onoway

My post wasn't accusing anyone of anything and wasn't intended to be specific. I think it is a very sensible policy in general. BBO is after all, a commercial enterprise and has its own and other products for sale. So it seems only sensible to me that it asks for some demonstrated participation in the site before it opens the doors to other people's stuff. On other forums I belong to I have certainly seen people flogging products and the ID associated with such posts is never seen before or afterwards. Such posts are not useful to the other forum participants as the post is clearly motivated to get people to buy, rather than being something brought forward for discussion and consideration. Those posters are simply coat tailing on someone else's work. It's really only another version of finding ads in your emails. Requiring participation before you can bring a program or product to the attention of BBO members isn't inventing a solution to a problem that MIGHT occur, it's identifying a problem that DOES occur, and heading it off.

If a person has never involved themselves with BBO forums before (possibly never even having played on the site!) then why should BBO be a platform for them to flog their product? BBO does so much and has so much on the plate to start out with, things like this must be a small help in letting the staff and volunteers focus on more productive things. I for one, appreciate what they already do and don't grudge them such a filter.

It amazed and impressed me to think that this outfit would make their discoveries open source. What a hugely refreshing approach to a discovery, when it sometimes seems that everyone is racing to patent and profit from everything possible.

I looked up the people on their advisory board and it looks pretty impressive. At least two of the profiles said they are now involved with this organization. I'd never heard of them before though.

Unless they have changed it, if you are on the web version, even if you are logged in as invisible, if someone types your name into the find member box, BBO will tell them you are here.

I likely wouldn't know a cheater if I tripped over him but abusers and the people who consistently abandon tourneys when they are going to get a bad result are highly annoying. Those ones get new ids when they are banned by the TDs so not really much to be done about them. Maybe design an electric shock for bad behaviour so they get zapped when they log back into BBO, the strength of which depends on how bad the transgression.:) I'm not really in favor of big brother, so prefer that BBO continue to struggle to contain the ones that get reported rather than patrol the halls looking for issues. The really weird contracts 7ntXX-13 Does this come up a lot? I notice this in the results maybe once a year..once at a table I was kibbing when a player threw a tantrum about his p with then stomped off. All very dramatic:) Also, some beginners don't realize (or forget) that their scores show up/affect the scoring for other tables and sometimes clown around. Perhaps there should be some mechanism to alert the yellows in such a situation so (if) they would be able to cancel the wildly aberrant score out? Come to think of it, that might also take care of some cheaters...

I was thinking about this today and remembered something I was once told. I was taking a self defense course for women(not my idea, a long story) and the guy running it said that the reason many women get badly hurt when they are attacked is not that they couldn't defend themselves. It's that they couldn't believe that anyone would actually intend to hurt them so they don't make a serious effort to defend themselves, until it's too late.

So many people died in world war 1 and 2 alone supposedly to protect "freedom" that as Hanoi5 says, we are now simply giving away. It is sad to think that freedom should be of so little importance that it would be traded off in the interests of protecting the country's "reputation and brand" from the misbehaviour or mismanagement of a commercial enterprise. I guess everyone makes their own choice as to what is important.

Paul I am so appreciative of your reply! I have been struggling with this for over a year as I was given to understand there was no solution. Maybe this is a development which happened later. Well done Sally to think to post this in the forums and thanks so much Paul for your help. It will save me having to pester Yellows to add me as a director all the time. Your response is like a Christmas present!

Not sure I follow you. If growing food isn't the problem then why are seeds specifically included? It is now illegal in most of Canada and the States (I don't know of any exceptions but there may be some) for anyone who doesn't have the use of an officially approved commercial kitchen to bake cookies and sell them at a Farmer's Market although there has admittedly never been a single issue anywhere that the government was able to cite as a reason for this. This could now be extended to include vegetables which were not of an approved variety or not grown with various chemicals. The e-coli outbreaks a few years ago in North America and last year (?) in Europe didn't happen in a farmer's market with locally grown and processed food, they happened through large corporate chain processing. But all are bundled together in a Food Safety package which in the American version at least lays a whole huge bundle of problems for the small producer. Example,according to Joel Salatin, small chicken producers must be able to track every chicken processed, whereas the huge producers do not, they can bundle maybe 50,000 chickens in one group. Each of the chickens from the small producer can be and is inspected. How can an inspector possibly inspect several hundred chickens an hour? Yet which process is more likely to have problems with salmonella? Alcohol is a totally different thing entirely and outside the discussion as far as I am concerned. Alcohol, though very pleasant sometimes, can hardly be considered food. Also, alcohol is already extremely heavilly controlled, e.g. I know of no country where it is legal to distill your own alcohol. Yet it still happens,and BECAUSE it is illegal there's no protection for the consumer except after a disaster happens. Prohibition was tried and didn't work very well, except perhaps for the Mafia and so forth. Anyway. To be sure, it's a good thing that the governments no longer allow many of the adulterants which used to be added to bread, for example But.. they allow all sorts of other adulterants of various sorts to be added legally. Some are preservatives some are taste enhancers, some simply cut the cost of the product to give a higher ROI to the producer. Some, like the methanol in your example, are toxic but in such small amounts that they seemingly have no effect. A couple of examples: Rice grown in US has an average 26 ppb of arsenic according to a study. (Wikipedia). Other sources say arsenic is also found in beer and seafood among other things. Arsenic is I believe an accumulative poison in that it tends to stick around in the body until it finally does you in when you get enough of it saved up. It can make your life pretty unpleasant before it kills you. (from another source) Red 3 Artificial Coloring: Candy, baked goods. The evidence that this dye caused thyroid tumors in rats is "convincing," according to a 1983 review committee report requested by FDA. FDA's recommendation that the dye be banned was overruled by pressure from elsewhere in the Reagan Administration. Red 3 used to color maraschino cherries, but it has been replaced there by the less controversial Red 40 dye. It is still used in a smattering of foods ranging from cake icing to fruit roll-ups to chewing gum. So this begs the question of safety..we really have no idea how safe over the long term most of these (legal) chemicals are that we are chowing down with virtually anything processed. The problem is that these things always sound so reasonable..who could possibly be against food safety? ..but there is a dark side which is not being addressed. Governments tend to gravitate toward wanting to have control over everything. Perhaps some feel that is what they are supposed to do. Others just like power. Of course they aren't regulating for regulation purposes, they are regulating to control, that's the whole point. It's one thing to say that nobody should be allowed to poison somebody by deliberately feeding them castor beans. It's quite another to pass a law saying that anything anyone produces as food must be preapproved by the government because someone sometime might serve castor beans as food. Or even that at some point some nutcase intentionally did. You cannot ever entirely avoid having crazies who will find ways to flip out and hurt people. All you are doing with this sort of legislation is restricting the freedom of choice of the rest of the population, who might enjoy growing them as a wonderfully ornamental plant. Presumably authorized growers would still be allowed to grow them for the drug trade. Or maybe a program of eradication of the castor bean would be undertaken with the slogan of public safety first. This is giving the government far too much power. The cost of such regulation is far too high. BTW did you know that the City of NY actually had a sting operation to nab, arrest and charge a guy for eating dandelions and such in Central Park? The Park supervisor said "He has got to learn that the park is not a supermarket" (Admittedly 20 or so years ago but still shows how rational people can be when they get a little authority.)

people who put advanced or even expert on their BBO profile when they barely know the names of the suits and think they have done something remarkable when they can claim they play Stayman and know what a finesse is.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/5601333/Food-safety-backlash-stuns-government Apparently the Minister has not yet done anything about the amendments she says she is pushing for in the article. I was unable to access the actual Bill; the government links are selective and don't link to it. This is a very similar situation that the States went through last year. In Canada we are pretty much already there unfortunately, just so far the government hasn't flexed its muscles too much. Too many people are unaware of the implications of these laws being quietly pushed through with very little public involvement. Saskatchewan is proposing a Environmental Code which basically could disenfranchise property owners from deciding what to grow or how to grow it; in the first paragraph the government asserts that it will listen only to "recognized authorities" when making decisions. Censorship at its best.. I had to buy membership in a club (cost me a penny) to buy heritage lettuce and pea seeds from England last year as the seeds were not on an officially approved list, and otherwise the growers could have been arrested, fined, and their seeds/plants seized. Growing food "unofficially" is rapidly approaching the designation of being a terrorist activity.

Life would have been MUCH happier if GIB had said "wanting slam unless we have 2 trump losers" :D For those of us at my level words are often much more comprehensible than a string of numbers. Perhaps BBO might consider a two level GIB based on that at some point ..one for the people "in the know" and one using word explanations for us feebler folk who have enough trouble trying to understand what the GIBs are up to at the best of times. Entirely missed the point of considering the first response as a limit raise, of course should have considered that and stayed at 6. Thanks everyone for the help.At least now I know what such a leap to the 5 level means, although I hope never to run across it again.

Ok Thanks. B-)

I didn't go down in 5♥ I went to 7♥ as I was told was expected by the 5♥ bid if I had the A♠ and went down one. Can't really get around missing the A of trump. I don't think that the GIBS use the system you are using here. I wanted to know what to do with the bidding as it was up to and following the 3!s bid... but thanks for trying to help.

This bidding was distressing to me. To say nothing of going down 1. [hv=pc=n&s=sahkj963dakqj8c95&w=sqjt95h5d9532c863&n=s7hq842d76cakt742&e=sk86432hat7dt4cqj&d=s&v=e&b=3&a=1hp3hp3sp5hp]399|300[/hv] What to do NOW? I had meant the 3♠ bid as a control bid looking to learn if p had any ♣ controls but apparently GIB thought I was asking for ♠ help to get to slam. Well, ok but when it jumps to 5♥ how am I supposed to find out about anything else? What should I have bid there instead of ♠ and how do I find out about any stopper short of a generic 4nt? Which, if p comes back with 1, still doesn't tell me WHICH one, as if it's trump and p has two clubs below the K we are still down in slam if opps lead ♣but if it's the A then 6 makes. Does the 5 bid specify something or other? mousing over the bid was totally unhelpful. I appealed to someone (at another table, who couldn't see the hands so only went with the bidding ) who told me if I had the A or a void (I assumed she meant in the ♠ suit since that was apparently what the GIB was reacting to) I was being told to go to 7 which I dutifully did, only to find out that we are missing the A of trump!. How do we get to the slam? If there is one thing that is disconcerting about the GIBS (there's more than one but) it's the tendency to leap levels of bidding for no apparent reason. Can someone explain what this all meant and how it should have gone?

What other income sources do the poachers have? How does that income compare with what they can get (if they don't get caught) from Rhino horns? Does enforcement involve any penalty for the people who are buying it?

All in all, after listening to the news just now, and looking out the window today, bring on climate change. It's been +5C or so here for the last few days, last year it was about -30C + windy for most of the winter. Some people believe the Mayans predicted the end of time for us in Dec of this year, maybe that's why governments etc. are determined to take us to hell in a handbasket with pollution, spectacular overconsumption which necessitates ripping the guts out of the world without regard for anything but the bottom line, and chest thumping between nations all over the place. Bring it all on. The faster we put ourselves out of the picture the happier and more peaceful the rest of the universe will be. I once heard a comment that this earth might be a science experiment such as we might do on fruit flies (not sure if that related to the Mayan calendar or not..the date for the experiment to run out maybe?). In any case if it did happen to be so, I imagine some creature is disappointed in the results. And I am gonna stop listening to the news.

I have no background at all in any statistical stuff beyond observing over the years that it appears to be possible to "prove" anything you care to if you choose the "right" statistical expert. However, it seems irrefutable that the ice caps on places such as Mount Kilimanjaro are a fraction of what they were a century ago, according to photos of then and now; nobody seems to be arguing that the south polar ice is also disappearing. There's no question that animals, fish and birds are being reported in areas and seasons hitherto unknown to happen. So something's going on. Willie Smits pointed out that the peat fires which sometimes have raged out of control for months in Borneo put prodigious amounts of Co2 into the atmosphere until they are finally extinguished. Borneo isn't the only place to have wildfires, peat or otherwise. Living growing biomass has a markedly different effect than the dead stuff and not all growing stuff is the same either; trees generally will have a very different effect than grasses. Someone once said the trees are the lungs of the planet and we are being as casual about destroying forests as a two pack a day chain smoker. These are things which could be relatively easilly and cheaply attended to, and also are already proven to affect the climate at least regionally. Both statistically and observationally :)) It seems to me that we could start out there; planting a mix of trees abundantly; selectively cutting instead of clear cutting and then burning the residue. Even just not burning the residue would help! if something must be done because of fears of bug habitat, then bulldoze a trench, push them in and doze some dirt over them! They will sequester carbon AND water, and provide habitat for new plant growth. It's called hugelculture in gardening terms. Learning how to recreate natural systems, do something about fuel & fuel efficient cooking stoves for the poor in 3rd world countries ( deforesting the land in any case, but making charcoal is horrifically polluting as it's normally done, and not just C02.) Crack down on the cement industry which is responsible for a huge amount of pollution. It's too much to hope that anyone would ever consider the amount of pollution being caused daily by war, what with planes and tanks and bombs and so forth, but maybe we could at least tag a rider on the money that we keep handing over to car companies that no more will be forthcoming until fuel efficiencies double. (Without artificially jacking up the sticker prices.) If they can't do it, then the money will have to go to found new car companies who will do better. Whatever happens to those bright young men who win these challenges and get 200 miles per gallon? Admittedly most of them look like they are driving a luge rather than a car but still... Just doing that would do a whole lot more to resolve the issues we may be causing than howling vague generalities; tossing money at random industries with "green" somewhere prominently in their prospectus, and banning incandescent light bulbs. imo.

I am not going to cite sources for the reasons I already said. These people frighten me and I am not normally scared of shadows. You are certainly free to assume whatever you please as a result of that decision. What I know about currencies, fiat or otherwise, you could fit on the head of a pin; I was only quoting part of what they were saying. I know nothing about your point number 3, the people I know about who are involved with this are several Americans, one Canadian and supposedly one Australian. Aside from the two I knew, several others are apparently well known in the financial world, including at least one having published best selling books on the topic. This is most certainly not a con in that I am absolutely positive the people who join WILL get a membership and the monthly newsletters and so forth they are expecting The group has been in operation for a year now, and claim to have done much better than.. well, basically than anyone else. They waved around numbers but it didnt mean a lot to me. But.. I have had dealings with the one person and he has not yet defaulted, lied or cheated on anything promised. That world is intensely competitive and word gets out pretty quickly if someone is a con artist and they won't last. He has quite a number of years in the business and is highly regarded by peers and customers. He is both very very smart and very protective of his good name. I can't imagine either of the two I know about would involve themselves so intimately with something unless they felt it would have a serious chance of success. If they are typical of the rest of the group.... This is a big part of what I find frightening.

:) this is beginning to look like 20 questions... yes the videos are put out by the people who start out explaining why and how the financial orders have collapsed according partly because of corruption and greed and partly because historically it supposedly was inevitable. That part involved saying (among other things) that fiat currencies (which I assume means currencies not actually backed with gold or some such actual asset) have ALL failed and the average life of such currencies is 40 years. They suggest that it's now 40 years since the US dollare was taken off the gold standard entirely and thus became a true fiat currency, which has come to the end of its life. They then go into the various scandals which have affected the US (and the world, for that matter) so drastically and announce that everyone in Washington (and other governments) is currupt and the whole system is rotton and the only way out is to scrap it and start over. So the US can take its rightful place as leader/guardian of the world. If you want to know what they are suggesting as financial strategies, it rests for now on buying very large and very undervalued apartment complexes in districts which promise to have jobs continue, such as in some high end districts around various cities in Texas. Gold and silver up to or even over $2000 an ounce for gold and something they describe as people being their own bank. A very rough understanding -they supposedly make a deposit and then borrow their own money (supposedly to buy these apartment complexes?) and pay themselves the interest they are charging themselves to borrow their own money. None of these are strategies are truly available to many people I should think, although they claim the contrary. Of course you would need their help to set this all up correctly. And as I mentioned before, if every penny was lost, then tough luck, though that was mentioned only in passing in the third video. The business of buying water rights came up in the third video when the presenter got down to tent revival enthusiasm for how they are going to change society around the world, starting with the children as they are the only way to really change society long term. He was entirely without hesitation or shyness about claiming that they WILL do this and that they are collecting extremely wealthy people who are supportive of their aims. I know of two supporters, one of them on his board of directors, both extremely smart marketters and as far as it's possible to tell, nothing else. One made millions starting out by making ebooks on dating advice and became one of the most successful sellers of information marketting on the internet. I have some knowlege of him and a great deal of respect for his intelligence, he is extremely bright and an avid student of what makes people do what they do. I believe him to have good intentions but even so not so sure I would want him to be the arbitrar of all society. The other claims to have a social conscience because he is supposedly involved in helping fight animal abuse in someplace like Honduras. He is a Canadian, and has no claims to be doing anything whatsoever here that could possibly be checked up on, aside from business. They want people to get involved by sending them money of course; in return they get a membership (so they can rub shoulders with the uberrich) and a course on what the extremely wealthy are supposedly doing to conserve and increase their wealth. It is a little odd to imagine that people who have risen to the top of the top should suddenly decide to share all their investment strategies with the great unwashed, but that's the main hook.

yes of course I have links to the videos. I thought about posting them and decided not to, the reluctance to post them rising from not wanting to be in any way helping to promote these guys. The saying is that any publicity is better than none. Sorry if that makes the posting seem like babble; it maybe is to some degree as I am still trying to come to some sort of equilibrium about it; the last video in particular really shook me up. I couldn't help thinking of people like Mao who feel the need to have everyone conform to their ideas, some of which might even be great ideas. So many of them start out with the best of intentions and believe they are the only ones who will remain pure in heart and deed... I was just reading a year end report of an aid organization in Palestine http://www.mediafire.com/?vdgbqa6kbh5lad2 Bustan_Qaraaqa_Annual_Report_2011 (it was awkward and slow to access on my computer but very interesting to see what they are doing once it does finally download) and how what they regard as the deliberate manipulation of water supplies to the region makes life there even more difficult than it needs to be. They are assuming it's part of an effort to force the Palestinian farmers off the land. The pattern is already set, it seems, although there is no reason to think there is any direct connection between this group and that particular example.

I've been watching some videos over the last week which depressed and scared me. People with a LOT of money, some of them among the wealthiest in the world by their own assessment, are now out of the shadows and proclaiming they do indeed intend to reshape global society in the image they are more comfortable with. Starting with online universities and then going down the age chain with brick and mortar schools for the younger generation. At this point visions of Hitler youth started going through my mind...it's all presented in the best possible colours, to be resistent to the idea is to be against wholesome food and integrity and suchlike. I thought that this New World Order stuff was all just conspiracy theorists getting carried away but the evangelical fervor on the last video was pretty frightening. Some of these guys are obscenely rich through marketting and that's ALL they have to show for their lives. Well, the presentor granted 12 Make A Wish kids their wishes but that's hardly in the same league as for example, trying to knock out malaria. Or distributing free vaccines and so forth in third world countries. Granted, there are all sorts of problems at the present time with corruption and dishonesty and so forth. I just don't see any sign in THIS bunch that they are above such skullduggery themsleves, certainly nothing they can point to suggests any sort of feeling of social responsibility. That is, beyong reshaping the global society into one more pleasing to them. They talk a a lot about ethical behaviour, while at the same time advocating buying up water rights so as to make untold riches from the future control of water. Also, just think, they wouldn't need armies, they only need to control the flow of water to control populations of people. This seems to me to be somewhat contrary to the idea of ethical behaviour, but ethical behaviour often clearly means something different to the ultrawealthy than it does to me. I am guessing that the people eagerly climbing aboard ignored or glossed over a very clear and specific warning that the organization has no sympathy or time for whiners, so anyone coming in who loses all their money will be given short shrift. When little guys get to play in the big guy's game, chances are they WILL lose all their money. These guys didnt get to be many times over multimillionairs by being kind and generous. At least some of them got it by being extremely smart about how to manouvre people into doing what they want them to do. They are extremely adept at getting people to buy whatever it is they are selling. Not sure what if anything I am expecting to result from this post but I am feeling deeply disturbed and wanted to share. If these guys weren't so rich and so smart I wouldn't think twice about it. Someone once said that the ultrarich can create their own reality and that's exactly what's openly being planned here. Brave new World, indeed.

more important than what? Air? water? How can it possibly be remotely sensible to be at war with something for which we depend on for our very existence? You cannot survive more than what - 6 minutes without air, a week at most without water, 60 or so days without food? So how does it make any sense at all to feel that what provides us with these things should be treated as an enemy? It seems to me to be the very height of ingratitude to say the least. You seem to be totally missing the point that without "mother nature" nothing that we think of as life, including people, would exist in the first place TO die or be killed. Someone pointed out that if all the insects in the world disappeared permanently overnight somehow, within a very short period of time the land would become devoid of all plant and animal life. If on the other hand, man somehow disappeared permanently overnight, the earth would flourish. So how should I take that to mean that humans are more important even than insects? What gives us this importance except our own hubris?