Agree with this too. OpenCV is functionality great but its constituent parts are written by many different people who all kind of do things a little differently and it shows.
But I can’t really complain because it’s open source and added to by contributors.
Cuz the actual nuanced reality is that it’s structural. (Most) corporations don’t want to control the world but they do have their own self-interests, but because there are so many corporations there’s always some corporation controlling some facet.
For another example of a structural problem, California has been trying to add housing for the past few years but it has been one piecemeal solution after another. People who own homes don’t want their lives to change, cities like how they are laid out already, parking requirements exist to prevent developers from skimping at the time, environmental reviews are meant to protect the environment… at no point was anyone thinking “I want a housing problem that leads to job flight and homelessness” — everyone is just solving their own problem at the time but together it creates a major structural obstacle.
The people at YouTube don’t actually care about controlling the narrative. They just want to make money while removing problematic content, but they’re not exactly sure what problematic content is and Google tends to invest in algorithms more than support, but the end result is channels get randomly removed sometimes.
The world’s problems are hard because not because people are generally malicious, but because everyone is just doing their own thing. That’s why the only fixes are structural, but structural solutions are really hard.
I mean you could say that baseball academies in Brazil aren’t good yet either, but I wouldn’t say that it’s because they “don’t know how to.”
It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular, except they already have soccer plus even basketball is growing quicker.
In America, soccer just isn’t that popular and there are so many other sports that people currently care about more.
> It’s just that Brazil currently doesn’t care about baseball that much and baseball first has to become popular
Baseball is a hardware-intensive sport. It's hard to get popular in poorer countries. Soccer on the other side demands just a vacant lot and some soft round object you can kick around to get started.
You just need a bat and ball? My friends use a plastic bat balls and find a grassy field. Soccer balls are actually more expensive.
Basketball is growing in Brazil a lot and that’s kind of expensive.
Skateboarding has become massive in Brazil and that’s even more expensive than soccer and every person needs their own skateboard, unlike soccer where you can pool your money to share 1 ball.
Idk what you are talking about, you don’t need fancy equipment to play most sports with your friends. Most of the time, it’s having the idea is the issue.
Not if you want to develop world class talent. Baseball is incredibly technology dependent at this point. Ultra high speed cameras, radars, bat and ball sensors, software tying it all together, it's become rocket science. And honestly, if you don't have access to that technology, your chances fall dramatically.
The article is about global soccer, I'm talking about global baseball (MLB takes all the best players in the world). If you are a pitcher wanting to make it to the MLB, getting to 18 and throwing 65 mph and claiming "well that works in my country" isn't going to help you. You are miles behind.
There is no supply chain of baseballs and baseball bats in Brazil. That would be considered a "exotic" choice of sport, with those supplies only available at expensive stores with imported goods
Right, but the limiting factor is not actually that it’s expensive.
The limiting factor is historical: Brazilians just don’t think of playing baseball already.
Which leads back to the point: Americans just don’t really think about playing soccer.
It’s not about cost, or about leagues, or any technical thing. There’s nothing stopping me, as an American, from trying cricket with my friends, except that the thought has never ever entered my mind.
Frankly that is a bad comparison. Soccer is incredibly popular at a youth level. The talent pool is there and the money is there. How big is the Brazilian baseball economy? As the article states there is about $1.5bn in player value in the MLS. Not to mention that our top tier talent is usually exported to Europe where there is an order of magnitude more money available for the sport. My argument is we have a big talent pool of kids who want to be successful in soccer and we have not learned how to manage it at scale. The talent market of potential players is incredibly fragmented.
The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).
Soccer has major competition in the US.
Because these sports started in America too, America usually dominates them.
> The US has also strangely invented a lot of sports (Americans football, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, skateboarding, snowboarding, and so on).
It appears the sports industry in US skewed local preferences toward hardware-intensive sports, that sell lots of gear. Poor children can start playing soccer stuffing crumpled paper in plastic bags to create a makeshift ball, and using spaced sandals as makeshift goalposts. Minimal hardware requirements. It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera. Basketball comes closer to soccer in this regard.
