onoway

ok I am likely to bring the wrath of everyone down on my head, but to some extent I do believe that if someone doesn't do what she or he can to rectify a situation then they do indeed take some responsibility for continuing to be in that situation. An analogy would be someone in a burning house waiting for a fireman to come in and carry her out when she was perfectly able to walk out on her own, and complaining to people that the firemen were taking too long, or had soot on their clothes. I don't expect them to put out the fire but I do expect people to take some responsibility for themselves. This appears to be a politically incorrect way of viewing things these days when it seems that no matter what it's always someone else's fault or someone else's responsibility. I was raised to think otherwise and still do, for any number or reasons. This is not to blame anyone for getting INTO a situation in the first place, just that they do hold some responsibility for doing what they can..it may be nothing or it may be a lot..to get out of a bad one. I once worked with a woman who had been so badly hurt by her boyfriend that she had been in intensive care for some time with the outcome in doubt. It was not the first time she had landed in hospital because of his attentions, but it was the latest, and worst. She was living with her mother, who was also working in camp. She was frequently talking about/trying to justify going back to her boyfriend. There are so many people who can make positive use of help that I personally don't have the energy/time to spend on people who can't or refuse to help themselves or even make use of the help they are given. There are professionals who are paid to help such people, and I suggest to such people that they find a professional to help them. T'aint me, and frankly, I don't know how to sympathize with those people without in some way validating their disfunction. I've no interest in trying to help someone who will try to drown me in the process of rescuing them. Luckilly, such people are very much in the minority, and most people can/do benefit from help that's offered, and will make use of whatever help is appropriate to help themselves.

I agree with your comments and found the link interesting. The findings are comparable with others I have read. In Canada it is estimated to cost over $100,000 per year per man to keep him in jail. The $100,000 doesn't include such things as the costs of getting him or her TO prison nor say anything about what happens when they get out, nor include the impact their antisocial behaviour has on the victims, both in their own mental and physical well being as well as loss or damage to their possessions. That's way way way more than anyone is estimating it would cost to help a family at risk. Such help would likely mean that that child would never end up in the justice system in the first place. Seems to come down to pay me now (when I am young and need help) or pay me later (through jails and mental health institutions.) The thing is that people hate to think that someone else is getting something for nothing, especially if its something of "theirs" (tax dollars) and although the majority of people on welfare are in real need of help, there will always be some who scam any system. Of course those are the ones most people focus on. One thing I thought was interesting in the study was the observation that the money was unconditional seemed to be important. This is a point which has come up more than once in Canada. Once a client got over a certain threshhold of income..fine, but the threshold was set so low as to not only keep them in poverty, but jeapordise any future help available.. "why did you leave your job" etc. More than one way to charge for help and humiliation/disrespect is one way that many (not all, for sure) welfare workers use (intentionally or not) on their clients, many of whom already have little or no self respect for being there in the first place. Someone with no self respect is unlikely to be able to teach their kids how to have any., Having the money come unconditionally wipes those issues out. Still, it's interesting how many people don't object to or even think about the costs of the justice system (jail) but they do object strenuously to providing for needy kids. Perhaps that's why the US has such a comparitively high percentage of their population in jails. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 It's not a cost effective way to budget.

Possibly a compromise in that once a player has reached a predetermined percentage of abandoned tables there might be some sort of insignia..or a change in the banner colour like "looking for a game" is now green,"runner" nicks could be bright purple :) but all that likely would do would be that they would just make a new nick, so not sure what it would accomplish. Also, it doesn't address the problem of unfairly labelling people who have unreliable internet connections and are not leaving the tables by choice. As far as I know, the completion rate also doesn't distinguish between runners and people who have not played a sufficient numbr of hands to have one, so to speak, even if they have completed all the hands they set out to play. Speaking of which, I have a question..since the tables automatically reset to a new hand when a hand finishes, does leaving a table at that point count as "leaving the table with unfinished hands?" If not, at what point in time does it count? Also, does leaving a table with 3 GIBS count? Unless a table is blocked and requires permission, normally table hosts won't know anyway until someone sits that they are a runner. If the host then boots them in anticipation, they will have another black mark and it becomes a cycle they cannot get out of. It would be too bad if BBO simply became a bunch of locked tables everywhere, quite an unfriendly sort of place, entirely different to what it (imo) ought to be. In any case, I tend to think in terms of how much information and control there is on a site such as this, it's the same as for government, a good rule to follow is less is more. Stick to the important stuff like abuse would be my vote, and let the little irritations alone, they're just part of life.

