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Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread


Winstonm

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  • 2 weeks later...

From an interview with Deborah Davis about her trip by car across the U.S. which she made while writing a book about Andy Warhol's trip by car across the U.S.

 

You write about Jack Rittenhouse’s guide to Route 66, which was the first guidebook to the highway. Did Warhol follow it? Did you?

 

It didn’t turn up in Warhol’s artifacts so I doubt it. I thought Rittenhouse was amazing. I loved his rule of the road that says you should stop at the roadside cafes where the most trucks are parked out front because you can be certain to find a good cup of coffee.

 

Did you follow that rule?

 

Absolutely. That was how we found the Midpoint Diner [in Adrian, Tex.], where we had breakfast. Steinbeck said breakfast was the best American meal when you’re on the road. He’s absolutely right. It’s all about beginnings, a new day, a new stretch of the highway.

 

What surprised you?

 

There were no Americans on Route 66. It was all foreigners. They’ve all come to see the quintessential America. They’re all looking for America, but Americans aren’t. I think it should be mandatory that everyone drive cross-country. Even though every city has a Starbucks and the big towns are alike, you still get those glimpses of something more authentic. You really experience America.

 

Where would you like to go again?

 

Pittsburgh. It was the most amazing city. It is both polished and scarred. It has a cultural center that you get from having Carnegie this and Carnegie that. The food scene is enough to keep you fat and happy. And you have the Andy Warhol Museum. It’s an incredible combination.

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http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/10/14/sports/yCUBS1/yCUBS1-master675.jpg

The Cubs rookie Kyle Schwarber after his leadoff home run in the seventh inning, his second homer of the series, gave Chicago an insurance run. Credit David Banks/Getty Images

 

CHICAGO — The Chicago Cubs played nearly 100 full seasons at their cozy North Side home without a day like this. From Three Finger Brown to Hack Wilson, Phil Cavarretta to Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg to Sammy Sosa, they had never clinched a postseason series at Wrigley Field.

 

That changed on Tuesday, when a band of upstarts slew their biggest rival and barged into the National League Championship Series. The Cubs used three home runs and eight pitchers to eliminate the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-4, in Game 4 of this division series. More.

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You know about net neutrality. Meet grid neutrality.

 

The electricity grid is in the beginning stages of a fateful evolution.

 

For a century or so, the model for the grid has been "hub and spoke" — electricity has been generated in large central power plants and spilled through wires into customer buildings. It works like water flowing downhill through canals and channels into basins; the basins are passive recipients, and the water only flows one way.

 

In the grid of the future, electricity will behave less like water and more like information. Everyone will consume it, produce it, store it, and share it. The customers at the ends of the wires will become active participants — producer/consumers, or "prosumers," in the awful jargon — and hub-and-spoke will give way to a multidirectional network.

 

In short, the grid will become less like a public water system and more like the internet, a networked platform upon which all sorts of innovations and markets can grow.

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The new normal: An Engineering Theory of the Volkswagen Scandal

 

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Kedrosky-AnEngineeringTheoryoftheVolkswagenScandal-690.jpg

 

In a powerful book about the disintegration, immediately after launch, of the Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven astronauts in January of 1986, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors. Starting in 1983, the Challenger shuttle had been through nine successful launches, in progressively lower ambient temperatures, across the years. Each time the launch team got away with a lower-temperature launch, Vaughan argued, engineers noted the deviance, then decided it wasn’t sufficiently different from what they had done before to constitute a problem. They effectively declared the mildly abnormal normal, making deviant behavior acceptable, right up until the moment when, after the shuttle launched on a particularly cold Florida morning in 1986, its O-rings failed catastrophically and the ship broke apart.

 

We are, by now, used to seeing greed as the primary driver of corporate scandals. In the wake of Enron and the mortgage fraud that led to the financial crisis, the great surprise of the Volkswagen scandal may prove to be that the malfeasance could have arisen systemically, without the direct involvement of anyone higher up (or the involvement of mortgage traders, for that matter). It is still possible, of course, that we will learn that the engineers were under orders from management to beat the tests by any means necessary, but based on what we now know, that seems implausible. It’s more likely that the scandal is the product of an engineering organization that evolved its technologies in a way that subtly and stealthily, even organically, subverted the rules. Volkswagen is promising to release a fix for its software soon; fixing its entire operation may leave it wishing it could merely fire a few mortgage traders.

