Month: June 2016

I am in love with Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras for their image quality (dynamic range so much better than anything from Canon), their compact size, and the back-saving flip-up rear LCD. I started with the NEX-6, moved to the A6000, and now have the A6300. The worst thing about the camera compared to a trusty Canon EOS body has always been the autofocus. Sony’s response to this is “Just give us $1000 for the new model, which has the best autofocus imaginable.” After playing around with the “green idiot mode,” however, I am shocked at the number of out-of-focus images. This is not a question of picking the wrong part of the scene but of an image in which literally nothing is in focus, perhaps due to “release priority” rather than “AF priority” (manually settable but the setting may not affect behavior in green idiot mode) combined with a generally inferior ability to autofocus.

Any readers with this camera? Does the purported Emperor of Autofocus actually have no clothes?

 

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I talked to a high-end trusts, estates, and foundation lawyer. I asked him if there was any difference in setting up foundations in various U.S. states. He said “Delaware is kind of the go-to place, but South Dakota is becoming more popular because of the professional trustees there offering lower fees.” He said to avoid Florida. “Most states it is the Attorney General who is responsible for supervising foundations and trusts, but in Florida it is the Department of Agriculture and they can be very aggressive due to the potential for taking advantage of the elderly.” Any other tips? “Stay out of California and New York. Their tax departments are like third world countries’.”

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I know that North Carolina is the State of Hate (TM) while Massachusetts is all about love, but I went for my annual workout and found this sign at the Boston Sports Club in Waltham:

How is this different from the North Carolina law that marks the Ignorant Southerners as haters? (And, as is well-established, haters are going to hate.)

One of my Facebook friends resolved the apparent contradiction by saying that the Massachusetts lovers who put up the sign meant to write “gender” rather than the biological or birth certificate-derived “sex.” Massachusetts lovers and North Carolina haters have more or less the same laws regarding amending the sex designation on a birth certificate. If we put up this sign are we actually distinguishable from the haters of North Carolina?

[Separately, will they have to take down this sign if the new transgender bill becomes law? (The governor says that it will.)]

Related:

• TIME article on how Massachusetts was the first (1887) to insist, by law, on the separation of the sexes in bathrooms.

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One corner of American society where regulators and lawyers do about 10 times as much work, measured in dollars, as primary producers: aircraft operations from places other than public airports.

What has typically happened in Massachusetts is that a property owner will get approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to land an airplane or helicopter. The FAA looks at the question of safety and, to a lesser extent, noise and impact on neighbors. Then neighbors or town officials look at the gleaming aircraft in someone’s backyard and try to shut down operations via zoning laws.

After at least four years of litigation, the question seems to have been resolved by a May 2016 decision of the Appeals Court in Hanlon v. Town of Sheffield (15-P-799). Essentially the holding seems to be that the town has to seek approval from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s aeronautics division prior to shutting down someone’s FAA-approved operation.

Related

• We can get stuff done in Massachusetts… it just takes 30 years (new runway at Logan)
• Stamford, Connecticut police ticket a medevac helicopter pilot for landing at a hospital

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I was chatting with a 25-year-old from Los Angeles, where the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp lawsuit is unfolding (posting 1; posting 2). By the time the dust settles, Amber Heard will likely have gotten paid more for every time that she had sex with her defendant during their one-year marriage than this 25-year-old, an arts educator, will earn in a year. Yet the 25-year-old was not envious of these profits nor skeptical of Amber Heard’s claim that the person from whom she was seeking tens (or hundreds?) of millions of dollars was also, conveniently for her financial lawsuit, a person who had been beating her up. “We were taught not to engage in victim-blaming or slut-shaming,” said the 25-year-old.

Related:

• USA Today on Amber Heard’s previous experience with the domestic violence industry

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A friend asked for comment on “How the FAA Shot Down ‘Uber for Planes'”. The proposed service would have allowed people to find a pilot heading for Martha’s Vineyard, for example, and hop on, paying his or her proportional share of the expenses, e.g., the flight school rental fee.

