http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/the-illusion-of-health/ Thu, 23 May 2013 19:48:55 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/the-illusion-of-health/#comment-23819 Sun, 17 Apr 2011 09:28:01 +0000 http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/?p=13575#comment-23819 [...] The Illusion of Health – via Situationist- If a box of chocolate cookies had an “organic” label, would you feel less guilty about eating them? Would you think they were more nutritious, or tastier? Economists who study social psychology refer to something called the “halo effect,” a bias in judgment that causes you to assume that one positive attribute comes packaged with a bunch of others. For example, you might perceive your attractive coworker as being more capable as well. Secrets of the Tax-Prep Business – via Mother Jones- JOHN HEWITT WASN’T seeking to turn the working poor into cash cows when his father and some friends helped him buy a six-store tax-service chain in Virginia Beach back in 1982. A 33-year-old college dropout who’d recently left his post as a regional director for H&R Block, Hewitt bought the Mel Jackson Tax Service hoping simply to break his old employer’s near-monopoly on the market. “We’re going to be bigger than H&R Block!” he liked to boast, though his operation was a mere tadpole challenging a leviathan with 7,000 stores in middle-class neighborhoods across the country. Hewitt renamed the company Jackson Hewitt and bet that his early embrace of computers would give him a leg up on his former bosses. But it wasn’t until he began offering something called a refund anticipation loan (RAL)—a product aimed at down-market customers desperate for cash—that his chain really took off. [...]

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