Rexfeng

Update. Ally Bank sent out an e-mail to customers in early October 2015 notifying them that they will introduce balance tiers on November 7, 2015. All existing CDs will not have their rates affected, and any features like Raise Your Rate will be retained. No actual rates or rate changes were announced. For the Savings Account and Certificates of Deposit, the new tiers will be:

• Less than $5,000
• $5,000-$24,999.99
• $25,000 or more

Commentary… I’ve felt that tiers would come to their CDs for a while now. With no minimum opening balance and no interest tiers, you could open up a bunch of $500 or even $5 CDs to avoid penalties on small early withdrawals. Lots of small accounts create more paperwork and increase costs. However, if the rates on their Online Savings Account drop significantly for the lowest tier, I will seriously consider moving accounts. Sometimes my Ally account has a lot of money, sometimes it doesn’t. I need this account to provide a reliable floor of 1% APY (as of 10/7/15) on my idle cash, regardless of balance. I’ll have to wait to see if/how they utilize these tiers for the savings account.

Original post:

I’ve done a significant amount of my banking with Ally for years (checking, savings, and multiple CDs), but the “gateway drug” for me and probably most people will be their Ally Online Savings Account. This is a review specific to using the savings account as a companion account to your existing checking account. Check out my Ally Interest Checking Account Review for more about using their checking and savings products together.

The Ally Online Savings Account has no minimum balance, no monthly fees, and currently pays 1.00% APY (as of 10/7/15). Their interest rates may not be the absolute highest, but they have consistently been within 0.10% of the temporarily top banks, making it not worthwhile to move my money. (See my rate chaser calculator). Let’s go through the important factors.

User Interface. Below is a screenshot of the main page after logging in (click to enlarge). I can see all of my accounts and their balances at a glance. The overall design is clean and minimalist, and it was recently updated to be more mobile-friendly.

Customer Service. Ally Bank differentiates itself with their customer service. First of all, they are available 24/7 at 1-877-247-ALLY (2559). When you use their smartphone app or log into their website, you can see the wait time beforehand. Even better, if you don’t want to call them you can just use their Live Chat feature.

Security. Ally Bank supports two-factor authentication with security codes sent via either e-mail or text message. They ask for a security code when you log in from a computer they don’t recognize. However, if you’ve logged into that computer before with a security code, they may not ask you again and you can’t choose to have two-factor authentication to always be in effect.

Awards. Ally Bank has won “Best Online Bank” from Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine in 2014 and “Best Online Bank” from Money Magazine from 2011-2014.

FDIC Insurance. Ally Bank is a member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, FDIC Certificate #57803. As with other FDIC-insured banks, this means your Ally deposits are insured by the FDIC up to $250,000 per depositor, for each account ownership category.

Funds Transfers. With no physical branches, online savings accounts should have maximum flexibility as they are often secondary accounts (given most megabank checking accounts pay either no interest or a sad 0.01% APY). Ally Bank allows you to link any other external bank account using the standard routing number and account numbers. As long as you initiate the transfer before 7:30 pm Eastern Time, the transfer will take 2 business days. You can link up to 20 different accounts (it used to be unlimited; but other banks limit to 3; I have 7 myself).

So if I initiate a transfer on Monday afternoon by 7:30pm ET, the money will be debited first thing on Tuesday, and credited to the destination account first thing Wednesday. But know that if you initiate on a Saturday, you’ll get the same result. Even bank computers really don’t like working weekends, it seems. Overall, free transfers within 2 business days during the week is about as good as it gets for online banks.

The transfer limits are also relatively high. On my accounts, I see that I have a $150,000 daily limit outbound and $250,000 daily limit inbound, with a total monthly limit of $600,000 outbound and $1,000,000 inbound. Keeping in mind that all savings accounts from any bank are limited to six withdrawals per month.

ATM Debit Card. You don’t get a debit card with their Online Savings Account. You can get a debit card with either their Checking or Money Market accounts, but note that those have lower interest rates.

