Two Word Review of Little America

Mr. Chandrasekaran has written another book, Little America, on the war in Afghanistan, particularly since Obama was elected.  His first, Emerald City, was well-reviewed.

My review is simple: "oh sh*t", repeat at least once for each chapter.

[Updated: For a more considered reaction, see this from Foreign Policy ]

What Really Really Gripes Me: Tax Cheats

From Brad Delong, quoting a Bloomberg piece by Jesse Drucker:

Mitt Romney ‘I Dig It’ Trust Gives Heirs Triple Benefit: In January 1999, a trust set up by Mitt Romney for his children and grandchildren reaped a 1,000 percent return on the sale of shares in Internet advertising firm DoubleClick Inc. If Romney had given the cash directly, he could have owed a gift tax at a rate as high as 55 percent. He avoided gift and estate taxes by using a type of generation-skipping trust known to tax planners by the nickname: “I Dig It.”…

The Obama administration proposed cracking down on the tax benefits in February…. Romney or his trust received shares in DoubleClick eight months before the company went public in 1998. The trust sold them less than a year after the IPO…. Multimillionaires use such trusts to avoid… taxes… [by] assign[ing] a low value to assets they donate to the trust….

 DeLong thinks this amounts to tax fraud, although IRS doesn't prosecute this, presumably because the valuation of the asset when put in the trust is hard to determine.   

Not that I'm calling Mr. Romney a cheat.  It's just taking logic to an extreme.  My alma mater solicits for donations of assets (or did, before the stock market and real estate tanked) as a good tax strategy. 

The Weather Gods Don't Like Obama

Apparently the heat and drought reduced our GDP growth this summer because of reduced agricultural production, just as our warm weather reduced it last winter because of lower usage of energy for heating.   Strange.

[Update: see Prof Roberts at Greed, Green, and Grain on the reduction in GDP.]

The End of a Common Culture?

Brad DeLong usually blogs about economics and economic history, bashing Republican economists with verve and vigor.  But he also blogs WWII, one of which triggers this:

Context: 70 years ago today, the Marines on Guadalcanal were engaged with the Japanese forces.  Due to poor communication, a group of Marines gets cut off.  Meanwhile the destroyer Monssen is patrolling offshore.

"It was then that Smoot noticed a lone figure on another hill waving signal flags. His signal read: SEND BOAT ASHORE. The captain was wary of Japanese trickery. The figure was dressed in what he called “army drill,” but from this distance the man could belong to either side. “We didn’t know who it was and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” Smoot asked a signalman if there were a way to verify his identity. The signalman had an idea, and flagged a question to their mysterious correspondent: WHO WON THE WORLD SERIES IN 1941? The answer—YANKEES IN FIVE—decided the issue.
The deck force lowered a whaleboat over the side, and it motored in to the beach. When it returned, it was carrying the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 7th Marines, his aide, and two other marines. Coming aboard, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, age forty-four, saluted Smoot. “I doggone near lost my life getting down to the beach. I’ve got a whole group of my men up there in the hills. I’ve got to get them out of trouble.”

 My title? In 1942 it was safe to assume almost everyone in the US military knew who had won the World Series in the prior year.  The nation shared a common culture, at least in that regard.  My feeling is such an assumption is not safe today, not about the World Series, not about the Super Bowl, not about nothing.

[Updated: Ezra Klein this morning admitted he didn't know who won last year's World Series.]

Graphing Your Wife's Contractions

Matt Stiles at The Daily Viz comes up with visualizations of every sort of data, but this time he outdid himself: graphing minutes between contractions as his wife went into labor.

Congratulations on daughter Eva.

FSA and Twitter Following

FSA is in the list of the 50 most followed Federal agencies. 

But it's included under USDA, which rates 19th out of 50. 

Query: why does USDA have both the @usda and @usdagov tags? And where are the other USDA agencies (Forest Service makes it on its own, no. 47) like NRCS?

The Nissan Leaf and Driving

Technology Review reports on a study of usage of Nissan Leafs.  It seems the drivers are going 16,000 miles a year and encountering greater battery fade than they expected.

I wonder if these owners are driving more because the cost per mile is so low (essentially zero).  The law of unintended consequences?

The Culture That Is Japan

Two bits from the news (NYTimes) today, without links unless I get ambitious:

• Apples poor map software in the iPhone 5 hit Japan hard, but they have their own mapping software because it's so important in cities like Tokyo.  Because the city just grew, it doesn't have a system of street naming and house numbering which permits verbal directions; you basically need a map to find your way.
• Ichiro carries 8 bats in a humidity controlled case because it's very important for the bat to be at the right humidity. Apparently a 31 oz bat can increase in weight by .75 oz due to humidity.  It's also revealing when he was playing in Japan as a young man, he broke his bat in anger, and then wrote an apology to the man who made the bat.

Bad Weekend and Throwing Like Girls

DC area had a bad sports Sunday (Nats, Skins) and a bad zoo Sunday (panda cub).  But James Fallows has had an interesting sequence of posts on the subject of gender differences in how people throw.  A good deal of evidence for culture/training, which makes sense to me.

Rising Costs: Tuition and Weddings

Saw the figure yesterday that the average American wedding costs close to $30,000.  I can't believe it, but then I can't believe tuition costs either.