Soapbox

TL:DR Avoid them.

I seldom print photos any more. When I do, I prefer to make photobooks, as the format is way more convenient than loose prints, takes little space, and looks more polished than a traditional photo album.

Unfortunately, most photobooks are printed on HP Indigo digital presses, which use a technology somewhat similar to a laser printer, but capable of better quality photo reproduction. Indigo presses were originally designed to produce personalized junk-mail, not high-quality photo reproduction, and the quality, while decent, is not at the same level as that of true RA-4 photo paper exposed with a laser or LED light source as done by most digital minilabs (e.g. Fuji Frontier or Noritsu QSS) or higher-end imaging systems like the Océ/Cymbolic Lightjet or Durst Lambda.

There are higher-quality options. AdoramaPix has a good reputation for its albums, which are printed on RA-4 paper and bound in a lay-flat binding without a gutter, a technique that lends itself specially well to panoramic prints. They also have a “Hudson” line of premium albums where the photos are laminated on thick cardstock for a more luxurious feel. In researching this flush-mount process, I discovered a company called ArtisanState. It is based here in San Francisco (manufacturing is in China), their pricing seemed attractive, so I decided to give them a try.

I used a selection of my panoramic prints and ordered a 6×8 album bound in genuine leather. They offer two grades of paper, Fuji Crystal Archive Lustre and Fuji Crystal Archive Pearl Metallic, and I opted for the latter. Metallic paper, first introduced by Kodak under the Endura brand, has mica particles embedded in the RC paper base under the photographic emulsion. The photo looks as if it is painted on metal, which can be spectacular, specially with specular highlights (although I would not recommend it for portraiture such as a wedding album, the fashion industry seems to be quite fond of it). The Fuji lustre has a grainy finish that resists fingerprints, but I don’t find it attractive, and would much prefer a satin finish without an obvious texture like the one Moo uses in its business cards.

When I received my album after 2 weeks, I was impressed by the reproduction quality and the metallic effect, but there was also a very visible texture on the pages, similar to an orange peel. After some research, I found that mounting metallic papers seems to cause orange peel unless done very carefully using a low temperature on the mounting press, and they are the exception to the general rule of thumb that Fuji products are superior to Kodak’s (although true to form, Kodak’s bean counters degraded the quality of the product by cutting corners to shave costs).

At the price they charge ($104 list, but I got it at 40% promotional discount), you can rightfully expect perfection. I wrote to ArtisanState to complain, got the run-around, and reviews online suggest my experience with unresponsive support is far from unusual. I am going to try again with AdoramaPix: they may be more expensive, but the product won’t be made in China and in the end you get what you pay for.

I have been an Amazon Prime customer since it was introduced, almost a decade ago in 2005. They recently raised the price to $99, which is not unreasonable given inflation and the rise of fuel and shipping costs. Unfortunately, the service has also degraded, and I am considering dropping it for that reason.

It really hit me this week. I ordered a bunch of loupes from eBay last weekend, as Schneider stopped manufacturing them 2 years ago and they are now officially listed as discontinued, and old-new stock of other reputable makers like Leica, Cabin/Mamiya or Rodenstock are starting to dwindle. At the same time, I ordered a few items using Amazon Prime (5 orders in all, 3 from Amazon themselves, 2 from third-party vendors but fulfilled by Amazon). All my eBay items have already arrived, including some shipped all the way from Canada that arrived yesterday, but only one of the Amazon items has arrived. Something is seriously wrong when Amazon’s vaunted logistics cannot match individual sellers on the fleabay.

The problem cannot be laid at the door of the shipping companies, the problem is that Amazon is taking longer to ship the items in the first place. It is an open question whether that delay is intentional (as seems to be the case for Amazon free super shipping orders, or when Netflix delays heavy customers’ DVDs to rate-limit them and thus reduce its shipping costs).

One other factor that has decreased the value of the service is the increasing proportion of items that are part of Amazon’s obnoxious add-on item program. Contrary to Amazon’s statements, many of the items downgraded to add-on status are not ones that were unavailable previously, but rather items that were previously eligible for Prime but no longer are. If I have to accumulate $25 in orders, I might as well go back to the free super saver shipping.

To sweeten the sticker shock, Amazon is bundling streaming video and music, and the Kindle lending library. Those services have essentially zero value for me, as the movie selection is as dismal as Netflix’s (mostly C-list or really old movies, hardly anything you might want to watch), streaming does not have good classical music coverage, and I refuse to use Kindle due to their predatory practices.

I find I am buying considerably less from Amazon these days:

• Since they introduced sales tax, they are often not competitive with bricks-and-mortar retailers like Target (which will give you an extra 5% discount for using their REDcard) or B&H.
• I refuse to buy books from Amazon (eBooks from iBooks or straight from the publisher like O’Reilly).
• I buy my classical music from ArkivMusic (for CDs and SACDs, and they have their own $20/year equivalent of Prime) or FLAC sites like B&W Society of Sound, Linn, eClassical and Chandos.
• I get my photo gear, computers and other electronics from B&H whenever possible, and that probably accounts for the bulk of my former Amazon dollars.

What’s left?

• Oddball items hard to source otherwise
• Tools
• Household supplies (although I get most of these from Costco or Soap.com, admittedly an Amazon company now).
• Very occasionally some specialty grocery items and clothes.

I used Amazon’s handy order history export (temperamental, it fails if you have Amazon Honor System transactions in the selected date range) to calculate how much I spend with them (removing Adorama as they are a big outlier), and the trend is clearly unfavorable to Amazon since the high water mark of 2011. Their changes to Prime (pay more for worse service) are certainly not helping.

I just wasted half an hour of my life on the phone with my credit card company’s fraud department, as someone attempted to buy expensive tickets from an airline in Panama. Most likely my card number was compromised by Target, although it could also be due to Adobe.

It is actually surprising such breaches do not occur on a daily basis—the persons paying for the costs of a compromise (the card holder, defrauded merchants and their credit card companies via the cost of operating their fraud departments) are not the same as those paying for the security measures that would prevent the said breach, a textbook example of what economists call an externality. There are reputational costs to a business that has a major security breach, but they are occurring so often consumers are getting numbed to them.

Many states have mandatory breach disclosure laws, following California’s example. It is time for legislatures to take the next step and impose statutory damages for data breaches, e.g. $100 per compromised credit card number, $1000 per compromised social security number, and so on. In Target’s case, 40 million compromised credit cards multiplied by $100 would mean $4 billion in damages. That would make management take notice and stop paying mere lip service to security. It might also jump-start the long overdue migration to EMV chip-and-PIN cards in the United States.

I live 1.2km away from Sutro Tower in San Francisco. At my wife’s request I was trying to calculate the safe radius at which emissions from the transmitters at Sutro Tower are of the same power as a cell phone held a meter away, with back-of-the-envelope calculations using the inverse square law and Wikipedia’s table of radio powers.

I was shocked to find out the total power from the transmitters is about 8 megawatts, not in the kilowatt range I was expecting, and once reached 29MW. For comparison, the power of France’s first-generation PWR nuclear reactors is 900MW, and a typical cellular tower is 100W to 500W. If I use 2W as the reference, this yields a “safe” radius of 2km, which excludes many desirable San Francisco neighborhoods like Twin Peaks, Forest Hill or Noe Valley (click on the map to expand).

I looked up the most recent Environmental Impact Report following the DTV transition, and it mentions a FCC maximum allowed flux level of 0.2mW/cm², and the measured levels in the Midtown Terrace neighborhood immediately adjacent to Sutro Tower reach 4% of this max level.

On further investigation, this is not one of those situations where US standards are significantly more lax than those in Europe, as France or the UK have the same level, derived from an international NGO called the ICNIRP. Interestingly, according to the WHO the maximum allowed emissions in such environmental paragons as Russia and China are one hundredth as high as those in the US or Europe and are just as science-based as those from ICNIRP (remember, for all its faults, the Soviet Union ranked very highly in maths and physics education & research, and in health care).

The ICNIRP/FCC standard is equivalent to a 25W isotropic emitter within a 1 meter radius, or 12x 2G GSM cell phones. Anyone who has experienced the squeal of unshielded and unpowered speakers next to an actively transmitting GSM phone will be skeptical about their claims that this is a safe level. Their methodology is based solely on the thermal effects of non-ionizing radiation, as if this were a mere microwave oven shielding exercise, and assumes that cells are otherwise unaffected by electromagnetism or cumulative exposure. This seems unwarrantedly optimistic.

People worry about cancer risks associated with radio frequency emissions from cell phone towers and cell phones themselves, but the real risk comes from overlooked obsolete technologies like TV and FM radio.

What to do? Getting a site survey from a Professional Engineer using calibrated equipment costs $1,500, which is something you would only do as part of a final inspection while buying a house. Most RF power meters sold on places like Amazon, usually in the $300 range, are pieces of junk with suggested applications like detecting paranormal activity and ghosts. Most likely solid engineering and metrology are optional given their application domain. Professional T&M gear like an Agilent V3500A or a Wandel & Goltermann/Narda EMR-300 cost $2,000 and $6,000 respectively, so the DIY route is also expensive.

Update (2014-03-08):

My father worked on some projects in the Soviet Union in the Seventies. He told me their workplace safety standards were much more stringent than the ones in the West. Workers were not allowed to lift weights above 25kg, for instance.

Update (2014-08-01):

We moved to a house across from Parkside Square (in the lower left corner of the map), well beyond the 2km limit.

Beloit College is famous for its Mindset List, which explains to teachers the radically different world view students have, because their assumptions and experience are different. One example from this year’s list: “GM means food that is Genetically Modified”.

I tried to imagine what the list looks like when my daughter starts University.

Some are no-brainers, as they have already occurred:

• A phone call has always involved both video and sound
• A computing device is always touch-enabled

For some others, I may have to go out on a limb:

• Cars have always been self-driving

Update (2015-08-25):

• House roofs have always been tiled with solar panels