pilowsky

Link Is this the link you wanted to post? East didn't understand how GIB treats a 2♦ overcall of 1NT.

That's the way I see it. The average Australian is willing to pay more tax than the average American - judging from my position on the two political quizzes. I'm presumably the same, but the political scale is markedly shifted when I do the US quiz. In Australia, I'm plum in the middle - in the USA; I'm aligned with the evil far-left communists. In Australia, Bernie would easily get to be the leader of our "left-aligned" major party.

Looks like the fringe is wagging the dog.

He's rightcha know. I've heard Garrison Keillor on the radio. He devotes many hours to discussions about accents and wrote extensively on the topic: https://www.prairiehome.org/story/1997/10/11/the-accent-school.html.

Fair point. From here, we get into a very lengthy discussion about how each country treats all its people: citizens, non-citizens, ex-felons, etc. A rabbit hole best avoided, I think.

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No wonder it's hard to get US citizenship.

From looking at the methodology it appears that the pollsters are attempting to help you work out your alignment to the groups that are seeking election. They do this by looking at the published policies of the largest parties (Labor, Liberal, Green and a few others). Then they look at the policies that are of most interest to Australians based on GKW and create a visual analogue scale of agreement with the positions. The difference in results that I get taking both the US and Australian 'test' reveals the massive "right-shift" in US political thinking - nothing to do with objective left/right. What you are doing when you answer the questions is finding out how your views align with the published views of the people standing for election. Clearly, this has very little to do with any kind of synthesised political philosophy. How many Americans have actually read anything by Marx/Hitler/(any American politician)? If they did, would it include a discussion of whether or not to build a US/Mexico wall, or gun control or climate change? People do not vote on the basis of a synthesised political philosophy they vote according to perceived self-interest (emphasis on perceived). I have voted for the Australian Labor Party at every election since I turned 18. Except once when the party leader stated in a speech that "Asians were coming to Australia and stealing your jobs". Since the other party is racist to the core I voted "informal". My vote is typically against my self-interest as an American would perceive it since the party I'm a member of favours higher taxation and more government spending on pointless activities such as health education and welfare. Over the past 10 years, Australia has presided over the slow destruction of investment in education and science - while at the same time moaning about a lack of STEM knowledge. Spending money on things that don't seem useful immediately is not easily understood by the majority. Watch any episode of Rand Paul being contemptuous of science spending.

You might be suspect, but I suspect you mean suspicious - watch out, the American English police will come and revoke your citizenship.

No country in Europe is crazier than the USA (the use of the term 'liberal' in reference to political philosophy is comical in the USA). 1. Switzerland is very tough on citizenship, but citizenship happens to about 0.5% of the population per year (around 40,000 new citizens). More importantly, there is a clearly defined pathway. Switzerland is renowned as the toughest of all European countries. Amongst the many racist things about the USA, you still have to pass an English test to become a citizen (no nasty tinted people allowed here). The US grants citizenship to ~850,000 people each year - which is about 0.26% - roughly half as welcoming as the Swiss - who are notorious (although better than the Japanese). When Melania Trump gave a speech she was "called out" by important people like Bette Midler because "she can't speak English". This is hilarious coming from a country where the President ordered the removal of diphthongs because they were too hard to spell; the reason the Americans have fones of different colors I suppose. 2. The US govt produces forms in every language - how is this a form of liberalism? 3. No official church: I take it this is some sort of joke? In the US, funding of churches (in the form of tax concessions) is given to any youtube that believes almost anything that must be "taken on faith" - including the church of sciencefictionology.

Methodology notwithstanding, it is clear from the type of questions asked that some things are rated very highly as 'matters of concern' in the USA that doesn't rate as important enough to be asked about in the Australian version. You might not understand these types of questionnaires or take them seriously, but I know for a fact that this is how political parties guide their policy-making. Politicians don't really care about abstract ideas of moral 'good'; they care about being elected. Australian far-right loonies exist. They are just the same in their world-view as those in the USA. It is even possible that the proportions are similar. The rump of the MAGA base in the USA is about 20-30 million (more than the population of Australia). Catchphrases like 'cancel culture' are being promoted (with little success) by Sky news (that's what Murdoch calls his Fox channel in Australia). Australia does not have the "right to say what you want" and "the right to carry guns" as top 5 political issues. The left in America would generally be considered 'wet' - left-wing conservatives. The mainstream Republicans would be considered 'dry' - right-wing conservatives. The MAGA faction is a tiny group that sometimes manages to get senate representation because of the vagaries of the Hare-Clark voting system. Someone like Bernie would probably be considered on the right-wing of the Australian Labor (that's how we spell it for the party) Party. I doubt that you would find more than 1% of the Australian electorate in favour of "open-carry" or abolishing free medical care for everyone or eliminating free University education (there is a small PAYG charge now) or getting rid of the social security safety net for the unemployed or aged.

Here's the link to the quiz from the 2016 US Presidential election. I just retook the Australian one from the last election (vote compass ABC Australia (My link) if you want to look it up). They are all constructed by the same company. As usual, I ended up almost exactly in the middle of the square. So, I tried the US version, and it placed me almost on top of Jill Stein. It seems that the average voter in America is incredibly conservative - including those that vote Democrat. I recommend trying both (Scott Morrison=Trump, Pauline Hanson=MTG+LB+MattG), Richard DiNatale=Jill Stein) <--- for reference. Some members of the Forum will be excited to know that the Australian version has a racism detector.

