pilowsky

People are people for sure, but... The USA of today bears absolutely no resemblance to the USA the founders were organising. The population of the USA in 1776 was less than 3 million. It was somewhat larger in 1861. In any event, in 1787 neither California, Wyoming nor Minnesota were states. Women, Slaves and First nations people were not permitted to vote. So the voting population in 1776 may have been well under 1 million. Washington was elected with less than 40,000 votes. To put that in context there are 200,000 members of the British white nationalist party attempting to replace Boris Johnson. The constitution that the revered founders put together was fit for purpose if the purpose was to run the ACBL. Basically a small country club. The irony of Trump running the USA out of a small country club in Florida is not lost on me.

Fuzzy Logic? In Florida?

Or the " " perhaps?

It is still structural racism. Just because something was established with one thing in mind does not mean that it doesn't give effect to something else. The objective of preventing California from "taking over" Wyoming - what a proposition! - seems to have enabled a tiny minority to exert disproportionate control of everyone.

[hv=https://www.bridgebase.com/tools/handviewer.html?lin=st||pn|~~M104596a,~~M10289dc,~~M7573r2j,~~M2578u29|md|3SKT73HK843DQ9CKJ5,S852HJDAJ632CQ742,SAHT97DT754CAT986,SQJ964HAQ652DK8C3|sv|o|rh||ah|Board%201|mb|P|mb|1S|an|Major%20suit%20opening%20--%205+%20!S;%2011-21%20HCP;%2012-22%20total%20points%20|mb|P|mb|2S|an|Simple%20raise%20--%203+%20!S;%207-10%20total%20points%20|mb|P|mb|P|mb|P|]400|300| Interesting that basic GIB doesn't touch it on the practice table. Must be an 'advanced robot' thing.[/hv]

Isn't the 3♥ bidder Thorvald the human?

The type of electoral fraud perpetrated by the creation of the Senate (and it's ludicrous powers) is much worse than the outrageous redistricting Gerrymanders. The structure of the US Senate is inherently racist. Designed to protect the wealth of the few (as shown above) from the aspirations of the many. If one single government structure has destroyed the hopes and dreams of the USA it's the Senataliban. A bunch of (by and large) crusty old white men that are clueless about the poverty, and suffering they create with all there desperate whining about "working across the aisle" and "creating bipartisanship to achieve the greater good". What is the net result? No health care, no infrastructure. no education, systemic racism, the list started after the civil war. When were all citizens of the USA allowed to vote? 1965. How old were you in 1965? Black women couldn't legally vote for John F Kennedy. The first time they were able to vote was for Richard Nixon in 1968. Even with the egregious gerrymandering in the lower house they still manage to elect Democrat majorities that can happily pass laws. Unfortunately they have no say in getting those laws past the upper house goons and even though they are the House of Representatives they cannot affect the appointment of Judges. American exceptionalism is an exception amongst other functioning first world democracies. I don't know what the answer is - we have our own problems - but one thing's for sure: you can't polish a turd.

Does this mean that your fundamental problem with GIB is that you don't like the bidding system that it uses and you want the developers to change it to something more to your liking?

Wrong. Senate races are Gerrymandered by definition, which is why the senate in Paul Keating's words are "unrepresentative swill". One of the primary differences between a pluralistic democracy where there is one vote/one value and the USA is the Senate. California (Population: 39,613,493) Texas (Population: 29,730,311) Florida (Population: 21,944,577) New York (Population: 19,299,981) Pennsylvania (Population: 12,804,123) Illinois (Population: 12,569,321) Ohio (Population: 11,714,618) Georgia (Population: 10,830,007) North Carolina (Population: 10,701,022) Michigan (Population: 9,992,427) Wyoming (Population: 581,075) Vermont (Population: 623,251) Alaska (Population: 724,357) North Dakota (Population: 770,026) South Dakota (Population: 896,581) Delaware (Population: 990,334) Rhode Island (Population: 1,061,509) Montana (Population: 1,085,004) Maine (Population: 1,354,522)

If two very senior opinion leaders in America are unable to think of a political force more dangerous than a bunch third-rate Hermann Göring lookalikes then all hope is lost. Unless they mean that stupidity, greed and gormlessness, constitutes a dangerous political philosophy.

Looking at BBO on a Chrome tab. First noticed that the Double dummy function was not responding then multiple outages on bits of the platform. Some functions are not responding - clicking on the three white hamburgers doesn't do anything. Unable to scroll up recent hands to see number 1. Messages/People/History/Account tabs not responding. Just tested if I could start a robot challenge - works OK but when the blank History area opened there's now a random board from an old tourney in the square below the history. Edit - and now, 30 minutes later back to "normal". Edit - 1 minute later - spoke too soon hung then crashed...

