1. I am delighted to be able to point you to the writings of my friend Herrmann Banks. For years, Herrmann has been sharing brilliant and original insights in private conversations and emails, and for years I’ve been telling him he needs to share them more widely. Now he’s up and running. Enjoy!
2. Many American highways have “HOV” lanes, reserved for cars with multiple occupants. Sometimes a driver with no passengers will cheat and use those lanes. This is of course a blessing to all the rule-abiding drivers in the regular lanes, which have just gotten a little less crowded. So why do those drivers tend to respond by giving dirty looks to the cheaters who just made their lives better?

   I expect this is related to the phenomenon of apartment-hunters getting angry at landlords who won’t rent to them, even though those landlords are making their search easier by renting to someone and thereby reducing the competition for other apartments.

   But in the case of the landlords, the psychology seems to be something like “Yes, you’ve helped me by renting to others but you could have helped me even more by renting to me!”. (Though this overlooks the fact that anybody could have made your life easier by becoming a landlord and renting to you, so maybe you should be equally angry at pretty much everybody.) Whereas with the HOV lanes, it seems like the cheaters have already done everything they could possibly do for you (unless you think they could do more by getting off the highway completely, making a little more room in the HOV lane, and thereby encouraging someone else to cheat).

   People are odd.

3. The next time somebody encourages you to “buy local” so you can “keep the money in the community”, try asking how they feel about the federal income tax, which is designed to facilitate the largest geographic redistribution of income ever conceived.

Hat tips to my friends Gerry Sohan for point 2) and John Barry for point 3).