Slashdot Mirror
World Cup Prediction Failures
pdcull writes "We all read on Slashdot about the investment banks using their massive computer power and clever modeling techniques to predict the FIFA World Cup outcome. Now that Goldman Sachs's, UBS's and Danske Bank's favorite, Brazil, has been eliminated, and with JP Morgan's England long gone, the question that begs to be asked is: can we really trust these guys to predict the financial markets any better than they did World Cup?"
We just bailed out the banks, so it's too late to start throwing in votes of no confidence!
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
The answer to a question.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Surely the last couple of years are evidence enough that the financial industry can't predict or manage the markets? We didn't need football to tell us this :D
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
What's an investiment bank?! I don't trust any large institution that can't spell worth beans.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Your question is, "Hey, these guys who spend their entire lives predicting financial markets aren't good at predicting sports. How can we trust them to predict financial markets?"
So stop. And stop voting for the people that do as well.
Goldman Sachs gave Brazil (the "favorite") only a 13% chance of winning the world cup.
The fact that Brazil was eliminated is not at odds with the reports.
Guess it's time to upgrade their magic ball software. This time maybe they shouldn't outsource the project to Mattel.
the problem is they didn't used enought feature factors or the relevant ones (like detailed statgistics for every player, for that player with coop with another player). i didn't read the stuff but i am sure they used only few factors mostly historic data the detailed forcast would cost too much money (but they invest them into stock forecast)
That squid or octopus or kraken Paul which consistently picked the "German" mussel.
Is this a trick question??
can we really trust these guys to predict the financial markets any better than they did World Cup?
You have that backwards.
And the sooner the world figures this out the better we'll all be.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Games are decided by refereeing as much as anything. Did they throw that into the model?
FIFA make UN look like a girlscout.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
They may not predict the exact outcome, but I bet they come close enough to make money on a series of hedged bets.
I predicted 3 of the 4 teams in the semi-finals. And I am not claiming any special powers here. But this does raise two issues. If these banks actually were that serious with the prediction: Either they are insane to actually try to predict the outcome using models and techniques that are used for finance, which raises the question of how fit they are to think they can predict the markets themselves if they think they have a "pass-partous" models. And if did they take into account every variable in the prediction, with such a poor predictions I can safely say they cannot be trusted with the financial future of a kid's lemonade stand.
Let's just ask the octopus how to invest.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I thought the point of the stock market was that people with money can buy shares into companies they think will be profitable. i pitty these idiots who try all their best to get as rich as possible as fast as possible. and I pitty the rest of the world, who see clearly that these guys treat everything like a lottery, and still trust them.
new sig
The predictions by various teams would have had a chance of happening.
Like Argentina will beat Germany 67% of the time. There is still the possibility that Germany will win a game.
One thing that makes the world cup very unpredictable is that only a single game decides winner/loser. Anything can happen in a single game. Someone can be a little off. The ball can bounce just so. A ref can blow a call. If they played best of 5 or 7 games the predictions would have a better chance of happening.
Still we can't predict the future 100% and the world is still interesting.
To the stock market. There are to many outside influences.
Could anyone have predicted the well blow out in the Gulf and its affect on the Gulf fishing industry or 911 ? Sure they would have been outside possibilities but no one could have predicted exactly when based on just looking at the stock market.
As much as the economists like to assume that economics is a measurable science the ideas of perfect knowledge and perfect actors are laughable given the way we know people operate. The basic foundation of the economic theory is very broken.
...of the probability of an event and a firm prediction you might be better off keeping your money in your mattress. Let's see how they do on average over the next hundred or so World Cups.
But then, "predicting financial markets" is not what I use banks for anyway. YMMV.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
...lots of people do it in Australia, especially in work places. Maybe you get a small prize if you guess best. Anyway one year we had this French manager who won the competition by a mile. All he had was a table of match results and a copy of excel. He was also the software metrics guru so knowing how to drive the spreadsheet helped as well.
I think the secret of his success was what he left out of his model. It wasn't smart at all. Just that when teams A and B play, what is the probability that A will win, or something simple like that.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Dartboard pics outperform the "financial wizards."
