FM75

Welcome to the forum. Thanks for the interesting hand. One problem with your 2 suiter is that it does not promise ever to be able to get to dummy. So the voids may only have value when the opponents win tricks. The ♦Q is nice, but give W ♦ A9x and dummy's Q8 would not have an entry. So you might have 2 entries perforce in hearts but lose 2 diamonds and a heart first. I don't see any artificial bidding that could pick this out scientifically. Maybe others have a trick up their sleeves. But a 6♠ sacrifice would probably be a winner if you found a way to bid 6♥?

Economics: One of the key principals in punishment is the the punishment needs to exceed the cost of enforcement - or be sufficiently costly to the perpetrator to serve as a deterrent. So fines at parking meters are large, because one can't efficiently catch every non-payer. Prison is costly to the perpetrator - compared to the alternative of being free. Cheating at anything for money tends to be a losing strategy in the long run. Logistics: It is probably fair to say that the typical venue described does not have the infrastructure to 1) power up all of the hardware - how many sockets do you see in a ballroom, 2) Wireless bandwidth and ports are likely insufficient as well - and many venues actually have the whole package farmed out to a provider that charges by the hour for each user. 3) The heat load of a ballroom full of laptops likely would overwhelm the HVAC? 4) These rooms don't have faraday shields - so they won't stop electronic communication between rooms, 4) provisioning all of the laptops, making sure they can't do anything but play bridge - awkward. Heck! people on BBO can't even agree to stop playing on the old windows client. Social: This has already been mentioned.

Ken, The "rich" in this game are people's pension funds, mutual funds, and life insurance companies. The people that you think of as rich are kind of like the "period" at the end of this sentence. They real "rich" are smart folks looking out for your money or mine.

Yes, 0 is the winning answer. It is the Nash Equilibrium for each player and it dominates every other strategy - a mathematical term that means pretty much what you would expect it to mean. Eventually, even the people who did not figure out the answer for themselves read about it, and they are now as smart at the game as the first one to figure it out. The point here is that HFT serves a purpose which is to make the markets more efficient. It is a game. It is a game that is well understood and consistent with modern game theory - worth a couple of Nobel Economics prizes - yes, not the real Nobel Prizes set up by Nobel, but a prize that is given out by a bank. It is played by multiple operators bringing liquidity to the markets. They get paid for executing orders efficiently the same as Amazon does. The more efficient they are, the more business they can do. In the low frequency days you paid ridiculous sums of money to execute a buy or a sell, evidenced by a bid-ask spread that might have been $1/8th or more PER share and with exchange fees tacked on top of that. Today you can purchase tens of thousands of shares for a fee of $4.99 or so, and do it in a market where the bid-ask spread could be less than 0.01. If you are an operator and try to cheat your customers, what happens? You have to play the game every second, day in, and day out to make money. You cheat and your customers leave - game over (for you). You might even go to jail, without passing Go. There is no relationship between this and the credit crisis - for which mortgages were only a tangential but visible event - to answer that question. What question then remains? Why did Lewis write this book? He worked in the industry many years ago and hasn't said anything particularly positive about it since, despite at one point working at one of the most respected and profitable firms on The Street. Suppose he found that everything was all hunky-dory. You can't sell that book. That dog won't hunt. If there is one difficulty in the system, it is stability. Think Flash Crash from May 2010. What is hard - likely impossible - to prove is that a system with multiple competing algorithms can avoid that type of behavior. That said, such events are not in the interest of anyone in the game, so it is something that all guard against to the best they can. Things can appear stable right up to the point where they go off the deep end. It is not just in financial markets. Companies do not typically last more than 30 years. The ones that do were always successful - until they weren't. Edit: I mentioned that now everybody knows the answer. By that I did not mean that everybody who has read the answer actually understands why it is the answer. But knowing it makes the game fair and "enforces" the Nash Equilibrium. :)

Was it really a transfer? Seems more like a beginner partnership mishap. Or opener was "the pro"?

Over the last 4 years Amazon has reported an average of about $900 million income before taxes per year. How much money did they spend to make that amount? Are they cheating their customers? How are they different? How about EBay? Netflix?

In the event of a tie, the prize is split equally.

Perhaps Lewis will write his next book about Mr. Nash. He developed some powerful theories. The one for which he is best known, suggests to me that not only is Lewis wrong, but that he is fundamentally ill-equipped to understand why he is wrong. Lewis is not unusual in this respect, however. You and Michael are about to play a game. Each of you will pick a number between 0 and 100, inclusive.The player whose number is closest to half the other person's number will win $100. What number will you choose?

Never tried it. But it makes sense to me. Especially on a small device lacking a real keyboard. That said, the output is text, so the person with failing near vision still has a problem on the receiving end.. The sound app on the web works great if everyone is on the web in teaching tables. Promote it to regular tablets! People want to record chat to text. This is an issue that needs thought. Bug alert - the speakers on web chat are all labeled as 4's regardless of their normal BBO designation.