 

My theory is that the engineers' managers optimistically committed to meet specs and dates which, early on, seemed aggressive but achievable. This is pretty typical for engineering projects, especially projects with super smart guys who are not in the habit of thinking a lot about what can go wrong. A year or so away from the start manufacture date, it becomes clear that emission specs can't be met without compromising fuel efficiency and performance and something has to give: emissions or fuel efficiency or performance or target dates. The managers probably had a meeting and someone suggested a temporary software solution (no doubt described as trivial to implement and switch off later) to buy the hardware guys another year or so and someone, probably the hardware project manager, under tremendous pressure, caved. You can't blame this on engineers. That's the fastest way to destroy an organization. Every manager worth his or her salt knows this.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Strange dream: I visited Winstonm's apartment. There was a completed manuscript on the desk in his office the size of a ream of typing paper wrapped in dark blue paper and string with a note saying something like 2/1 Notes from the BBO Forum. Maybe that's a sign I need to spend more time on the bridge part of this forum. Sorry to say I did not get to meet Winston. I have no idea how I got in. I don't recall ever dreaming about this forum before.
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Strange dream: I visited Winstonm's apartment. There was a completed manuscript on the desk in his office the size of a ream of typing paper wrapped in dark blue paper and string with a note saying something like 2/1 Notes from the BBO Forum. Maybe that's a sign I need to spend more time on the bridge part of this forum. Sorry to say I did not get to meet Winston. I have no idea how I got in. I don't recall ever dreaming about this forum before.

Last night I had the strangest dream I never had before

I dreamed the world had all agreed to play two-over-one

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  • 2 weeks later...

there is the theory that as our solar system circles the galactic core Every 32 million years it hits a dense patch of dark matter. The gravity pulls a comet from the Ort cloud that may or may not hit planet earth.

 

 

64 million years ago it did hit earth, destroyed most life that cleaned the slate that lead to humans. mammals were tiny and burrowed into the earth

 

so dark matter lead to the human domain

 

---

 

 

I guess we are about due(* give or take a few million years) for another close call from dark matter gravity pulling a comet from the ort cloud

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I guess we are about due(* give or take a few million years) for another close call from dark matter gravity pulling a comet from the ort cloud

Reminds me of an old rule for (economic) forecasters: "Either forecast what is going to happen or when something is going to happen, but never both at the same time...."

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there is the theory that as our solar system circles the galactic core Every 32 million years it hits a dense patch of dark matter. The gravity pulls a comet from the Ort cloud that may or may not hit planet earth.

 

 

64 million years ago it did hit earth, destroyed most life that cleaned the slate that lead to humans. mammals were tiny and burrowed into the earth

 

so dark matter lead to the human domain

 

---

 

 

I guess we are about due(* give or take a few million years) for another close call from dark matter gravity pulling a comet from the ort cloud

 

We are all the children of Lord Voldemort? :P

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JOHN LEGEND LYRICS

"All Of Me"

 

[Verse 1:]

What would I do without your smart mouth?

Drawing me in, and you kicking me out

You've got my head spinning, no kidding, I can't pin you down

What's going on in that beautiful mind

I'm on your magical mystery ride

And I'm so dizzy, don't know what hit me, but I'll be alright

 

[Pre-Chorus:]

My head's under water

But I'm breathing fine

You're crazy and I'm out of my mind

 

[Chorus:]

'Cause all of me

Loves all of you

Love your curves and all your edges

All your perfect imperfections

Give your all to me

I'll give my all to you

You're my end and my beginning

Even when I lose I'm winning

'Cause I give you all of me

And you give me all of you, oh oh

 

[Verse 2:]

How many times do I have to tell you

Even when you're crying you're beautiful too

The world is beating you down, I'm around through every mood

You're my downfall, you're my muse

My worst distraction, my rhythm and blues

I can't stop singing, it's ringing, in my head for you

 

[Pre-Chorus:]

My head's under water

But I'm breathing fine

You're crazy and I'm out of my mind

 

[Chorus:]