Mobile check deposit. You can use the Ally smartphone app to deposit checks using your smartphone camera. (This is in addition to using your computer scanner and/or free postage-paid deposit envelopes.) I’m not sure if this is the same for everyone, but my deposit limit is $50,000 which is higher than many other electronic deposit programs. I’ve used the app to deposit multiple checks without issue. Screenshot below.

 

Mobile app. Available for iOS and Android… you can do all the important stuff – see transactions, transfer funds, deposit checks, pay bills. It can remember your username, but you must type in your password every time. I usually just use my Mint app for checking balances, as that only requires a 4-digit PIN. The overall design is acceptable, and the ATM locator is helpful if you have the Ally Checking account with free AllPoint ATMs and $10 in fee rebates each statement cycle for any ATM.

Details

• Interest Compounding: accrued daily, compounded daily, credited monthly
• Minimum to open: $0
• Minimum requirements to avoid monthly service charge: None
• Number of external bank account links allowed: 20
• Routing Number: 124003116

Bottom line. The Ally Online Savings Account is a solid offering with with no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirement, and a historically competitive interest rate. Additional features like a flexible funds transfer system and solid 24/7 customer service help differentiate themselves from the competition. It works fine on its own as a “piggyback” or companion account to your existing checking account.

You can also combine it with the Ally Interest Checking Account (my review) which offers ATM fee rebates (up to $10 per statement cycle), free online billpay, and the ability to use the savings account as a free overdraft source. Ally also has certificates of deposit which offer competitive rates at times.

Ally Bank Savings Account Review from My Money Blog.

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© MyMoneyBlog.com, 2015.

The ramen brotherhood has been stopping by Ramen Lab during previews this week. Ramen King, Shigemi Kawahara of Ippudo fame paid a royal visit to the soon-to-open Sun Noodle Ramen Lab yesterday. The Sun team posted on Facebook:

We were honored to have the Ramen King, Kawahara-san from Ippudo New York visit our space today. Sharing the moments with people on the same mission is always invigorating. #ramenlab #sunnoodles #ippudo

When Eater checked in with the Ramen Lab team a few weeks ago about Con Ed woes, a staffer said all of the owners were in touch regularly about the issue and are friends. Proof that the ramen brotherhood is alive and well.

"Now folks, if this is your first time tuning into The Colbert Report, I have some terrible news."

Last night, Stephen Colbert — both the character and the human — ended a nine-year, 1,447-episode run with one final edition of The Word ("Same to you, pal") and an all-star singalong of "We'll Meet Again" with Randy Newman, Jon Stewart, Patrick Stewart, Big Bird, Vince Gilligan (still locked up in the basement), and dozens more:

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when
But I know we'll meet again some sunny day

If the joke eludes you: Colbert is taking over for David Letterman next year as host of The Late Show on CBS. At no point does Colbert mention that or even talk about the future, opting instead to focus on the...

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For Facebook, buying Instagram was a steal. In a note this morning, Citigroup says that it has reexamined its valuation of Instagram and now believes that it is worth $35 billion. Citi had previously valued Instagram at $19 billion, that itself being far above the $1 billion that Facebook purchased Instagram for back in 2012. The increased value is due to Instagram's announcement last week that it now has over 300 million active monthly users — meaning that it's growing faster than expected. Citigroup also believes that Instagram could eventually contribute around $2 billion in annual revenue to Facebook if it were to fully monetize its network. Most of Facebook's revenue still comes from Facebook itself, but beginning next year, Citi...

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A major study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health has found a significant link between autism and the exposure of the mother to high levels of air pollution during the third trimester of pregnancy.

Researchers focused on 1,767 children born from 1990 to 2002, including 245 diagnosed with autism. The design of the study and the results rule out many confounding measures that can create a bias, Weisskopf said. The researchers took into account socioeconomic factors that can influence exposure to pollution or play a role in whether a child is diagnosed with autism.

The fact that pollution caused problems only during pregnancy strengthened the findings, since it's unlikely other factors would have changed markedly before or after those nine months, he said in a telephone interview.

