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At a dinner party on Friday evening, the Canadian hosts asked, in light of 2012’s mass shootings, what conceivable purpose could be served by allowing Americans to own such large personal arsenals. Being a parent and a non-gun-owner it was tough for me to come up with a rational argument other than a weak “Well, it is in the Constitution”. Contemplating the question later, however, I wondered if we would still be the same nation without so many passionate gun owners. From a strictly rational point of view it is tough to justify a lot of things that Americans do. We spend a lot of time and energy watching professional football, which is injurious to the players and even more so to the spectators (who should be out exercising themselves or learning Mandarin!).

It is tempting to think that we could pick the best laws from various countries around the world and come up with some sort of optimized society, but perhaps it simply isn’t practical. The Japanese have a national character of craftsmanship. The French have a national character of enjoying rich food and wine. Maybe one aspect of our national character is that a lot of us need to be gun nuts.

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I have now spent nearly four years in possession of two of the world’s best video cameras: the Canon 5D Mark II and the Mark III. These have a 24x36mm sensor and I have a whole closet full of high performance lenses to stick front of them. Yet I have never become comfortable using either body as a video camera. The first problem is that the $3500 camera won’t autofocus while filming. You’re supposed to “follow focus” like a Hollywood cinematographer, but my 49-year-old eyes aren’t so good at perceiving sharp focus on the rear LCD. The second problem is that high quality video starts with high quality audio and I don’t think the on-camera microphone in the 5D Mark III is especially good. Even if it were, it is in the wrong place for a lot of subjects. I would want a Bluetooth microphone that I could clip onto a subject’s lapel and/or shotgun mic mounted farther away from the noise of the autofocus motor.

These photos show the 5D Mark III mounted inside an IDC System Zero. It seems to solve a lot of the problems described above. With the eyepiece over the rear LCD it becomes possible to evaluate focus more easily. With the big knurled knob it becomes easier to follow focus smoothly. With the big accessory cage it would be theoretically possible to plug in a shotgun microphone and run a cable down to the camera. Does it work? Maybe for a professional movie maker it would, especially if mounted on a tripod. I found the rig too difficult to hand-hold and also too cumbersome to mount and unmount. It would be perfect for a full-day video capture project but it doesn’t work for a parent interested in using one device for both still and moving images of a child.

My most-used video camera right now is the Sony NEX-6. The sensor is smaller than on the big Canon, though the dynamic range is better according to DxOMark. The high quality lenses that I ordered are out of stock so I’m using a $150 kit lens on this camera instead of the $2000 Canon L zoom that I might be using on the 5D Mark III. But the camera will autofocus while capturing video, the microphone seems pretty good, and flip-up LCD screen makes for an awesome 49-year-old parent camera (I would rather hold the camera at waist/child level and look down than stoop to waist/child level.)

Is anyone out there having good luck using a digital SLR such as the 5D Mark II/III as a video camera? If so, what accessories do you find essential? (And I guess it would be interesting to hear from folks who are having good luck with just the raw camera; I know that it can be done.)

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The folks at DxOMark have a new measurement, Perceptual Megapixel. This purports to boil down the information from modulation transfer function (MTF) graphs into a number. It proves that a camera with an enormous number of pixels isn’t all that useful unless you have an amazingly high quality lens and, probably, have locked the camera/lens down to a tripod. Folks who have a 20 megapixel camera and a $200 kit lens might be better off simply capturing at 6-10 megapixels. See, for example, a test of a Nikon superzoom lens in which 6 perceptual megapixels was all that could be extracted (third party superzooms came in at 4 or 5 megapixels). This is the resolution that Kodak selected for its consumer PhotoCD system back in the early 1990s.

Summary: the electrical engineers have pushed sensor resolution far beyond the capability of any optics that ordinary consumers are willing to purchase and carry.

[Separately, one of the first tests done using this metric shows that the $900 Sigma 35/1.4 lens dramatically outperforms both Canon’s $1300 equivalent and an $1800+ Zeiss manual focus lens. (The failure of prestige names to dominate objective tests is not new. I remember years ago a European photo magazine did optical bench tests of 50mm lenses and concluded that the $100 to $200 Canon and Nikon 50/1.8 lenses outperformed Zeiss and Leica lenses costing up to $2000. If memory serves, the magazine selected the Nikon 50/1.8 as the best lens overall, considering the balance of sharpness and distortion.)]

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Saturday’s New York Times carried an article “How to Attack the Gender Wage Gap? Speak Up”, pointing out that women earn only a fraction of what men are paid. The Times cites some numbers: “77 cents for white women; 69 cents for black women. The final dollar — so small that it can fit in a coin purse, represents 57 cents, for Latina women.”

While for the non-profit organization described in the article this is seen as a problem, a profit-minded business owner might see this as an opportunity. Why not find an industry with mostly male employees, offer jobs at 57 percent of the current wages in that industry, attract an all-Latina workforce, and crush the competition with labor costs that are a fraction of those in the rest of the industry?