Yesterday I was at a venue where I could not log into BBO. It had wireless access and support for http/s. I suspect that I could not login because of the additional port that BBO uses. I seem to recall a link that allows you even to watch both rooms in each of two windows without needing a BBO login. I was not able to find that link, so missed chances to watch the finals of the Vanderbilt. The BBO app on the phone also did not support it, or I could not find out how to do it.

Yes, it can be done using the hand-viewer (sort of - it is tedious). Export the game to view on the web. It constructs a really long URL. That has the auction and the entire play history. You can stop the play at your desired point by editing the URL - erasing all play. Then paste that into your browser. At the end of the play, GIB will show you the double dummy analysis of the options that the next player has. Not pretty, or easy. The down-side is if you really want to step through, each step you make will require pasting a new url AND stepping through to the end.

Maybe BBO could do that. It would be nice. In any event, you can do what you want. Right click in the chat window, select all (or Ctrl-A keyboard shortcut). Then right click copy (or Ctrl-C), then paste it where you like. You might like to use Evernote, or MS-Word, etc. Evernote is a nice choice - searchable, you can organize it however you want to, and you don't need to back it up because it is stored on Evernote's servers. You can get apps for it on smart phones, tablets, your PC, and if you got a Mac, you would still have access to it. :)

http://www.bridgebase.com/forums/topic/41312-pbn-to-lin-converter/ Instructions for converting .pbn to .lin. Each hand in a .lin file can be represented as a single line. IIRC multiple hands can be loaded with one file. Off hand I can't remember whether it matters whether the lines are separated by a LF or CR-LF.

I would think you could use a BBO Teaching Table to achieve what you want. You can preset the deals in advance, and play it through by yourself to make sure it works.

"...but I can look at the data and see that when the US had higher tax brackets and less regressive taxation (payroll taxes) that GDP was higher and unemployment was lower - over decades. " This is what you said, dude. Now tell us which years showed the higher GDPs and the higher tax brackets. Be specific to show your clear understanding (in your own words). Or do what you did before. Post something unrelated, rather than simply admit your mistake.

Calling you out on that crock. Why do people assert nonsense as fact in support of their beliefs. Is it to disguise it as careful analysis? Is it because most of the people they talk to have the same beliefs and don't bother to check facts? http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDP

If you want to talk specifically about it, why not post a link to the prospectus. Otherwise, we don't have any facts to discuss with respect to the issue. So we will expect the usual "feelings based" biased statements. Of course, even if you do that, we are likely to do a lot of resulting. :)

Ok, the names are withheld to protect the innocent... Given the auction, I think RHO made a mistake on the first trump lead, but who would blame somebody for playing second hand low on a 5 lead? http://www.bridgebas...HJ%7Cmc%7C10%7C Dummy leads trump 5 at trick 6 and wins the trick, stealing an extra trick. (I think.)

There is no liability sharing. The liability is entirely on the insurer. The premium payers have an asset whose value declines until expiry, unless the option value is in the money - due to some sort of loss. Purchasers of insurance are not ordinarily looking for a gain, only a limitation of loss. That said, there are some forms of insurance, for example as practiced by Lloyds where the liability is shared by other investors (reinsurers seeking a profit) or resold to manage exposure. Everything that I said was accurate, some of which you even repeated. All options are inherently derivatives. The value of a derivative is based upon a contract with an expiry, and a stochastic distribution of events governed by the contract. Looking at it other ways, will only mislead you into difficult and wrong conclusions.

