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Those of us with big collections of Canon EOS lenses have had to watch enviously as cameras with Sony sensors outclassed all of the Canon bodies, regardless of price. The Nikon system, anchored by Sony sensors in camera bodies such as the D800, inspired the most envy. Sony’s own systems didn’t seem that awesome, however, due to the lack of lens choices. The latest DxOMark tests, however, show that the lens options for Sony mirrorless systems are not to be sneezed at. Some of the better lenses ever tested are the Zeiss 25/2 and Zeiss 21/2.8, both designed for the Sony A7 camera. If you want an awesome 50/1.4 it seems that the Sigma 50/1.4 “Art” lens is the best mixture of optical quality and price/weight and it is available in a Sony mount (but for their DSLR cameras rather than the mirrorless? This would then require an adapter).

Even Pentax is now crushing Canon in the DSLR image quality area with its K-1 body that includes the Sony 36 MP sensor lifted from the A7.

So… Canon doesn’t make bodies with competitive image quality and most of the great new lenses are coming from third-party makers such as Sigma and Zeiss. How does this happen to a market leader?

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Here’s an excerpt from an article by a sex worker:

I arrived in New York City from Chelyabinsk, a city right in the middle of Russia, when I was 19 years old, with $300 in my pocket. I turned 24 in March and have managed to save $200,000…

If she continues to save at this rate ($40,000 per year), she’ll have put away $1.44 million in today’s dollars by the time she is 55 years old (a standard retirement age for a government worker). If we assume that her funds are invested in securities that are actually available in the market (the current yield on TIPS is 1.06 percent real; source), she’ll still have adequate retirement funds (though likely nowhere near as large a cashflow as a retired police officer or firefighter who uses the overtime system thoughtfully).

If only we could get our politicians to exhibit this much fiscal prudence! (good first step: laws prohibiting politicians from giving public employees defined benefit pensions, unless they first get a letter from God telling them (a) how long all of their workers will live, and (b) what actual market returns will be for the next 50 years).

This is why I can’t be enthusiastic about someone like Michael Bloomberg as a presidential candidate. He kept ladling out the pension promises to New York City workers. The city won’t become insolvent as long as the following conditions hold: (1) there is no major innovation in medicine that allows retirees to live longer, (2) Wall Street continues to be the world’s money center, and (3) markets continue to boom. That’s a lot of risk to impose on future residents and taxpayers.

Related:

• “The Rules of Engagement” (by the same author)
• Americans’ inability to think about pension costs on display in the Boston Globe

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I can’t understand why Americans have trouble maintaining a health weight…

(from the supermarket in Dillon, Colorado)

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Donald Trump is under attack for hiring foreigners, especially Romanians, to work at his club in Florida (nytimes). In a country with low labor force participation (compare to Singapore), it does seem surprising that Americans aren’t hired for these jobs. I interviewed some shopkeepers in 2011 and wrote “Polish accents on Martha’s Vineyard”. One explanation is that collecting welfare is a superior alternative for American citizens, but isn’t available to foreigners (see The Redistribution Recession for a quantitative analysis of how many Americans don’t work because the government gives them money conditional on them not working).

[Note that a foreign worker who has sex with an American and ends up with custody of the resulting child can have money wired back to the home country at the child support rates that prevail in the state where the sexual act(s) occurred. This will be a lot more lucrative than the $10.60/hour W-2 wage. Wikipedia says that the “net average monthly wage” in Romania is about $463, which works out to $5,556. The child support cashflow out of having sex on Martha’s Vineyard, for example, should be a minimum of about $1 million under the Massachusetts guidelines (assuming a defendant earning at least $250,000/year, which is a safe assumption among hotel guests on the Vineyard!). That’s $40,000 per year for 23 years at the top of the guidelines, after which judges typically extrapolate at an 11 percent rate. Thus child support will pay more than 7X better than working back in Romania. The cash value of a child conceived in a room at Donald Trump’s club would likely be determined under Florida family law and thus would typically be less than half compared to if the parties had sex in Massachusetts. The official Florida chart shows that having sex with an American earning $2100 per month ($25,200), after taxes, will yield the same revenue as the average job in Romania.]