The ultimate cause of autism remains a mystery in most cases, said Charis Eng, chairwoman of the Lerner Research Institute's Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. While the Harvard study isn't definitive and the findings could be coincidental, it's not likely given the large size and the precise results, she said in a telephone interview.

"The truth is there has to be gene and environmental interactions," said Eng, who wasn't involved in the study. "I suspect the fetus already had the weak autism spectrum disorder genes, and then the genes and the environment interacted."

It would be a huge help (and I am not in any way being facetious about this) if Jenny McCarthy and all the other celebrity "vaccines cause autism" folks threw their weight behind cleaning up pollution the way they attacked vaccination. Redeem yourselves. (via @john_overholt)

Tags: autism   Jenny McCarthy   medicine   science

 Polling startup Wedgies.com (yes, that’s really its name) is announcing that it has raised $700,000 in seed funding led by Greycroft Partners. Co-founder and CEO Porter Haney told me the company’s goal is to “legitimize web voting,” and its approach is to bring those polls to social media: “Think about what Gallup or SurveyMonkey would look like if they were… Read More

There's lamb, chicken, and of course, white sauce.

The second of what will be many, many new outposts of The Halal Guys is opening today on the Upper West Side. The team behind the cult favorite 53rd Street food cart opened its first brick and mortar location in the East Village in June and there are franchise plans in the works for LA, the Middle East, and Canada. On the Upper West, the walls are decked out with drawings of customers like a construction worker and an old lady waiting in line at the Midtown cart, says Ligaya Mishan. To eat, there's of course the lamb, chicken, and falafel, either over rice or in sandwich form, plus there are desserts. But most importantly, there's white sauce and hot sauce in good supply.

Back in September, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson became ludicrously wealthy after Microsoft bought the game for $2.5 billion. And as of this week, he's now the owner of a $70 million megamansion in Beverly Hills, California. According to Curbed, it was all but expected that Beyoncé and Jay Z would win the bid, but alas, Beyoncé and Jay Z didn't make Minecraft.

I'm just going to paste Curbed's description of the megamansion, because there's no better way to say it:

"It's outfitted with a candy room, a car showroom, vodka and tequila bars, a 54-foot curved glass door that opens onto the pool, eight bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, apartment-sized closets, and a movie theater, and even the listing called it 'an overwhelming sensory...

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In case you needed a material transaction to illustrate just how much money Markus Persson, aka Notch, has having sold Mojang (and Minecraft) to Microsoft, take a look at this: the dude just paid $70 million (and maybe beat out Beyonce & Jay-Z) to buy the most expensive house in Beverly Hills.

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If the ongoing Steam Holiday Sale has you strapped for cash, Devolver Digital's faux CFO Fork Parker wants to cut you a deal in Fork Parker's Holiday Profit Hike, a freeware platformer released today on Steam. Developed by Enter the Gungeon creator ...

We've got computer graphics software that's so powerful it can generate images that make it seem like dinosaurs are back. But they still can't compare to the simple satisfaction you get from making a really complex hypotrochoid or epitrochoid with a marker and some perforated gears. So Nathan Friend was kind enough to build a browser-based Spirograph you're probably going to want to immediately bookmark.

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Cheetah, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Wasteland, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Gaze, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Hawk, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Hunting, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Lotus Pond, Metal, 35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm, 2014

Bones of a Snake, Metal, 200 x 38 x 9 cm, 2014

Artist Li Hongbo, whose flexible paper sculptures we’ve admired many times here on Colossal, recently created a new series of silhouette artworks as part of a solo show at Contemporary by Angela Li in Hong Kong. Each piece is delicately cut from the knife leaving a complementary negative space from which it appears to rise. Hongbo says the pieces are meant as a warning, that “human beings will eventually destroy themselves because of their gluttony and their abuse of animals.” You can see more from the series here. If you liked this technique, also check out paper sculptures by Peter Callesen. (via My Amp Goes to 11)

Apache Junction, Arizona, couple Charles and Ann Lanter are regulars at their local Taco Bell, so when the franchise's owner found out they were about to celebrate their wedding anniversary, he offered to host a party that involved cake, balloons, and a platter containing 64 inches of nachos. They even received a $64 gift card. "We're just happy, my only regret we can't live them again," Charles Lanter said, reflecting on the decades of marriage. The couple were joined by family and friends, and the news report makes it look like a real party. While diamonds are used to mark 60th anniversaries and blue sapphires are traditional for commemorating 65 years, there's something sweet about doing the 64th with a bunch of tortilla chips and bright orange cheese.

