Over at Missile Test, Bryan Larrick on last week’s Republican presidential debate:

But the worst moments of the debate came at the end, when each of the candidates not named Trump was asked if they would support Trump were he to win the nomination. All said yes.

And this on a day when the 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney, came out of the shadows and gave a blistering speech on why Trump should be stopped. It was a rallying cry, and was supposed to pave the way for the public figures in the GOP to denounce Trump. Yet mere hours later, when the three non-Trump candidates were given an opportunity to stand with their party’s leadership, they all, to a man, decided to protect their own asses. Well done, sirs.

This whole presidential election, on both sides, has really been depressing.

Bill Clinton, 1999

Over at Re/Code, Ina Fried searched for the most TED thing at TED:

I thought I had found the TED-iest of them all: A helicopter trip to the top of a mountain to play ice hockey on a frozen lake while being instructed by former pros.

But there were a couple problems. First off, the hockey experience sold out in minutes despite the $3,000-plus price tag. That meant no room on the helicopter for poor scribes hoping to glom on.

Undeterred, I arrived Wednesday hoping that someone was out partying too late with Al Gore and was too hung-over to turn up for their helicopter-and-hockey tour. But it turned out there was an even bigger problem, one Gore has been warning about — global warming. The lake in question wasn’t frozen, so the whole thing got canceled.

Seems TED has crawled up its own ass, not unlike what you see in the real Silicon Valley and the (barely) parodied version on HBO.

On a related note, check out this interview with Eddie Huang on The Joe Rogan Experience where he describes the cult-like rules when you’re a TED fellow.

I’m a big fan of making up projects for yourself if you’re in need of portfolio pieces but have any work or clients (I don’t recommend you work for free, but creativity is a muscle that needs regular exercise).

A great example is this subreddit: Your_Post_As_A_Movie

via design you trust

Tony Larsson on why you shouldn’t worry about identity theft (via Life Hacker):

Bringing a product to market takes a huge investment of time, energy and money. This means that if a person wanted to capitalize on your idea, they would need to stop current endeavors and refocus their life on this new task.

It is highly unlikely that the person you are sharing your idea with would want to do that. Also the type of person that would completely change their life course on a whim, probably lacks the focus necessary for executing the idea in the first place.

Most people don’t execute their great ideas. Most of the time peoples’ ideas turn out to be shit anyway.

Actually, many of ideas of successful people start out crappy as well. The difference is the successful person has the grit and drive to iterate on an idea until it becomes something great.

While I generally agree with Larsson, I would be careful about who you share your great ideas with if you live in Silicon Valley or San Francisco. Don’t get what I call, “Zuckerberg’d”.