Fair enough. I consider being equated with a troll because I suggest that taking steps to help herself is a good thing or being yelled at that we (the women who responded) had no right to suggest that HIS idea of restricting interaction from the general population wasn't the optimum solution, (unless we were somehow "qualified", a restriction he himself was immune from) is being something other than helpful or supportive. If others disagree that's certainly their right. I stand by what I said.

I thought that a few times in the dim and distant past there had been a couple of tourneys run for forum posters..not the JEC matches, just normal tourneys. People registered on a thread in the forums to play, so anyone who never visited the forums didn't even know about it, it self selected for the people to play. I thought they were offered as a chance for forum posters to interact outside of the forums. People who had low tolerance for ..erratic or less than stellar play or people on the other end of the skill spectrum who were intimidated didn't participate but it was just a fun thing anyway. Then there were those (like me) who found out about them too late to join. Was I dreaming about this? If so, then can I put it forward as a possibly interesting idea? If not, can we have another one please?

I find I am upset about your posts and since I am not a yellow so don't represent BBO, I can say what I think. I think that your posts show a neanderthal attitude possibly reflecting a Walter Mitty point of view of yourself as some sort of knight defending a lady in distress, or more darkly, reflecting a preference for women to stay feeling helpless and out of control. The latter is early stages on the same continuum as the predator's behaviour, so I hope that they come out of the first. I'm generously assuming so, and hoping they reflect simple ignorance rather than intention, though your energetic attacks on the women posters here make me wonder. They most certainly reflect a truly astounding arrogance.

One of the recurring themes I keep running across, obviously from people who are (economic) doomsday people to one degree or another, is the gloomy statement that "all fiat currencies have failed. Each and every society which has tried them has been forced to go back to using a system based on something tangible (usually gold)." Or words to that effect. Anyone more knowlegeable than I care to comment?

I don't know where GreenMan gets his idea that I am saying not to protect herself. Nor did I or anyone else ever suggest her wellbeing was not a concern. I AM saying that to have BBO set up a way for people to hide from the general BBO population by restricting any communications from anyone other than yellows or already established friends would be a sad thing and would indeed mean that the stalker "won". Women who allow such things to restrict their lives unnecessarily are choosing to remain a victim, allowing someone else's problems to limit their freedom. I'm sure GreenMan will feel I am being unsympathetic but that's the reality. Live with it. Hiding without valid reason is demeaning and destructive to self respect. I posted about my background and have come back and deleted it, I don't owe GreenMan or anyone else any explanation as to how I "qualify" to give my opinion, suffice to say I do. In any case it seems the height of arrogance for a man to tell ANY women who themselves have experienced the same problems, that they have to have experienced a certain degree of harrassment, presumably which meets his criteria, in order to give an opinion on the matter. It would seem he feels that somehow he is more of an expert on such things than people who have shared the experience of being targetted by a predator. Also, overreacting is not helpful. To use the term "terror" in this situation is absurd. Upset, yes, shocked, embarrassed, angry, frustrated, many things but not terror. The guy is known to live halfway around the world from her, doesn't know who she is or where she lives and has no way to contact her in real life, this is entirely online. Several of us have given her ways to prevent him from being able to contact her or even know who she is or when she is online. He cannot affect her if she chooses not to let him, To define this as being terrifying trivializes the anguish of people who are living with people who are predatory and abusive, and who are in daily danger of being hurt or even killed by the person abusing them, or those who are unfortunate enough to physically encounter one of these subhumans on the prowl. Her solutions are simple and easy, theirs are not. I might also point out that she knows the country where the stalker originates and suggested in one of the other threads she started about this that she contact the police there. She could offer documentation from her BBO chat log. Most countries now have some sort of law about cyberbullying and this certainly qualifies. Women ( or men for that matter) who take steps to help themselves in a situation are more likely to walk away stronger than those who count on others to do it all for them. Encouraging them to feel helpless, misunderstood and "hard done by" if anyone suggests they do what they can for themselves is a very destructive thing to do.

