Those Efficient Private Companies

MGM is building a casino in Prince Georges County, the National Harbor project.  Today's printed Post had an article on the opening plans.  What caught my eye was the subheading--a $500 million cost overrun--the whole project cost $1.4 billion, so that's probably a 33 percent overrun

This will go unnoticed, but similar inefficiency in government tends not to.

Japanese Self-Cleaning Ovens

From Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling we learn that the Japanese have no word for "self-cleaning oven".   That inspired me to search: inquiring minds wanted to know why?  Were all ovens self-cleaning, or what?  This led me to an interesting write-up on Japanese kitchen appliances.

It doesn't directly answer the question, but this is what I read between the lines:

• kitchens are small and appliances are small
• meals are physically small (no Thanksgiving turkey)
• ovens are small (microwaves now)
• ranges are gas (I presume given the size of Japan and population density fuel was never abundant, so no (i.e. "no" = "few') wood/coal stoves for cooking and no transition to electric stoves.

Book Recommendation: Rosa Brooks

The book is "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon", the author is Rosa Brooks, the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, the leftish foodie and writer.  Interestingly, Brooks is now married to a colonel in the Special Forces, having spent time in the bureaucracies of the State Department (Bill Clinton admin) and Pentagon (Obama admin) as a human rights/law of war lawyer. 

The book is a little diffuse, but it gets blurbs from Gen. McChrystal and Anne-Marie Slaughter, former policy wonk in the State Department.  Brooks acknowledges her experiences have changed and undermined her inherited preconceptions, though you still get the idealism of the former human rights activist. To me, of course, the most interesting bits reflected the bureaucracies of DOD and State, and the tension between them, but Brooks' thesis is that the old paradigms of war and peace no longer work, we need to pay attention to the in-between, particularly as impacted by technology, and fashion new rules of law and social structures to deal with social conflict.   I was struck by her thoughts about the individualization of war--we can track and kill individuals now--what does that do to "war", which used to be anonymous mass versus anonymous mass?

Clinton and the Modern Age

Some sentences from Garrett Graff's writeup at Politico after reading the last batch of FBI reports of interviews of the Clinton people:

 "Together, the documents, technically known as Form 302s, depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age. Reading the FBI’s interviews, Clinton’s team hardly seems organized enough to mount any sort of sinister cover-up. There’s scant oversight of the way Clinton communicated, and little thought given to how her files might be preserved for posterity—MacBook laptops with outdated archives are FedExed across the country, cutting-edge iPads are discarded quickly and BlackBerry devices are rejected for being “too heavy” as staff scrambled to cater to Clinton’s whims."

 Secretary Powell tried to bring State into the modern age:

Powell invested in 44,000 new computers, giving every employee a computer on the desk, and monitored the adoption of the new systems as he traveled by conducting unofficial audits, sitting down at embassies overseas to check his own email and attempting to log into his account. As he told FBI agents, “This action allowed Powell to gauge if the embassy staff was maintaining and using their computers.” He also regularly checked the department’s internal “Country Notes” on the intranet to see if missions overseas were keeping their details up to date.  

 I come away from the long article, thinking more highly of Powell as a bureaucrat--at least he knew from his Army days about the need for solid routines and the likelihood that things will be Fubar.

As for Clinton, since I have a close relation who's never used the IPad Air she received, I shouldn't complain much about her technological incapacity.  I think the facts in the article fully support Comey's decision.  However, I'm bothered by the idea that nobody in Clinton's circle of advisers and support staff, except for the IT guy, seems really to have worried about the nitty-gritty.  It's a prevalent disease of big-shots, IMHO, but I hope as President she finds a Sherman Adams*.

* Ike's chief of staff who made the trains run on time.

Census Bureaucrats and Immigration Laws

I think I stumbled on an interesting bit of bureaucratic history today.  In trying to help a relative decipher a 1910 census listing for a Fanny Cohen in New York City.  The census form is confusing, apparently because it was worked over two or three times.  The initial listing showed her and her parents as being born in Russia, and Yiddish was her first language.

The confusing parts were additional notations, possibly made by the census taker, but more likely done later.  The notes aren't clear.  Our best interpretation at the moment is that they are classifications perhaps required by the Immigration Act of 1924, that is, what was "Russia" in 1910 becomes Poland or Lithuania  after WWI. Because the Act imposed quotas based on the national origins of those already in America, the Census bureau seems to have had to come up with those statistics.

I'm curious whether this is true, and if so how they went about it.  If you have someone going over the 1910 census in 1924, how do they know which part of the Russian Empire, now defunct, Fanny Cohen came from?

Trump's Economist

Prof. Don Boudreaux, of George Mason U. blogs at Cafe Hayek. He seems to be a classical economist, i.e., someone with whom I would agree only once in a blue moon.  Frankly, I don't understand the issue with the Trump economic plan, but I find this pussyfooting around without saying what you really think most distressing: (from an "open letter" to Trump's economist):

"Tipped off by Scott Sumner, I read Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro’s analysis of Trump’s economic plan.  Words fail me.  Nearly everything Navarro writes about trade is not only wrong, but foolish.  A good economist setting out to write a spoof of bad trade analysis could not have done a better job of mimicking complete cluelessness about trade."

-

Chinese Exchange Rate

 From Feb 2015 economist:

CHINESE officials tired of defending their exchange-rate policy can at least appreciate the irony in the latest charges levelled against them. For years foreigners [including Donald Trump in the debate on Monday] accused them of keeping the yuan artificially weak to boost exports. Now, domestic critics say, they are doing just the opposite: keeping the currency artificially strong and, in the process, wounding the economy. Some predict China will soon change course and engineer a devaluation. But just as the Chinese authorities did not resort to a big one-off appreciation when the yuan seemed too weak, they are unlikely to embark on a dramatic devaluation now that it is looking strong

Qualifications for President: Not Quite the Most Versus the Least

From a piece challenging Obama's description of Clinton as the most qualified person to be president,  a few sentences:

With the sole exception of Henry Wallace, she is the most qualified person to seek the office since Reconstruction. Moreover, she is the most qualified Democratic nominee since Lewis Cass and since the first American women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. By contrast, Donald Trump, having never held public office nor served in let alone commanded the US military, is the least qualified presidential nominee in American history. However, Trump is tied for this distinction with another dark horse corporate executive. In the 1930s, Wendell Willkie was CEO of the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, an electric utilities holding company known today as Southern Company (the parent corporation of Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power, and Mississippi Power).

 (The analysis is based on different types of positions held and years of service.)

Asking [Debate] Questions

This site for submitting and voting on questions from the public for use in the second debate is, on the face of it, a good idea.  But I'm skeptical.  The Obama administration tried something similar.  My impression is they found many, perhaps mostly, crackpot issues--I'm using a broad definition of "crackpot".  It's IMHO a populist idea.  We shall see what questions actually come out of the process, hopefully not the ones with the most vote.

I spent a little time there and voted for one issue (legalizing pot, not because I think it should be, but because it's a valid issue and probably not one which would be asked in the usual way.)

Questions for Clinton Which Won't Be Asked

What one thing did Bill do in the transition to the Presidency or in the organization of the executive branch which you will try to avoid?

Same question but with Obama?

Will you work with your Secretary of State as Bill did with Christopher, as Bill with Albright, or Obama with you?