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I lent out a Sony a7R and 35mm and 55mm lenses to a friend who is a very accomplished conventional DSLR photographer. Here’s what he had to say…

I was very excited to try the Sony having been impressed by the overwhelming flood of positive reviews and sample images. At first touch I hated the camera. Coming from a Nikon DSLR, I found the layout confusing and nothing worked the way I thought it should. I couldn’t adjust the focal area without digging deep into the menu. The front and rear dials, which I thought should control aperture and speed respectively, didn’t seem to do anything, and all the photos I took were out of focus. I tried reading the manual, but this was akin to following the instructions of an autistic pedant. The manual mentions every dial and menu option without ever explaining how to use the damn thing. I found some intelligible comments and reviews online and eventually was able to configure the camera enough to make it somewhat useable without too much head-scratching (and slapping).

If your subject is willing to stand still you will be hard pressed to find a better pairing. Set the camera to aperture-priority, open the lens as wide as it will go, ignore ISO, and have fun. If your subjects are mobile 13-month-old boys, load your gun and shoot yourself.

The sample images below were captured in RAW and imported into Lightroom, mainly for slight cropping. Portrait: 1/250 f2.0 ISO 800. Black and white: 1/60 f1.8 ISO 1250.

Requiring insurers to pay for lots of mammograms is one of the features of Obamacare so presumably this billable procedure is going to become more popular here in the U.S. A new study, however, shows that the billions of dollars per year (NPR estimates) that Americans spend on mammograms is mostly wasted (New York Times).

This reminds me of a conversation that I had with a woman who turned 40 and had her first mammogram. The doctors found something that looked unusual and they told her that there was a significant chance that it was cancerous. I said “Doctors can’t understand basic probability. If you’d had a mammogram last year and the one this year showed something different then they might be correct. But given that this is their first look, the probability of a real problem is vastly lower than the number that they citing. I would wait a couple of years and let them do another one and see if anything has grown. Then let them cut you open.”

The woman accepted the advice of the top physicians at the Massachusetts General Hospital and let them cut her open, removing a portion of her breast tissue for a biopsy. They found nothing but left a scar a substantial bill for Blue Cross.

DxOMark.com continues its cruel exposure (so to speak) of Canon’s image quality weakness relative to Nikon and Sony.

Their direct comparison of sensor performance among three entry-level SLRs shows that Nikon crushes Canon in dynamic range, color sensitivity, and low-light performance.

Below are two photos from brunch today. One was taken by a friend with an iPhone 5s. The other by me with an admittedly rather bulky standard camera (Sony NEX-6 with Sony/Zeiss 16-70mm lens). The light level was fairly similar, on opposite sides of a table. It was fairly bright by indoor standards, with a lot of window light reflecting off white walls.

As you can see, the camera phone picture, despite having come from a state-of-the-art phone (iPhone 5s), is painfully noisy (“grainy” as we film dinosaurs might say).

I can understand the rage for thin and light phones but with more than 7 billion people on the planet I would think that there would be a market for a thicker heavier phone that could deal with indoor photography more gracefully. Samsung has tried in this area a few times (e.g., this Galaxy S4 Zoom camera) but somehow consumers aren’t buying.

[If you’re curious to see more photos with this fairly new lens, I’m building up an examples folder. At first it seemed as though the lens would be unbalanced on the small and light NEX-6 body but I have gotten used to it.]

My question actually relates to Java frameworks for Web development, but I didn’t want to put such a contentious topic in the headline.

Some friends and I are building a Facebook app (like Will Ferrell in “The Other Guys”). Most of the work is likely going to be in JavaScript but we do need to generate some pages from a MySQL database management system. We’ve settled on Java as the server-side page script language, mostly because we want something that people will still understand 10 years from now.

That leaves us with the question of how to program in Java. Much of the code that I’ve reviewed using frameworks and towers of abstraction has been extremely inefficient and hard to debug/change. Generally the organizations who invested in those Java-based systems would have been better off with VB.NET or PHP. The cool kids tell me that the Play frame is what is hip right now. But watching http://vimeo.com/58969923 I can already see some horrifying SQL practices from the auto-generated SQL, e.g., using a string data type as a primary key instead of an integer and a lack of not-null constraints to the point where it was possible to put a row into the database with no information at all, other than the primary key. The video also shows coding in Coffee instead of JavaScript, which seems like a bad idea for maintainability. Is there any guarantee that Coffee will be popular a few years from now? Generally the amount of machinery to generate a “hello, world” page seems excessive, though perhaps the Play framework makes more sense for complex applications?

