Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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?

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

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

(from the supermarket in Dillon, Colorado)

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?

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?

“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, …”

“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?

“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.”)

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?