Consulting by RPM || Free Advice Blog

Bullet Points

* On a recent trip in a Buddy Holly plane, Nature called so urgently that I actually had to go in the prop jet’s bathroom, which had roughly the volume of a basketball for the WNBA. I wasn’t particularly nervous about the talk I was going to give, so I concluded that it must have been something I ate. Then it occurred to me, “Are pilots forbidden from eating at the same restaurant?” After all, if the two pilots had had the same batch of food as me, and were in the same condition, we would have been singing La Bamba on the way down. (I later asked a woman–yep–who was a commercial airline pilot, and she said that pilots eat together in airports all the time.)

* Is anybody else a little weirded out by Carbonite? The Big Three radio guys tout it all the time. But it seems that on the road to serfdom, one neat step would be for everyone to arrange for his hard drive to automatically get uploaded to a central location every time a connection is made to the Internet. (BTW before you roll your eyes and say, “C’mon this is just a market solution to a legitimate problem,” let me ask if this freaks you out at all.)

* Do you think the number of normal illnesses will be way down in 2009, because everyone is washing his hands etc. in fear of H1N1? The first year after my son’s birth, I literally did not even catch a cold–despite the fact that he subjected us to a sleep-deprivation experiment–presumably because I was so fastidious in washing my hands.

* Here’s something I’ve noticed: Many Austro-libertarians (like me) are very worried about runaway price inflation, while we are not worried about catastrophic climate change. On the other hand, many Keynesian interventionists (like Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman) are very worried about climate change but they are not worried about price inflation. Of course if you ask me, I will give you what I think are good reasons for why I come down on the sides that I do. But I just thought it was worth mentioning.