From Here to Eternity: The Folly of Perpetual Trusts

Trusts that can operate for as many as a thousand years or even forever, typically for the benefit of the settlor’s descendants living from time to time, now and in the future, are all the rage in banking and estate-planning circles. Before 1986, when Congress passed the federal generation-skipping transfer tax (GST tax), settlors had little incentive and probably little desire to establish perpetual trusts, even though they were permitted to do so under the law of Wisconsin, South Dakota, or Idaho. The GST tax created an artificial incentive for the wealthy to establish such trusts. The origin of the perpetual-trust movement is the GST exemption, which is part of the GST tax. When Congress granted the GST exemption, it did not impose a durational limit on trusts that qualify for the exemption, but instead relied on state perpetuity laws to supply that limit. The reliance on state perpetuity laws was badly misplaced. At the instigation of state banking groups and estate-planning attorneys, states began to pass legislation allowing trust settlors to create perpetual trusts—trusts that can last for several centuries or even forever. With state perpetuity laws out of the way, the wealthy began creating perpetual trusts in significant numbers. This essay questions whether the state legislators who vote to authorize perpetual trusts and the wealthy who create them are thinking through what they are allowing or putting in place. The essay shows the folly of such trusts, primarily by producing a table projecting how, with each step down the generational ladder, the number of beneficiaries will proliferate and the settlor’s genetic connection with the beneficiaries will decline. The essay then points out that the primary responsibility for the perpetual-trust movement rests not with the state legislators or the wealthy, but with Congress. The primary responsibility for curtailing it also rests with Congress, but so far Congress has been decidedly uninterested in curtailing the duration of GST-exempt trusts

PFAS, from here to Eternity - or maybe not

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of synthetic chemicals with extremely strong C-F bonds. Due to their thermal stability, acid resistance, and high surface activity, they have been widely used for several decades in various consumer products. PFAS has been detected in water, soil, sediment, air, food, and biota samples on all continents and due to this are recognized as environmental and human health risk (Carlson et al. 2022). In the last decade, several available technologies were tested for the remediation of PFAS-polluted environments, such as adsorption, filtration, thermal destruction, oxidation/reduction, and soil washing, but several disadvantages were reported (Bolan et al., 2021). We hypothesize that by using advanced oxidation techniques followed by microbial treatment decrease in the concentration of PFOA as a PFAS model compound will occur. In the beginning, we tested separately abiotic and biotic degradation of PFOA. Target LC-MS/MS was used for quantitative analysis of PFOA decrease, and for detecting degradation products, nontargeted LC-MS/MS analysis was used. In the photocatalysis study, we used selected Ti and Al-based photocatalysts. The experiments were conducted at 20 °C in an open cylindrical polypropylene reactor, and a simulated solar radiation lamp (Solimed BH Quarzlampen) was used as a light source. Microbial communities were isolated from the locations in Serbia, Japan, and Italy known for their pollution with PFAS, and enrichment was conducted on the media supplemented with ppm values of PFOA (Beskoski et al., 2018). Microbial communities were used as inoculum in the PFOA biodegradation study

PFAS, from here to Eternity - or maybe not

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of synthetic chemicals with extremely strong C-F bonds. Due to their thermal stability, acid resistance, and high surface activity, they have been widely used for several decades in various consumer products. PFAS has been detected in water, soil, sediment, air, food, and biota samples on all continents and due to this are recognized as environmental and human health risk (Carlson et al. 2022). In the last decade, several available technologies were tested for the remediation of PFAS-polluted environments, such as adsorption, filtration, thermal destruction, oxidation/reduction, and soil washing, but several disadvantages were reported (Bolan et al., 2021). We hypothesize that by using advanced oxidation techniques followed by microbial treatment decrease in the concentration of PFOA as a PFAS model compound will occur. In the beginning, we tested separately abiotic and biotic degradation of PFOA. Target LC-MS/MS was used for quantitative analysis of PFOA decrease, and for detecting degradation products, nontargeted LC-MS/MS analysis was used. In the photocatalysis study, we used selected Ti and Al-based photocatalysts. The experiments were conducted at 20 °C in an open cylindrical polypropylene reactor, and a simulated solar radiation lamp (Solimed BH Quarzlampen) was used as a light source. Microbial communities were isolated from the locations in Serbia, Japan, and Italy known for their pollution with PFAS, and enrichment was conducted on the media supplemented with ppm values of PFOA (Beskoski et al., 2018). Microbial communities were used as inoculum in the PFOA biodegradation study

Fiction as History: James Jones, \u3cem\u3eFrom Here to Eternity\u3c/em\u3e.

This study examines one of James Jones\u27s novels, From Here to Eternity,as more than a fictionalization of historic events. Juxtaposing the correspondence between the author and his brother, begun when James Jones enlisted in 1939, and the novel allows an understanding of the extent that the novel was a distillation of Jones\u27 personality and experience. Jones felt fiction must be pieced from real experiences, but also contain original emotions disguised in the pages of a novel. Analyzing Jones\u27s personal letters, interviews, and experiences offers, with some degree of certainty, the understanding that From Here to Eternity is more than merely a famous novel. It is an entertaining exposition of not only what military service does to men, but also what it emotionally did to James Jones. Thus this study reveals how much an author incorporates the essence of his historical experience-his soul -into his work