>It's harder to play baseball or football without all assortment of costly bats, helmets, gloves, et cetera
In practice, casual football isn't any more resource heavy than soccer. Most non-league games of football are going to be "touch football", which only requires a ball, a field, and some sort of end marker (as a kid, it was usually just "from that tree to that other tree").
Obviously, organized league play has a ton more equipment, but the sort of informal casual games that kids or young adults play requires much less. It's one of those things that doesn't really get talked about a ton compared to league play, so it's easy to miss for those who didn't grow up with it.
This is way off. You only need a ball to play American football. Or a ball and bat to play baseball. Yes, the organized competitive versions have more gear involved, but so does organized soccer/football.
A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat if you're hitting a light enough ball. It you can scrounge up a tennis ball, they work pretty well for street baseball. Don't need gloves, bases can be whatever you can agree on. Of course, it you have something vaguely soccerball shaped, you can play kickball with improvised bases rather than playing soccer.
>A sturdy stick makes a decent enough baseball bat
Right around the 80’s and 90’s the idea of zero-tolerance youth crime policies swept the US. Right around the same time the popularity of baseball began a decline in the US. It went from being a universally played ‘pickup culture’ sport, to a sparsely played ‘pay to play’ sport.
Now I’m not gonna say the need for 8 or 9 boys to roam around a neighborhood with a giant stick looking for a place to play was the reason the ‘pickup culture’ games died. But I will say that it was probably a lot safer for those boys to just go to a basketball court and wait their turn in a ‘pickup culture’ game that did not require a giant stick or bat.
I don’t it’s the imperfections that are being chased. Most people don’t pay attention to technical details like that.
Instead it’s about chasing the era. For example, the 80s/90s seemed like a happier time, for both those who grew up in it and those who don’t, and imperfections like VHS artifacts put the viewer in that mindset.
For those born after an era it can be easy to romanticize an era. And for those who lived through it, it can be easy to remember the good, and forget the bad.
Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"
Ultimately each era is different. Some good, some bad. But in 20 years expect your kids to be idolizing the "20s". "Such a simpler time than now..."
> Growing up in the 80s with no cell phones meant it was much harder to co-ordinate schedules, events, social events etc. No "I'm outside, where are you?"
I disagree with this, the lack of cellphones meant that once people agreed to a plan, they stuck to the plan. "Meet next Saturday at 17:00 at the main square", and everybody would be there.
Nowadays people keep arguing and changing plans until the very last minute, it's exhausting.
Laws and rules don’t hold anyone accountable. Anyone can say anything and then break that trust the next second.
Instead you trust your best friend because you have known them for 15 years and seen them in enough situations. It’s long term observation and predictability they ultimately gives trust.
AWS has been around 20 years and has never once shown a sign that that they would sell customer data. Could they still try? Sure, in the same way they my friend who hates seafood his entire life could suddenly flip 180 and love it. Yeah I guess it’s possible.
The Soviet Union was an economic disaster for a long time. During the space race, which was ultimately a fight about economic systems, NASA’s budget was 0.7% of the US GDP but the Soviet Union was spending up to 15-20% of their GDP to “keep up with the Joneses” (the exact figure isn’t known because they lumped everything into military spending).
They were dirt poor and were throwing an extreme amount of money at looking rich for decades and eventually it caught up with them.
Like the people who take out giant loans to lease an expensive car above their means.
And, despite their attempts to keep up, they were behind in the number of missiles and bombers they had in comparison with the United States.
The missile and bomber gap - the belief that the Soviets had more - was wrong.
Although it seems like insiders within the United States Government always knew the USA was ahead, but refrained from mentioning it for political purposes.
My favorite was block chain. A company I used to work for that was not a tech company, suddenly going on about the block chain. I saw former, non technical colleagues that were still there write long authoritative LinkedIn posts about the advantages of the block chain and it was incredibly cringey because I am not sure what they thought the block chain was, but I am confident they didn’t understand it at all.
Before the iPhone was the iPod, and before the iPod I had an iRiver mp3 player. There was certainly a trend and only Apple's product survived that one.
But I can’t really complain because it’s open source and added to by contributors.
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