onoway

The first and one of the few who made jazz not only palatable but highly engaging for many including me.

love it! :lol:

ok now I am confused about something else. Isn't a new suit by responder forcing one round? That pass is the only bid by my p that I had an issue with (aside from wondering how we could find the ♣fit) but since I thought that I should have passed 2nt it was my fault anyway. Several people have said that I had enough to raise to 3nt but if we don't have a suit to run and must depend on sheer hcps, then my thought was that 5 + (possibly) 19 doesn't quite make it. It does on this hand but as a general rule a)aren't you suppose to have at least 25 between hands to bid 3nt and more to bid suit game and b)with only 5 hcps aren't I telling a story I've already told to bid again? Wouldn't p be entitled to think I am stronger than I actually am?

I'd mark her as enemy and forget it. With the huge number of players on BBO there are bound to be a few oafs and occassionally you will be unfortunate enough to have one at your table. Sorta like life. When they eventually find that nobody will play with or talk to them perhaps they will learn some manners....I doubt many of them read the forums tho:)

[hv=pc=n&s=s953h8dqjt842c643&w=sqj42htd97653cq92&n=sat7hkq75432dkcj5&e=sk86haj96dacakt87&d=w&v=b&b=4&a=p1hdp1s2h2np3dppp]399|300[/hv] Needless to say this was a disaster. Obviously west (me) is too weak to bid again but I thought p had a huge hand and didn't like ♠, so with a 5 card suit (however feeble) and a singleton in opp's suit I thought better to give options. Clearly I should have passed. But the hand brings up a question which I've run into fairly often. Would it have been reasonable at some point for p to bid his ♣ suit? wouldn't that have shown the same values as 2nt? not trying to shift responsibility here, but wanting clarification as to why/if 2nt was better than 3♣. I understand to some degree the logic when the suit is a minor because of the possibility of 3nt vs 5(minor) game. (Though I still think that making a minor suit game is better than going down in 3nt). But it seems that even when it's a major people bid nt rather than their suit after they've Xd. I tend to think if people don't bid a 5+ card suit it's because they don't have one..(not to open, but in subsequent bidding). I really hate it when partners do this so would like to understand why this is apparently the "correct" thing these days.

The whole gamut from the usual male enhancement crap to incessant messages from the university of Phoenix. I know where some of it comes from.. a site I signed up with for some information almost definitely sells the email addresses. So mailing lists that get sold over and over spawn emails from new suckers who buy the things and annoy people. Most privacy policies are worth almost as much as most Canadian politicians' campaign promises.

I didn't check my email for a day or so and found three PAGES of junk on it this morning.It's very annoying that anyone can track where you go and what you do on the internet but nobody seems to be able to keep track of what emails in the inbox get marked as junk and deleted time and time again. Someone told me that marketers can track if you even delete a message so then they know it is a "live" email address and redouble their messages. Hotmail SAYS they intecept and prevent messages marked as junk from getting into the inbox but it certainly doesn't seem to be the case. And if they can track what stores I visit even if I don't buy (and they can and do) then why can't they simply stop messages I've marked as spam from coming in to either my inbox or my junk mail at all??? If the providers could spend a little more time actually doing something productive for their CLIENT with all the info they collect it would be a welcome change.

It has always been a mystery as to how it is supposedly horrific to abort a foetus of 3 weeks but perfectly ok if not admirable to terrorize and/or murder doctors who perform careful and legal abortions. I also cannot understand how people can justify forcing women to bear children who are not wanted without any concern for what sort of life that child will likely have, nor for the thousands of children already born and in the process of dying in great distress from such simple things as lack of food. It's handy for them that none of the "pro life" people apparently care at all if some children may inherit the sort of life they would be horrified to see anyone inflict on a dog. It all seems a very conveniently compartmentilized morality.