This makes no sense. They might have been completely right that some particular team was most likely to win, but then the randomness of the game made it so that the most likely winner didn't win. We have no way to tell. To evaluate their ability to predict correctly, you would need data for how well they did over the course of many world cups. Besides, they can't possibly do better than the quality of their data and the extent to which that data actually allows to predict the outcome. E.g. if they fail to predict the outcome of a game of stone-paper-scissors, that is hardly saying they aren't good at their jobs. This summary has nothing to do with science, it's a blatant troll.
They have a fail-safe system that is statistically guaranteed to create lots of wealth and keep the stock market booming. No taxpayer money is at risk, unless some incredibly improbable event occurs, such as Brazil, Argentina, and Italy all missing the semi-finals.
If some random schmuck on the street accurately predicted the four semifinalists does that mean we should trust him to predict the financial markets?
I wonder how climate modelers would have gone?
That's like saying the horse with the best odds didn't finish first, do the bookies really know what they're doing? There's these things called chance and statistics. Also it's not like Brazil did badly.
A friend and I wrote our own computer based predictor for FIFA, at last count it predicted 33 out of 58 games which I would say is pretty good given that games had 3 possible outcomes in earlier rounds: win/lose/draw (and yes we predicted Brazil I'm afraid).
If anyone's interested in a shameless plug here's our version for quite a few sports for the iPhone http://itunes.apple.com/au/app/sports-predictor/id340126905?mt=8# the model of a free download that gives you samples followed by purchases turned out to be extremely unpopular, but that's another discussion.
It's turtles all the way down.
Why should we trust them to predict the outcome of a sporting event when they have such a poor record predicting financial markets.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
While that's not a bad way to start, what seems to be more important is how well the team plays together and the chemistry and attitude of the team in general. As we saw with England (and France), you can put a bunch of great soccer players on one team, but that doesn't mean they're going to play well together.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
It's pointless to try to predict the outcome of a soccer match. It is known as the sport with the most upsets for one simple reason: luck plays far too big a role in a match's outcome. The winner of any game in any sport is determined by some mix of skill and random occurrence. I'm not saying that skill isn't important in soccer (and I'm certainly not saying that soccer players do not have skill) but the role that skill plays in the determining the winner is much less compared with other sports. Is this possibly one of the reasons soccer is only really popular with children in the US? I think it's a factor.
How good are they at climate prediction. I'm just wonderin'...
Can you put this in car terms?
I think the winning conditions are inappropriate for this contest. It was set up so that you had to pick a team. There's no reason in a game as random as soccer to expect a particular team to have a high likelihood of winning. An appropriate guess would have been a statistical distribution with every team having some chance of winning. By playing the game, these financial teams were more likely than not to lose.
Today a lawyer failed to save a patient undergoing cardiovascular surgery.
Can we really expect him to persuade a jury his client is innocent?
is the fact that these guys might have actually thought they could predict Soccer games.
They can very easily "predict" market moves in very short time frames -- they have access to real time data as well as prices/sizes of tickets that are lying outside current bid/ask range.
Frankly anyone here could write a program to predict that a stock and, by doing this for multiple stocks, an index using this information to calculate momentum. Place a bet with enough money and you only need a small change so you can make your bet after the move has already begun.
These aren't really "predictions" but rather having enough information to make a bet with significantly less risk ... if there are a bunch of buyers and few sellers below you then you are protected on the downside and if there are bunch of buyers and few sellers above you then the stock is going to go up -- you just have to give it a little nudge.
"Oh, you hate your job? There's a support group for that, it's called everyone, they meet at the bar."
So much you can put into a prediction but it is still restricted to proxy stuff such as stature, how many players playing at "top level football", and managers. But still the ones who doing the real stuff on the pitch are human; 25 of them. It is impossible to de(rive|vise) a relatively accurate mathematical model(s) on what going to happen minute-by-minute.
Well that's why even the likes of Slovakia can roll over Italy, Holland to Brazil, South Korea to Italy, and every other underdogs trashing big-names games. With the insistence of FIFA towards, basically encouraging, drama is why the game is so damn addictive to many people.