Readers: What do we think of Trump’s Romanian-staffed club? Outraged because he isn’t giving Americans a chance to cut short their 99 weeks of Xbox? Proud because we’re rich enough to pay our fellow citizens to rest on the sofa while foreigners come here to serve us drinks?

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The over-30 people who can spend a week skiing in Beaver Creek, Aspen, or Jackson have generally achieved success in three dimensions: (a) wealth, (b) leisure time, and (c) health. Transportation, lodging, and lift tickets are expensive. Most people who ski at these big mountains are people who have been skiing for years and therefore who have been successful for years. For a young person who wants to succeed in at least these three dimensions, why not spend a season working in a customer-facing job in a luxury ski resort in order to learn the kinds of careers that lead to success?

[During my week in Beaver Creek it seemed that the dominant careers were in health care (especially anesthesiology and radiology), real estate ownership/investment (especially of properties that could be used for health care, e.g., addiction clinics), financial services, and collecting money from divorce/alimony/child support. Health care seemed like the surest path to having enough money and free time in 2016. Nurses, doctors, technicians, administrators, et al. were all over the mountain, despite health care being only about 20 percent of the economy. (Note that these folks, when not trashing Bernie Sanders, said that being a doctor per se was less lucrative than it had been. “A partner in our radiology practice used to make at least $750,000 per year,” said a nurse from a low-cost Southern town, “but now $600,000 is probably more realistic.”)]

Readers: What do you think about this idea for a college student who (a) likes to ski, and (b) wants to figure out which corners of the economy lead to the good life?

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“Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected” by Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, is an interesting analysis of Donald Trump’s popularity. Here are some excerpts from this WSJ piece:

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

[The protected] are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.

[The protected] let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

… we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

Perhaps the central story of our time therefore is “inequality,” though not simply “who is a rich enough douchebag to have a penthouse next to the lift at Beaver Creek and use it twice a year?” Could it be that the most consequential inequality is between people who have government jobs, especially high-level ones, and people who don’t have the connections, education, or skill to get those jobs. My hometown of Bethesda, Maryland, where the ruling class tends to move after having kids (don’t want to pay for private school; don’t want your children to encounter any poor kids), has become spectacularly posh over the past 40 years. Baltimore, Maryland, by contrast, is plagued by violence. Baltimore, however, is just far enough away that nobody in Bethesda has to care what happens there (see this chapter on Maryland family law, in which a state legislator from Baltimore described the laws of Maryland as having been made to benefit “wealthy lawyers who represent people in Montgomery County”).

• “It takes a lot of personal courage to dismiss the security concerns of others when you have Secret Service protection for life and will never board another commercial flight.”
• Is it fair to refer to Barack Obama as King Obama? (“recent American presidents are like kings in that their experience of life bears no relationship to that of a commoner.”)
• New York Times article on 258 presumably luxurious trips taken by Justice Antonin Scalia during 10 years on the Supreme Court: “Justice Scalia went on at least 23 privately funded trips in 2014 alone to places like Hawaii, Ireland and Switzerland, …”

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“What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team” gives some insight into the working lives of young people. Here are a few excerpts:

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’

‘‘We had to get people to establish psychologically safe environments,’’ Rozovsky told me. But it wasn’t clear how to do that. ‘‘People here are really busy,’’ she said. ‘‘We needed clear guidelines.’’

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

And thanks to Project Aristotle, she now had a vocabulary for explaining to herself what she was feeling and why it was important. She had graphs and charts telling her that she shouldn’t just let it go. And so she typed a quick response: ‘‘Nothing like a good ‘Ouch!’ to destroy psych safety in the morning.’’ Her teammate replied: ‘‘Just testing your resilience.’’

‘‘That could have been the wrong thing to say to someone else, but he knew it was exactly what I needed to hear,’’ Rozovsky said. ‘‘With one 30-second interaction, we defused the tension.’’ She wanted to be listened to. She wanted her teammate to be sensitive to what she was feeling. ‘‘And I had research telling me that it was O.K. to follow my gut,’’ she said. ‘‘So that’s what I did. The data helped me feel safe enough to do what I thought was right.’’

If employers such as Google are interested in “safe spaces” maybe humanities majors concentrating on “safety” are not wasting their college years.