I think a big part of the problem is that everyone seems to have the idea that only duplicate bridge is actually "real" bridge and so rubber bridge...which is what most people probably used to play, is regarded as somehow inferior and not worth discussing or encouraging. I doubt most people who had weekly get togethers with their neighbors or had bridge luncheons used to belong to the ACBL and until you have people a) learning the game and b) then deciding that they want to get more competitive then you won't make much headway into bringing the game back. Bridge had the reputation of being too difficult for "normal people" before Goren came along, I believe, and much of his success was bringing to it a system that anyone felt they could play, and so they did, feeling perhaps slightly smug that they could play a game they had THOUGHT only MIT profs and such could play. He celebrated and was successful using a simple method of playing bridge and I think that's why so many people learned the game in the first place. He established that you didn't need to know/play 50 conventions to play competitively. How well most people played might be a matter of question, (how well do most people play now?) but they enjoyed the game and that was the point.. and it was a regular part of their lives. You could teach someone how to play basic bridge in a very short time. I taught my kids how to play when they were all very young (6-10) using Goren (all I knew at the time anyway) and now I have returned to the game and somewhat come up to speed...if we were back in the day but I knew what I know now I wouldn't even start to try to teach them the game. I think the other major problem is courtesy. People play games such as bridge for the social aspect..otherwise why play a game which normally requires 4 people? If bridge is known for being a game for smart people it is often also known as the game where people are sometimes unbelievably rude to each other. Agreed that most families have both parents working now, so no way the bridge luncheon thing is likely or possible, but as people get more and more isolated it seems to me that bridge COULD be a way for people to reconnect socially. I don't think it's going to happen unless another such as Goren comes along..who can take a game with the image of being both elitist and for older people and bring it into the sphere of the average person. Most people don't want math and complicated stuff in their lives, their lives are already too complicated. Goren showed them they didn't need much of it at all. Nobody now is carrying that torch. Perhaps one direction could be that some mover/shaker of the bridge world recognise that lots of people would never be especially interested in playing duplicate bridge or going after points and just focus on bringing in players who enjoy a few rubbers every week. I think then more people would find their way into duplicate bridge eventually, if only to avoid the dreary nights of rubber bridge when the cards all run in the wrong direction. Starting with duplicate is to me like taking people who want to play pick up basketball and treating them as though they all are trying to get into the NBA. No doubt some do, but most have no such illusions, they just want to have some fun. Nobody now seems to be able to project the idea that bridge is..or at least can be... FUN.

One of the things which nobody seems to be looking at in terms of how much fuel usage drops (or not) is what options are available for people who need to get from point a to point b. Even in the cities the public transportation systems are often inconvenient and expensive for anyone living outside core areas, and rural people living even on main transportation arteries are pretty much out of luck. Canada and the US are BIG countries and that seems not to be occurring to anyone. I would guess that both suffer from the same lack of options. I live close to the Yellowhead highway which is a major artery crossing the middle of Canada and cannot get to Saskatoon ( normally a 3 hour drive) for a day trip, but HAVE to spend the night there if I travel by bus. Bus service for me to get to Edmonton would cost me almost three times what it costs me to drive, and that doesn't consider the inconvenience of having to find and rent a vehicle when I get there, nor having to leave sometime after midnight going in either direction. I'd be delighted to take the train but to do so means first travelling 5 hours in the wrong direction before I could start west again. Also, it only runs a couple of times a week. So to ask people if they are using less fuel is a bit of a silly question unless you also ask what options they have to do what they need to do without using their vehicles.

Perhaps a question that should be asked is whether or not the world actually wants or needs the US or anyone else to be the world's police force. Wasn't that supposed to be the bailiwick of the UN? It's clearly not working very well in terms of Syria but as only one example it would have kept the US out of Iraq and saved both countries many many lives and trillions of dollars.