My response via Facebook was

The FAA tries to draw a sharp line between airlines, which they want to be 100% safe, and personal flying, where they let you build your own plane in your garage and then fly it yourself. They don’t want to put non-pilots in the position of having to judge if an operation is sufficiently safe. I think that perhaps there should be a middle ground. Require that there be a two-pilot crew, for example, which is the cornerstone of airline safety. Also require a higher level of insurance and that the pilots comply with the insurance company’s training requirements. The rest of the charter/airline regulations are not as important in my opinion.

(The FAA does have a track record of innovating in rule-making. It created the Light Sport Aircraft and Sport Pilot regulations, for example, to simplify two-seat visual flying. It took “more than a decade of deliberation” (see http://generalaviationnews.com/2013/09/09/a-new-approach-to-lsa-certification/ ))

What do readers think? On the one hand it would be nice if adults could meet over the Internet and do something that is already legal if they were to meet face-to-face. On the other hand, if you have never met someone face-to-face how can you evaluate his or her ability to be the single pilot of an aircraft?

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A working mom friend sent me “How to Fix Feminism”, a recent New York Times piece that opens with

Over the past half-century, unmarried childless women have overcome every barrier to opportunity you can think of, and now earn 96 percent of what men do. Mothers, on the other hand, aren’t doing nearly as well: Married mothers are paid 76 cents on the dollar.

One argument is for a central planning ministry to step in:

Here’s a fantasy my daughter and I entertain: What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft? Both sexes would be expected to chip in, and the state would support young parents the way it now supports veterans. This is more or less what Scandinavian countries already do. A mother might take five years off, then focus on her career, at which point the father could put his on pause. Or vice versa.

(Let’s see how enthusiastic that daughter is about Scandinavian laws and policies after she has sex with a married dermatologist and needs to choose between receiving $100,000/year tax-free for 21 (New York) or 23 years (Massachusetts) versus a Danish maximum of $8,000 per year.)

Fresh from a Girl Scout overnight camping trip (don’t ask), I wonder why the focus on what people get paid on a W-2 instead of on what they can spend? Some stay-at-home moms drove up to the event in $70,000 SUVs. Their W-2 earnings were “0 cents on the dollar” compared to anyone with a job, but their spending power was obviously far above the median. Is the life goal to have an impressive 1040 return or a comfortable material lifestyle?

If feminists who identify as “women” can’t be happy without a W-2 that precisely matches that of American workers who currently identify as “men,” why not let citizens pay each other? In a currently heterosexual couple, for example, the person who identifies as a man could provide a weekly paycheck, perhaps at the state of residence’s current child support guideline rates, for “caregiving” and deduct that from “his” income for tax purposes. The person who identifies as a woman would then receive an additional W-2 for this caregiving and thus end up with a taxable income that equals or exceeds the “man.” If there are gender changes within the household the arrangements can be altered, potentially on a monthly basis. (Note that this is not quite the same, cashflow-wise, as actual court-ordered child support. Child support revenue is not taxable for the winner parent nor deductible for the loser parent. Jessica Kosow, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who outearns her classmates 3.2:1 based on a four-year marriage, would be considered an impoverished single mother by the measures put forward in this NYT article because her W-2 earnings are $0.)

Readers: What do we think? Is it time to heal this rift in our society by just having people within a household actually pay each other for perceived caregiving value? (Also, I didn’t check the 1000+ comments on this article, but do any of the readers point this out? Or do people just accept that W-2 wages is the correct measure?)

Related:

• Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?
• Discussion of feminism in the Rationale chapter
• “Women now control more than half of US personal wealth, which ‘will only increase in years to come'” (Business Insider, 2015): “About 51 percent, or $14 trillion, of American personal wealth is now controlled by women, according to the Bank of Montreal’s Wealth Institute. The Canadian bank also expects them to control about $22 trillion by 2020. .. This sea change has come as women have also moved to fill 52 percent of management, professional and related positions in the country, according to BMO.”

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In 2010 I wrote about the Icon A5, a seaplane that would go into production in 2011 and therefore start delivering a return to its investors in 2011. The airplane was quasi-certified in 2015, but now it seems that the payback for all of that design engineering investment won’t begin until 2017 at the earliest because that’s when production will start. Flying Magazine says that they are looking to raise more money…

The company was founded/funded in 2006 (Wikipedia), so that’s a minimum of 11 years from first funding to first profits.