A major flaw with the argument of American industry/policy makers regarding the need for patent protection is that they are actually agrarian socialists: their profits belong to them and their costs must be shared by everyone. See if you can work out what is wrong with the following statements remembering that the only reason that major companies succeed is because they get a highly educated workforce free of charge. 1. We need tax breaks to set up industry in America because labour costs are too high. 2. We need to overcharge for the drugs that we patent because we need the extra money to invest in new drugs. When the Chinese government discovered that the USA was sending its soft plastics to China for recycling and that the company doing it was just making a tiny profit but at the cost of workers health that the Chinese community had to pay for, leading to a net loss, they shut it down. In Australia we do something with a similar effect. If a company can't be profitable because of our stringent occupational health and safety laws it shuts down. The problem is that we export our pain and import our pleasure. A kind of affective capitalism. Eventually, the people suffering for our joy get annoyed and say genug ist genug.

Noam Chomsky is too busy to contribute to this discussion directly but here's what he had to say on the topic of America to the 'intentists' art movement. Spoiler alert - he doesn't like Ted Cruz.

I wonder if he knows what eggplant is slang for?

This is an interesting question (to me anyway). If GIB based its leads purely on simulation, and if its partner paid no attention to the 'meaning' of leads, we might expect that from a holding of Axxxx against no trump, or AKxx in a suit contract GIB would randomly choose any equal x in the first case or A or K in the second. Given that it reliably leads 4th down (NT), K from AK (suit contracts), top of doubleton etc it seems that there are some overriding rules on top of the simulation to choose the suit to lead. Similarly (and I say this with pretty much no actual evidence), GIB defenders appear to discard high when it wants partner to lead to it through dummy/declarer.

The problem with Trump supporters is not that they don't believe experts. They know what an expert is, they go to the doctor when they're sick and take their car to the mechanic when it doesn't work just like everyone else. Trump supporters have a different problem. Imagine you live in a country where every day from the moment you're born you are told that there is a divine being who decides everything and so long as you believe in his (always a he) existence you will succeed in life, become insanely wealthy and never have to worry about anything. After spending a lifetime like this you wake up one day and there's a problem you can't quite get your head around. What to do? Well the answer of course is that George Soros pinged you with a space laser. When a person with a formal thought disorder tells you that they are required to hang around the headquarters of the FBI with a gun or that Salman Rushdie is Satan, they aren't exercising any kind of 'right'. They've reached a point in their existence where the stuff they were told in school and the stuff they see in front of them cannot both be true. When this happens they make posts about M.B. Mathews in the water cooler of a Bridge Forum.

Noam Chomsky discusses power, justice and the state with Michel Foucault in 1971. Plus ca change. There's a part 1 - .

This comes from a BBOfest tourney a moment ago - real people. You have 30 seconds per decision. Matchpoints, strong NT system, nil vul. How do you open this hand?[hv=pc=n&n=sakq6542hdaqj865c]133|100[/hv] Whatever you open opps will get to 4♥ and your partner will have passed. What now?

I'm with you Ken. It was hard to be certain which problem exercised Simon HB's correspondent the most. Possibly she was most concerned about being married to a 63 year old accountant.

Maybe it's the element of danger that causes the enjoyment.

Interesting idea. GIB - in common with all computer programs has some features of psychopathy (I assume the spelling error in your title wasn't a veiled reference to Python?). Lack of empathy and remorse - tick.Inability to distinguish between right and wrong - tick.Behaviour that conflicts with social norms - probably gets a pass on this one.Manipulating/hurting others - to do this there needs to be intent so no.Disregard for the safety of others - complete.Frequent criminality - no.Gets angry with others - never.Arrogant - nope.Lies often - well, hardly ever.Has a superficial charm - not that I've noticed unless you mean Pycharm - see above. On balance it seems that GIB does have some characteristics of p(s)ychopathy, but no more - possibly less - than the average human player.

Yes. If you want to create a board click on any hand in your history then click on export and choose hand editor. Now choose 'new'. Then make the hand you want. Save it - 'save deal as'. Go to the file in your account you saved it in and click on it then choose export - load to table (only available on teaching/bidding tables). play it/save it - etc. Is that what you meant?

If you want to keep track of articles that have been retracted - representing only the stuff that has been caught and dealt with, you can search the "Retraction Watch" database. Here are the results for amyloid: the stuff that is seen in the brain of people that had Alzheimer's disease. A simple example is the old saw that Bridge improves cognitive function and decreases the risk of dementia. There is no evidence for this. The 'findings' (very slender indeed) show an association between playing Bridge/Chess/wordle/ etc etc and better levels of cognitive function but there are no studies that I'm aware of that demonstrate causation.

What would you do? [hv=pc=n&s=sjt9864hkj8432dqc&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=pp1c]133|200[/hv] What I did. What basic robots do.