Unfortunately that is simply not true. Corn ends up in all sorts of unexpected places in the forms of sugars and starches in processed foods, not just cake mixes and cereals or coatings but all sorts of things. Soy also. And now most of the corn and soybeans grown for agribusinesses are GM and so I believe is most canola which of course is probably the most common oil in use for food in North America. Most decidedly GM canola seed is marketed to farmers here. Farmers were fighting having to grow GM flax but they lost that fight last year. Since the seed companies also do the buying, anyone who doesn't buy their seed doesn't have access to the big markets.If it had not been legal to sell GM flax the farmers would not have to grow it. Also, farmers are not allowed to save seed from harvest for the next year but must buy the seed from the companies for whatever the companies choose to sell it to them for, and are hostage to the price the companies will then pay them for the crop. Many of these seeds are modified so they will not set viable seed anyway, so there is another question as to what that actually means in terms of nutritional value. There was a study some time ago done in Scotland feeding rats with GM food and they found that the GM food diet changed the bacteria in the gut. They didnt know what that would mean over time.I don't remember how long the study ran. However, someone forwarded me this link http://inspiringscience.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/gut-bacteria-may-cause-diabetes/ which may be something that needs to be looked at. The problem is more than the video shows. In the States, GM corn was designed to thwart the cornborer. What has happened there now, is that the cornborer has become immune to the poison in the corn which was supposed to destroy it, in the same way that bacteria is becoming resistant to antibiotics, or indeed superrats to some rat poisons. It's unlikely that humans can evolve as quickly as insects do to handle the chemical residues in the food. One whole area of India has been declared a GM free zone after an absolutely disastrous attempt to change over to GM food production. Dr Vandana Shiva documented what happened there in her Melbourne Peace Prize acceptance speech. The BBC did a documentary on GM soy and found there were all sorts of health problems associated with the farmers growing the GM soybeans for Monsanto in Brazil. You can find that on You Tube. The problem is that Monsanto has played fast and loose with the truth. Roundup has been touted as harmless, and we are told it becomes inert when it hits the soil, which apparently is not true. One study done in Ontario by a group of scientists from Europe, found strong enough correlation between Roundup use and prostate cancer and spontaneous abortions among other things that they called for a world ban on it. It's difficult to study something that the people will not allow you to access, as noted in the beginning of the video. All of the crop is sold back to their companies by contract. Monsanto has already taken people to court for supposedly violating this. It appears that someone skimmed some off to enable these scientists to run their studies. The point is that unless there is impartial study of GM foods, it's like taking a drug company's word that something is safe that has only been studied in rats for three weeks. Drug companies have to undergo much more rigorous testing of products and they STILL come out with things that they have to recall after disasters such as thalidomide or more recently arthritis drugs which caused strokes or antidepressant drugs which cause some people to become violently aggressive. We just don't know enough about the effect of GM food over the long haul. The point is for an informed public to have a choice. Monsanto has been working very hard to prevent both.

video takes about 13 seconds to get going.. The WTO declared the moratorium on GMO seed illegal but France has been sticking to its resolve. Meanwhile, Canada and the US scurry blindly towards the cliff like rats following the Pied Piper of Monsanto...

A headline in the Wichita Eagle someone sent me From the Eagle... "Traffic was heavy on Kellogg for yesterday morning's commute, despite 47% of the population lying in bed waiting for a government handout."

Ah. Then the guy from Stanford was making claims he had no right to make, and the interviewer had not done her homework either. I thought the CBC was a bit more sensible than that. He didn't say it was inspired by the Khan Academy, but by Khan,fwiw, but he definitely was presented as being the first to develop the idea of offering the same courses online for free as were being offered to paying students on campus.

A high school teacher in Edmonton is embroiled in a battle to save his job after assigning zero grades for assignments not done such as papers not turned in. The school board apparently has a policy that teachers are not allowed to give zero for anything. The public response seems to be overwhelmingly in support of the teacher but the board members apparently feel that it is pschologically damaging to the fragile ego of adolescents to be told they failed, no matter how deserved the message. So many things seem to get more bizarre by the year.. As a matter of interest, the free online university classes at Stanford (and later followed by M.I.T. and others) were inspired by Kahn, according to the Prof at Stanford who started them. (Listened to an interview with him the other day but don't now remember his name, sorry)

Zucchero and Ronan Keating The Flight

Consider how advanced this technology is over the wooden leg. And then consider how advanced the technology is likely to be in another few years. Then what, when the advantage is no longer minimal? The news today said that officials were looking out for various methods of cheating going on in the paralympics - such as competing with a full bladder. That must be somewhat difficult to prove is intentional. "I told you to go before we left the athlete's village!"?