Of course the drama is not all there is for football. On each game you can expect to see real skill from players of the big-names or inspiring determination from the underdogs. That's why if you value things such as skill, team work, determination (and other things that many people attribute to football) you are likely to fall in love with the game.
Sure the big-names got their reputation for good reasons, so there's a great chance that they will run all over the underdog, scoring at will, and being classy at the same time; well basically living up to their reputation.
Slightly off but related, in my opinion it is the likes of Fulham, Aston Villa, Everton, and Bolton Wanderers that kept BPL making money, the same with Catania, Cagliari, Napoli to Serie-A, and basically every other league with big-names and underdogs teams. It is the fans of those underdogs that willing to pay up a lot of money to see their beloved team to go against the big-names and hoping for some sort of reimbursement of local pride (or insert-your-favorite-reason-for-emotional-attachment here) being served by 11 men on the pitch. On the flip side the fans of big-names want a good time on the weekend seeing their favorite players trashing a no-body on the pitch so they reach their pocket too.
So what? This year your big-name team defeated by an underdogs? well there's always next years (or four years for WC). Even with those shocking results the fans still lining up in great expectation for the next season, with dreams of what to come with new players coming in from the transfer market or local talents "stepping up" to the game.
If the game can be predicted even with a-rather-good accuracy we'll see games "played" by analysts and numbers crunching experts instead of players running, wailing, **cough**diving**cough**, getting bruised, injured, fouled in the process. So much with nurturing talent, buying players, training, and prep-talk; just bribe some math-wizard to come up with smelly statistic to favor our team and call it a day.
Don't be fooled, all that prediction is going to pay for themselves anyway. Match-prediction pundits/"experts" are there to sell commercials and corporations prediction are to sell their products, as evident in this case.
Predicting every single game is a joke. Stop doing that and just enjoy what's on the pitch. Just like a respected manager (that I fond of) once said: "Football, bloody hell."
Like the World Cup, Climate, Weather, and one moment to the next for any human being, all are unpredictable!
The outcomes of our most fastest supercomputers are as unpredictable, irrespective of code or problem.
Yet, the U.S.A. Department of Energy "thinks" that the "quality" of our M88 warheads are still 100%.
For them, USA DoE, the fallicy might just save the rest ot us from a nuclear holocaust, since they, DoE are desperately holding onto their cherished religous beliefs against the bitter narled face of reality. If they were to realize that 90% of the nuclear aresnal has decayed to a non-nuclear state, they might be prone to lauch another failed war against some conutry of (roll the bones) choosing, just as Bust II.
They probably picked Brazil to win, meaning they thought Brazil had the best chance. They would probably also admit that "the best chance" is still pretty small. So, the fact that their pick to win was eliminated really isn't a blemish on their prediction ability, given our sample size is "one".
can we really trust these guys to predict the financial markets any better than they did World Cup?
You're asking if we can trust big banks to predict the financial markets when we are on the slow rebound from a crashed economy? I think you're a couple years too late asking this question and the answer is a clear "no"! No we can not.
Then you're not trusting them to do anything for you.
Stop worshipping the God of Money and get on with your own life.
By having superfast computers on the floor and looking at the orders coming in, they buy and sell just before the orders execute.
This would be like observing a goal was clearly going to occur (or not occur) and then betting a goal would occur (or not occur) in the milliseconds before the goal actually occured.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This article has a stupid premise, the author should be ashamed.
Even Paul the octopus made better predictions...
...they are doing.
Wall street is hiring to influence and skim off the market
http://christianmarks.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/mathematical-logic-finds-unexpected-application-on-wall-street/
and this works better if you think you can do a better job with markets.
It isn't too hard to get in on the conspiracy.
Just such lovely and caring people
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html
System not setup for BAD referees!
...they are doing.
Increasingly complex trading strategies aside, they only work if someone is here to buy when their model says 'sell'.
TFA should read:
the question that begs to be asked is: can we really trust these guys to give their best advice to customers further down the investor 'food chain'?
There's a good reason that lotteries and other similar contests prohibit their own employees from playing the games they manage. Why doesn't the same principle apply to brokerages trading securities they sell on behalf of their customers for their own accounts?
Have gnu, will travel.