'Cause all of me

Loves all of you

Love your curves and all your edges

All your perfect imperfections

Give your all to me

I'll give my all to you

You're my end and my beginning

Even when I lose I'm winning

'Cause I give you all of me

And you give me all of you, oh oh

 

[bridge:]

Give me all of you

Cards on the table, we're both showing hearts

Risking it all, though it's hard

 

[Chorus:]

'Cause all of me

Loves all of you

Love your curves and all your edges

All your perfect imperfections

Give your all to me

I'll give my all to you

You're my end and my beginning

Even when I lose I'm winning

'Cause I give you all of me

And you give me all of you

 

I give you all of me

And you give me all of you, oh oh

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This is written to be not deleted (so I am censoring myself strategically):

 

Things are going on that we know, or some of the naive of us don't know about.

 

People who are mentally ill are tolerated if they are talented/good at something that people care about (talent is not a real thing). We are lucky: we have good support systems, we are cared about because we are good at something arbitrary, and even our "mental illness" happens to have a label. In reality we have won the genetic lottery; in my case I was born healthy and smart and to a good family with a lot going for it. That is a lot luckier than a lot of people. But I have been labeled with an identifiable "mental illness." I don't disagree with this label, despite my use of ", I simply think I buy into the label. Other people do not have labels for what concerns them and they are much less lucky than myself. It is easy to say that, it is hard to accept/think that during the bad times. It is crippling to imagine going forward and all that is available to think is that 99 % of people are less lucky than me, so I should go forward and not think that way. But it is hard during the worst 1 % of my time. But I do know it's true. It can be hard to continue moving forward, bridge is a great thing for me and I play my best when I am thinking this way (which is lol) but it is not exactly how the business model of a bridge pro works. It is literally CRIPPLING so think about how the poor or below average intelligence person or disadvantaged person thinks. Those people are not necessarily lazy or bad, some of them genuinely need help and we need to help them. ***** this "free market capitalism" thought process that makes it seem like they are not rational. Sure, they are not what economists would call rational, that is the point. We need to help those people. Those people need help, not because they are bad or lazy, but because it is hard for those people to help themselves. Sure, some of those people will choose to be homeless and alcoholics/drug addicts, but we don't need to lock them up either. We need to try to HELP people. As a society, we need to HELP our fellow people. And some will call that "handouts" but you know it helps you also, instead of locking people up (at a large cost) and excommunicating them, lets ingratiate them back into society. I am lucky with my advantages, I cannot imagine being born to even an average family with average talents, in todays society I would be CRUSHED if that were true. Even with my advantages I struggle. We need to help people. We do not need to be punitive. Some people are trying to be beneficial to society but are lost and having a hard time and have no one and nothing to turn to. Being punitive towards these people is not just terrible towards them, it is a net negative to our society. I know the demographic here is largely skewed towards the right but I also think those people are open to other points of view. I have also been totally a free market person. It builds wealth maximally, so that benefits society maximally right? Well, yeah, but society is not better overall. It is easy to fall into that viewpoint. Trying to lift up the people living in the margins is a net gain for society and it is also the right thing to do. True, some people will exploit this, and some people are just bad, but I believe that a lot of people are in the situation where they are not able to help themselves but would if given the opportuinity. I equate this to the justice system being based on "it is better for 100 guilty men to go free than 1 innocent man to be convicted." Let's as a society try to help people. We live in such a litigious and punitive world and it is so sad and hard. I am not crying for myself, I am lucky. But I cannot imagine for the less fortunate mentally ill people how it is. They are LOCKED UP. In UNDERFUNDED ***** BRUTAL WORLDS. If you think that mental hospitals are at all reasonable then GL to you. They are not. They are horrible. They stop people from seeking help because they are like jail, maybe worse. And that is a private hospital. Again GL with a state hospital lol. I am crying for those who have no other options. Send them to jail over that *****. Or just ***** kill them, that would be a better option.

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/Yes I know I am hurting my bridge career with that message. I know I am not playing the game. I know you all think I am insane and some of you even "pity me" (ok that last part is actually hard). I don't care. I don't want to be pitied. I want for a real change to be enacted. I don't want people to be scared. Scared to talk. To breathe. I want real change. The only CRAZY part of that is thinking that anything will matter. I am thinking totally clearly on this one, hopefully others will see what I am saying.
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