It seems odd to me that this business strategy is never described by folks who decry wage disparities among groups. At a party the other night I met a young man who is in law school and hopes to, upon graduation, do “public interest” work. He cited the statistic that women get paid only 74 percent of what men earn for exactly the same work. He said that he had gone to “socialist summer camp” as a child and still believed in most of the tenets that he had learned, e.g., that corporations are soulless profit-seeking machines who would destroy society in pursuit of the last dollar. He cited Walmart as an example of the worst possible enterprise. I asked “Couldn’t Target then destroy Walmart simply by hiring an all-female workforce and undercutting Walmart on costs? Consumers don’t usually check to see who works at a big box store before buying paper towels on sale.” His explanation was that otherwise heartless capitalists are generous when it comes to men. In order to perpetuate the patriarchy they are happy to pay a 30-percent premium in order to have a man in a job that a woman would do equally well at a lower wage. This seems potentially plausible for managers in government who can steal from taxpayers in order to indulge whatever favoritism they might wish to use in employment. It also seems potentially plausible for managers and board members at public companies who can steal from shareholders and pay people more than a market wage (see Bob Nardelli at Home Depot and Michael Eisner at Disney, for starters!). But it is tougher to explain why an individually-owned or family-owned business would do this. Would you steal from your children in order to pay a man $100,000 per year to do a job that a Latina would do for $57,000 per year?

[Separately, does this wage gap exist in other countries? Foxconn is frequently pilloried as among the world’s most evil enterprises, enslaving workers in order to fatten Apple’s profit margins by making iPads at the lowest possible cost. Yet http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57406751-37/apples-supply-chain-a-portrait-of-a-foxconn-factory-worker/ says that about 65 percent of Foxconn’s factory slaves are men. If women would do the work for less, why hasn’t Foxconn figured that out?]

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I attended a talk today at MIT by Amy Finkelstein, an economics professor who led a $20 million research study of a group of poor people in Oregon who were randomly assigned either to receive Medicaid or not (paper). Oregon had enough money to do for some of its poor able-bodied adults what ObamaCare will do for all poor able-bodied Americans: give them Medicaid (unlimited river of money as long as it is handed over to the world’s most expensive health care industry; I pointed out in my health care reform article that Americans could have a free house, free cars, free children, and free college education for those children if they cut their health care spending to what Mexicans spend). Oregon did not have enough money for everyone and therefore decided that the fairest way to allocate coverage was to let people apply and then give out coverage by lottery. It was an almost perfect random experiment, except that the program was limited to those who bothered to fill out the paperwork to apply (possibly sicker than average).

The study included actual checkups for thousands of participants, hence the enormous cost.

The conclusion was that Medicaid increased hospital use by about 30 percent, outpatient medical care by about 35 percent, and total spending by 25 percent. Finkelstein noted that advocates for expanding health insurance often predict that use of hospital emergency rooms will decrease when everyone is insured. That turned out not to be true in Oregon. The insured and uninsured used emergency departments at hospitals at roughly the same rate.

An unexpected result was the recipients of the Medicaid card reported themselves to be about 30 percent happier than before, a result equivalent to having doubled their income. As they did not measure all that much healthier this may be partially explained by a feeling of security that they won’t have to deal with the nightmare of being an uninsured individual in an American health care industry that exists to serve insurance companies, not individuals.

Finkelstein closed by noting that this result should not be too surprising. The introduction of Medicare in the 1960s resulted in an enormous increase in hospital usage and then a huge boom in hospital construction.

So if Americans as a whole behave the same as the survey group in Oregon, health care spending on approximately 20 million Americans should go up by 25 percent (Medicaid already consumes about half a trillion dollars every year, about the same as the GDP of Argentina, Belgium, or Norway). We may get some value for that money, though, as these people will be walking around with big grins.

[Note that the study proves Malcolm Gladwell more or less dead wrong. In 2005 he wrote a New Yorker article about how health care was different than anything else people buy. Providing insurance would not increase demand. The “moral hazard” that applied to every other kind of insurance did not exist for health insurance. Related: see my analysis of Gladwell’s Outliers.]

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I’m getting ready for a trip to Israel and Jordan so it is time to buy a memory card. My Canon digital camera takes either CF cards or SD cards. It seems to write and read much faster with the CF cards so that would be the natural choice except that 128 GB CF cards at Amazon are $300-700 (name brands; I don’t want to trust my images to “Komputer Bay”) while 128 GB SD cards at Amazon are $96-$136. What’s different about the innards? I don’t think it is the package that makes a CF card expensive because an 8 GB CF card sells for as little as $15.

[Separately we get to the question of why a 256 GB SSD costs $191 at Amazon but Dell charges $300 to upgrade a to-be-built laptop from a 128 GB drive to a 256 GB SSD. The mechanical hard disk market seems almost perfectly rational by contrast.]

