“The Suicides usually attack early in the morning,” Amin said. “It’s a hot country and the explosive vests are thick and heavy.”

I’d never thought about suicide bombing in terms of comfort. Here’s some guy who’s decided to blow himself gloriously to bits and he’s pounding the pavement all dressed up in the blazing sun, sweat running down his face, thinking, “Gosh this thing itches, I’m pooped, let’s call it off.”

“It’s the same with car bombs,” Amin said. “You don’t want to be driving around the whole day with police everywhere and maybe get a ticket.”

Imagine the indignity of winding up in traffic court instead of the terrorist equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

A huge challenge for user-generated websites is overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem: attracting users and contributors when you are starting with zero content. One way to approach this challenge is to use what Geoffrey Moore calls the bowling pin strategy: find a niche where the chicken-and-egg problem is more easily overcome and then find ways to hop from that niche to other niches and eventually to the broader market.

I’ve been building venture-backed businesses for over 11 years now. In that time, I’ve seen a sea change in how businesses are put together. Engineering approaches, marketing approaches, pricing, service delivery … they’re all dramatically different than what they used to be.

But what I’ve come to appreciate is that, ultimately, businesses live and die on three simple dynamics: Distributions, network effects and sigmoid curves (s-curves). Almost all problems (and most opportunities) come from understanding how to take advantage of these functions – rather than fight against them.

When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money. I now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before: how not to lose it. I knew it was possible to go from rich to poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich. But while I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor. Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they were.

2) Electrical goods

You may worry that if you buy electrical goods secondhand, they won’t work. But did you know several well-known high street retailers sell their reconditioned electrical goods online, complete with limited warranties? For example:
the Comet Clearance auction website specialises in refurbished kitchen appliances
the Tesco Outlet on eBay sells everything from refurbished digital cameras to televisions
Argos Clearance Bargains sells a wide range of refurbished electrical goods including laptops and DIY tools
whilst MPB Photographic sells high-end used digital camera equipment.

Just remember to research such websites first using search engines, to pick up any bad reviews.

Most valuable additions to a property:Rank Addition Typical average value added Added value based on the Land Registry’s average house price
1st Extra bedroom 8.8% £14,572
2nd Loft conversion 7.1% £11,757
3rd Extra bathroom 6.1% £10,101
4th New kitchen 5.8% £9,605
5th Central heating 5.4% £8,942
6th Off street parking 5.2% £8,611
7th New bathroom 5.1% £8,445
8th Conservatory 5.0% £8,280
9th Double glazing 4.2% £6,955
10th New conservative decoration 3.7% £6,127
11th Improve/ landscape garden 3.6% £5,961
12th Insulation 2.3% £3,809
13th Wooden flooring 2.0% £3,312
14th Alarm system 1.6% £2,650

“Willingness to try – even in a data-driven culture, you’ll always run in to folks who either don’t believe you have collected the right supporting data for a given decision or who just aren’t comfortable when data contradicts their gut feeling. In many companies, those individuals would be the death of decision-making. At PayPal, I felt like you could almost always get someone to give it a *try* and then let performance data tell us whether to maintain the decision or rollback.” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

“Data-driven decision making – PayPal was filled with smart, opinionated people who were often at logger-heads. The way to win arguments was to bring data to bear. So you never started a sentence like this “I feel like it’s a problem that our users can’t do X”, instead you’d do your homework first and then come to the table with “35% of our [insert some key metric here] are caused by the lack of X functionality…” (by Yee Lee, former Product & BU GM of Paypal)

Buy a bag of seed potatoes. Potatoes will grow in a small area. They are a miracle crop. They are pure photosynthesis to carb converting machines. One awesome method to grow them I've seen is to get a length of cheap wire mesh about 6ft long and 4 ft wide from a hardware store. ($2) Wrap it in a circle forming a cylinder. Lay down some straw first, then some kitchen scraps, then some soil. Create alternate layers of this to about 3 ft deep. Plant 2-4 seed potatoes per cylinder. Water. In 4-5 months you will have 100+ potatoes. To liberate them, just cut the wire and they will all fall out into your lap with no digging. Create 4 cylinders or more (depending on available space, a balcony can house at least 4) and you have enough potatoes to feed yourself and make mellobeth's soup for 3 months from a $5 dollar bag of seed potatoes.

This terminology comes from a brilliant web posting by Andrea Donderi that's achieved minor cult status online. We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid "putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept."

Apparently BP has its own navy, a small air force, and enough money to build floating cities on the sea, most of which are still upright. If there's oil on the moon, BP will be the first to send a hose into space and suck on the moon until it's the size of a grapefruit. As an investor, that's the side I want to be on, with BP, not the loser moon.

It's like the old saying, "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." And of course, that's the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you've got to have multiple models