Cthulhu D

It makes total sense for doctors to ask their patients about smoking, this has been effective at making people stop smoking, which in turn is a highly successful healthcare measure. Really the only thing that can happen with government intervention in healthcare is that it becomes cheaper and less poor people die. See: Every wealthy OECD country vs the US.

Of course, for the same reason that you can beat the casino in the short term but in the long run you're going to lose. Models are probabilistic and it only works over large sample sizes. It's by no means the models are a lock, but we've got a pretty good idea of what it's likely to be. However, if you think the models are incorrect, how can you possibly think fiddling around with large scale climate engineering when you don't know what will happen is a good idea? Your line of logic is really this: A) We're making massive changes to the environment! B) Experts are incapable of predicting what might happen! C) Because we cannot predict accurately what might happen, all bad outcomes can be discarded in our risk analysis! D) Therefore we can do anything we want! This is completely insane. If you think that the best models we have are unable to predict what can happen, how do YOU know what's going to happen when make significant changes to the atmosphere? MORE caution is called for as the changes are irreversible and the risks are unknown. There is no 'whoops we *****ed up guys and ruined the planet, let's just load from an earlier save' It could be a total disaster and turn the earth into a snowball for all we know if the models are busted. If one of the possible risks you have in your risk analysis is 'world wide warfare and starvation, millions die' and that's not even the worst case scenario, you should be pretty god damn careful about your course of action. To put it in another context, you're literally proposing that when confronted with a new drug of totally unknown properties, we should instead of a very cautious approach of animal trials, clinical studies, etc, the entire human race should just slam back 14 because what could possibly go wrong. My observation would be that this school of thought is heavily promoted by the Evangelist movement because they are of the view that C) is actually 'God told us nothing bad can happen' and thus it does make sense to do whatever you want. If you believe that a man in a beard speaks down from space.

The modelling indicates that the impact will be net negative. This is seriously lol. Why should they - who's carbon emissions and wealth are a fraction of yours - pay for clean energy when you - the rich American - won't? It's a relentless comedy goldmine. Maybe we should help them out with the clean energy thing! Maybe we should do it ourselves first? It seems to me that on a solar system or cosmic scale we are all in a very small boat together and relentlessly drilling a hole in the bottom is amazingly dumb. You might not understand the consequences for sure, but projections seem to indicate it will be bad and there is no turning back once we've done it.

Playing 2/1 I'd open this - I think strongly that not opening this sort of hand is a minus play. Playing precision opening is automatic. You are just so much better off once you've got your hand in the picture, and you even want a spade lead. A better question is something like QTxxx, Qx, Kxx, Axx - I would still open but without the same conviction.

I think you misunderstand what poverty means - it's worth considering for a moment the hardship definitions of poverty. If you are in poverty, you have to choose between feeding your kids, having necessary medical treatment, paying your power bill or using a money lender. Your pick! Now, something like 10% of Australians live in circumstances that meet this definition of poverty - considerably less than the US because we'll pay for healthcare and education. How is that person not 'forced'

It has made a number of them, and this is definitely demonstrable because evolution can get 'stuck' in a local maxima that prevents reaching the absolute maxima. Consider your eyes. Your eyes have the nerves coming out of the front of your retina, which loops then back through your retina to behind your eye. This creates a blindspot in your vision that your eyes compensate for via a variety of tricks. (It's also wired up to stuff on the back of your brain) Obviously this design is totally dumb. The optimal design would be a design like a squid, which has the nerve cluster leaving the back of your eye and thus no blindspot. This shows that evolution isn't some perfect force - there is no way for your eye to turn 'inside out' so evolution's sequential changes will never get to the most optimal design. It also shows intelligent design is totally bunk because intelligent design has not been deployed here. This has probably happened because the eye has involved in two different ways.

Posting in 32519's threads loses 100% of the time, wins 0% of the time. Seriously that was the greatest quote.

Isn't curling just lawn bowls for people who don't have the sense to move somewhere warm?

why is switching them silly from a frequency point of view? once they've opened its likely to be there hand so you ewant to use as much space as possible, and 8-14 NTO is much more frequent than the strong NT overcall

I'm pretty sure it's because there is a huge informational advantage in being the first mover.

After playing other games in a Swiss format with a cut to the top 8 or similar for the finals, I miss A) Elimination finals B) The ability to agree to intentionally draw with your opponent.