Just saw a headline that some parts of Australia are saying they are in the worst drought ever. Guess it depends on where you choose to measure. Another arctic vortex is supposedly set to hit the North American midwest and east in a couple of days or so, possibly worse than the one a week or so ago. They say dry sand is a good insulator.

I think by now JEC deserves a thread of its own, maybe two..one for the players scheduled/wanting to play and another for the hand recaps. Any other forum events which might be offered are likely to be buried by the volume of posts connected only to the JEC events. Not everyone wants to wander through all the JEC hands on the off chance that another event might be cowering in a corner somewhere. At one time wasn't there an occassional forums tourney?

It is annoying when people leave abruptly and the message comes up that they've gone to a tourney, especially when they've just arrived at the table..once or twice the player has been there for less than a hand. It's rude and inconsiderate. However, I don't think it's up to BBO to monitor this sort of rudeness.. everyone has their pet peeves and pretty soon BBO would be a cross between the police and Miss Manners, hardly their mandate imo. Point 2 is more difficult, quite a few players are in situations where computer connections are iffy and inconsistent. If players leave as soon as they're going to get a poor result, you can take some comfort in the idea that (I think) the player who started the hand gets to reap the results. Mark them as enemy and don't worry about them..it would be highly unfair to group the people with poor connections in with those twerps. Point 3> Lots of people, possibly most, would rather have someone of relatively similar skill with a relatively similar profile sit as partner than stare at an empty chair for 10 minutes. (if you leave as soon as someone sits who doesn't fit your profile or expectations, would you then qualify for leaving the table without finishing the hand?) I personally find it obnoxious when people sit at table, take a look around and leave again, or ask to sit and then take off, as though they've checked us out and found us all deficient. (It's interesting that none of these so far are particularly good bridge players according to their My Hands records, at least the ones I've checked for interest's sake). BBO has a lot of members and some of them have the "people" skills of a cockroach, that's just the way it is. If you are very fussed about it then set your own table and lock it for anyone you don't approve of. But then don't complain when you have to wait for someone to show up who meets your standards. Personally, I think you need to relax a little and go with the flow; life is full of little irritations and if you let them all get to you then you'll be stressing way too much for a long and happy life.

I tend to think that that is what government is SUPPOSED to do but they have mostly got way off track. Someone once said that it costs so many millions of dollars now to get elected to top offices that when people get there they owe a whole lot of favors, and if they don't honor them then somehow everything they try to do gets lost or buried. If one party comes out with something great, the other side has to shoot it down just because they didn't suggest it. I'm sure that's not the way things were supposed to happen, but more and more it's the way things are happening. Not sure I can point to anything much that's come out of our government in the past while that I'd consider in any way related to "the good of all". I can surely point to a whole lot which is not. I've no idea how you get back to the ideal. Jefferson had something pertinent to say" Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny”

If the end result is a drop anyway from 3rd to 11th in production from scaling back - and hearing mutterings about more jobs being cut even now - or if the bailouts need to happen more than once, it sounds to me more like dying slowly from an ongoing infection rather than cutting it out and starting to heal. The longer the infection is allowed to continue the harder it is to heal, but eventually things will come to the crunch. Then what? It wasn't just the government..the workers in the auto bailouts (in Canada at least) took wage rollbacks with the understanding that things would be adjusted upwards when all the dust had settled. Last I heard, that has not happened. But now they are afraid to go for what they were promised in case the rest of them lose their jobs. This hardly seems to be the optimum or even a particularly positive outcome. There's certainly no feeling of security there. We are becoming a society of serfs to big business, from people afraid to ask for what they were promised to being told what sort of lightbulbs we are permitted to use, (let's put more mercury into our homes and landfills) to companies being held above the law (Monsanto being given (temporary so far) immunity from lawsuits. All paid for by taxpayer dollars. Sorta sad.

