Cthulhu D

The truly dumb part is saying that OH NOES 187,000 people were killed by medical errors is completely ignoring that we saved a much larger number of lives via medicine. The cost of occassional medical errors it the price to be paid for medicine. We seek to constantly reduce medical errors, but we acknowledge that some people are gonna die. It's the same thing with cars. 32,367 die in motor vehicle accidents in the US. This is bad, but that's the cost of doing business with cars.

It's just wrong though. On average, atheists are less likely to commit crimes though they are more likely to commit suicide. Fluffy's comments are just blinked bigotry. It's worth getting to the root cause here though - atheism or religion isn't what causes you to commit crimes, it's how well educated you are, which is mostly a function of how much money your parents earned. Better educated people are more likely to be atheists. Fluffy is just making ridiculous attacks that are completely unsubstantiated by any evidence. Rational and reasoned critiques based on evidence are not bigoted. Fluffy's statement was bigoted.

It's an intent and capability thing. You can control intent - by providing mental healthcare etc or you can control capability by restricting access to firearms and the like. Current US policy doesn't really provide for either, so that's probably not where you want to start. You're missing his point - it's worth looking up his remarks for the full context. His basic thesis is that religion defines the standards by which someone can do evil acts in the name of good. In the other examples you are thinking of, such as someone achieving a powerful position and then using that position to profit at the expense of others (as opposed to profit from his own labours), that is recognised as evil. However when a doctor refuses an abortion to someone who doesn't share his beliefs, and she dies as a result (as recently happened in Ireland), that is upheld as a good act. Besides, it doesn't matter what you do - Fluffy needs to understand that his remarks were bigoted :)

This may actually be the dumbest opinion I've seen expressed on this forum, which is quite an achievement considering the climate change thread. Do you have any evidence at all for this? Indeed, do you have any evidence that it isn't a rise in religious extremism that isn't the cause? Or are you just a bigot? To demonstrate exactly how ill informed your post is, let me try it again with some word substitution! See, that sounds pretty bad, I'm sure you'll agree. Let's try some other stuff! See, that's amazingly racist! Tada! Do you see why your opinion is bigotry? vvv What he said.

You're almost certainly better of splitting the problem in two. The bidding engine and the play engine need no relationship with each other, as long as the bidding engine outputs all infomation it knows about the hand at the end, and the play engine picks that infomation up - but for declarer play, it doesn't even need that (thought it might be wise to do it anyway). It's probably best to split the problem in three, bidding, declarer play and defensive play, and start with bidding or declarer play.

Find you a partner should, in an ideal world, find you a partner and two opponents of roughly equal skills. Quality partners and opposition is a good situation in which to improve imho. It wouldn't cut out the angry asshole partners, but hey, nothings perfect.

It doesn't have to be like this. I don't play on BBO much because it is like this. It's just dumb. Of course it won't work brilliantly for their first first 5 games, but no reason why it shouldn't be functionally perfect after that.

The only workable plan I could come up with entailed ~1000 million dollars of tax hikes, which the house republicans won't pass. Can anyone come up with a workable plan that doesn't include that much in the way of tax increases? Anyway, as for the cost of corporate tax cuts, Romney's plan was a 10% corporate tax cut (from 35 to 25%) which cost $100 billion per year or so. Not that the defacto corporate tax rate in the US is actually much lower due to dumb accounting rules you let corporations use, tax treatments for oil and gas companies that amount to huge subsidies because Exxon is notoriously unprofitable etc. Cleaning those up would let you fund the 10% cut in corporate tax rates straight up.

It appears that raising it from 15% to 20% (or letting the tax cuts expire) is worth about 40$ billion dollars. Eliminating the carried interest provision for hedge fund manages raises a further 13 billion dollars.

http://projects.wsj.com/my-deficit-plan/ Is a good look at the deficit reduction that the US needs to do. Post your plans! I raised taxes by a billion dollars, so I wouldn't get elected.

Polls need a 'candy' option for precisely this reason.

Yup. Maybe not at exactly the same time, but yeah.

