Cthulhu D

Isn't there a loss as you cannot freely advance diamonds as well? This significantly reduces the nuisance value of the bid. I think you'd be better off putting the weak 2 diamonds hand in 2C. Then you could change the weak option in 2D to something else.

I used 2D as an assumed fit (diamonds + major) pre-empt, in part because we play 2C as weak diamonds or strong. Prior to that I played it as an assumed fit pre-empt with both majors.

There are numerous combinations of nasty stuff possible. 2H as 4+ hearts and either 4+ spades OR 5+ clubs is extremely high frequency. Ultimately the sky is the limit - you're mostly constraint by system regulations and how much potential you lose in advancing. The costs to advancer are non trival as well - because both me and partner believe in frequent action, we have a very overloaded 2C opening to enable us to play 2D: 4+/4+ diamonds and a major and 2H: both majors. For this and other reasons, we play 2C: Weak Diamonds, Weak Spades or various strong hands. You never get those awesome 2S -> 4S auctions as a result. This has a cost that should be considered.

To be fair, they are not quite independent, though for a simplistic analysis that's fine.

Oh yeah, it's funny watching the US situation vs the EU. Germany is trying to make Greece into Mississipi, but unlike Greece, Mississipi WANTS to be like Mississipi. I have no idea why. I think people have bought into prosperity gospel preachers or something.

Well, obviously but you've pretty much fixed that. That is why the labor share of earnings has been declining since Reagan was elected.

There is nothing in the US constitution that would prohibit a move to Australian levels of inequality. Literally the only thing preventing you is that Americans as a whole don't want to.

I think Australia has more system variation, and 'standard Australian' is much more ill defined. Unlike Vampyr even when I play pretty good players, I regularly have all the following systems described to me as 'standard' and all of the systems people play with 5 card majors haven even more hilariously been described as 'standard american' 5 card majors, strong NT, 3 weak twos. 5 card majors, strong NT, 2D = Multi, 2H & 2S = M+m 2NT = C + D (repeatedly referred to as 'standard american' and 'SAYC' despite the fact that I think a big chunk of that is banned in many US tournaments) 5 card majors, weak NT, various random 2 level openings 4 card majors, weak no trumps with benjaminized twos or an artificial 2C and 3 weak twos or with a multi or with other random stuff People shouldn't call things names that range from unhelpful to blatantly misleading, so I try and avoid using any system names when saying what I play.

You can definitely play that you can overcall with this stuff. I play 4 card overcalls and 1NT as a wide ranging weak takeout and it rarely gets nailed (though I have definitely got nailed). I you are willing to contemplate that level of aggression, here is what I play, and Jeff goldsmith has a very good writeup on his website as well. http://www.fernside.com/bridge/TheOvercallStructure.html Its a lot of fun, and radically increases the % of time you can take action in the direct seat after an opening. I'm not sure its massively plus style - its probably not, but you can generally take action (the exception is a (32)44 hand when they've opened your short major

Why isn't it lifetime? It's really annoying when you use the service infrequently.

The hand records we get after the game at my club include HCP, 7+ card suits, singletons and voids for each of N/S/E/W so you can usually confirm whether it was bias or the fact that you where averaging below 8.5 HCP a hand with no voids that made that session boring. I like sessions where I have low HCP but very shapely hands, I tend to do better.

We have 11 - but all are with countries that hold a single payer system (including Slovenia of all places), which suggests what the main challenge is. Coverage varies by country - I count as an NHS patient and am entitled to free healthcare and heavily subsided medication, but I must pay for dental care. In NZ I am covered for free emergency hospital treatment only and nothing else. It's unlikely that you will be able to do so - the relative costs are hugely disadvantageous for you because it's so much cheaper for us to deliver healthcare. Its interesting to note that for me travel insurance is cheaper for countries where the promised response is 'we medivac you to a Singaporean or private Thai hospital via a charter flight if necessary' is cheaper than the US where they only promise the local hospital or clinic.