Well, it all seems very strange and sad and I don't understand the point of it all. He's retired in any case and if they couldn't catch him in spite of their best efforts over the years he was competing then I think they should have let it go. A sort of double jeapordy thing seems to me to be going on here. In the Olympics, if the officials found evidence of drugs, they didnt send their findings to an arbitration committee, they sent the athletes packing and said why. That's clean and fair. If they don't find anything within a reasonable period of time then that should be that. Years is not a reasonable period of time. I just listened to an interview with a former teammate who had testified that he overheard discussion in a hospital about performance enhancing practices. The guy came off like a sanctimonious slimebag with his comments. Sorta like a murderer pointing the finger at someone else because he's cut a deal if he will nail somebody the police have been after. It was interesting that he volunteered a couple of times that he was really really surprised that Armstrong has given up fighting about this..why should he have been surprised, if Armstrong was indeed guilty? It makes the Cycling organization look petty, ungrateful and a bit silly..He brought competitive cycling to the attention of many many people who otherwise would never even have heard of it. Now the organization just looks silly as they seemingly have no idea who (if anyone) actually won those races, as all the other top finishers apparently were already found to have been doing something illegal. It is undoubtedly stoking the ego of someone (who has likely not ever actually accomplished anything of note in his own life) to have destroyed the man's legacy but I can't see how it has done anything else positive.

The news stories about Armstrong today say that he passed all the drug tests that he was ever given. The testing picked up a whole whack of people who lost to him, so if he was guilty why didnt/couldn't they find it? Doesn't there have to be some sort of hard evidence? It's pretty scary if they can do this without any evidence except rumour and gossip and the belief that somehow he must have been cheating to do so well. Salem, anyone?

Of course. There would have to be a level (perhaps 1 1/2 times poverty level?) at which point this would kick in..no point in trying to grab taxes from someone who has barely enough money even to survive. And if they could make a little without being penalized then they might get to like having some money to spend and actually work hard enough to get out of poverty. That's a different discussion tho. Even 9% of $10,000,000 is a whole lot more than nothing, which is what was suggested. And if deductions were limited to only wages and material costs,(sort of an integral point I think) then the actual taxes due would inevitably be a good deal higher than when all sorts of deductions were allowed. The point is not to try to drive the companies into the ground though, only to have them pay their own way as any other money earner has to. Also, if wages and materials were the only deductions, there would be no incentive to try to cut wages or use second rate materials, rather the opposite, and that would seem to be a good thing? Aside from many wage earners who would be ecstatic if their tax rate went down to 9% !! a flat rate would possibly also be an incentive to work. I know of people who have turned down a raise or quit after getting one as they calculated (or saw on their first subsequent pay cheque) it would cost them money because they'd be thrown into a higher tax bracket. Seems sorta counterproductive. Perhaps they'd get it back in refunds, but in the meantime..

Ok, what about a flat tax on income, period? No deductions except wages and costs of materials. That's already more of a break than the workers get. They don't get to deduct the cost of their houses (at least here) or the other mundane bits such as energy usage that they have to pay to cover the costs of living, so why should a company not also have to pay for the costs ITS existence entails? Then the actual true costs of things would show up and it would likely be less appealing to send trees from Alberta to Japan to be made into toothpicks and sent back to Wisconsin. . It would POSSIBLY cut a little into the incentive to bring everything in from another country also, if the wages were deductable but the transportation costs and so forth were not. As the price of fuel goes up those will be getting to be more and more of an issue, and why should taxpayers encourage that by not requiring companies to pay those costs if they choose to put their businesses offshore? And a flat tax would certainly simplify tax codes, if that's the goal. I don't know what such a tax should be, but pehaps it should be in line with the rate that the average worker for the company pays? What it appears to come down to is a matter of values, whether people or businesses are more important and which should have priority. I am not convinced that IBM or Walmart or Exxon or even Pfizer or ANY single business is so important that the world could not get along without it, so it should pay its own way and earn the patronage of consumers. If it cannot do that, then maybe it needs to rethink some of its business practices or maybe it isn't really a viable company. I find it disingenuous to suggest that Big Pharma is badly treated because of patent laws. The markup and profits such companies show suggest otherwise. Big Pharma is worth a thread of its own... Of course, putting in a flat tax would cause chaos for a while, at least, (at least if it also wiped out all the deductions) and is in direct opposition to the "global market" way things are going. So it will likely be seen as undoable. But I can't see how the way things are going is sustainable either, so thought I'd throw it out there. On a radio talk show today one caller said that governments (and big business?) need to STOP thinking of the taxpayers as ATM machines. You put in a law and get out money...