Only the ones where I fail to make the contract and others succeed - which is more than half the time. So - not random in the sense that others are more skilful than me.

My new favo(u)rite website. Learn how Robert E Lee would manage the war in Afghanistan. https://www.donaldjtrump.com/news/news-nqqxjy65sh0

If it's a meaningless bot session I might bid the unusual 4NT and probably end up in a 4/3 Club fit.

It sounds like detecting cheating using a computer ought to be straightforward. In Bridge - unlike many other games, there are some boards where the result depends on luck. This could be a 50% chance of a finesse or a guess about the location of certain cards during the bidding. 'Luck' factors cannot be eliminated unless a pair obtains illicit information; consistently resulting in a right-shift AND skewing of their results curve. A given pair of players will have their outcomes in a tournament distributed across a normal curve depending on their combined skill level + 'luck' factors. Sometimes their curve will move to the left or right depending on how lucky (or, as Bridge players say: skilful) they are over a tournament worth of boards. Next time around, they will be more or less 'skilful', but the shape of the curve will remain the same over time. A friend of mine developed a method for detecting publication bias that may cause problems with meta-analysis (here is a link to the latest iteration, including a program in R). Its mechanics are well above my head, but the principle is that if (usually negative) publications are suppressed, then the scatter of results around the mean will not be normal. Instead, there will be a bias towards (usually) favourable results. One consequence of this approach is that clinical trials now have to be registered so that all of the results are available for meta-analysis no matter the outcome. It seems likely that the same (or similar) approach could be implemented in Bridge. If the results of a pair display a consistent right-shift, there may be something questionable happening. An advantage of this type of approach is that there is no need for experts to assess whether or not a good result occurred because of cheating. I would anticipate that many tournaments would need to be analysed to prove anything - which might be a whole different problem.

I thought other people could transfer funds to your account.

An excellent film where the blob was destroyed by Maybe they should have tried sunlight or bleach.

The blobs prove that the Australian voting system is better (but not perfect) than the US system.

Speaking of cheating - .

Are there many Bridge clubs where getting your face smashed in is a major risk?

I suppose the interesting underlying question is: When you enter an individual game, what do you assume your partner is likely to understand? I play quite a bit of robot Bridge, and I understand quite a lot of the Bot bidding (but not all of it), even the sometimes deceptive alerts. When I play in tournaments where the default is GIB 2/1, there is a lot that I avoid including - but not limited to - Lebensohl, Cappelletti, Texas transfers and the entire minor transfer system. I also don't try Soloway jump shifts. I certainly would avoid DOPI, ROPI. On the other hand, my carding is typically meaningless, so GIB and I have that in common.

I suspect that many Bridge players are lawyers or doctors. Another large group is mathematicians or engineers (software on this forum). A doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician and a software engineer sit down to play bridge - what do they agree on? The first three agree that it's the engineer's fault and go out for a beer while the engineer talks to the support desk. The structure of the game is unique in that it promotes cheating because of its social nature. There are ways around this, but nobody wants them. I like the idea of preventing cheating pairs from playing together permanently. Proving it beyond a reasonable doubt is another problem. If an offender continues their behaviour after being discovered, that may be cause for permanent disbarment. Good luck keeping them away from anonymous sites. I didn't answer the poll because I think the problem is more nuanced than the answers permit, but I agree with the sentiment.

When are you "only playing against robots"? Not that long ago, I was invited to join a group of players who were playing challenge format tournaments on BBO. One of the players ran a Twitch.TV channel. The tournaments typically involve all players paying between $0.29 and $0.50 and competing for masterpoints. Every player plays the same hand as the other players with robots starting East, West and South. Each tournament took about 30 minutes to complete. The Twitch commentator was in the same room as their spouse. During the play of the hand, I watched the progress of the commentator - who was discussing each hand with other players. I didn't think it took very much integrity to realise the possibilities for cheating. But the operator was under the impression that the activity was 'educational' and a bit of 'fun'. This illusion was enhanced because if their channel became more popular, they would make money from it. Wikipedia talks about this form of behaviour in their entry on Cheating in online games: in https://en.wikipedia...n_online_games. They call it 'look-ahead cheating.' I call it 'past-posting' in reference to the George Roy Hill film: The Sting. A technique that is also used IRL This is not the form of behaviour that you describe. I think that assisting a weaker player in succeeding by transferring knowledge to them that they would not otherwise have access to could be described as 'twinking': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinking To decide whether or not a behaviour is cheating, I would apply the harm principle. Ask the question: Does the behaviour cause harm/damage to other players? If you are playing with a friend and you tell them something that they are not aware of AND your action results in a better outcome (score), then the other players were harmed by definition. If you are playing on a practice table where the result is not compared with others, it is impossible to cause harm. If you are taking advantage of a quirk in the system that any other player has equal access to, you are not causing harm. This last point is how the stock market works - if you have information that others do not have access to, you are guilty of insider trading. I like playing with robots as opposition. I find that it enhances my bidding and playing skills because the robots cannot cheat. In the end, I get to compare what I did to others doing the same thing. But, I don't forget that I am playing against people. The motto of the CFMEU - a somewhat socialist society is "Touch one, touch all". Urban guerillas made a song about it - Primum non nocere.