[Eater]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: video feed, nacho anniversary, taco bell

Just a day after Sony decided to cancel the debut of the embattled comedy The Interview, Paramount Pictures is pulling Team America: World Police from release. The Alamo Drafthouse, which had scheduled Team America as a fill-in for the Seth Rogen comedy after yesterday's development, confirmed that it' December 27th screening had been canceled, as did Cleveland Cinemas, which had booked the film for a 2015 midnight screening way back in October.

From South Park masterminds Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Team America: World Police is a 2004 satire sending up action movies (complete with the memorable musical number "America (Fuck Yeah!"). The villain of that film was North Korea and Kim Jong-il — the father of current North Korean dictator...

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As a kid, I strapped a Nerf gun to my bicycle so I could dive bomb the neighborhood kids, while traveling—I imagined—at five times the speed of sound. As an adult, I’ve carried a foam-firing blaster to no fewer than three jobs. But a funny thing happened last year: I realized my old guns weren’t any good anymore.

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Filed under: Tesla, Sedan, Electric

While falling gas prices are cause for celebration among Americans, many of whom are seeing their budget for Christmas presents burgeon on account of the cheap fuel, it's decidedly bad news for Tesla Motors.

Analyst slashes Tesla sales forecast by 40% due to fuel prices originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 18 Dec 2014 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in the spring of 2012, Greg Cohn and his co-founder were working on a product that would let others know when they were available for a phone call. One of the features generated a temporary number that you could share on social media so anyone could reach you. They jokingly called it the Burner feature, an homage to the throwaway phones made famous by drug dealers on HBO’s The Wire. But they quickly realized that this feature was far and away the most popular part of their service, so they focused on that. They created an app called Burner that allows users to quickly and easily create new numbers, which they can use to send and receive calls and text messages, then destroy them at any time.

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In 2008, I moved to Dallas to cover the oil industry for The Wall Street Journal. Like any reporter on a new beat, I spent months talking to as many experts as I could. They didn’t agree on much. Would oil prices — then over $100 a barrel for the first time — keep rising? Would post-Saddam Iraq ever return to the ranks of the world’s great oil producers? Would China overtake the U.S. as the world’s top consumer? A dozen experts gave me a dozen different answers.

But there was one thing pretty much everyone agreed on: U.S. oil production was in permanent, terminal decline. U.S. oil fields pumped 5 million barrels of crude a day in 2008, half as much as in 1970 and the lowest rate since the 1940s. Experts disagreed about how far and how fast production would decline, but pretty much no mainstream forecaster expected a change in direction.

That consensus turns out to have been totally, hilariously wrong. U.S. oil production has increased by more than 50 percent since 2008 and is now near a three-decade high. The U.S. is on track to surpass Saudi Arabia as the world’s top producer of crude oil; add in ethanol and other liquid fuels, and the U.S.is already on top.

The standard narrative of that stunning turnaround is familiar by now: Even as Big Oil abandoned the U.S. for easier fields abroad, a few risk-taking wildcatters refused to give up on the domestic oil industry. By combining the techniques of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and horizontal drilling, they figured out how to tap previously inaccessible oil reserves locked in shale rock – and in so doing sparked an unexpected energy boom.

That narrative isn’t necessarily wrong. But in my years watching the transformation up close, I took away a lesson: When it comes to energy, and especially shale, the conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.

It isn’t just that experts didn’t see the shale boom coming. It’s that they underestimated its impact at virtually every turn. First, they didn’t think natural gas could be produced from shale (it could). Then they thought production would fall quickly if natural gas prices dropped (they did, and it didn’t). They thought the techniques that worked for gas couldn’t be applied to oil (they could). They thought shale couldn’t reverse the overall decline in U.S. oil production (it did). And they thought rising U.S. oil production wouldn’t be enough to affect global oil prices (it was).

