It would be an act of terminal insanity for Barack Obama to name Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential candidate. It would not help him get elected, it would drag all the Clinton controversies into the general election, and having her down the hall in the West Wing would be a recipe for disaster, dissension and civil war. Other than that, it’s a hell of an idea!

...

Finally, having Hillary in the West Wing would be a nightmare. There is no way that Obama could trust her. She would be a throwback to the old days when the president did not consult the vice president on anything, a situation which led Vice President John Nance Garner, FDR’s VP during his first two terms, to call the office “not worth a pitcher of warm piss.”

on Page 120:
"... it does not need to make sure its contributors are competent, or producing steadily, or even showing up. Mandated specialization of talent and consistency of effort, seemingly the hallmarks of large-scale work, actually have little to do with division of labor itself. A business needs employee A and employee B to put in the same effort if they are doing the same job, because it needs interchangeability and because it needs to reduce friction between energetic and lazy workers. By this measure, most contributors to Wikipedia are lazy."

"I appreciate what they [the flowers] do for me, so I do something for them...sexually."
When I didn't think I could be any more uncomfortable, it did.
The fat-activist had a bit of a breakdown, right there.
Fat activist: "I AM FULL OF FAIL."
Polyamory woman: "No, we are full of win."
Trans she-he: "This room is full of win."

Religion easily has the best bullshit story of all time. Think about it. Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man…living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

Common memes include:
Common sense, as spread from generation to generation
Popular works, such as music, literature, and video; often transmitted in the form of specific quotes and scenes.
Technology and technological artifacts: cars, paper-clips, etc. Technology demonstrates mutation as well as transmission, which memetic (or genetic) progress requires. An often-cited example of "technology as meme" involves the building of a fire. Some researchers sometimnes refer to memes concerning technology as "temes", which rhymes with "memes".[6] Also see Moore's Law.
Traditions, including religion, fashion, proverbs, epic poems, stories, music, dance, and children's culture
Theories, including scientific, pseudoscientific, and conspiratorial
Medical and safety advice: "Don't swim for an hour after eating", "Stop, drop, and roll".
Popular concepts: these include Freedom, Justice, Ownership, Open Source, Egoism, or Altruism
Group-based biases: everything from anti-semitism and racism to cargo cults.
Programming paradigms: from structured programming and object-oriented programming to extreme programming.
Phrases, slogans, and expressions. May come from advertising ("Whasssssup!"; sometimes accompanied by melodies), the Internet ("all your base are belong to us!") or politics ("mob rule")
Viral marketing: a type of marketing based on memes and using "word of mouth" to advertise (see the recent example of Snakes on a Plane).

Let me see
Mark Brooks had a Kindle idea which got me thinking:
1. Let me see the percentage of people who have bought a book and actually finished reading it. (The Kindle knows, right?) Even better, let me see Kindle books that are finished by people who finish books that I finish!
2. Let me see a map of my town with the location of pedestrian accidents highlighted by color.
3. Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way to bringing equity to the assessment system.
4. Sort restaurants on Open Table by the percentage of reservations booked by returning diners.
5. Sort Facebook invitations in order of how many times someone has been unfriended.
6. Sort credit card offers based on data from Mint or Wesabe... show me the credit cards with the fewest bankruptcies/financial troubles among recipients first.
7. Sort corporate email by how many people in my company have indicated that a sender is important.
8. Let me see stocks ranked in order of recent purchases by successful investors.
9. Let me review bids from builders ranked in order of complaints filed or the length of time between first application for a building permit and finished building.
10. Let me see potential online dates sorted by how frequently (or infrequently) the person goes on first dates.
11. Sort car models by crash and repair data.
12. Let me see my salesforce ranked by closing rate or cold call rate or customer satisfaction.
13. Let me see my inbound call data by hour, sorted by number of rings before answer, or by percentage of calls unanswered.
14. Let me sort my customer service requests by customer value. (Including loyalty, purchases and referrals).
15. Let me choose a doctor by malpractice suit rate.
16. When I watch TV online, recognize the pundit and flash historical accuracy rates on the screen while she talks.
17. Blank out comments on posts that agree with my point of view.
18. Highlight the floor of the trade show and let me see which paths are walked the most. Or give me glasses that let me follow in the footsteps of people I admire. Or let me walk on paths no one else is walking on.
I guess I'm talking about passive contributions of public behavior information to traditionally-sorted data.

The personality of the vice president is also a potentially decisive factor. He well exemplifies the mentality of the Bush aide (Karl Rove?) who in a conversation with Ron Suskind in 2004 mocked "the reality-based community," comprised of people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." No, he argued: "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

even though molecular biologists and biochemists have often gone beyond single proteins, and studied chains of interacting proteins in an information processing pathway or a metabolic system, these pathways and systems are often so complex that verbal, intuitive reasoning isn’t enough to understand how they work. We need mathematical models

The wealthy devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they're rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, the very wealthy are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

you come back after a really good group conversation filled with partially developed ideas. It just takes a different kind of conversation to explore those ideas, test them for truthfulness, examine their usefulness, place them in context with what we already know.

you come back after a really good group conversation filled with partially developed ideas. It just takes a different kind of conversation to explore those ideas, test them for truthfulness, examine their usefulness, place them in context with what we already know.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

So, is genius linked with craziness? Is this why we aren't all geniuses? Is mankind only so smart because if we get any smarter, we cease to function correctly? Maybe it's just not evolutionarily advantageous to be smarter than we are; it makes us mopey, and we end up cutting our ears off when we're trying to woo girls, which rarely results in offspring.

Biden usually requires 90 seconds just to warm up and lubricate his vocal cords, after which he reliably barks some ridiculous gaffe.