Well, corporations "earn" so why shouldn't they pay taxes just as people who "earn" pay taxes? It seems to me to be far clearer about who is paying and for what if the corporations are taxed..then people have the choice whether or not to contribute part of what they "earn" to the corporation's bottom line. Otherwise who knows where the taxes paid are going, lord knows much of the time it isn't anywhere people would normally choose to have their taxes go. Governments have all had and continue to have corruption scandals and suchlike. They also already bail out corporations with taxpayer money but at least now the taxpayer KNOWS that their taxes are going to benefit banks and big business. Why make it easier for them to hide such activities? Also seems to me that the more you tax people rather than corporations, the more you limit the ability of people to start and run businesses. I would guess that that isn't high on the list of priorities for governments oriented toward "bigger is better" and "global economy" but I read somewhere a long time ago (but it stuck in my mind) that the period of time with the lowest taxation for the middle class corresponds to the period of the most active development of the economy in terms of businesses starting/employment and so forth. Problem is that now there are so many regulations (many put in place because big business misbehaved but applied to small businesses even when it isn't appropriate), it costs so much to start up a business and it's pretty tough for a small business to compete with the big players, who have the sympathetic ear of governments everywhere. As someone said to me recently, there are too many people in the government (from municipal on up to federal) in charge of "making people sad" for trying to do anything. Now you have the mega businesses such as Walmart driving 3 generation family businesses to close their doors permanently just by announcing they are moving into an area. As far as I can see, the wholesale pandering to megabusinesses is turning the general population into a society of workers rather than entrepeneurs with all of the fallout that entails. It's a sort of 22nd century feudalism situation but the "lords" (corporations) clearly most often feeling no responsibility for the workers at all, but only to the bottom line and the shareholders. It's what leads corporations to go to set up sweat shops for child labour in 3rd world countries, or dump their toxic wastes there, or cut corners on materials/upkeep which leads to toxic spills, or give as few as possible of their workers full time work so they don't have to pay any benefits such as health care or pensions, or to fire/downsize an older worker who is approaching retirement or may have health issues. In an industry I once worked in, it was common knowlege that if anyone ever used workman's compensation they would be dumped by the company (just no work at the moment, we'll call you) and would not work again for the company once the claim was over, no matter how valid, and no matter how many years they had worked for the company. But of course they weren't fired..that would be illegal, so until word got around people waited to get called to work rather than looking elsewhere, until finances made them desperate and they had to go elsewhere. It's what allows corporations to pay one woman what they pay men and all other women get much lower wages doing the same job. As long as ONE woman has parity, 1000 others could get paid half of what men earn and the company is within the letter of the law. I don't know about the States but that is certainly true in Canada. Given that stats say women earn less in the States it appears to be true there as well. We now commonly have the situation where workers take rollbacks for a number of years to help corporations deal with the results of their own mismanagement, often also subsidising such businesses as the auto industry with taxpayer dollars. The companies take the taxpayer money, turn things around and start to make big profits again. Then if the workers want to benefit from the turnaround that they funded through wage rollbacks and tax dollar forgiveness/subsidies,the companies threaten to take all the jobs elsewhere. Or they just move, once they've milked the taxpayers for everything they can get, and abandon the workforce that kept them in business. Or as one company did, keep a handful of people temporarilly on the payroll for a couple of months to train the replacement workers in the new country. And they should pay no taxes? Why on earth not? a) They are earning money b) they use the services of the community such as the police, and c) too often as a result of their activities, whether it be toxic wastes or an abandoned work force, taxpayers are left to deal with the fallout d) Of course the costs will be passed on to the consumer but then it is his or her CHOICE to buy from BP or Walmart or whatever. It seems the perfect example of how schizoid govenments are about handling money when it relates to big business when you consider that (to my understanding) tobacco growers are heavilly subsidized with tax dollars even as the tobacco companies are being taken to court and zapped with fines for selling the stuff. Great for lawyers, I suppose. It may be that the government figures it makes more money back in fines than the subsidies, but if all the hoopla is true, then we are paying much much more in such things as medical care than the fines could ever hope to approach. Why not do the simpler thing and subsidize the tobacco farmers ONCE to switch to another crop such as hemp? :P As far as the guy paying no income tax, of course I have not seen his tax returns and am going by what he claims. I think the way he did it was to have everything owned by the various companies..e.g. the vehicles by the car dealership, the house was on a horse farm (very common for lawyers and such to have a "farm" to avoid taxes here). The stables/arena area were.. much nicer than many peoples's houses, and included his accountant's office etc. I know there are people in the States with some authority who are claiming to know how to retire after 20 years or so with well over $100,000 per MONTH, ALL NONtaxable income, if they make certain arrangements having to do with the way the banking system works. The catch is, as is so often the case, you need to have lots of money to be able to set it up. Like the old joke which is too often true, you can only get money if you don't need it.

