pilowsky

Not being an accountant, lawyer, prominent businessman or prosecutor with the SDNY, it is not entirely clear to me what it means when an accounting company severs all ties with an organisation. But it smells bad.

Great. That clears everything up.

Rambling is fine with me. I was not suggesting that a large portion of the population is suffering from a treatable mental illness. What I am suggesting is that the susceptibility to irrational thinking lies on a spectrum. (No jokes about Bridge and chess players and spectrums intended). Since you mention hydrocephalus, here is a link to an article discussing a patient of Dr John Lorber. Lorber is reported as follows: "There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, "who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honours degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain." The student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply out of interest. "When we did a brain scan on him," Lorber recalls, "we saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled mainly with cerebrospinal fluid." The reason I recall this story is that the case was presented at the very first international congress I attended. The CT scan was shown and then a PET scan (showing activity rather than structure). Although there wasn't much there, what was there shone like a bright light. Returning to the original point, I suspect that the capacity for rational decision making is not as widespread as one might hope. A lack of this capacity is not a mental illness, but it can be problematic when faced with significant adversity.

Doesn't "the cards in order of rank with lowest ranking cards towards declarer," mean SHDC?

Thanks. I saw the idea of West leading from Jx and being able to finesse twice if I take in dummy. This would have made more sense in a NT contract. Given that the bidding was 1S-2S-4S, the problem I was faced with was trying to imagine a layout where South had enough to bid 4S, North only had enough to bid 2S, neither East nor West had enough length or strength to poke their heads above the parapets and it was still critical to take the first trick in dummy.

[hv=pc=n&s=skqj97hk54dak92ck&w=s432hj2dq83cat532&n=sat86hat9d54cj987&e=s5hq8763djt76cq64&d=s&v=0&b=11&a=1sp2sp4sppp]399|300| I found this lead problem and the question was "What to play from dummy after a ♥J lead from west" The answer was the ♥A and not my choice of the ♥9. "Assume 4th best spot leads and standard honor leads". In the problem only the hearts and the bidding are shown. http://rpbridge.net/cgi-bin/gt11.pl Why?[/hv]

Richard Pavlicek has a very concise summary of different evaluation methods - http://www.rpbridge.net/3t00.htm

I think the critical issue is that a substantial portion of the world population are nuts. This was less of a problem 100 years ago when the world population (let's see if I can get it right this time) was about 1,800,000,000. Now that it's 7,794,798,739 there are a lot more crazy people. Some estimates are that diagnosable schizophrenia is about 1/300. This figure excludes all those people that harbour very strange ideas, have a tendency to speak really quickly and make no sense (mania), or just have a tendency to never change their mind when it's made up. The increasing tendency to manage mental illness in the community (for reasons I won't go into) means that a lot of people are wandering around not being noticed. A very common place for people that don't know what they're talking about or who are bordering on florid madness to end up in is places where their thoughts require no evidence at all: religion and politics come to mind. Individual skill at certain very specific things (tennis, singing, chess, acting etc etc) are compartmentalised from skills at empathy and caring for others. The concept that doing something that requires even a mote of self-sacrifice for the benefit of all - and ultimately yourself is a concept so alien to many that it was written out of the documents from the US founders where the sole emphasis seems to be "the individual". To return to the numbers, if the incidence on election day of people that are inclined to think that bananas are wombats is about 1 in 200 then a large portion of the vote may be swayed by people with ideas even more unusual than a belief in the tooth fairy. Now, if you can motivate all these people to vote in a system where voting is not compulsory and where the turnout is typically low it isn't hard to see how Trump gets elected. [edited to remove a typical arithmetic error]

Only half?

I'm not sure if it's helpful but Neil Timm has an extensive discussion on Precision in his 2/1 book. This is the 2021 (7th edition) of "2/1 Game Force system: The final word" with Chapters on Precision simplified, Transfer Precision and Meckwell lite.

Another Fox factoid. So, my question is, what is the "work" that Greg Gutfeld contributes to society that allows him to be entitled to food and shelter while 2 million men get nothing?

I was told Trumps on the right prevents a fight. In one club there was a tendency to put the led suit on the left. I'm still uncertain of the legality of either.

Look at all those happy white faces: giddy with activism.

Got it - that's what I did and nothing changes. I guess I don't have access to that feature.

Apart from annoying declarer by interrupting their train of thought, can you suggest a way that it might damage the opposition - unless they have a super-secret code where palm down means "don't forget the 6 is top" for example? If I was declarer I would find this type of behaviour the opposite of helpful.

Can you clarify what you mean by "put +video+ in the teaching table description". There is a space for "description" when starting a table. Do you mean type +video+ in that space or something else?

Same problem here but now it sometimes offers a list of previous messages when I click in the chat box.

Well, obviously they don't play high encourage in the sense that they are informing a sentient being that they "want" something. It's a computer program not a spouse. It's a problem with anthropomorphising machines. They don't "remember" (as in random access memory), they assign values to things and then use an algorithm to calculate the optimal answer to a problem based on the assigned values. Having said that, when the program seems to consistently play a high card if it is beneficial to have that suit returned (and I repeat, I may be entirely wrong here) humans might be tempted to label this "behaviour" high encourage. At other times they randomise (so do I) to avoid giving anything away.

It's in the "main Bridge Club" in casual. If you "friend" your friends they can click on your name and "join" the table or sit at it if you change the settings to allow them to sit or kibbitz.

This is the real issue. As I noted above there is a difference between the "Company" and individual shareholders that have varying amounts of taxable income. Given that 100+ years of governments attempting to regulate corporate governance has totally failed to have any discernible effect on the obscene concentration of wealth, it seems that the original premise of this thread "has US democracy been trumped" is misguided. It was fubar long before Trump - he simply crystallised the resentment that poor people felt towards the concentration of wealth in the US economy. Ironic considering he's Trump. There's a reason why poor people get exploited, while the rich take whatever they want. They know something is not quite right but they can't do anything about it. It's the same sensation I get when I play Bridge most of the time but at least Bridge is a game I can walk away from. My children won't starve, I won't be homeless and I can still get medical care.

On a side note, robots sometimes replace humans mid-hand. Does the replacement GIB get to peek at the played tricks or do they suffer the same disadvantage as human subs?

Although with enough lawyers, guns and money you can avoid both. .

This might help - https://bit.ly/BBOPractice

BBO accepts .LIN format which look like this: qx|o2|md|4SAJ42H92DT74CKQ96,ST98HQ87543DQ92C3,SKQ7HAKT6DA6CAT82|rh||ah|Board2|sv|n|pg|| .PBN files look like this: [board "1"] [West "?"] [North "?"] [East "?"] [south "?"] [Dealer "N"] [Vulnerable "None"] [Deal "N:KQ7.AKT6.A6.AT82 653.J.KJ853.J754 AJ42.92.T74.AT82 T98.Q87543.Q92.3"] [scoring "?"] [Declarer "?"] [Contract "?"] [Result "?"] I haven't tried it but apparently this site will convert PBN to LIN

Under "play or watch bridge" Click "Practice" Then "Start a teaching table" Then "Start table". After you seat players/robots there is a button at the bottom labelled "voice" click that and a box comes up allowing you to add speakers. Takes a bit of messing about.