In Search of the Perfect Investment

My friends are still sick from their recent plane trips. Some have been sick for three weeks. One has yellow eyes and is still coughing his guts out.

Getting sick from a plane trip is is the worst — because you don’t know where the sickness comes from — Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia, or worse, Australia.

The best research shows airplane passengers are 113 times more likely to catch a cold during a flight than during normal daily life. (I didn’t make that number up.)

Thanksgiving will put all of us on planes. Hence I repeat my warnings and repeat my tips — the key one being: Take this seriously.

Before you go: This is what you need to take with you (with some input from Caring.com)

 1. Cough-suppressant drops. They’re good for you, yes, but there’s another reason to carry them on flights. Offering them to fellow passengers who are coughing on you is a polite way to indicate that their coughing is bothering you.

2. Nose protection. Make sure your accessible toiletries contain nasal mist or saline nose spray to combat the dry air inside the plane. Tea bags are another useful item to carry, as drinking hot liquids throughout the flight keeps your nasal passages moist, which can help fend off viruses.

3. Hand sanitizer. Studies show that sanitizing gel is a good alternative when you can’t get up to wash your hands. Use it before you eat.

4. Alcohol-based disinfectant wipes. Use them to wipe down your tray table, your arm rests, your seat and all the surfaces you’ll be touching.

5. Eye mask and ear plugs. They help you sleep. Sleep boosts your immune system.

6. Take a face mask. You’ll need it if you end up close to someone coughing.

On the plane (with help from Yahoo Health):

While recirculated air is most often blamed when people get ill after a flight, the researchers’ conclusions were much more surprising. The prime culprits: Dry air and the body’s physiological response to lack of humidity top the list, followed by “small cabin space per person,” then limited air circulation.

Step 1: Stay well hydrated. Planes lack the humidity to keep your nasal passages moist. When the mucus membranes of the nose and throat get dry, it screws up the natural drainage system that carries any viruses or bacteria encountered down to the stomach to be flushed out. Drinking water keeps the mucus membranes in the nose and throat moist and better equipped to fight germs.

What helps: Drink a bottle of water before you get on the flight, so you start your journey well hydrated.

Step 2: Travel with nose protection.

Use a saline nasal solution or nasal mist to keep your nasal passages moist (just follow the directions on the bottle), which boosts your body’s own germ-flushing action. Or try applying a small amount of Neosporin or petroleum jelly just inside the nostrils (use a Q-tip if your hands aren’t freshly washed).  The steam from hot drinks, like tea and hot chocolate, is also an effective way to keep the mucous membranes moist. (Skip the coffee, though, since it’s dehydrating.)

Step 3: Don’t eat airline food.

Although you may like the convenience of in-flight meals on shorter flights, those served on longer flights and in first class may not be the perk they appear to be. In 2010 the FDA issued a warning about food-borne illness from airplane food, reporting that cockroaches, ants, flies, and debris had been found during an inspection of the Denver facility of the world’s largest airline caterer, LSG Sky Chefs, which provides 405 million meals a year worldwide for more than 300 airlines. The FDA also detected the deadly bacteria listeria in samples taken from a kitchen floor.

Since then, LSG Sky Chefs says it has taken measures to remedy the problems. But such information isn’t exactly reassuring, and FDA inspection reports show that unsanitary and unsafe conditions have been found in many of the catering operations that have provided food to airlines in the last two years.

What helps: Since heat kills most food-borne bacteria, pay close attention to whether your airline meal is served piping hot. If you see evidence that a meal wasn’t heated thoroughly, such as a still-frozen or cold spot in the center, send it back. Make sure all snacks and sandwiches are served in plastic. Better yet, bring your own food from home.

Step 4: Beware your fellow passengers.

The bad news: One person with the flu who’s coughing and sneezing can infect others. The good news: You’re generally only in danger of catching the flu if you’re within two rows or seat lengths of the sick person, according to new research. In a study conducted after the advent of H1N1 flu in 2009 and published in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) publication Emerging Infectious Diseases, passengers were found to be at a 3.6-percent increased risk for flu if they sat within two rows of someone with symptoms, and the risk jumped to 7.7 percent for those who sat within two seats of the sick passenger.

Best strategy: move.

If moving isn’t an option, take steps to protect yourself. If someone behind you is coughing or sneezing, don’t tip your seat back, which brings you closer. If the person hacking away is in the row in front of you, tip your seat back; gaining even a few inches can be protective. And when possible, travel with a face mask — available at any drug store — and put it on when you have no other options.

Step 5: Disinfect, disinfect, disinfect.

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the rhinoviruses that cause the common cold can live up to three hours on shared surfaces such as armrests, tray tables, and bathroom door handles. And the seat pocket in front of you? The passenger before you may have put his used tissues or discarded napkins there.

What helps: Pack disinfectant wipes, and use them to wipe down tray tables, seat arms, remote control devices, and TV touch screens. Try not to stash personal items such as eyeglasses and Kleenex in the seat pocket. Instead, keep them in your carry-on. For public surfaces you have no choice but to touch, such as bathroom door handles, use a tissue or paper towel between your hand and the object.

Step 6: Wash your hands.

Hand washing is first line of defense against all types of illness. Wash your hands before and after you get on the plane. Use a paper towel to turn off the faucet so you don’t pick up more germs before you’re out the door. Scrub under your nails; up to 70 percent of germs live there. Use your Purell when you can’t get to the bathroom to wash.

Don’t touch your eyes or nose with your hands. Experts say this is the most common route for cold and flu transmission.

Step 7: Open the air vent above you and breathe its air.

The air coming out is is filtered. Also, the blowing air can help push away the germs that float into your space from a nearby sick passenger.

Step 8: Fight for your rights in a delay on the runway.