Perhaps people would be more comfortable with corporations not paying much (or any) taxes if they weren't ever given preferential treatment / subsidised/ bailed out/ with taxpayer money. Aside from that, why should corporations not be required to give something back to the community? Don't they also use the infrastructure that the taxes supposedly are paying for? Roads, police, septic systems and so forth? Education systems which prepare their workers for them? Roads would last a whole lot longer if big heavy trucks weren't trundling over them, and a whole lot of civil servants would be unnecessary if too many corporations didn't try to get away with what is basically antisocial behaviour. Reasonable behaviour has too often gone by the wayside by companies who pollute and cut corners re safety and generally disregard anything but their own bottom line as having any importance. Such behaviour means that society has to have something in place supposedly to protect the citizens from corporate misbehavour. Why shouldn't corporations be held responsible for paying for such things? People have to pay taxes for schools even if they have no kids, so why should corporations not have to pay their share as well? I know someone who owns shopping malls and 100+ apartment complexes and at least one car dealership in Canada and the US and pays NO income tax at all. Hasn't for many years. And now you are saying that his companies ALSO should pay no taxes? That's a pretty hard sell, I think.

Agree with all of this. The police told my landlady when she bemoaned not confronting people who broke into my house that she was very lucky she hadn't, and that anyone who got into a situation with a gun had better be prepared to use it effectively. Most people will have hesitation and that will allow the bad guys, if not to actually take the gun away and maybe use it or at least try to and who knows who will get shot in the struggle? The scenario of a whole bunch of people in a crowded gas filled theatre pulling weapons and trying to shoot the gunman would likely delight the gunman as the carnage would undoubtedly have been much worse; including people shooting other people they THOUGHT were the gunman and perhaps then being shot themselves, and those would be the people who had some presence of mind and weren't just shooting blindly in panic. OTOH not long ago a woman in Edmonton heard noises in her garage and had a legal handgun; she investigated and found a man with a crowbar who had broken into the place; she was quite capable of using her gun and the burglar very sensibly stood there and waited for the police to rescue him. The police were not happy with her but she was briefly a heroine to the community. As far as a hope that the police and army would protect the citizens in a government/citizen conflict, or even a BUSINESS/citizen conflict there's not a lot of precendence for that..Kent State and the Chicago Dem. Convention and the use of police against coal miners and other striking workers suggests otherwise. What's happening in Syria seems FAR more likely, once things get to that stage. In that case, having some sort of weapon might give a person some sense of security, thus all the survivalists talk about weapons and ammo stashes, but it's quite difficult for most people to grasp what that would actually mean. For one thing, if known, then those people will be the FIRST targets, (and likely labelled as terrorists).There's not much chance they would not be known to the authorities, either, hard to imagine it's not extremely easy to track who buys such things, especially in any quantity. Given the latest mass shooting in Wisconsin, it seems to me that terrorism INSIDE the country ought to be given at least as much attention and resources as terrorism outside the country. It seems sometimes as though everyone conveniently forgets the first terrorist event in the US..the Oklahoma bombing... was done by an American. I have no idea what the answer is..but surely something needs to be tried to prevent these people from reaching the state that this behaviour seems a reasonable way to act. I personally think children who grow up learning through video games, TV, movies and the political decisions by governments that killing is the best if not only way to resolve differences are going to have a very different attitude from those who have learned to see there are usually other routes to conflict resolution.