[I do wonder if the Google employees didn’t fool themselves in concluding that psychological safety led to a high-productivity team. Consider a low-productivity team. If the top managers had full information most of the people on it would be fired. Thus everyone on the team is inherently in an “unsafe” position, from a job security perspective, and sharing information can be dangerous indeed. In a high-productivity team, on the other hand, everyone will be retained and probably promoted regardless of what is said at meetings. To the extent that they did correctly identify correlation, causation may run in the opposite direction!]

Separately, the article opens a window into one of America’s most selective business schools:

Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. … She applied to business schools and was accepted by the Yale School of Management. … The members of her case-competition team [fellow students] had a variety of professional experiences: Army officer, researcher at a think tank, director of a health-education nonprofit organization and consultant to a refugee program.

In other words, the only thing missing from this business school team was a member who had experience in an operating business.

What do readers think? Are Google’s profits driven by their search monopoly and their near-monopoly on hiring capable programmers? Or by providing safe spaces?

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“German nobleman sued in NY court for $2.5M in unpaid child support” is a New York Post story illustrating the importance of venue. From my NBAA report:

[from a German] “If you open a German tabloid in any typical week you’ll read about a woman who divorced her rich husband and was so upset about the end of the marriage that she had to move with the kids to New York or Los Angeles. Really it is about trying to get a U.S. court to take over and order child support at U.S. rates.” (maximum child support revenue in Germany is much less than what can be earned from working a W2-style job); [from a European immigrant to the U.S.]

The plaintiff here seems to following what was described as the standard script:

Nathalie [von Bismarck], 45, who fled Europe last year to escape her ex, refuses to give her New York address in the suit, saying that she “fears for her physical safety.”

She got an order of protection in December, preventing Carl-Eduard, 51, from seeing or even contacting their son Alexei, 9, and daughter Grace, 6.

A couple of interesting points: (1) the plaintiff here is keeping her defendant’s last name, despite the fact she is afraid of him and that her children would be in danger if they were to be contacted by him, (2) child support is critical to “a life of continued leisure for the [adult] countess: ‘The wife is not obliged to care for her own needs by taking up gainful employment.'”

Related:

• “Do all German women now qualify for refugee status in the U.S.?” (quote from a German: “it is a lot easier to work your pussy in the U.S. than in Germany.”)

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The on-slopes restaurants in Beaver Creek do a lively lunchtime business in alcohol. The most enthusiast consumers of beer, wine, and mixed drinks seem to be European. In other words, they’ve come from sea level, are drinking at 10,000′ above sea level, and will take the lift up to 11,000′ after drinking. Conventional wisdom (e.g., Wikipedia) is that alcohol and high altitude are a bad combination. Conventional wisdom is that alcohol does not contribute to coordination and quick reaction times, like you would need to ski down a black diamond trail. Yet one can observe hundreds of people at just one ski resort lunch spot loading up on alcohol and then getting on the lift.

Readers: How did it become common for people who aren’t acclimated to high altitude to mix alcohol and and skiing? And, for those who actually have tried this, how does alcohol affect your ski performance?

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Barack Obama, our Nobel Peace Laureate, has a new plan to shut down the military prison in Guantánamo. If you’re wondering what it is like day-to-day there, Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi is worth reading.

Gourmets need not fear a diet of rice and beans: “[an interrogator] offered me McDonald’s one day, but I refused because I didn’t want to owe him anything.”

Who is Mr. Slahi? It turns out that he is an admitted Jihadi:

In Germany, Mohamedou pursued a degree in electrical engineering, with an eye toward a career in telecom and computers, but he interrupted his studies to participate in a cause that was drawing young men from around the world: the insurgency against the communist-led government in Afghanistan. There were no restrictions or prohibitions on such activities in those days, and young men like Mohamedou made the trip openly; it was a cause that the West, and the United States in particular, actively supported. To join the fight required training, so in early 1991 Mohamedou attended the al-Farouq training camp near Khost for seven weeks and swore a loyalty oath to al-Qaeda, the camp’s operators. Mohamedou returned to his studies after the training, but in early 1992, with the communist government on the verge of collapsing, he went back to Afghanistan. He joined a unit commanded by Jalaluddin Haqqani that was laying siege to the city of Gardez, which fell with little resistance three weeks after Mohamedou arrived. Kabul fell soon thereafter, and as Mohamedou explained at the CSRT hearing, the cause quickly turned murky:

But he does not want to fight coreligionists:

Right after the break down of [the] Communists, the Mujahiden themselves started to wage Jihad against themselves, to see who would be in power; the different factions began to fight against each other. I decided to go back because I didn’t want to fight against other Muslims, and found no reason why; nor today did I see a reason to fight to see who could be president or vice-president. My goal was solely to fight against the aggressors, mainly the Communists, who forbid my brethren to practice their religion.

And, though many of his friends and associates were Al Qaeda members, he says that he did not take any practical steps to wage Jihad against the U.S. or Americans.

Canadians and Americans are unable to understand or appreciate any of these distinctions:

In 1998, Mohamedou and his wife traveled to Saudi Arabia to perform the hajj. That same year, unable to secure permanent residency in Germany, Mohamedou followed a college friend’s recommendation and applied for landed immigrant status in Canada, and in November 1999 he moved to Montreal. He lived for a time with his former classmate and then at Montreal’s large al Sunnah mosque, where, as a hafiz, or someone who has memorized the Koran, he was invited to lead Ramadan prayers when the imam was traveling. Less than a month after he arrived in Montreal, an Algerian immigrant and al-Qaeda member named Ahmed Ressam was arrested entering the United States with a car laden with explosives and a plan to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Day, as part of what became known as the Millennium Plot.

Ressam’s arrest sparked a major investigation of the Muslim immigrant community in Montreal, and the al Sunnah mosque community in particular, and for the first time in his life, Mohamedou was questioned about possible terrorist connections.

Back in Mauritania, Mohamedou’s family was alarmed. “ ‘What are you doing in Canada?’ ” he recalled them asking. “I said nothing but look[ing] for a job. And my family decided I needed to get back to Mauritania because this guy must be in a very bad environment and we want to save him.” His now ex-wife telephoned on behalf of the family to report that his mother was sick.

I didn’t like this life in Canada, I couldn’t enjoy my freedom and being watched is not very good. I hated Canada and I said the work is very hard here. I took off on Friday, 21 January 2000; I took a flight from Montreal to Brussels, then to Dakar.

Americans spent a lot of time, energy, and tax dollars interrogating this Mauritanian regarding his involvement in Ahmed Ressam’s Millennium Plot, but the dates never made sense since the two hadn’t been in the same place at the same time. The book doesn’t give the government’s side of the story, but a federal judge heard both sides and ordered him freed after nine years. The New York Daily News didn’t have Donald Trump, Candidate to kick around at the time (“I’m with Stupid” cover) and hence turned its attention to this Jihadi:

The lead editorial in the New York Daily News on March 23, 2010, was titled “Keep the Cell Door Shut: Appeal a Judge’s Outrageous Ruling to Free 9/11 Thug.” The editorial began: It is shocking and true: a federal judge has ordered the release of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, one of the top recruiters for the 9/11 attacks—a man once deemed the highest-value detainee in Guantanamo.

A section of the opinion summarizing the government’s arguments for why Mohamedou must remain in Guantánamo included a footnote that might have surprised the newspaper’s readers: The government also argued at first that Salahi was also detainable under the “aided in 9/11” prong of the AUMF, but it has now abandoned that theory, acknowledging that Salahi probably did not even know about the 9/11 attacks.

That certainly would make it a stretch to call Mohamedou a “9/11 thug.” It is also a stretch, by any measure, to call a judgment ordering a man freed nine years after he was taken into custody a “rush to release.” But there is a truth at the heart of that Daily News editorial—and much of the press coverage about Mohamedou’s case—and that truth is confusion. Nine years is now thirteen, and the country seems to be no closer to understanding the U.S. government’s case for holding Mohamedou than when Judge Robertson, the one judge who has thoroughly reviewed his case, ordered him released.

Slahi admitted trying to assist fellow Muslims who wanted to kill Russians, e.g., by offering them advice on where to go for training, but the U.S. seems not to have obtained good evidence of him trying to assist Muslims wanting to attack Americans.