As an Australian we have negotiated 'shared coverage' with a bunch of nations - so if a New Zealander gets treated here they quality for government assistance and visa versa. The US does not partake in these arrangements obviously, so you have to buy private travel insurance or get stuck with a huge bill - but private travel insurance for a trip to the US is almost twice the price of any other country because the US is a higher insurance risk due to the insanely high prices of care. This is one of the reasons I hate travelling to the US. It's also worth noting that the Canadians quite sensibly use the US for profit system to provide surge capacity (though this is not why all Canadians leave Canada for medical care, it is why some Canadians do so) - the Government send you to a hospital across the boarder and pick up the tab like they would if you were treated in Canada. This is quite prudent for them as it means they don't have to build capacity to deal with demand spikes.

They have a bit more grunt as well, but yeah that's the crux of it. I use mine to read and watch videos in bed, which my iphone can do, but not do well. If you have that giant sized galaxy note thing though, the use case is a bit less clear cut. The downside with them is I tend to lie on my back and hold it over my head, then I doze off and drop it on my face, which has a stimulating effect.

Yes, I have made an error, for which I am sorry. I had the comparison the wrong way around. The Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center is the one that charges twice as much for the same quality of care as the Mayo clinic. Whoops. The UK system quite sensibly says the cost we will pay for procedure Y to quality standards Z is X and if you want to charge more than that you can get nicked. (It's actually a really complicated schedule of graduated costs that reflect the complexity of individual cases, but hey)

Mayo is very, very expensive, often for no discernible benefits (in terms of healthcare outcomes compared to other leading US hospitals). It is a pragmatic decision to cut it.

Indeed it does - but there are a bunch of offsetting factors. Car insurance lacks the complexity of healthcare insurance. For example, you're never going to have to make decisions about your car insurance while unconcious, and there is never a need to have your car repaired at a dealer that may or may not be in network for your insurance provider urgently because you are bleeding out. The result is you can make much more informed decisions, and the claims processing process is completely different. When I make a claim with car insurance I ring up my insurer and they arrange to have the car taken to their approved provider. There is no doubt or uncertainty about if my treatment is going to be covered, or if the provider is in network. They insurance company will cover all damage up to a pre-agreed insurance value X, and I have a co-pay way, and if damage to the vehicle exceeds X they will just pay out X to me in cash. So we have the following attributes A) No material time pressure on decision making B) No questions about in or out of network providers - you have time to ensure that you never violate the process. I have days to drop off my car after an accident with an insurance company. C) Clear liability caps and co-pays - only one service (car repair) is offered. The company is on the hook for max X. Imagine if at a hospital you ran up a 10k bill and they just ejected you onto the street to die because you'd hit the lability cap. Cannot happen in healthcare! Car insurance companies do it all the time. It's all very simple, and all very clear cut, and is totally in contrast to healthcare. Home insurance on the other hand is a more reasonable example (check out the buy vs rebuild triggers in your home insurance contract), but again it's all much more clear cut. If you mean third party person insurance (coverage for you cleaning up a third party), that's usually massively government regulated for the same reasons as healthcare - and is widly regarded as very inefficent compared to no fault accident compensation schemes run by the state a la new zealand, because it doesn't cover what happens when an uninsured driver hits you. If this was the case of course, people with government plans in the US would be less satisfied with their care than those not on government plans - but the VA and Medicare both score very highly. Similarly the universal healthcare systems get higher patient satisfaction than the US healthcare system as a whole. For healthcare this is not true btw. As it's the foundation of your analysis, you might need to reconsider the analysis. Why is it not true? Because you have to deliver emergency care without checking if the person can pay. Emergency care costs, depending, 100 to 1000 times as much as preventing it in primary care (Costs drawn from studies in Australia, it is likely to be higher in the US where the cost of acute care in hospitals is much, much higher than here but primary care isn't so much). The uninsured who are unable to pay for catastrophic care end up in hospital anyway (if a guy collapses in a mall carrying no ID he gets treated at a hospital). This care is very expensive and the uninsured guy is unable to pay (that is why he is unisured, he is poor). The hospital however has to recover its cost somehow! so it bankrupts the poor dude, making him unable to break the poverty cycle, then still has to recover the costs, so it cranks the costs up for all its other patients - aka those on insurance. The end result is you end up paying for a universal healthcare system, but a very bad one. If the guy could have gone to a GP and gotten insulin or whatever, he wouldn't have collapsed! The cost of that hospital visit is probably north of 20k including ambulance costs, the costs of treating him at the GP level is about 1/100th of that a year. So you're overpaying massively compared to a universal healthcare scheme where our collapse guy could have got primary care. The other alternative is to let people who don't have their insurance company approved ID chip installed literally die on the streets, so your pick really. I understand that the government or corporations chipping people is part of apocalyptic US right wing fantasies about judgement day, so people might be in favour of that?