I have a great deal of sympathy for the victim but I think this idea would definitely be letting the bad guys win. Although when someone is hassling you it is uncomfortable and sometimes quite upsetting, the nasties are a very very tiny portion of the BBO population. To withdraw into a shell because of the few nasties seems to me to be losing a good deal of the point of being on BBO. To my understanding, these are power trippers who get their jollies from having people on the run; you've admitted defeat if you hide in a corner. I'd suggest: Change your nick so he has to look for you..there are a LOT of people on BBO it will take a while to find you again, if he ever does. You can always log on invisibly with your old nick and/or play at invisible tables as well, although if asked the web version used to tell if you were online even if you were invisible, I don't know if that's changed or not. In any case people cannot get to an invisible table without an invitation. It would probably be a good idea NOT to tell the world that you've changed your nick from XWZ to abc, if you share that information with good and trusted friends they should be people you can count on to keep that info to themselves. If you aren't sure, then don't tell them, just create a new identity. Mark all his known nicks as enemy and hope he gets hit by a train if you think about him at all. He doesn't know who you are in "real life" so really only has the power over you that you give him. It's sort of like having a gigantic mosquito around that you can't kill but you can keep it outside the house...it might get in when friends come in but you just mark that nick enemy as well, and he is outside the house again. A bit of a pain, but to mark someone enemy takes about 10 seconds and is better than letting him control what you want to do. It would be nice if BBO could wave a magic wand and have these losers disappear for good, but since the jerks can make new nicks and return, you may as well do what you can for yourself. I think most of us (females, anyway) who have been on BBO for any length of time have had a contact or two with such morons, you aren't alone. They feed off people getting upset. Prevent him from being able to harrass you and get on with your life.

One of my pet peeves is how people try to put labels on everything so they know what tidy little box to file it away in and don't have to think anymore. Perhaps this might be of interest, it's certainly pertinent to what I am objecting to:

I'm not an economist either but some things need to be noticed. In Canada, " in order to save jobs" the government handed over millions of dollars to companies who were threatening to move out of the country. At least two of them moved out of the country anyway asap. So what exactly did we gain for all that taxpayer money? A few months worth of work..it would likely have been cheaper and more productive to give it to the workers instead, to retrain or to start new small businesses. Polls consistently say most people want to do that and even though most of those may fail, it's small businesses which keep a country alive, not the monolithic ones which replace as many workers as possible as quickly as possible with robotics etc. We have bailed out subsidiaries of American car companies twice (Ford only once ..so far..)yet have still fallen from 3rd to eleventh in production. Air Canada has been bailed out at least twice, and Blue Sky, a huge conglomerate of pig farms which was finally sold to new investors last year, had been bailed out by taxpayer money twice just in the four or so years previously. If bailing out companies works, why does it need to be redone? As an aside, taxpayer money was simultaneously being given to Blue Sky to keep them going at the same time as small pig farmers were being paid pennies on the dollar to kill their breeding sows because of overproduction of pigs. Why is it that for the companies which employ many workers some form of the following is apparently never up for consideration? " It's really too bad you can't meet your obligations and have to close down shop. I guess we will have to take it over and keep it going with the workers who are already doing the job, and promote some of them to management with a panel of expert advisors to help. Good luck now, you hear?" Is it that McCarthyism still exerts a gangrenous influence over common sense or something else? It seems as though there is almost a deliberate decision to ignore the concept of consequences. Yet Pavlov clearly demonstrated that consequences drive learning. What do you suppose the bankers who walked away from the debacle they were responsible for, have learned? to say nothing of everyone else, corporate or individual, who was watching this? Perhaps the problem is that it is a whole lot simpler to hand a whack of money over to one entity than to deal with hundreds. Too bad nobody seems to have noticed that bailouts "because the company is too big to fail" seem to be ineffective at best and even if passively, encourage huge companies to be careless if not actually misbehave at worst.