Americans’ attempts to understand the enemy are portrayed as comically inept. Slahi was spirited out of Mauritania, imprisoned in Jordan, and then flown to an interrogation prison in Afghanistan. Shortly after arrival he was asked about the whereabouts of top Al Qaeda leaders. He hadn’t even known about the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, much less the locations of any Afghanis:

The escort team pulled me blindfolded to a neighboring interrogation room. As soon as I entered the room, several people started to shout and throw heavy things against the wall. In the melee, I could distinguish the following questions: “Where is Mullah Omar?” “Where is Usama Bin Laden?” “Where is Jalaluddin Haqqani?” A very quick analysis went through my brain: the individuals in those questions were leading a country, and now they’re a bunch of fugitives! The interrogators missed a couple of things. First, they had just briefed me about the latest news: Afghanistan is taken over, but the high level people have not been captured. Second, I turned myself in about the time when the war against terrorism started, and since then I have been in a Jordanian prison, literally cut off from the rest of the world. So how am I supposed to know about the U.S. taking over Afghanistan, let alone about its leaders having fled? Not to mention where they are now. I humbly replied, “I don’t know!” “You’re a liar!” shouted one of them in broken Arabic. “No, I’m not lying, I was captured so and so, and I only know Abu Hafs…” I said, in a quick summary of my whole story.

Slahi dug a deep hole for himself by pretending not to recognize Jihadis whom he actually had met.

The next day ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ reserved me in the ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ and showed me two pictures. The first one turned out to be that of ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, who was suspected of having participated in the September 11 attack and who was captured ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​. The second picture was of ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ one of the September 11 hijackers. As to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, I had never heard of him or saw him, and as to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​, I figured I’ve seen the guy, but where and when? I had no clue! But I also figured that the guy must be very important because ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ were running fast together to find my link with him.* Under the circumstances, I denied having seen the guy. Look at it, how would it have looked had I said I’d seen this guy, but I don’t know when and where?

If we accept all of Slahi’s story at face value, the conclusion is that once American interrogators knew that he was lying but were unable to determine the extent of the lies, they went into the “lock him up and throw away the key until we have some time to figure this out” mode. Slahi attributes his continued imprisonment, however, to malice against Muslims. To an interpreter: “Aren’t you ashamed to work for these evil people, who arrest your brothers in faith for no reason than being Muslim?”

The book is a good illustration of the costs to American taxpayers of trying to sort out Jihadis and non-Jihadis from a group of people who grew up in cultures that we don’t understand. It also highlights that it isn’t enough simply to sort out those have waged Jihad from those who have not. Americans have set for themselves the task of trying to figure out if a Jihadi was set on fighting Americans or not. How much can this cost and how long can it take? There doesn’t seem to be a limit:

… has there ever, in all of recorded human history, been an interrogation that has gone on, day in and day out, for more than six years? There is nothing an interrogator could say to me that would be new; I’ve heard every variation. Each new interrogator would come up with the most ridiculous theories and lies, but you could tell they were all graduates of the same school: before an interrogator’s mouth opened I knew what he ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ was going to say and why he ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ was saying it.* “I am your new interrogator. I have very long experience doing this job. I was sent especially from Washington D.C. to assess your case.”

(As Slahi is still in Gitmo, the interrogation has now lasted a lot longer than six years.)

No American workplace is complete without motivational signs:

I used to make fun of the signs they put up for the interrogators and the guards to raise their morale, “Honor bound to defend freedom.” I once cited that big sign to ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​. “I hate that sign,” ■​■​■​■​ said. “How could you possibly be defending freedom, if you’re taking it away?” I would say.

Slahi sees Americans in close quarters:

the movie Black Hawk Down; … The guards almost went crazy emotionally because they saw many Americans getting shot to death. But they missed that the number of U.S. casualties is negligible compared to the Somalis who were attacked in their own homes. I was just wondering at how narrow-minded human beings can be.

[a guard] used to play video games all the time. I’m terrible when it comes to video games; it’s just not for me. I always told the guards, “Americans are just big babies. In my country it’s not appropriate for somebody my age to sit in front of a console and waste his time playing games.” Indeed, one of the punishments of their civilization is that Americans are addicted to video games.

When I was

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