What do folks who are using Java on the server like? And do these frameworks at the end of the day actually save time compared to old-school Java Server Pages?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

One of the perks of being a software patent expert witness is that one gets to visit Wilmington, Delaware, where the Federal District Court hears disputes between corporate titans. Walking and driving around the empty blighted downtown it occurred to me that it will likely be decades before most parts of the city could be revitalized as a place where people would voluntarily live. Without a sufficient core population of people with at least a middle class income there is no way for a supermarket to thrive. Without an array of businesses, there is no practical way for a middle class person to move into Wilmington and have the kind of city living experience that is available to a resident of Boston, San Francisco, New York, or Washington, D.C.

[Note that due to Delaware’s niche in providing a safe legal home to America’s corporations and banking services, plus presumably a reasonably efficient city government, Wilmington is not nearly as blighted as Detroit, for example. Middle class people commute into work here every day, but they also go home at night, resulting in a dead downtown.]

Our governments (federal, state, and local) spend a huge amount of money and energy helping poor people to stay poor in cities such as Wilmington. We provide free housing, free medical care, free food, etc. Our society also spend a lot of money to bring poor people to middle class areas, e.g., in Massachusetts where the state mandates a certain percentage of “affordable” housing in every town. and where children from poor areas rides buses, sometimes for two hours each day, to attend schools in richer areas.

But once a city falls below a certain level of prosperity it often seems to get stuck. Nearly all of the locals are now poor. There are few of the services available upon which middle class families would depend. The tax base shrivels to whatever percentage of federal Welfare transfers can be harvested by the local government, e.g., taking a percentage of Medicaid spending through a property tax on a doctor’s office.

For an attempted quick break-out, why not offer 10 years of free housing to the first 5000 families willing to move back into a blighted city? The conditions would be that the family must have at least 1.5X the median household income of the state and send their children to the same schools that are available to other city residents (i.e., public schools, charter schools, and private schools if a voucher program is in place). That critical mass of 5000 families would be sufficient to support the range of businesses necessary to attract the next 5000.

The success of cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, et al., proves that middle class Americans want to move back into the cities. The continued failure (in terms of desirability for middle class residence) of cities such as Detroit, Baltimore, Buffalo, Wilmington, et al., proves that middle class Americans don’t want to move in by themselves.

Newspapers are filled with stories (example) about how Russia’s Sochi Olympics construction has cost a lot of money due to “corruption.” I asked my in-apartment Russian experts what this might mean. It turns out that cronies of the government are getting paid more-than-standard-commercial rates to build stuff. So taxpayer funds are being transferred to the politically connected.

I’m wondering how this is different than the U.S. military, which is ridiculously expensive but not typically labeled “corrupt.” TIME reports that the cost of a USAF Boeing 757 (C-32A) is about $43,000 per hour to the taxpayers; Conklin & De Decker says that $12,000 per hour is about what an airline would spend to fly one extra hour in the same airplane. In December, I wrote about how the U.S. Army is planning to do primary helicopter training in $6 million Eurocopters (foreign militaries and private flight schools get this done in aircraft that cost about 1/20th as much).

Why is Russia’s government “corrupt” when it spends more than necessary to build some Olympics venues but the U.S. government is not corrupt when it spends more than market rates to buy military hardware from contractors, pay federal employees (source), and do construction?

[For a Boston example of federal construction, look at the $22 billion spent on the Big Dig (source), partly by paying contractors on a “cost plus” basis (this site notes that “The Big Dig cost almost three times that of building the Panama Canal, in current dollars”).]

This article says that Russian taxpayers got soaked for between 1.5 and 2.5 the normal price for construction on various venues. Yet that is not very different than the 1.75X ratio that the Cato Institute found separating federal worker pay from private worker pay. And it is much lower than the ratio between what the U.S. military spends on buying and flying an aircraft compared to what private airlines and flight schools spend (see the 3.6X ratio above for the B757).