what companies do you consider "too big to fail"? I can't think of any that people couldn't manage to adjust to being without unless ,perhaps, some companies involved with medical stuff, and even then it seems likely that it wouldn't be long before the gaps were filled by other companies. According to reports there are over 200,000 refugees in camps from Syria alone, and 10s of thousands fleeing the violence in the Sudan, and that doesn't consider the others such as the Palestinians and the people in other parts of the world. Some of them are now 3rd generation in refugee camps. What possible acceptable rationale would there be to any of them to tell them that they can't get help because some business enterprise needs the money more because it's "too big to fail and we can't do without them" ? Do you suppose that that value system might conceivably have something to do with the fact that some people would rather tie a bomb around their belly and walk into a crowded shop and blow themselves up than live under those conditions any more? Seems to me that the "competition" laws that many countries have were designed to make sure that no company ended up the only game in town. If governments have reneged on that responsibility then they should do something about fixing the situation, rather than supporting bloated, badly run companies feeding off the taxpayer. The last time the taxpayers in Canada bailed out Air Canada the president who (almost) put them into recievership walked away with an over $600,000 bonus. Rumor has it that this is not an unusual sort of thing to happen. Too big to fail, my foot.

Discussion the other day about what pass pass pass 2(♠ or♥ or♦)signified in terms of hand strength, playing 2/1. People came up with various answers ranging from 12-14 to 15+. I'm also curious as to the rational for opening 2 with a normal opener in 4rth seat. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me..nobody left to preempt and p may not have anything helpful to contribute to the cause. Is there any consensus about this in the wider world?

Talk to one of the Yellows about how to send a screenshot to abuse. Changing your nick might be the simplest/least troublesome way to stop being a target. It's difficult for BBO to ban people when as you noted, the vermin simply change their nick and reregister. If he is really that bad, you could even contact the Scottish police, they may have some sort of law about internet behaviour. More and more countries are putting internet bullying laws into place and it sounds as though what is happening would meet that criteria. Good luck

Had a very long wait for a connection late at night in Vancouver bus terminal so asked people if anyone played bridge, mostly being met with a discrete and studied avoidance of eye contact. :) So went back to playing patience until eventually a young man - I'd guess about 23 or so - sat down and we got to talking. He said he thought we could play a sort of two handed bridge and we muddled about a bit trying that for about an hour until the person he was waiting for arrived. I asked him where he had learned to play as he obviously had some knowlege but equally obviously was not a college person, which it seems most people that age who play, are. I wanted to do a spoiler and have people guess but don't know how to do it. He said he had learned in jail and the men there play bridge a whole lot, usually for stakes. No idea if he was pulling my leg or not but he discussed it all very plausibly. It was certainly a somewhat novel concept to me. (I didn't ask him what he had been in jail for). Just thought it was interesting.

What an amazing story. An excellent read and that it actually happened makes it more compelling.

Given the national debt of virtually all nations these days, it seems to require a stretch of the imagination to infer what the value of any currency really is. To my uneducated eyes, you could swap the money speculators..or perhaps the IMF.. with Humpty Dumpty; But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected. 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.

On a podcast yesterday someone was discussing something called bitcoins and I'd never heard of them before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin I've read the article but still can't quite wrap my mind around how it actually works. Apparently there is yet another one on the horizon which is less technical but otherwise has much the same structure, I'd have to listen to the podcast again to get the name. It would seem as though banks...and possibly governments..might get a little restive about a currency not under their control. Supposedly an earlier version of this sort of thing was closed down in China but bitcoins are becoming increasingly accepted and used there now. Anyone have any knowlege or thoughts about this?

It's still happening. Might have something to do with my computer but it never used to happen and I don't know what/how to check. I don't get a notification that firefox has blocked popups as does happen sometimes on other sites.

In Team matches or tourneys at the end, I don't get a score page, I get a "cannot display webpage" When I refresh I get "navigation to that page has been cancelled." I can look at the movie and see how things went but it would be nice to see the proper page. The same thing happens with the news and also if I click on find a game. Any ideas?