Amber Heard got there in about one year, with a boost from a domestic violence allegation. Google got there in about four years (Wikipedia says it was a research project in 1996 and then started selling ads in 2000). Icon is on a timeline similar to that of Diavik, “surveyed in 1992 … with production [of diamonds] commencing in January 2003,” but without the diamonds…

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Under the “it takes a lot of courage to condemn a convicted rapist” principle, my Facebook friends are complaining about what they feel to be the insufficient punishment meted out to Brock Turner (strictly speaking, he was not tried for or convicted of “rape,” though the New York Times and other national media refer to him as a “rapist”). His family probably spent roughly $1.5 million on a criminal defense (source of estimate). Unless he emigrates he will spend a lifetime as a third-class citizen on the sex offender registry. He will be in prison for up to six months (this latter punishment being the focus of public outcry).

As I was not in the courtroom hearing the evidence it is not for me to say whether or not justice was served. (And people who are outraged that he didn’t get the maximum sentence possible should review Langbein’s “Torture and Plea Bargaining” to learn how today’s maximum sentences relate to what were considered fair sentences pre-1960.) However, I think that nearly everyone would agree that, without alcohol having been consumed by both criminal and victim, at least this particular crime would not have occurred.

The politically acceptable point of view seems to be that we should change the behavior of drunken men, e.g., with harsher punishments for bad behavior while drunk. I wonder how successful that can be, though, given that there are already harsh punishments, mostly practical but also criminal justice-related, for bad behavior while drunk and yet humans continue to drink when alcohol is available and behave badly when drunk.

What about Prohibition? It didn’t work very well 100 years ago, but the modern police state is much more sophisticated. Americans are packed much more tightly together and subject to more surveillance. Getting truckloads of alcohol across the border from Canada doesn’t seem as practical today as it was in 1920.

There are a lot of reasons why Prohibition could make more sense today than it did in 1920.

In 1920 if a person suffered health problems due to alcohol consumption the cost of treatment and disability fell on the individual and his or her family. Today, through a combination of Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and SSDI, most of those costs will fall on taxpayers. Society thus has a more compelling interesting in prevent residents from drinking than it did in 1920.

In 1920 the government had debts that were minimal by today’s standards. The government was not obligated to pay large pensions to former public employees. There was no Social Security or Medicare. Headline bond debt was not at 100 percent of GDP. If Americans didn’t work at maximum efficiency the consequence was slower economic growth, not insolvency. Americans would have to work productively pretty close to 24/7 to pay off all of today’s obligations. Given the lack of productivity of drunk people, it seems intuitively obvious that we would have a larger economy and therefore pay more in taxes if none of us ever drank (except when traveling to foreign countries). [See link below, though, for a posting questioning this common sense idea.]

In 1920 the U.S. did not have a significant Muslim population whose religious principles prohibit alcohol consumption.

In 1920 there was a reasonably high percentage of jobs where consuming alcohol wouldn’t affect performance too much. Today even a slight mistake with a computer can cost the employer a fortune (21st century draft horse posting) and massive litigation costs can be incurred after missteps (you’ll never believe what happens when the rushed workers at Panera try to fill an order for grilled cheese that contains two comments regarding peanuts).

Could it make sense to prohibit alcohol when various U.S. states are in the process of legalizing marijuana? If alcohol is more likely to lead to stuff that society no longer wishes to tolerate, I don’t see why it would be inconsistent to ban alcohol while freeing the stoners to do as they please.

[Of course you could argue that preventing people from drinking alcohol takes away their liberty, but it seems that Americans are long past the point where liberty per se is a concern.]

Related:

• Why can’t a country’s productivity be predicted by alcohol consumption?
• How do people mix alcohol and skiing?
• Alcoholism = stepping stone to success (plus why we must all move to Switzerland)
• “Drummer Defends Stanford Student Convicted in Rape Case. Her Band Pays a Price.” (nytimes) — report on some collateral shrinkage of the economy

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A friend’s daughter graduated from Harvard this year and the family threw her a party. I learned that Harvard Hillel is now a safe space from everything except diabetes…

 

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