they are part of the official protocol?
No, thank you.
We aren't talking about some random person in the crowd here; we are talking about a component of the official protocol.

Jessica Gonzalez said:I hear there might be some player protests, if you ask me.

Hopefully, they at least finish out the Champions League.

I'll try to grab Mbappe and Neymar for a quick word once the local pubs open up.