Now, oil prices are cratering, falling below $55 a barrel from more than $100 earlier this year. And so, the usual lineup of experts — the same ones, in many cases, who’ve been wrong so many times in the past — are offering predictions for what plunging prices will mean for the U.S. oil boom. Here’s my prediction: They’ll be wrong this time, too.

To be fair, the drop in oil prices is still too new for the experts to have settled on a clear consensus of what it will mean for U.S. producers. But the range of opinions is narrow, ranging from “production will be keep growing, but more slowly” to “it won’t have much effect at all.”⁶² Author and analyst Daniel Yergin, long the embodiment of the conventional wisdom on all things energy⁶³, put it this way in a Wall Street Journal op-ed late last month, when oil was trading for just under $70 a barrel:

It is now clear that the new U.S. production is more resilient than anticipated. … True, with prices now near or below $70 a barrel, U.S. companies are looking hard at their investment plans — where and how much to cut or postpone. But it will take time for these decisions to affect supply. U.S. oil output will continue to rise in 2015.

I don’t take issue with anything Yergin is saying here. In fact, it makes sense. But that’s the thing about the conventional wisdom: It always makes sense at the time. It’s only later that we can see all the reasons it was wrong.

I don’t yet know why the conventional wisdom will be wrong this time, but I can guess. Not about what will happen — I’m no better at these predictions than anyone else — but about the sources of error. Here are a few of the most likely candidates:

No one has any idea what oil prices will do: In July 2008, my Journal colleague Neil King asked a wide range of energy journalists, economists and other experts to anonymously predict what the price of oil would be at the end of the year. The nearly two dozen responses ranged from $70 a barrel at the low end to $167.50 at the high end.⁶⁴ The actual answer: $44.60.⁶⁵

It isn’t surprising that experts aren’t good at predicting prices. Global oil markets are a function of countless variables — geopolitics, economics, technology, geology — each with its own inherent uncertainty. And even if you get those estimates right, you never know when a war in the Middle East or an oil boom in North Dakota will suddenly turn the whole formula on its head.

But none of that stops television pundits from making confident predictions about where oil prices will head in the coming months, and then using those predictions as the basis for production forecasts. Based on their track record, you should ignore them.

Drilling economics are complicated: In recent weeks, Wall Street analysts have published estimates of “break-even prices” for various U.S. oil fields. According to Goldman Sachs, for example, companies need at least $80 oil to make money in Texas’s Eagle Ford shale but only $70 in North Dakota’s Bakken shale. In theory, that makes it easy to see where companies will keep drilling at a given price and where they’ll pull back.

The reality is far more complicated. Not all parts of an oil field are created equal. Wells drilled in a “sweet spot” can be an order of magnitude better than those in less promising areas. Companies will keep drilling in the best areas long after they’ve pulled the plug on more marginal prospects. Break-even prices also change along with the price of oil. As prices fall and companies drill less, that leaves more rigs and equipment available, pushing down the price of drilling a well and allowing companies to stay profitable even at lower oil prices.

With oil under $60 a barrel, it’s a fair bet that many U.S. wells are now unprofitable. But that doesn’t mean companies will stop drilling them, at least right away. Companies often have contracts for rigs and would rather keep drilling than pay a penalty. They also have contracts for the land where they drill. If they don’t drill within a certain period, they lose the right to the land altogether.

Even when drilling does slow, production won’t necessarily follow. Wells keep producing for decades after they’ve been drilled, although at ever-declining rates. Companies prioritize their most promising projects, so the wells that do get drilled will be the best ones. And technology keeps improving, so companies can coax more oil out of each well. Natural gas provides an instructive example: The U.S. is drilling half as many gas wells today as it was five years ago and producing a third more gas.