Do we consider ourselves superior to the Russians because the profits from higher-than-market-rate government spending are more broadly distributed here?

Downtown Wilmington, Delaware is a tough place to find a barber shop, but there is a blood donation center on the main commercial street. This spurred a thought: why not offer blood donors a free on-site haircut? That would keep them coming back at approximately the every-three-months interval that is ideal.

A quick Google search does not reveal that this has been tried by any hospital, though the Red Cross has offered coupons for free haircuts to donors willing to make a second appointment and travel to another site.

[Personal anecdote: I have been a blood donor at Boston Children’s hospital for about 20 years. I would like to donate every three months but often it takes me a year to get organized to make an appointment and drive over there. They offer a free T-shirt with every blood donation and the retail value of the T-shirt is only a little less than the retail price of haircuts that I buy. If the phone call and drive effort would yield a haircut I would definitely donate more often.]

As noted in yesterday’s posting, income inequality has captured the imagination of our politicians and they now spend a lot of time reminding us that some Americans are way richer than we are. As I wrote back in December, income inequality doesn’t surprise us when we look at tennis players or novelists, but at least some politicians are able to get the public’s attention citing statistics about workers across different fields of endeavor.

Measured in terms of cash it is beyond dispute that Goldman Sachs partners, medical doctors, and public company CEOs have pulled much farther ahead of the average worker than in, for example, 1950 or 1900. But I’m wondering if cash is the right measure.

Due to the rise of universal health care in most developed countries (e.g., 1948 in the U.K.) and public hospitals (mid-1800s) and Medicaid (1960s) in the U.S., the rich and the poor now have pretty much the same health care in most countries (and die within a few years of each other, life expectancy-wise). The rich and the poor have the same access to the Internet and to mobile phones; compare to 50 years ago when an immigrant might have to spend a day’s wages to make a phone call back to the old country. The rich and the poor have the same access to the most popular forms of entertainment, i.e., movies, television shows, and video/tablet games.

If one were therefore to look at health care, entertainment, and communications, one would conclude that America’s income/lifestyle disparity was narrowing.

Middle class people get a lot of enjoyment from dating and sex. How about rich people? The economist or politician will point to a statistic showing that a rich person has 50 times the income of the middle class person and we need to be envious. But could that person with 50 times the income date people whose company is 50 times more enjoyable? Have sex 50 times more frequently? From the stories that I have heard, it is unclear that overall rich people get more out of dating and sex and middle class people. One of the guys in my pilot circle thought that he was having some harmless fun with a carefree 25-year-old. He was able to take her on a couple of trips that wouldn’t have been affordable for a middle class man. But after a few months she presented him with a positive pregnancy test result, an Excel spreadsheet showing the millions of dollars in child support that he’d have to pay over the next 23 years, and a lawyer ready to negotiate the sale of her abortion for $250,000 (plus the cost of the procedure and attorney’s fees). A divorce litigator in Los Angeles that I interviewed told me about a woman who had a brief encounter with a wealthy man in New York City, then flew her pregnant body to California in order to get around a New York law that caps child support at roughly $50,000 tax-free dollars per year. When the baby arrived she sued the guy in California for $1.5 million per year (times 18 years = $27 million) arguing “Why should my child have to look at the Mona Lisa as a picture in a book when I can charter a Gulfstream, fly him to Paris, and hold him up above the crowd to see the real thing?”

Middle class people get a lot of enjoyment from marriage and children. As noted in this posting about Jane Austen, in the old days there were people who married for money but they had to stay married to keep the money and the lifestyle. With the availability of no-fault divorce in all 50 states, as well as a legislative and customary preference for sole custody to one parent in many states, plus the doctrine that a rich defendant should pay a less-rich plaintiff’s legal bills, the rich person becomes a target for a mercenary marriage. While a middle class couple is gaining a deeper mutual understanding and settling into the routine of having children in K-12, the rich person is likely to be defending a divorce lawsuit, facing the loss of his or her parental role (except every other weekend), and paying the legal bills on both sides. These academics found that the probability of being sued for divorce rises linearly with what a plaintiff can expect to collect. One of my high-income friends just finished writing $130,000/year tax-free child support checks to the woman to whom he was married for two years back in the 1990s. “I was supporting my ex-wife, her new husband, and the boyfriends she was cheating on the new husband with. My daughter was in public school and maybe $5,000 per year trickled down to her. Though my ex-wife and her lawyer had insinuated that I was molesting my daughter, as soon as she got the cash she wanted to be out having fun with her friends. She used me as a free babysitter for about half the time. Not a day went by when I wasn’t angry about what my ex-wife got away with, though of course it was all perfectly legal under Massachusetts law.” A middle class person is statistically more likely to be married for love and to stay married. A middle class man is statistically more likely to be able to enjoy the company of his children (wealth/high-income women are sometimes the targets of for-profit marriage but it is difficult in most U.S. states for a father to use litigation to take the children away from a mother).