We play it a 3 point range - 17-19. 1NT is 14-16. 2NT is 20-21. We do this because it helps us in other places - limiting openers minimum rebid to 11-13 makes simplifies judgement on the most frequent hand types, and the 14-16 NT is about 30% more frequent. It does make XYZ or similar extremely useful though.

He could easily fix that by playing transfer XYZ. So play the sequence: 1C-1D; 1NT-2D; as a retransfer to hearts. Invitational with hearts is wrong sided though.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html Good article, and neatly illustrative of the problem. If you're saying that 40% of consumption sitting with 5% is reasonable - or to put it in pragmatic terms the top 5% consume 11 times as much as the remaining 95%, you have a recipe for disaster. If the trend of the last 20 years continues, you'll soon be facing more income inequality than France in 1780 in the next 20 years. That can only go well.

I play Multilandy because it's effective, shows a variety of hand shapes and for memory reasons - I probably see 5% mini no-trumps, 30-35% weak no trumpers (typically ACOLites) and 60ish% 14-16 or 15-17 or 15-18 NT so having one defence that can flexibly work in all three scenarios is very useful. For us, this is powerful because I agree with Billw55 - having one method that you both understand in depth is more effective than playing different things in different places that you don't. If we were playing super seriously we might change things up a bit but for a once a week partnership

This is how I was playing 'strong' jump shifts. It did, indeed, never happen. While this is in part because often you didn't want to make a jump shift over our short club opening. It's hardly frequent.

My local club has 'brown sticker and HUMs banned on walk in nights, for events refer to the conditions of competition' (which will always ban HUMs but not BS) posted on their website. Why don't club owners turn to the ACBL rules on what is and is not okay? I see a bit of the same stuff though, people continually wonder if transfer responses after 1C are banned by that (no), but are surprised that an overcall of 1NT for takeout is.

It's almost impossible to get people for shoplifting unless you catch them red handed. Prevention is much better than any prosecution from the retailers perspective.

The reverse flannery hands (5 spades, 4 hearts) are not really a problem - we play transfer XYZ so it's very easy to show the handshape. AFter say a 1C opener, we bid 1C-1H; 1S then either 2C-2D-2H with invitational values or 2D! (transfer to hearts) with the weak hand. The showing the 5th heart in a 5/4 hand is harder.

Yeah, I was thinking of something along those lines. It makes invitational diamond hands a complete bastard to bid though. 5+ diamonds, 4 hearts, minimum ish.

1 club. No - 1S is 5+ diamonds and 1NT is balanced. 1NT, the minimum balanced hand accepts the transfer. Balanced minimum with 2 or 3 card support or a 5431 hand that has no logical rebid avaliable (e.g. you accept the heart transfer with a stiff spade and 3 hearts after 1C-1D, but if you have a stiff diamond, 3 hearts and 4 spades you bid 1S after 1C-1D. Yes, I'm stuck with it because 1NT is not forcing. We play 1m - 2NT as balanced invitational and 1M-2NT as a limit raise or better.

As we play 1D-3C, 1H-3C/D etc as natural invitational, this has appeal. Isn't the situations where opener rebids his minor the ones where you have the biggest reverse flannery problems? Though I guess partner is not going to rebid his minor if he has 4 spades, so the problems might be irrelevant.

This is how we do it as well, and you may get something else to take home (my last win was a cheque, a medallion and a pen, two before that were cash and bottles of wine). It presumably saves the organisers a lot of hassle as well. I cannot image letting people take the trophies home! You'd never get them back.

What do people do with their 2 level jump shifts after 1C and 1D (and 1H-2S)? We've been playing Soloway strong jump shifts through to this point, but they have come up maybe once a year so it seems like a waste of a bid. Anyone got any thoughts on what a better system might be? (We need jump shifts to the 3 level for other calls) I've seen people propose reverse flannery with 5 spades and 4 hearts by responder, and that's definately something to consider, but I'm not sure what else to do. You could also have a purely artifical SJS setup with something like: 1C-2D: Artifical SJS 1C-2H: Reverse Flannery 1C-2S? I really have no idea. Edit: We play 1NT as SF as best (and very semi forcing, it is routinely passed) and inverted minor raises.

Is 2NT as either A) Weak with clubs or B) Strong, Balanced (20-21) a brown sticker convention under ABF system regulations? Relevant part of ABF regs: It seems the 2NT = Weak clubs or strong balanced does not qualify as 'brown sticker' because of Exception i. Is this correct? I wasn't sure if I should post it in the Laws section or here.