Isn't Octopus better than Goldman Sachs?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
The banks hire actuaries by the boatload to create advanced statistical models which are then programmed in the most efficient manner in order to predict the outcome of any given event. They present the data to the sales team to sell to customers over the phone. Billions are traded every day in this manner. The only possible problem is..... that their models may not actually reflect the real world, and worse..... someone comes along and breaks the perfect statistical distribution scenario ... like "too big to fail" or "labor strike" or "stimulus package" or any of a thousand other events that breaks the standardized distribution model and pisses all over the stock ticker parade. "Bank bailout", "labor shortage", "volcano eruption", .... pick another, there are thousands to chose from. Every last one will work on the market, and they all work in concert. Oh, and as stated before, sometimes the banks just get it wrong..... the question that you really have to ask is: do they every get away from 50:50?
They will mess up the outcome just like they messed up there bail outs!
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
Well, I think everyone would agree that no prediction is perfect, and all of them have a certain confidence interval associated with any prediction. For example, I find it very disappointing and deceiving to say that Goldman's favorite is out, because the teams they predicted second most likely and third most likely to win the thing are still in it.
It's terribly hard to predict those results, you can't blame them.
Puppies Husky
SciAm had an article I have referenced before showing the the equations for economics we incorrectly generalized from physic equations and those and been invalidated since. Economics is not a science at all.
These idiots assumed that the games weren't fixed. Hence the crappy results. If they wanted a reasonably accurate (give or take) estimate of who was going to get to the semi-finals in the World Cup, they should have consulted a London bookie...and guaranteed his place in some kind of witness protection program, of course.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The stock market is essentially a Markov chain. Any predictions made about it, therefore, are nothing but astrology.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Well i would put more faith in Paul the Octopus than any of the above mention clowns.
There's heaps of statistical noise in football! They weren't predicting a result. Just predicting a probability. A single result is absolutely meaningless.
In finance, a 10% probability of making $100 is considered the same value as a 1% probability of making $1000. Make enough bets and you'll win on average.
"Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win."
Gary Lineker
Thought, kind of offtopic, here I am.
They're simply making the market, not predicting it.
The crisis are also not so unexpected, in the past two centuries the crisis were almost regular (though some smaller and some bigger).
One could say they never learn, though considering that some financial empires always make money in these times and consolidate their power and monopolies, one should wonder if they have any interest in fixing the problem. Basically every big financial crisis was offering means for shifting the wealth from the many to the few, in a very short time span.
Its very hard to predict about any game especially football. Beacuse just one mistake can change everything and good team can also loose.
Also visit: http://top-online-money.yolasite.com
You think these Keynesian fools can predict the outcome of a mere game when they can't even predict the economy with their false voodoo?
Give me a break.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Stop on.
Linker was always under-rated.
It's because soccer is low scoring therefore a single goal could be lucky AND STILL WIN THE GAME. It is for this reason that the US bookies DO NOT WANT soccer: they want games where you score 300 points so that luck evens out and you can predict more accurately who will win in a game.
Is /. not seeing that this is just a huge statistical game?
I've looked at a fair amount of the financial models and they are either a) statistical models that do try to gauge the market, or b) purposeful obfuscation bullshit trying to make things seem very complicated while it hides the true intent of enriching those who make them.
I have no doubt that they used A in their model for doing whatever they were trying to do by predicting the World Cup. Just in the same way all of the people in Vegas, and all over the world, have been doing for years. But when you only have a limited number of 'flips of the coin' it's never going to be perfect. Never mind the human error factor in crafting said models.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I live in Cape Town where last night's game between Spain and Paraguay has convinced me that Seb Blatter and Fifa are reluctant to use video replays to play the game WITHIN THE RULES because they will lose the control necessary to influence the outcome. If Fifa controlled the markets, NO forecast would work, now, at least financial institutions have trends and hearsay to work with, not referees!
the Dutch. Surprise is our main weapon!
Surprise... and underestimation!
Please STOP GAMBLING with the publics money. You are welcome to pay yourself massive bonuses but not from my cash.
If you do gamble with the publics hard earnt savings, then the majority of the profits should go back to the public (99.99% tax).