Insurance, in all forms, is a derivative contract. If you are buying the contract, you pay a premium for a put option to the seller. It is little different from buying a put on a stock. Stock options are normally standard contracts bought and sold on exchanges. They have an exercise price and an expiration date. Insurance is the same, except that the contract is normally not bought and sold in an open market. The seller's business is to make money by analyzing the risk across a portfolio and pricing it to make money. (For the benefit of the one guy here who opposes profits, if the company is not profitable, then it is highly likely to be unable to perform on a claim - i.e. would default when a claim was made. If that happens, you have paid insurance premiums for nothing.) The buyer of the contract should take into account the credit-worthiness of the seller - ability to pay the exercise price, in the event the option is "in-the-money". As with the options with which you might be familiar, there is an expiration date, after which the company no longer has a liability, and your option has expired worthless. You buy home-owners insurance. You pay premiums. The exercise price is your deductible. If you have $1000 deductible and an incident that cost $800, your option is out-of-the-money. Your put still has time-value, which is related to the likelihood that your damages would exceed $1000 by the expiration date. Whatever the risk it is that you want to insure, it is an exercise in mathematics to the insurer to price it and legal judgment to determine whether the terms of the contract are sufficiently safe against fraudulent claims. If you want to insure against having to buy drugs, then you will be charged something in excess of the expected value of the drugs you will purchase (modified slightly by the ability to invest the premium in "risk-free" investments - there really is no such thing, but they get something suitably close.) If you don't buy the average amount, you will have paid out more money in premiums than you would have for the drugs. Would it be smart to charge everyone the same amount, knowing that some will be riskier than others - yes, if you charge everybody an amount that covers the worst risk. So you assume that everybody has all the bad preconditions and none of the good ones. Why must you do this? Because only the worst risks will pay the premium. So if you look at it that way, it should be VERY clear. Universal health insurance must cost more in the aggregate, than non-universal. Why? Because the self-insured population will not be paying a profit, and as a result will have lower health costs. Does this mean that you should not buy insurance? No. If you are just out of school, with no accumulated savings, a catastrophic illness could be devastating. But it is also less likely if you are healthy and maintain a healthy lifestyle. So you might reasonably opt for a reasonably large deductible, if you have a good job. Likewise, as a hedge against loss of income, you might purchase disability insurance that would cover a percentage of your normal earnings if you are unable to work for some minimum time. Does it make sense to buy insurance to buy birth-control pills? Clearly not if a) you are going to buy them anyway, or b) they would not work - unless you were planning to sell them for more than they cost you - highly unlikely - if the premium is fairly priced.

Now that this has popped back onto the board... What is the time frame for the OP? months, years, decades? If the Euro exists in 2050 (off-chance I will be alive so see this prediction), the Euro will be the official currency of the "Euro" nation-state.

At this point.. the "Whatever happened to journalism" part of this topic seems to be either a) historical artifact, or b) never relevant. Thread drift alert!! We have beat the freedom of the individual to choose versus the right of government to choose to death. A few Europeans and Euro wannabes have chimed in how much better their system is. So here is the chance to show how savvy you really are. (Challenge.) Predict the endgame. Obama (semi-)caved on his promise that you could keep your insurance. Now (if the states and insurance companies play nice with him), you can keep you insurance (for only one more year). Prediction is hard, especially about the future. So there is a good chance your predictions will be wrong. But make them anyway. 1) What percentage of the people (like my self-employed friend, and others who got policy cancellations because their policy was not PPACA compliant), will be allowed to retain the health insurance policy that they chose and paid for? 2) If they are allowed, will that same policy be available in 2015, 2016, ...? (Note. Obama and co did not promise they could keep it for only one year...) 3) With the president having a majority approval rating in only one demographic - blacks, be able to control his party in either house of congress for the rest of his term? 4) How many states agree to let the insurance companies provide policies that are not compliant with federal law - based on Obama's plea? 5) Where (if) states do, will the insurance companies allow their customers to continue their policies? 6) With Congress's ratings at a very significant, if not all time low, how many incumbents will lose seats when they are next up for re-election? 7) If he continues to blame Republicans (not the Tea Party) for the problems, how many Democrats will distance themselves from him? Which ones? 8) How many people will enroll in Obamacare via the Federal websites by 3-1-2014? How many will enroll by the same date on Federal and states web-sites? 9) How many people will be charged by the IRS to pay a "TAX' for not enrolling for the 2014 tax year? 10) 2015? Ten questions. All requiring an answer of yes or no, a count, or a percentage. (Exception - the follow-on question in 7.) Good luck. Prediction is hard....Give it your best shot. :)

Did you look at the bidding? Partner did pass the [takeout ?] double. In my mind, that means that there was no PA that the double was takeout. I am not saying it shouldn't be takeout, simply that from the evidence, it was not part of their agreement. The logic was based on that.

Lack of science is an understatement. Well said. One could think of a single-payer system as one consumer pays one provider. That seems like the simplest definition and logical. The opposite is an every-payer system in which everybody pays one provider for that consumer's health care. (Oh, wait. We want to call that single payer, as in the government, which has no realistic way of earning income outside taxation, ignoring public park fees and the like. Is it single payer when supported by massive transfer payments from taxpayers?). Then you have the in between schemes where some people never pay for anybody's health care including their own. As to it not being "good for 50 million or more"... I think you really mean not "good enough" by someone's standard. Why should health care be any different from food, housing, or any thing else you might want or need? You want/need a car? Go buy one (that you can afford). You can't afford the one you want. Steal one that somebody else paid for. Are you really, really hungry. Drop by McDonald's. Grab somebody's dinner and run fast. Consider this. How about a one-time transfer payment for health care? You don't like your options, fill out this form (on paper, so we don't have to get a web-site working). Sign it. You get a one way air-fare to the country of your choice. No returns. No rush. No deadlines. You can opt in any time you like.