You're obviously right - though does the WBF ever publish anything about why they do stuff? The banned and restricted list in Magic: The Gathering is accompanied by regular news items on their website from the guy who makes the decisions that outline why things are being banned. Additionally the the list is regularly reviewed and cards are unbanned as possible to minimise the length of the banned list. This is an effective process - has the WBF ever done something similar?

I don't think that 1+ promises length or shortness - the intention is clearly to prohibit wonder bids or similar which, to my understanding were defined as 0-1 (maybe 2) or 5+ or similar. Length or shortness (to accept my view you have to agree that a three card holding is neither length or shortness, if you disagree you reach your conculsion) However that doesn't matter really - the larger issue is that it is totally preposterous that the bid is treated as anything other than an artifical bid.

The insurance company that gets the best rates for hospital care is Medicare. Not for drugs though because you ban Medicare from negotiating with the drug companies. A simple fix would be to give everyone access to Medicare's negotiated prices for all services, and let them negotiate with drug companies. Also legalise parallel imports from Canada and the like. Also, change your patent and copyright protection laws. As for what happened, well it's obvious. Everyone else went down various degrees of a national insurance / single pay scheme, and you didn't. The specific issue is that you have misaligned incentives. The insurance companies are rewarded for denying your coverage. This is literally the most profitable move for them to make at any point in time. It is also the opposite of what you want as the customer. The only way to fix this is by having the insurance companies incentives aligned to yours. There is a similar incentives misalignment in the US about primary care and acute care. In the US the hospitals are finacially rewarded if you come to hospital and need expensive treatment for something easily preventable in primary care. (There are probably similar incentives to overtreat in primary care, but getting people to show up to primary care is hard enough). But for you the customer, going to hospital is a bad outcome. Incentives are misaligned again. You could do this in lots of ways, and I invite you to think of some. The reason public sector insurance works better is there is no profit motive for the government to screw you out of coverage, and they can capture more of the positive externalities created by keeping you alive. Incentives are better aligned. Similar where the government is responsible for both primary and acute care, they want to get you out of acute care and into primary care - which is also your desired outcome.

This is ridiculous. While 1C = 1+ C is not a HUM, it is artificial.

It's not even how much better anyone else's is, it's that the US has a healthcare system that is just amazingly bad. It has everyone elses problems AND a whole bunch more! If you want to see why everyone's healthcare systems are apocalytipically awful, check out what percentage of recommended care is delivered to AIDs patients (it typically ranges between 40 and 60% of what the WHO guidelines are), and the prescription error rates - studies in Europe indicate that somewhere over 40% (ranging to as high as 80% for non pediatrics specialists doing pediatric care) of all prescriptions are either contraindicated or proscribed in incorrect doses for the patient and symptoms presented. The Australian system kills about a 747 load of people a year through prescription errors alone - but that's not an exceptionally high rate, it's slightly better than average. The reason why the US system is awful is this A) It's doesn't do any better than anyone else B) costs two to three times what other people pay C) doesn't cover a huge chunk of your population. Thats why everyone sits around an laughs at the US in this regard - it's the tri-defecta (sic) of problems. But make no mistake - everyone's healthcare system is screwed up because doctors are unable to do their jobs effectively any more (which is why I laugh when people say they want to choose their doctors, how the hell do you know when they are making mistakes? These guys all make like 10+ errors a day and they don't notice and they are doctors with medical training!)

There are lots of constructs where slam is going to be on though, ignoring partners actual hand, particularly after the preempt on your right shows that he's likely to have 10+ HCP. All you need is two cover cards, but I have no idea how to find out about the situation.

Yeah, that was my concern, so I had no idea what to do and just bid 4S. I was considering 5S as well, but not convinced of the merits of that either.

Unfortunately hand records are not available on line, so some of the small spots are missing, but south deals, all NV, sitting west I had S: AKQJT9543 H: 9 D: A C: 73 and partner had S: 8 H: xxx D: KQ9xx C: AJTx Bidding is opened 3H by south and then they pass throughout. 6S makes, but how do you bid it? I was extremely puzzled. We have no specific agreements and this hand blew my mind.