It really pisses me off thinking that these highly paid gamblers (that are not more intelligent than me) are being backed up by goverments. When they win, they get massive bonuses (6 figure bonus, on top of thier 100,000 a year salary). When they loose, we cough up so they still have money to keep things ticking over and pay their bonus. I work for charity and it makes me feel physically sick, thinking of the money that was being paid to some bankers. I used to ask my Dad, how can people be worth that much - and he told me that they must have made much more for the corporation. So how can this be? Well because people were selling depts and making money!
Why don't Ladbrooks go into banking? It seems the obvious think to me as that's exactly the nature of the business.
...You can always rely on the same consistent results when you expect these people to tell you what to think. And if you think there is someone else better equipped to accurately predict the future, then it won't matter who you ask. Its bad enough to have a great deal of faith in one's own self interest and greed, but its retarded to expect your satisfaction from their appetite. Human nature is the only thing thats broken here. Now try to enjoy the rest of World Cup and World Economy without gambling on winners while acting like losers.
There ability to predict economic set backs was not very good. And as these models all use the assumption that markets tend to stabilize, they are all biased by a theory which has been proven wrong centuries ago. A capitalistic market system is inherent unstable. The only thing you can really say about it is: Money gets accumulated up to a point where it cannot be invested into "real economy" products or services anymore, because the "real economy" is not growing fast enough to produce enough profit for the return of investments. At that point, people start to bid on outcomes and later they bid on outcomes of biddings and use money they will possibly collect in other biddings. This works well until someone starts to get cold feet. It has some similarities to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_(game) However, in that dice game you know for certain that a claim is impossible. In economics you do not have a upper bound. As trust is a psychological thing, it can be very, very unpredictable.
Did I really just see a post on Slashdot saying...
"Can we really trust these people to accurately predict the future?!"
Bwahahaha.
Soccer is a great sport for kids and girls. It is not one that even deserves a 2 second ad on American tv much less wall to wall coverage. I have yet to see a single player who would not puke after getting hit by any defensive end from any real "FOOTBALL" team. Nor have i seen them demonstrate any skill in their audibility to hit a ball traveling over 90 mph. Hockey is the closes thing to soccer and i would love to see a soccer goalie go against a hockey goalie. Since most people do not follow this why would you expect any programmer to have enough information to build an algorithm that would work?
So again i say why should we care, hell i am shocked it made it to slashdot.
Economics is a science to explaining you today why your predictions about tomorrow was not succeed yesterday.
GS and the other big banks, businesses etc, get politicians elected to office to enact legislation that helps them make more money at the expense of the poor all over the world. In this case they not only managed to do that, but they got a bailout added in. Its like a criminal robbing a bank, and when they are caught, instead of throwing them in jail, the government gives them the entire contents of another bank as well.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Hehe, but seriously...
This is basic mercenary in action, and mercs are motivated by money too. Any "victim" of such caliber could outbid the merc and send him/her back on you, and it is not just movies.
To accomplish what you propose, there's need to be ideologically motivated people, who are, actually, if combined with the required skillset, surprisingly hard to find...
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
While they might have got the winner wrong, they have correctly placed Netherlands and Spain in the final four !!
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
"It fails at football so can it succeed in economics?"
Uhm, what?
I assume the later is somewhat more predictable. I don't see why there would be a contradiction. And I don't really see why it matters much for normal people either.
Regarding banks and strategies I think the Europe line of saving money rather than spending them to fuel more economic growth is better now. I can understand how China and India want the later, countries like USA will borrow more money to spend on among other things a faster market buying items from China which can catch up faster _AND_ with money they have lend to the US. .. So ..
If the rest of the world would spend less then the catch up of China and India would take longer time
Don't really know why USA want to followed their line though, maybe it's just an example of what they always want to do. Freer market, more capitalism, hope for the best.
This is the worst analogy I've seen this week. Clearly someone doesn't know how football works. Even the octopus has more chance to guess the results than an algorithm with no referee error or pure luck modeled in. You do not need a computer to tell you who the favorites are.
I think people are taking this way too seriously. This is a game played by the research divisions, who are not (1) traders, who actually buy and sell things (2) quants, who figure out how stuff should be priced (3) sales, who try to get other people to buy financial products (4) bankers, who advise corporate clients. In other words, this stuff was not even done by anybody who is involved in revenues.
