11:13 – I’m going to hell for this. I’m writing a sidebar in Chapter I-14 on Preparing for Financial Emergencies. The sidebar is about inflation and fractional-reserve banking, and I’ve titled it, “Money From Nothing (and Your Checks for Free)”. I may be drummed out of the Austrian School for that one. Or not.
Crap. I just Googled that exact phrase and came up with six hits dating back to 2009. Oh, well. I thought it was original when I coined it a few minutes ago. I guess it was far too obvious not to have been coined years ago. Actually, it was probably coined by you-know-who. As Dorothy Parker famously observed, “I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.”
We don’t have a vacuum sealer. As usual, before we made our Costco run Sunday we looked through the coupons. They had a Food-Saver vacuum sealer on sale for $120, which was something like $40 off. I checked Amazon for a price comparison and found that Costco’s deal was in fact a good deal. Fortunately, I also checked the reviews on both Costco and Amazon. There were a lot of very negative reviews, many of which said that they were on their second or third vacuum sealer, that they’d bought the Food Saver brand in the past and that it had worked well and lasted a decade or more. Their comments about the current models weren’t so kind. Dying in a couple months if not DOA; wasting the (very expensive) Food Saver brand bags, and so on. From these reviews, it seems that Food Saver products made years ago were excellent but newer models suck. I ended up ordering a Nesco model from Amazon, which was half the price and had excellent reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. It’s a very new product, so it has no track record yet, but we probably won’t be beating it death as some people do, so it’ll probably work just fine for us.