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Our most distinguished economists and government experts tell us that the U.S. has an unemployment crisis. There are millions of high quality workers out there who cannot find jobs. Paul Krugman here speculates that employers have colluded to pay workers less. Yet in situations where an average consumer becomes an employer, the labor market looks very different than how it is described by our brightest minds.

Suppose that you want to hire a house cleaner. This is a job that requires only very basic skills and training. English fluency is not required and the job may be competently performed by a recent immigrant. You might think that you could hire someone for the $9.45/hour figure cited in this article on the 2012 labor market (average wage for a young high school graduate). But in fact you will be paying closer to $25 per hour. Similarly, being able to take care of a child is a common skill and does not require English fluency yet good luck finding a nanny for less than $17-25 per hour.

Are the experts wrong or is the market experience wrong? How is it that people who know that they can’t find a reliable house cleaner or nanny for less than $17-25 per hour can sit down and read, without skepticism, complicated theories about a “skills gap” or a conspiracy theory or that great quality workers are sitting idle?

[At the other end of the labor market, this Bloomberg.com article chronicles California’s public employees, including “Mohammad Safi, graduate of a medical school in Afghanistan, collected $822,302 last year [working as a prison psychiatrist], up from $90,682 when he started in 2006, the data show.”]

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The government reports that the U.S. economy added 146,000 jobs in November. The New York Times headline says that “Job Growth is Steady” and then cheerfully notes, in the first paragraph, that this figure was “well above the level economists had been expecting”. The Wall Street Journal describes the same facts with a summary paragraph beginning “Employers added jobs at a slow pace in November.”

[Neither paper enables its readers to compare the numbers easily to the number of jobs one would expect to be created in response to a larger population (a country with 311.5 million people should have more jobs than a country with 3 million people!). Perhaps this is because it is tough to find agreement on a number. http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/how-many-jobs-are-needed-keep-population-growth covers the diversity of numbers put forward. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-many-jobs-do-we-need-teaching-arithmetic-to-economists makes a fairly compelling case that the correct number is 90,000 jobs per month. Back in 2006 people were debating between 110,000 per month and 150,000 per month (see http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/11/what_level_of_j.html ). http://www.zerohedge.com/article/monthly-non-farm-payrolls-have-grow-121000-month-2011-just-keep-population-growth cites Congressional Budget Office figures of 121,000 jobs per month from 2011 declining to 110,000 in 2012. If we accept that there are about 15 million Americans out of work (the BLS says 12 million but we know that they like to kick people out of the labor force in order to make the numbers seem less alarming), we can then figure out how long it would take for those folks to get jobs. The most optimistic scenario is 146,000 minus 90,000 = 56,000 jobs per month that will not be snapped up due to population growth. That gets rid of unemployment after 268 months (22 years). If we use the CBO numbers, it will take 35 years. If we take the old Wall Street number of 150,000 then there is no hope for reducing real unemployment. (We should probably adjust the 15 million figure downward a bit to account for the fact that some unemployment is inevitable due to job changes, moves, etc. Vibrant economies such as Singapore that don’t offer payments to the unemployed have rates of 2-3 percent. Therefore we have only about 11 million people who are unemployed for longer than normal and the 22- and 35-year figures should be reduced by about 25 percent.)]

[January 4, 2013: A jobs report came out today showing that 155,000 jobs were added in December, actually more than the number the New York Times, above, called “steady”. This time the headline is “U.S. Continues to Add Jobs at Slow Pace”.]

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An English friend alerted me to the fact that the British have been changing their income tax rates every year or two recently, thus providing some interesting data on the effects of such changes. The top income tax rate started at 40 percent (sounds high, but I am not sure that they have the same state and local income tax that we have in the U.S.; perhaps this 40 percent rate was pretty similar to what someone in California might pay, for example). In 2010 the top rate was increased from 40 to 50 percent and the number of people reporting incomes over 1 million pounds fell from 16,000 to 6,000. Now the rate will be set at 45 percent and the number of high income taxpayers is going up to 10,000. (Source: Daily Mail)

I was kind of surprised at the sensitivity of collections (which went down with the rise in rates) to these changes. In America we have been taught that people in Europe and the U.K. love to pay taxes to support a welfare state.

 

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Having founded photo.net back in 1993, it has long surprised me that there is no “photo.net for camera phones”. DxO Mark has begun to put up some objective tests that are interesting, though they don’t capture the practicalities of using camera phones. The tests show that the Nokia PureView camera, which averages 41 megapixels of crummy noisy data, crushes the competition in low light (i.e., the indoor conditions where most people want to take pictures). The Samsung Galaxy S III is a distant second in the noise department. Yet worse (though not by much) in low light are the latest Apple products, iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, and iPad 3, all of which offer similar performance.

(Recent tests on the same site show that Canon continues to lag in sensors. The Powershot G15 is absolutely crushed by the Sony RX100, admittedly $200 more expensive. Canon either needs to improve its technology or buy DxO and shut down their web site!)

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