Drilling finances are even more complicated: One thing I learned in my years covering the industry is that oil companies, and especially small oil companies, will keep drilling for as long as they can get the money to do so.⁶⁶ That means the key variable in forecasting oil production isn’t drilling costs or even oil prices; it’s Wall Street.

In recent years, investors have handed energy companies half a trillion dollars in loans. That’s partly because of all the promising new oil fields in North Dakota and Texas, but it’s also because with interest rates near zero, investors are hungry for returns wherever they can find them. Now the Federal Reserve is talking about raising interest rates, which could kill the bond bubble, even as falling oil prices make those loans look riskier than they used to. If Wall Street turns off the money spigot, drilling will slow down no matter what oil prices do.

And then there’s politics: Why are oil prices falling? The short answer is lots of supply (the U.S. oil boom) and not much demand (a weak global economy). The longer answer is all about the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. OPEC usually tries to keep prices high by limiting supply. But right now the cartel — or at least its dominant member, Saudi Arabia — appears content to let prices fall. The Saudis apparently think they can weather the storm of low prices better than companies in the U.S., where oil is much more expensive to produce.

But the policy has created divisions within OPEC, and no one knows when or if the cartel will start pulling back production. Tumbling prices are wreaking havoc on Russia’s economy, and they could easily lead to political unrest in other countries as well.

Oh, right, and geology: It’s easy to forget, but just a few years ago people were fretting about “peak oil,” the idea that global oil production had reached its maximum capacity and was doomed to start falling. The shale boom pushed those fears out of the mainstream, but the underlying questions remain. The shale boom is still young, and it was unclear how long it could last even when prices were higher. The U.S. government’s official production forecasts are subject to an almost comical level of uncertainty, and independent researchers have called even those estimates into question. The government didn’t see the boom coming, after all; there’s no guarantee it will see the end coming, either.

 Amazon has just launched Prime Now, a one-hour delivery option for Amazon Prime members in NYC. The service will debut in Manhattan beginning today, and should roll out to additional cities through 2015. It covers tens of thousands of what Amazon calls “essential” products, including things like paper towels, batteries, toys and books. The local one-hour delivery is a service… Read More

Peter W. Singer, in an interview with Motherboard’s Jason Koebler:

​Now we get to the part that moves from jokes and silliness to serious, which is: This is not just now a case study in how not to react to cyber threats and a case study in how to not defend your networks, it’s now also a case study in how not to respond to terrorism threats.

We have just communicated to any would-be attacker that we will do whatever they want.

It is mind boggling to me, particularly when you compare it to real things that have actually happened. Someone killed 12 people and shot another 70 people at the opening night of Batman: The Dark Knight. They kept that movie in the theaters. You issue an anonymous cyber threat that you did not have the capability to carry out? We pulled a movie from 18,000 theaters.

This, in a world where “Keep Calm and Carry On” has become an overused meme.

Marco Arment:

Ged Maheux searched the App Store for “Twitter” and found Twitter clients ranked horribly below a bunch of spam and garbage apps, most having little to nothing to do with Twitter.

You can see similar ranking problems with almost any common search term. I searched earlier today for an iPad Instagram client — the iPad App Store search list for “Instagram” is just as spammy and unhelpful as this. I was only able to find what I was actually looking for by searching Google and asking people on Twitter.

It has always been the case that a Google web search for “whatever iPhone app” provides far superior results to searching the App Store for “whatever”. Sometimes the difference is as vast as perfect (Google’s results) and useless (the App Store’s), as we can see searching for “Twitter iPhone client” in Google and “Twitter” on the App Store.

That this is still the case in 2014 is a worrisome sign.

American intelligence officials have concluded that the government of Kim Jong-un was “centrally involved” in the attacks on the film company’s computers.

American officials are now saying that they believe North Korea—despite their protestations—is behind the cyberattack on Sony Entertainment over the release of the James Franco-Seth Rogen comedy The Interview. [ more › ]

Somehow I didn't know that Zoolander (which Terrence Malick and I both love and Roger Ebert hated) began as a short clip Ben Stiller did for the 1996 VH1 Fashion Awards.