Beware of any situation (such as a delay on the runway) in which you’re held on a plane with the ventilation system turned off; there have been documented outbreaks of flu on airlines under these conditions. In one case study, 72 percent of passengers who were delayed for three hours before takeoff because of engine problems became ill within two days. The researchers traced the flu strain back to one sick passenger.

FAA rules require that passengers should be removed from an aircraft within 30 minutes of shutting off the ventilation system, but they’re not always enforced. If you’re on a delayed flight and you notice the air go off, watch the time, and remind flight attendants that regulations require that the ventilation be turned on.

Don’t be shy.

 Havoc and changed wrought by the Internet. I made my money in publishing. I sold the publishing business in 1997. If I sold it today, I’d be working as a Walmart greeter. The Internet devastated the business I sold. The Internet is also creating amazing new wealth. We’ll see many more Twitters, Googles, Ubers, Snapchats, ZenniOpticals, Facebooks, Pricelines, eBays, Warby Parkers, Open Tables, in coming years. Our job is to find them EARLY. I’m looking. I bought a little Open Table yesterday. I’m very impressed with eBay’s new interface.

Here’s a favorite author writing in this week’s New Yorker magazine.

Gross Domestic Freebie by James Surowiecki

Twitter’s recent I.P.O. bonanza gave us all some striking numbers to consider. There’s the company’s valuation: an astounding twenty-four billion dollars. And its revenue: just five hundred and thirty-five million. It has more than two hundred and thirty million active users, and a hundred million of them use the service daily. They collectively send roughly half a billion tweets every day. And then there’s the starkest number of all: zero. That’s the price that Twitter charges people to use its technology. Since the company was founded, ordinary users have sent more than three hundred billion tweets. In exchange, they have paid Twitter no dollars and no cents.

Ever since Netscape made the decision to give away its browser, free has been more the rule online than the exception. And even though traditional media companies have been erecting paywalls to guard revenue, a huge chunk of the time we spend online is spent consuming stuff that we don’t pay for. Economically, this makes for an odd situation: digital goods and services are everywhere you look, but their impact is hard to see in economic statistics.

Our main yardstick for the health of the economy is G.D.P. growth, a concept devised in the nineteen-thirties by the economist Simon Kuznets. If it’s rising briskly, we know that the economy is doing well. If not, we know it’s time to worry. The basic assumption is simple: the more stuff we’re producing for sale, the better off we are. In the industrial age, this was a reasonable assumption, but in the digital economy that picture gets a lot fuzzier, since so much of what’s being produced is available free. You may think that Wikipedia, Twitter, Snapchat, Google Maps, and so on are valuable. But, as far as G.D.P. is concerned, they barely exist. The M.I.T. economist Erik Brynjolfsson points out that, according to government statistics, the “information sector” of the economy-which includes publishing, software, data services, and telecom-has barely grown since the late eighties, even though we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of information and data that individuals and businesses consume. “That just feels totally wrong,” he told me.

Brynjolfsson is the co-author, with Andrew McAfee, of the forthcoming book “The Second Machine Age,” which examines how digitization is remaking the economy. “We’re underestimating the value of the part of the economy that’s free,” he said. “As digital goods make up a bigger share of economic activity, that means we’re likely getting a distorted picture of the economy as a whole.” The issue is that, as Kuznets himself acknowledged, “the welfare of a nation . . . can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.” For instance, most Web sites are built with free, open-source applications. This makes running a site cheap, which has all sorts of benefits in terms of welfare, but G.D.P. ends up lower than it would be if everyone had to pay for Microsoft’s server software. Digital innovation can even shrink G.D.P.: Skype has reduced the amount of money that people spend on international calls, and free smartphone apps are replacing stand-alone devices that once generated billions in sales. The G.P.S. company Garmin was once one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S. Thanks to Google and Apple Maps, Garmin’s sales have taken a severe hit, but consumers, who now have access to good directions at no cost, are certainly better off.

New technologies have always driven out old ones, but it used to be that they would enter the market economy, and thus boost G.D.P.-as when the internal-combustion engine replaced the horse. Digitization is distinctive because much of the value it creates for consumers never becomes part of the economy that G.D.P. measures. That makes the gap between what’s actually happening in the economy and what the statistics are measuring wider than ever before.

Figuring out the invisible value created by the Internet is no easy task. One strategy that economists have used is to measure how much time we spend online (on the assumption that time is money). A recent study by Brynjolfsson and Joo Hee Oh concluded that in 2011 the value of free goods on the Internet was hundreds of billions of dollars, and that it was increasing at a rate of more than forty billion dollars annually. Another study, by the economist Michael Mandel, contended that the government had underestimated the value of data services (mobile apps and the like) by some three hundred billion dollars a year. These are rough estimates, but they give a sense of how much better off the digital economy has made us.

There’s a catch, though. The enormous gains for consumers in the digital age often come at the expense of workers. Wikipedia is great for readers. It’s awful for the people who make encyclopedias. Although the digital economy creates new ways to make money, digitization doesn’t require a lot of workers: you can come up with an idea, write a piece of software, and distribute it to hundreds of millions of people with ease. That’s fundamentally different from physical products, which require much more labor to produce and distribute. And while digitization has already transformed the media and entertainment businesses, it’s not going to stop there. “There are very few industries that are going to be unaffected,” Brynjolfsson told me. The value that the digital economy is creating is real. But so is the havoc. 

Favorite recent New Yorker cartoons.

Harry Newton who yesterday got hit on his bicycle by another bicyclist. I’m banged up, but OK. Bicyclists are the worst traffic hazard in cities today. They don’t obey traffic rules. They come at you from all directions. Be careful. Don’t text and walk. Pedestrians who don’t look get hit by bicyclists.