Two observations 1) Lots and lots of people play SAYC, so you'll want to learn it for playing in pickup partnerships, and, importantly, playing against SAYC players. Hrothgar is correct that availability of partners is more important than the technical merits of the system. 2) 2/1 and SAYC are so similar that converting from SAYC -> 2/1 doesn't require much time. Given the popularity (and superiority imho) of playing 1M-1NT as semi-forcing, the only significant differences are in 2/1 auctions that just don't happen that often. With that in mind, time invested in SAYC will help you with 2/1, and visa versa.

Yeah this would be a great and simple addition.

It's not that at all - it's that the blue collar unions are in with the environmentalists, the civil rights guys, people opposing police powers and such and they all want different things. Building a coalition is trickier. The right has fewer groups comprising it and thus a more cohesive ideaology. The fact that the right is typically more authoritarian helps as well. The problem becomes of course when winning your demographics stops being enough to actually win - the left is practised at getting the hispanic vote to work togther pro abortion activists, the right.. well, just go to freerepublic.com to see what the right thinks about working together with hispanics or pro abortion activists! Yeah, this points partly to why purely alogrithmic approaches don't quite work. It is logical to group together communities of intrest, like the people who live on a bay or whatever. If you are intrested in purely alogrithmic approaches, someone has done this for the US already: http://www.rangevoting.org/GerryExamples.html It also includes some awesome gerrymanders like Florida's 22 and 23 districts which were purely desired to waste the votes of as many democrats as possible. See also Texas and Illinois.

I would love this.

It matters hugely because it is what keeps the congress like it is, and also prevents congressmen from either side moving towards the centre. Without that you cannot compromise. Without comprise you cannot pass legislation. If your legislative body cannot pass legislation, you don't have a government any more.

It's an established fact that the US is heavily gerrymandered - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-league-of/309084/ Really it's one of the most damaging forces in the US today, because it means you're not running against the other side, you're running against the other wing of your own party!

It's clear that the US has a major problem with Gerrymandering in the lower house though. I do not understand why the land of the free continues to tolerate this sort of bizarre disenfranchisement of the voters. Only one of 53 seats in California has changed hands in the last decade?

Yeah, it's much less of a problem with transfer walsh. The relevant sequences are 1C-1X-1NT 1C - 1D - 1S 1C - 1D - 1H 1C - 1H - 1S And of those, 1 and 4 are perfect for XYZ, 3 just needs you to resolve what you do with the 1S bid, and 2 is unsuitable for the reasons you point out. The frequency of 1, 3 and 4 is so high that it costs little.

Yeah, it's easy to combine them as they have no impact on each other. The only thing you have to change is if you you use 1C-1D!-1H!-1S as an artifical relay, you dont need to put those hands through XYZ. This is good, because it lets you get out in 2C more easily.

Transfer Walsh is supplanting Walsh as it is technically superior and conceptually easier. I'm pretty sure Walsh's existance is mostly due to system regs. Transfer Walsh will use use different responses for the game force values hands - typically rebidding 1NT with the 17-19 NT or reversing with game force unbalanced hands (so after 1C - 1D! (showing hearts), 1NT is 17-19 balanced, and 2S is typically the spade reverse hand, while NT is a very good raise or similar). The exact structure depends on your NT range. Playing a 10-13 NT NV, I sacrifice accuracy when accepting the transfer in return for the NT range, but you don't need to do that when playing a 14-16 NT. The things we like about it is that you can easily play a 14-16 NT (which we reckon is a modest win when you open 1NT with 14, a modest loss when you open 1C with 17, but the combination of transfer walsh and a 14-16 NT is a modest win on all auctions that go 1C! - (showing a major) - (accepting a transfer), responder is now in control and there is lots of space in the auction, or responder can get out, and these auctions are very frequent. http://bridge.mgoetze.net/bbf.html has good links to discussion.

It's been shown that you are right - people do better when you actually give them the apartment or whatever, or have some scheme where they can buy the place off you after renting for a while, and these schemes are cost effective for the government because they flip a homeless guy incurring medical bills into a low skill worker who pays a small amount of net taxes. Unfortunately, they tend to be opposed by segements of the electorate despite the fact they are profitable for the government to operate.

I'm pretty sure they already have a big order in that go something along the lines of "Stop talking making amazingly dumb and ill informed comments about rape!"

We play the jump rebid quite strong, I was expecting a 16/17 count or equivelent playing strength (which he had). If you don't use the jump rebid for those hands, what do you do?