H/t Tyler Cowen.

(H/t Paul Hsieh.)

Then I saw this video:

I am now enlightened:

I love these sorts of ads. Although I don’t foresee needing to buy something from NTT DoCoMo anytime soon. Nor watching vtm soon.

(Really, I just love watching that vtm video. I’ll take any excuse to post it.)

H/t: CJ.

When I look at the budget problems we face, I’m skeptical that Congress is going to live up to its promise to keep its hands off that money.  At the very least, I’d bet that high earners are going to see some sort of surtax on their Roth withdrawals.

Of course, I think this is true of non-Roth retirement savings as well.  Ultimately, Congress is going to be faced with penalizing people who didn’t save adequately for retirement by cutting their benefits, or penalizing people who did save, by raising taxes on their savings.  For a lot of reasons, I expect them to err on the side of penalizing savings.

She’s adjusting her savings accordingly.

I’ve started thinking about saving in ways that Uncle Sam won’t be tempted to touch--like paying off your house early, maybe buying a vacation home (for cash) if you know where you’re likely to want to spend a lot of time, and doing the kind of renovations that save you money in the long run--better insulation, higher-end energy-efficient appliances, etc.  Paying now to lower your monthly costs later may have a better after-tax return than that “tax free” account.

But, of course, Rep. Paul Ryan finally opened the serious debate about our long-term budget, and President Obama is going to follow with a (hopefully) serious response later this. With this debate underway, maybe future Congress won’t feel the need to touch our piggybanks.

MN: Since they are unnecessary and deceptive, I can’t see any reason to do anything to protect their use.
AO: You say that food coloring is “unnecessary and deceptive”. But couldn’t you say the same thing of essentially any garnish or cooking technique designed to make food appear more appealing without physically modifying the flavor?
MN: The issue is artificial. Food garnishes and cooking techniques are usually not.

Megan McArdle argues that the natural versus artificial dichotomy presents a false choice.

Actually “natural” foods would also come with things like toxic fungus and horrible parasites which--I guarantee--are much worse for children and other living things than artificial food coloring. “Natural” is not synonymous with “better for you”. It’s absolutely true that you’re probably less likely to get fat if you eschew highly processed foods in the snack and cereal aisles. But oversimplifying this message to “natural good, artificial bad” quickly turns ridiculous.

via xkcd.

There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to suppose this is true, but it probably is. We are all more likely to become friends with someone who has a lot of friends than we are to befriend someone with few friends. It’s not that we avoid those with few friends; rather it’s more probable that we will be among a popular person’s friends simply because he or she has a larger number of them.

The rest is here. H/t Paul Hsieh.

In the experiments, the students were asked to predict how much they would remember a week after using one of the methods to learn the material. Those who took the test after reading the passage predicted they would remember less a week later than the other students predicted — but the results were just the opposite.

. . . .

Why retrieval testing helps is still unknown. Perhaps it is because by remembering information we are organizing it and creating cues and connections that our brains later recognize.

“When you’re retrieving something out of a computer’s memory, you don’t change anything — it’s simple playback,” said Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved with the study.

But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Dr. Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”

This fits my experience. I took my share of standardized tests in grade school (I remember taking the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in elementary school). The subjects were usually not that interesting, but I would recall the subjects and silly little facts from them years later. One 7th-grade test included a passage about beriberi—a disease caused by a vitamin deficiency linked to eating polished (white?) rice—that I still vaguely recall today.