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This is my prediction of Obama’s VP announcement:

Obama has an event scheduled in Springfield, IL to show off the VP and he’ll be like, "You want to know who it is?" and pulls out a phone and types it out and hits send.

Beeps and buzzing fill the audience and a roar starts to move through the crowd as people read the text message. As the crowd comes to a fever pitch, Obama smiles and the VP comes parachuting in or does something pedestrian like come out from behind a curtain.

The question then becomes, how do they get the person out from the surveillance that the media has on the "short list"?

Its not someone on the shortlist.

8/24 Addendum: Darn you Andrea Mitchell. Darn you for spoiling my plan!

While its hella-amusing that McCain doesn’t even know how many houses he owns, I would have rather they’d gone after McCain’s desire to reinstate the draft. Or inability to listen to a soldier’s mother’s question and properly parse the words in order to properly disagree… you know.. whichever.

Let’s go to the videotape!

Also, while Obama and McCain keep trying to say that the other one wants to raise your taxes and circling around each other, all we needed was this handy chart from the Tax Policy Center and published by the Washington Post.

And finally, Obama selects his running mate!

I find NBC’s commitment to the Olympics to be great simply because they are going all out. My TiVo informed me that we now have an Olympic Soccer and Olympic Basketball channel, in HD no-less, as well as the coverage on NBC HD, USA HD, Universal HD, CNBC HD and I think there’s some other ones as well… Bravo maybe?

Combine this with their website and the Olympics On The Go site for Windows Media Center users and there’s just a myriad of ways to watch the different events going on!

I have to recommend the Men’s 4×100 freestyle if you didn’t catch that and the highlights of the USA vs China basketball game to get a taste of the pain that the "Redeem team" is going to inflict this year.

Top gear top tip: When you pick a video, make sure to click the "Enlarge Player" option because that’s how you get access to the Picture-in-picture, highlights and "live video control room" which really make it easy to keep track of your particular sport.

Schrodinger’s Wolfman would be a good band name…

Oh, and mini golf is awesome.

So I took a little break from the blogs to play Penny Arcade Adventures – On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One and was totally surprised at how much fun it was! I’ve never played any adventure/RPG type of games but quickly found out what worked and what didn’t.

There are some repetitive parts but the reason that I stuck with it was that the writing was just so freaking hilarious! From the descriptions of the items in the world to the character’s dialogue as they go about the business of chasing down the giant robot that crushed your house.

A+ Penny Arcade guys. A+.
I look forward to the next episode!

With the current price of gas and the record profits being posted by companies like Exxon, it would stand to reason that this is a good time to be a gas station owner. Apparently not. Via NPR: Higher prices mean slimmer profits for gas stations.

As it turns out, that’s not the case. Of the $3-4 per gallon of gas that we’re paying these days, over 70% goes towards the crude oil itself and only about 3-15 cents actually go to the gas station owners. The worst part is that the station’s profit margin per gallon is fixed thanks to their delivery contracts but the credit card transaction fees are based on a percentage of the dollar amount of the gas sold. This creates a pretty bad situation for the station owner as their profit per gallon is significantly cut. The example given was of a station that makes 16 cents per gallon and then pays 7 cents in credit card fees for regular unleaded.

In Texas, I’ve seen a number of cash-only or cash-preferred gas stations and never really knew why they offered cash a better price than credit card sales but this makes perfect sense.
Will I change my ways? I don’t know… but I’ll certainly think about it.

Carrotmob is an interesting one… Via the one and only Ze Frank, I learned of a group out in San Francisco called Carrotmob whose stated purpose is to organize consumers to make purchases from companies that agree to make environmentally friendly choices.

If you have a few minutes, you can watch the video of their first proof-of-concept campaign and see how it went down but here’s the short version:

Carrotmob went around to 20 some-odd corner/liquor stores in San Francisco and promised that many shoppers would come if they would commit a certain percentage of their purchases to making environmental improvements to their stores. The stores then bid against each other until the winner came in at 22%. A study was done to make recommendations of what could be improved and how much it would cost, and then at a specific day and time, the people would show up.

And show up they did! For reference, this store receives about $2,000-3,000k in revenue on an weekday and the mob spent over $9,000!

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

All in all, I think that this is an interesting concept blending good old consumerism with community and environmental activism… I’m kind of curious as to how it scales though. An example is given of toothbrushes, and I think its spot on because its easier for something like this to succeed if its a commodity where environmental effect is the differential factor but I acknowledge that I’ve selected some things mostly based on their environmental impact. Case in point, my Nau outerwear. I specifically decided to buy from Nau because of their commitment to sustainable fabrics, recycling and their unique Partners for Change program where a percentage of each purchase is shared with a charity partner of your choice.

And yet, as I typed that last sentence, I visited NAU and found out that they are going out of business as they haven’t been able to get more funding. They are currently having a 50% off clearance sale and so I’m picking up a couple of items. Its bittersweet.

Science comes back to prove what we already knew: First borns do have it rougher.

A quote from the article:

First-borns who dropped out of school were 20 percent less likely to be getting most of their annual income from their parents than younger siblings in the same situation, Hao and her team found after reviewing annual surveys, involving more than 7,000 kids each year, conducted from 1979 to 1994 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In addition, the researchers found, first-born daughters who got pregnant as teenagers were 30 percent less likely to be getting most of their money from their parents than younger female siblings.

“Parents have an incentive to play tough with their kids, especially the older ones, to try to establish this signal to the other children that they’re not a pushover,” says Joseph Hotz, an economics professor at Duke University and a co-author of the study.

It’s all for the sake of setting an example, a refrain first-borns know all too well. By punishing the oldest kid more severely, Hotz says, parents are hoping to essentially scare the younger brothers and sisters straight, keeping them from making a similar mistake.

Emily and I did not need science to tell us this fact.