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Overlyinvestedinlife

@overlyinvestedinlife

Currently overly invested in sports

“There are days in the race when I’m like "I don’t know if I can do it for you. I don’t know if I can win, Bono”. And he is like “You got this.” So, you know, that team, that communication, that little lift that you are able to give through those open communications can make a big difference.“

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Sky Sports F1 — F1 Champions (with Damon Hill, Jenson Button, and Nico Rosberg)

Q: Lewis, are you a better driver now than you were in ’16? LH: Yes. And team-mate. - NR:

— 2021.12.11.

We have very similar backgrounds. We’re both children of Latin immigrants, so there’s sort of a cultural familiarity, then at the same time we’re both actors. We have the same dreams. It’s something very special because it can be a lonely journey when you’re out there going after — it sounds corny, but going after your dreams, and to find family along the way.

PEDRO PASCAL on his friendship with OSCAR ISAAC

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Look up Compassion Fatigue. We are getting barraged with so much bad crap that we are developing a condition which, until recently, was mostly found among medical personnel, police, fire fighters, social workers and other people who deal with horrifying things on regular basis.

Free PDF Workbooks for Japanese, Spanish, Korean, etc. (30+ languages)

If you’re looking to practice a bit and remember your target language better… here are tons of free worksheets/workbooks for 34 languages (Japanese, Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian, etc, etc.)

It’s the same type of “fill in the blank” workbook across all of their languages but the magic in actually rewriting things over and over is that the words end up sticking. Plus, there are English sections where you’ll have to force yourself to remember and write the word/phrase in the target language - which is even better for your memory (called active recall - forcing yourself to remember).  I’m personally a big fan of this approach and I’d do similar to pass vocab quizzes in my HS & uni language classes.

If you’re interested, give these a go.

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Delusional Horner is tarnishing the whole sport of Formula One

Red Bull principal is rivalling José Mourinho for gracelessness, Matthew Syed writes.

Lewis Hamilton was robbed. I think we should make that plain at the start of this column. I emphasise this because Christian Horner and Max Verstappen of Red Bull decided to boycott Sky Sports after one of their reporters used this word in relation to the finale of the 2021 season, after a controversial safety car restart in the last moments of the race. Even the FIA, the sport’s governing body, admits that this was a significant error from the race director.

So, permit me to say it again: Hamilton was robbed. If the rules had been correctly applied, he would now have an eighth world title. If the race director had done his job, Mercedes would boast another champion. Horner may now be pondering whether to ban The Times, and perhaps The Sunday Times too, on the basis of this assertion. If so, it won’t be long before Red Bull are avoiding all press outlets, and perhaps all social media too. Because “robbed” is the way most people think about that incident. This doesn’t imply that Hamilton was robbed by Horner or Verstappen — it just means that he was denied what was rightfully his, which is pretty much the textbook definition of the term.

But there’s another aspect to the controversy that has engulfed Formula One over the past few weeks. We now know that Red Bull broke the rules in the amount they spent last season. There is a limit set by the FIA and all teams sign up to remain within this envelope, but one team failed to do so. The amount of the overspend is — according to both the FIA and Red Bull, who accepted the verdict of the governing body — £1.864 million, amounting to 1.6 per cent of the budget, set at £114 million. This may not sound like a lot, but in a sport where margins are measured in factions, it might have been decisive.

So not only did Horner and his team benefit from a poor decision by a steward, in violation of the rules, they were also the beneficiaries of their own breach, albeit — they claim — an inadvertent one. So, let’s go back to Hamilton again: was he robbed? Is the terminology in keeping with what we know about the facts? I think most reasonable people will say “yes”. Indeed, it seems rather delusional to deny this, as Horner has sought to do.

But this isn’t the end of the matter. Zak Brown, the chief executive of McLaren, pointed out that when teams breach their spending limits, it amounts to “cheating”. “The cap is a rule, no different to the technical rules in the sport,” he said. “We feel it’s a performance benefit if someone has spent more than the allocated cost cap.” The word cheating is quite strong in this instance, but many people will agree with it. At the very least, Red Bull’s actions represented the gaining of an unfair advantage. Every other team was carefully audited and stayed within the agreed limits.

Yet Horner was scandalised by this terminology too. He claims that the breach was an oversight and had no performance effect, but this is a curious argument. If you exceed a budget, you presumably benefit from doing so, otherwise what is the point of the cap in the first place? Moreover, when it comes to breaching these (or any other) rules, it is surely important that the miscreants face reputational damage. Horner wants the payment of a fine — $7 million (about £6.07 million), to be exact — and reduction of permitted research to be the end of it, but that is too easy an escape route for a team awash with money. Social stigma is crucial for any rule to have teeth but this is what Horner is unwilling to accept.

And here we move from the regrettable to the surreal. Instead of owning up to his error, Horner has lashed out on those who have dared to criticise him. At a press conference last week, he said that the censure Red Bull has received has undermined his team’s “mental health” and has led to the children of staff being “bullied” in the playground. I had always thought that José Mourinho was the ultimate in gracelessness under pressure (to invert Ernest Hemingway’s quote) but Horner has taken it to a new level. How dare the Red Bull principal deploy sensitive moral issues such as bullying and mental health to deflect from his own rule-breaking.

If there are mental health issues at Red Bull as a result of their rule breach, the responsibility lies with them and them alone; not with those who have criticised them. To say otherwise is an Alice in Wonderland inversion, a gaslighting of those who stayed within budget. Like Mourinho at his worst, Horner is willing to blame everyone else, to distort reality, even to boycott those with whose opinions he disagrees, to sustain the pretence that everything Red Bull does is pure and it is only the ill intent of others that obscures this fact.

And, on the wider point, what of the mental health of the teams who have worked diligently to stay within the agreed budget? What about the drivers whose ambitions have been thwarted by Red Bull’s overspending? What about people with genuine mental health issues whose difficulties have been trivialised by Horner’s self-serving cant?

What makes this worse is that Horner is the first to point the finger at others when things don’t go his way. Remember at Silverstone when he lashed out at Hamilton after the clash with Verstappen, calling the British driver “desperate” and “completely out of order”? Remember when Horner savaged a “rogue marshal” after Verstappen received a grid penalty for failing to respect double yellow flags in qualifying at the Qatar Grand Prix? I could go on.

The older one gets, the more one realises that it is not winning that matters in life, but the way one conducts oneself. Horner may have won both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships this season but in his manner and example, he is tarnishing not only his team but F1, too. You might even — at the risk of a fresh boycott — call him a loser.