What if we look at houses and cars? It is indisputable that rich people have more and fancier houses and cars. But on the other hand how much value do they get out of these things? A person with 10 houses can use only 1 house at a time. The economist would point out that this person has 10X what the rest of us have and if he or she acquired two more houses, 12X what we have. Similarly with cars. A rich person has a $1 million stable of exotic cars in which to drive around and impress other rich people. A poor person has a 10-year-old Dodge Caravan worth $3000. So a politician would say that the rich person is 333X better off but it would be just as easy to note that both will get through traffic in LA at the same rate. The rich person cannot drive multiple cars simultaneously. The rich person does not own a car that can hold more friends or family than the poor person’s Dodge Caravan.

In the bad old days, therefore, the rich person had a lifestyle that was not recognizable to an average person of the time. There were servants, doctors when necessary, communications with foreign lands, a box at the opera, a horse or a touring car instead of walking, a spouse from a good family, private tutors for the children, etc. As noted above, the rich person today may get less enjoyment from family life than the middle class person. The people who are paying the new wealth transfer taxes, e.g., the Obamacare taxes that start at $200,000 per year in income, will have a similar medical care experience, similar options for entertainment and communications on most days, and will get around in a similar way, albeit in a much newer and more expensive car.

If we look at statistics we can imagine an investment banker driving around the Hamptons in his Rolls-Royce , while his other 5 houses and 7 cars sit idle. We can see him walking in the door to an adoring wife who “loves him for himself” and four well-scrubbed children. We can imagine that he has hired a string quartet to play Mozart in the dining room during the family dinner. After dinner, nobody in the house reads a Kindle, watches Netflix, or surfs the Web because they have better and different “rich family” things to do with their time. The Harvard Medical School graduate drives out from Manhattan to make a house call the next morning when Little Johnny wakes up with a tummy ache.

But what if this guy doesn’t exist? Why are we putting so much energy as a society into figuring out how to tax these non-existent rich people who are supposedly pulling away from the rest of us in terms of quality of life?

The hot idea among American politicians right now is reducing income inequality, i.e., taking money from rich people and giving it to middle class and lower-middle class Americans. A recent book by Thomas Piketty (see this review in the New York Times) adds some academic credibility to the idea that drastic changes in taxation would make almost everyone better off:

“The only way to halt this process, he argues, is to impose a global progressive tax on wealth – global in order to prevent (among other things) the transfer of assets to countries without such levies. A global tax, in this scheme, would restrict the concentration of wealth and limit the income flowing to capital.”

I’m wondering if there isn’t already a good body of data on what happens when middle class people get a big infusion of wealth from rich people. This kind of transfer of wealth happened in the U.S. in the mid-2000s. A huge amount of wealth was transferred from (mostly rich) investors in mortgage-backed securities to (mostly middle class) homeowners who siphoned equity out of their houses every time the value went up. A a lot of middle class Americans ended up not only living rent-free for 3-7 years but also some drew additional spending cash out of these houses. We should be able to find thousands of people whose housing costs went from +$2000/month to -$2000/month. That’s a $48,000/year after-tax supplement to income and presumably more than the average family could expect to receive if the wealthiest Americans were subject to a 90% wealth tax.

Tracking these folks down shouldn’t be very hard as many of the transfer recipients were clustered in California. Wouldn’t that be the natural place to start a research project on whether or not a wealth tax and transfer program would yield long-term benefits? Are the families receiving the $48,000 per year transfer now better off than a control group of families who incurred substantial housing costs over the same period, e.g., those who paid rent throughout the boom years rather than participating in the bonanza?