(via the dissolve)

Tags: Ben Stiller   movies   video   Zoolander

Blinky and Inky approve.

The U.S. subsidiary of Namco Entertainment Inc. — the company behind classic arcade games like Pole Position, Galaga, and, of course, Pac-Man — will get into the restaurant business. In fact, the group is putting the final touches right now on a spot called Level 257, a reference to an impossible-to-reach level in the very first Pac-Man game (because of a bug, the actual game ends at level 256). Set to open this January in a Chicago suburb, the place will be like a glorified, 40,000-square-foot Dave & Buster's: 16 bowling lanes, table tennis, pinball machines, and the obligatory arcade parlor with newer titles alongside the Namco classics.

The executive chefs promise a "serious" menu that may still include "some inside jokes" — though hopefully stopping short of a menu exclusively consisting of fruit salads. "There'll be a lot of hidden and subtle references," says David Bishop, the company's VP of strategic project development. "There's a little bit of nerd factor there — if you get it, that's cool."

[Crain's Chicago]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: waka waka, chicago, namco, news, pac-man

The life of most migrant workers in Qatar is bleak—so bleak, it's a human rights violation . The latest report from Doha reveals a new twist in the sad story. When they're not toiling away at building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, many workers are being paid impossibly small wages to be fake sports fans. It doesn't sound fun, either.

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You've probably heard the story of the painter who was able to perfectly match the color of a room to a priceless vase by simply painting the vase to match. That's the basic idea behind this matching Waltz Cup & Saucer set, whose mirror-finished tea cup will match any surface on which it's placed.

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The trick is figuring out how to buy exactly $25 worth of coffee.

It's not like you need anything official to let you know that there's a very good chance you will be either getting, or giving, a Starbucks gift card at some point in the next couple of weeks. They are easy, and cheap, and they're just the kind of thing you buy when you realize you forgot to get a gift for that person you know but don't really like all that much.

Even still, this stat is somewhat impressive: The coffee chain sends word that they anticipate a record-breaking Christmas Eve this year — better than 2013, in fact, when last-minute shoppers in the U.S. and Canada bought 2 million gift cards in a single day. (That's about 1,400 cards per minute over the course of 24 hours.) The chain says 1 in every 8 American adults got some kind of Starbucks gift card last year, though, which means you're going to have to track down one of those gold coffee-for-life cards if you really want your present to stand out from everyone else's.

Related: Why Yes, There Are $5,000 Solid-Gold Starbucks Cards

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, gift cards, holiday shopping, starbucks

There will be just three ramens and possibly some gyoza on the menu.

After a long wait, Sun Noodle's Ramen Lab is tantalizingly close to opening. Recipe testing and previews are underway after Con Ed finally paid the tiny space on Kenmare a visit around Thanksgiving. The 10 seat counter will double as a restaurant and educational facility, schooling New Yorkers in the ways of ramen. To get started, it looks like there will be just three ramens on the menu: a traditional shoyu, a veggie ramen, and a seasonal special (the tsukemen and mazemen promised back in September are out, at least for now). The traditional is topped with one piece of pork, what appears to be fermented bamboo shoots, some greens, and a single sheet of nori. All bowls are of course made with custom noodles from Sun Noodle's Jersey factory.

Thank you, @RamenLab for opening your kitchen and welcoming us in for a bowl this afternoon! ❤️ #sunnoodles pic.twitter.com/955IDLhz0t

— C.B. Cebulski (@CBCebulski) December 16, 2014

Master at work! @chefnakamura preparing #ramen @sunnoodles #RamenLab #comingsoon #sunnoodles Thanks @CBCebulski pic.twitter.com/9oCluzlen5

— hungrycarly (@CarlaSiegel) December 17, 2014

Thin-skinned gyoza pan-fried together into a fan — which Danny Bowien's also been testing out and is on the menu at Ganso and a couple other places — might also make the menu. And — because mason jars are so 2012 — all of the beverages come in beakers, reports Eataku.

Previews are continuing through next week, and the lab should open sometime early in the new year.

While waiting on that, check out how those noodles are made: