DrTodd13

Why just 2? You're a polygamy bigot!!! The one good thing is that you don't seem to have a problem with incest.

People just don't understand government and long ago when there was a majority of one mind on some topic that majority lobbied to get the government to ban or tax or regulate or whatever what it is they didn't like. As soon as they did this they said "Government, you're in control of this area." Once in control, the government can change its mind later and decide in the exact opposite way. Of course, these people have a short memory and later when the gov. has reversed its position they cry foul and now say the gov. shouldn't be in this area at all. Too late. These are the people who wanted marriage laws to stop certain people from marrying. They got their wish but now the situation is almost reversed where soon not only will anyone or any number of people be able to marry each other but it will be a crime to personally discriminate based on others' living arrangements. Let the government mandate that children must be schooled and little by little the government inches towards banning homeschooling (a California judge recently ruled homeschooling unconstitutional because the state has an interest in seeing that children are endoctrinated with obedience to the state), giving parents no say in what their children are taught in schools, and eventually it will become criminal for parents to attempt to subvert what the government wants the schools to teach the kids to believe.

What happens when you play against such a pair, and you have an auction where the meaning of the opponents calls is dependent on the meaning of your calls? They can ask the meaning of your calls whether or not you alert. If they need your alerts to help them know when to make conventional defensive calls, they shouldn't ask you not to alert in the first place. Why shouldn't opponents be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot? So opponents should be allowed to bid 3N or 7N every contract. They are just shooting themselves in the foot right? Well, bridge isn't fun if one side is ignoring their hands or your hands. The laws of bridge state they must be attentive to the game and not knowing which artificial bids to double or when the opponents have reached a final contract that you might like to double is not paying attention to the game.

1st question: You should be more concerned about people who play a natural system and very infrequently alert. When they do alert, then that is much more likely to alert partner than a pair who plays an unusual system with a lot of alerts. If you alert almost every bid anyway and very few bids are natural then hearing partner alert tells you nothing since you know almost every bid has a special meaning anyway. Personally, I don't feel that saying "no alert" should be allowed. People have an obligation according to the rules of bridge to pay attention to the game. You may want to alert some artificial bid in the auction to tell partner what suit to lead. If you don't have alerts then you won't know what is natural and what is artificial and so you wouldn't be able to double. As such, just ignoring opponents while they are bidding I think is a violation of the rules. 2nd question: When bridge was invented, they decided that the meanings of bids would not be secret. As soon as they made that decision, they needed alerts for when bids had unusual meanings. How else would you know when a bid was normal or when it wasn't? Occasionally, somebody will run a tournament on BBO that is technically not a bridge tournament because it makes the meanings of bids private. I've played in these and even though I usually play unusual systems, I don't really like these tournaments. 3rd question: The reason that most cue bids are not alerted (some are) is that people expect cue bids to have unusual meanings and so they can always ask if they want to know.

Define landslide. If I had to guess right now, I'd say that Obama wins with less than 50% of the popular vote. Probably the most he can expect is 55%. Even if that 55% gives him a plurality in every state so that McCain gets nothing from the electoral college then I still wouldn't say it is a landslide.

From both of them I heard "We're spending too much....(10 seconds later)....here's billions of additional spending to fix our problems." You have to love the "we got in this mess due to deregulation mantra." Of course, the problem could not possibly be the mandates and the creation of two mortgage giants to give loans to people who didn't have the credit needed to otherwise qualify. Politics is a joke. They never even get close to addressing the fundamental issues.

For me, 2♥ is weak and to play, 3♥ is invite and cue-bidding first and then bidding 3♥ would be forcing.

I think if you claim making in this situation with no explanation that the director must then choose a reasonable line of play that is most beneficial to the defenders. In this case, that would be the failing heart finesse. So, I would assign -1 here. There is no way to continue play after this claim.

Did you hear about the 90 year old woman who police came to evict her from her house as she had defaulted on her mortgage? She shot herself twice in the arms. What did Fannie Mae decide to do then? Why, forgive her her debt and let her keep her house. Hello?!?!?!? It doesn't take a genius to realize now there is going to be a string of people shooting themselves when they default on their mortgages.

I'd love to play but where I come from 0800 doesn't exist.

I agree with this 100%. The excessive focus on the numbers for this quarter and this year override building for the future. If you reward wild risk taking, you get wild risk taking. This is a great story for those who love regulation. In the late 90s, the Democrats thought it was unfair that CEOs got paid huge sums of money independent of the performance of the company. So, they made it advantageous from a tax perspective to give a million in base (non-performance) pay and base any other pay on performance (and the easiest way to determine performance is by stock price). This is what created the CEO fixation on stock price and the endless manipulations to bump up the stock price while the current CEO is there so that he can cash in. I read a book on this that mentioned that GE had something like 42 consecutive quarters where each quarter's profit was higher than the previous. This is clearly an impossibly unlikely result in the absence of purposeful manipulations. The law of unintended consequences in brutal action here. Other than Ken Lay, you now know who to thank for Enron.

Of course, if I had slaves, one of my highest goals would be to convince them that they weren't slaves but still keep them obedient. Certainly there are degrees of enslavement but the degree doesn't matter when it comes to the fundamental question of what your state is. Please command on my thought experiment where the slave owner temporarily frees the slave or takes only 10% of his output. Is he still not a slave? How is that different than the current state of affairs where even in the US estimates for the effective tax rate go as high as 50%. Half your productive efforts go to someone else and you dismiss enslavement as a gross misuse?

I don't think your analogy is apt. A free black is a free black. Sure, he could be taken captive and re-enslaved but the possibility isn't what we're talking about. Let's say that a master says to his slave "You can now go wherever you want and do whatever you want until I tell you that I need you again." The slave then goes off and lives his life however he chooses. Is he still not a slave? The master can rescind his temporary freedom at any time. However, if a slave is completely freed, his master can't come back later and legitimately "unfree" him and start ordering him around again. That is the difference. The government has the attitude that they can regulate or tax you to whatever degree they desire. If they choose to not regulate or tax you for some reason, that in no way makes your state less than enslavement. If they try to regulate or tax you too much then you can try to elect someone who will buck the trend (good luck with that) or you can revolt. However, from the government's perspective, you are still at a minimum their economic slaves.

I play the one described on Dan Neill's webpage. Dan's Bridge Page

If you see me online then I'll play F-N with you. My BBO id is DrTodd.

How so? Well, let's see, the government reserves the right to do everything to you that I mentioned as part of economic enslavement. Where are they limited in terms of maximum tax rate? Where does it say they can't nationalize every business and force you to do the job they want you to do? The 9th and 10th amendments are dead my friend. Thank for mr1303 for noticing. One would have to suppose that those voting "none of the above" don't believe that we are economically enslaved. Is a slave not still a slave if he works 1 hour a day for his master versus 16?

I suppose you are right. How else would you justify means? Yeah...you're right. The only question is what the proper end is. If you don't think the ends justify the means then you must hold some ideal as more important than the end in question. Then, that ideal becomes your new "end."

I agree that "sometimes" is not really an answer. It is in effect saying that in some circumstances you think that overall happiness is improved with one course of action and in another similar case you think human happiness is improved by the opposite course of action. In both cases, you are still operating on the ends justify the means.

If you are going to buy into the nonsense that it is the job of our "leaders" to "run the economy" then it is comical for McCain to say he is retiring to Washington to contribute. He has been quoted numerous times as saying he doesn't understand economics. If there were such a thing as an ideal fix to this problem, it would almost certainly be unpopular politically. What McCain adds to the process is politicization, taking something that might help and turning it into something that will certainly help less and may contribute to the problem but will be certain to benefit those with political clout, which ain't you and me.

In a hypothetical universe, if the murder, total enslavement, or economic enslavement of one innocent individual could guarantee universal happiness and lack of need, which of these actions would you consider right or wrong to achieve the aforementioned guarantee. Total enslavement here means that every facet of the one individual's life is controlled by the remainder of the population. Economic enslavement here means that non-productive personal matters such as religion and family are still under control of the individual but economically productive actions are under the control of the rest of the population...including dictating what jobs he can and can't do, how he does them, and up to 100% taxation.

"Speculators" are always the scapegoats but the term is not definable. In essence, anything you do with your money is speculation. If you buy something now you are speculating that it won't be cheaper in the future. If you hold dollars then you are speculating that dollars will appreciate against other currencies or that gains in productivity will lower prices in some market segment in which you wish to buy. Anything you do with money that you don't have an immediate need for like buying food or shelter is an investment and investment is indistinguishable from "speculation."

That's like saying that Robin Hood always stole exactly the right amount of money from the rich man. We sit around and argue about how much he should have stolen but never question the fact that it is theft nonetheless. Of course the FED always overshoots or undershoots...they don't have perfect knowledge. No one does and no one can. That is why central planning is always doomed to failure. All that should be necessary to know about them is that the FED is a private institutions and we taxpayers borrow money from them and pay interest to them when we could just print the money ourselves and pay no interest. Whose interests do you think a private bank serves, their own or ours? They have everyone brainwashed that there can be no other way. You try telling this to people on the street and that won't believe that the system actually functions this way. Hell, something like 20% of the members of the house of representatives banking committee think we're still on the gold standard!

It is the rapid increase in the supply of money that is the problem, not the existence of money.

I wish people would stop blaming this on the "free market." We don't have a free market in this country. We have a regulated, monopolized and mandated market. Here's the quick summary for you. The US spends way more than it gets in revenues. The solution? The FED buys the debt with money created out of thin air. All this new money coursing through the system has to go somewhere and so one business segment or another will be viewed as "hot." Chaos theory probably applies here but once people see an area become warm they want to join in on the profits so they invest and the area becomes hot and then everyone invests and the area becomes red hot. At some point, it becomes clear that this area didn't need or require that much investment and then everyone runs scared and everything comes crashing down. Tech bubble or real-estate, the problem is malinvestment triggered by excess money creation. Our market isn't free because in a free market, no one would have a monopoly on the creation of money. At some point, the government REGULATED the use of red-lining which had the effect of many people getting homes that wouldn't have previously based on their poor credit. This regulation contributed greatly to the next bubble being a real-estate bubble. The government's solution? Let's create a trillion more dollars and trigger another wave of malinvestment. The problem is whack-a-mole...you can try to regulate the last two areas that happened to fail but this money will flow somewhere new and create another bubble. It is inevitable and cannot be regulated out of existence. The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Maybe we need a sticky post in each forum saying what topics have been discussed. That way, people can stop thinking their ideas are original. This suggestion has been made numerous times in the past. I've even posted the code to do it! BBO management has no interest in introducing any ratings system.