That's the thing with soccer. The favorites don't always win. It's not like American sports where outcomes tend to be more predictable. Although, I also games at the World Cup level are less predictable than at the club level because the players don't play together enough for people to be able to make a clear assessment. Most predictions seemed to be based on past performance despite the fact we were looking at a lot of new players.
Starting with that very first game against North Korea I felt that Brazil was overrated. And with American commentators they also pass the Brazilians off as these happy-go-lucky guys who just love the game and play for fun. But in every game where they've actually been challenged, meaning everyone they've played except North Korea players were getting openly pissed. In all their other games it looked like it was going to come to blows.
With the other so-called favorites, Italy, France and England people had already been saying for quite a while that they were quite a bit weaker than they had been in the past. It's a lot harder to make clear predictions because there are so many players from different countries playing in competitive leagues around the world. So I think performance comes down to who has more good players interacting extremely well in competition.
My prediction for the final is Netherlands vs Germany with Germany winning. Uruguay shouldn't have gotten this far and I think Spain has been overrated. Spain has great players and they have impressive individual plays but they always seem to just barely get by. Germany has been great, perhaps the most cohesive team of the World Cup. Either that or they haven't been adequately challenged.
Unfortunately, with Netherlands and Germany it's going to be a smaller corner of the world truly interested. Not the best match up for ratings.
Of course the banks can predict financial markets,
they manipulate them
Both soccer and markets are determined largely by micro-decisions that human beings make. And many of those decisions are not rational, but instead are based upon emotion. In market behavior, you could argue that humans have specific material needs, and humans make rational decisions to meet those needs. But this ignores the fact that many of our purchasing decisions are made for reasons that we do not fully comprehend. Why do we like a particular type of music? Why do we like particular brands? Why do we want buy goods that are popular, just because they are popular? These decisions are fundamentally emotional, and are not easily predictable at a specific level. Similarly in soccer, mood plays a role. The tide of the battle turns one way or another. Confidence is gained and lost for intangible reasons. And the results of games is determined largely confidence.
If stock markets and soccer are governed by such chaotic factors as human emotions, how can they ever truly be predictable. I would argue that to make predictions about such things, one would have to have the god-like ability to track the brain activity of all of the participants in the system. And right now we barely understand the most rudimentary parts of our minds. Thus I would argue that there is a fundamental limit to the certainty of the types of predictions made by, for example Wall Street quants. I think the recent housing market crash bears this out. Despite our hubris, human beings are not gods.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I'm prone to believe they - as usual - goaded the market to bet wrong, while they - or their fronts and doppels bet right.
Real "FOOTBALL"? You mean rugby for pussies? LOL!
But with results like 2-1 it's pretty much down to $random circumstance of the day.
My god. What are the moderators thinking?
I've been playing the game for 23 years, was trained by world-class coaches, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.
Because in 80% of the matches it makes fans go "If only..."
It's part of the joy of the game, part of the culture of the game to wish and hope for your team to win. But just because a fan thinks something doesn't make it so.
this is mostly luck
If that were true, a group of randomly-chosen people would have a similar chance of winning the world cup as e.g. Germany. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
Obviously the game has a lot of problems, and some of those topics are hot today. The game arguably needs to be refined in a couple ways.
But it is absolutely *not true* soccer "isn't about making the best team win" or that it's "mostly luck". The overwhelming majority of the time, the best team *does* win. It's just that when that happens, it isn't big news.
...the answer to that question had already been answered?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
In Mexico banks were nationalized for a decade, and the service was abysmal (why should they bother to provide good service? There was no incentive wahtsoever).
Once they became private again service improved (and interest rates have gone down to more realistic levels according to the economic situation, not according to a politician's needs).
What governments should do is force banks to ensure their commercial operations against unforseen circumstances, so in case of systemic collapse their clients in the traditional banking side of things are protected, even if the banks are betting their shirts on things they don't understand (something more sensible would be to forbid to mix investment and commercial banking under the same roof)
The above approach is bullshit, because obviates to include how the observer is actually modifying the outcomes of what is being predicted.