There is a bill making it’s way through the MN legislature that says, essentially, that if someone enters your house via force or “stealthily” you have the right to use deadly force.  It is/was my understanding of MN law that if you are able to retreat, even in your home…you must.  I think this is a self defense law that should be on the books in every state.  At the very least, a man should have the right to protect his home against someone entering unwanted.  Now we need MN and ND to validate each other’s concealed weapons permits and we’d be getting somewhere.

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ST. PAUL — A bill that would change the state’s laws on gun permits and the right to use deadly force in cases of self-defense is getting a hearing before a House public safety committee.

The committee plans to hear testimony on the bill Thursday.

Among other things, the bill expands the state’s laws on use of deadly force in self-defense situations. It creates a presumption that anyone who forcefully or stealthily enters a home intends to cause harm, so deadly force is allowed.

Proponents say it allows law-abiding citizens to stand their ground. Those against the bill say it would allow deadly force even if the person is making a peaceable entry and is unarmed.

The bill also would require that Minnesota recognize gun permits issued by other states.

It was clear by 1/2 way through episode 2 that I am not able to sit back and just enjoy this series for what it is.  I am constantly comparing it to the book, and in doing so I can’t understand how a virgin to the story could possibly be enjoying it.  If you have seen the first couple of episodes and you are enjoying it or if your a little bit lost and still remotely interested…go read the book.  The book adds so much more detail and richness to the overall story.  This show is giving you the cliff notes of the cliff notes version at best.  I’m hopeful that I can stop comparing the two and just enjoy the show for what it is.  As I said originally, the quality of acting is good, set design is good…etc.

The rest of this might contain some spoilers, read at your own risk.

I’ve been so terribly disappointed so far about how they have told the story of Dany.  In the book her story read (so far, I’m 1/4 into the 2nd book) as a woman who came from a position of being abused with no power, being tossed into a marriage with customs she thought barbaric and would never understand…to a woman whom claimed equal footing (in the marriage relationship) with her husband and over comes the abuse of her brother by standing up to him at certain points.  She gained that status with her husband via sex and her taking control of their encounters…embracing them and on some level seemed to find a certain level of happiness with her husband.  A huge step in the process of her embracing their culture was her first “dominate” sexual encounter with Drogo.

Did you see the scene when they helped her off the horse in episode 2?  How stiff and sore she was…how she could barley walk?  While the show doesn’t actually say anything about it, the book lets you know that her soreness is not solely caused by riding the horse.  Some might dismiss that as a little bathroom humor that didn’t need to be included, but it did show how she was being treated in the sack by Drogo, and that the experiences were not pleasant for her during or after.  At one point she asks another chic what she should do for him…that was covered in the show.  When she started in on Drogo though she took him outside, it was important to the story that she took him outside.  ”everything important in a man’s life should be done under the open sky”, is something the Dothraki believed, and it was key that she was the one to take him outside.  She understood this and was on the journey to embrace their culture as her own.

Also, there has been virtually no friction show between her and her brother.  Who she was before and how this guy treated her is going to have an affect on who she becomes in life and it’s being pretty much written out.  I assume at some point they will show some abuse, but without the ground work laid before hand it will look like an isolated incident, not the ongoing series of events that it was.  When the brother gets crowned it’s going to not be near as sweet as it was in the book because there is no foundation laid for it.

Where are the wolves?  They are pretty much side characters that you don’t really get attached to.  Why did I care that “lady” got killed?  Why would I care that bran’s wolf (can’t remember his name) came to his aid…what foundation has been laid for me to understand that the wolf would come to his aid…that it would be expected.  These wolves became very important to the children as both protectors and companions.  While we can watch on the screen that the children are upset Lady had to be killed, we don’t feel that attachment between them.  It’s not as powerful to the viewer because there is no connection formed in our eyes.  Also, at the end when the butcher’s boy was killed…I thought there was more discussion about “how” they killed him.  Maybe that’s later in the book, but I seem to remember a discussion that set a particularly brutal scene.

Also, when the prince and Sansa went on their walk and they encountered her sister and the boy…the conflict happens and Sansa says a couple of times “You’re ruining it!”…ruining what exactly?  If you read the book you know exactly what she is talking about and how it is important to her that things go a certain way…but watching you have no feeling of that.  To her character the idea of a lavish life fulfilling all her hopes of being a queen is very important and shapes how she acts.  It also heavily influences some of the decisions she makes later in an effort to reach that ideal life.  The show gives no sense of that though.

Maybe later in the show these “feelings” (for lack of a better word) will establish themselves in other ways.  Right now, all we have to go on is the point the show is, the corresponding point in the book and compare how the characters are established.  It is following standard HBO first run show themes though, throw a bit of sex in the first couple episodes, a bit of action…then follow through with character development.

Why gas prices don’t go down as fast as they go up…

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Why gas prices go up much faster than they come down

By Bob Sullivan

You might have heard over the weekend that skyrocketing gas prices have finally “plateaued.” If gas prices were like gravity, you would anticipate they would start plummeting soon.  Raise your hand if you expect that.

Me neither.  While the words “skyrocketing” and “gas prices” often end up in the same sentence, “plummeting” and “gas prices” rarely occupy even the same paragraph. In a perfect free market, prices should float up and down with equal speed. But in our market, what goes up doesn’t seem to come down, at least not at once.  What gives?

We’ve been told for months that instability in the Middle East spooked the traders who set gas prices, which are almost $1 per gallon more at the pump than a year ago. Prices jumped 30 cents from mid-March to mid-April alone, to an average $3.88 a gallon.  What are odds, do you think, that average prices will return to $3.58 by mid-May?

The quick rise/slow fall phenomenon will feel familiar to most consumers, who often explain it with this conventional wisdom — greedy retailers take advantage of temporarily high prices as long as they can to sock away a little extra profit.

Economists tend to scoff at conventional consumer wisdom, but basic economic theory holds no explanation for the sharp rise/slow fall price pattern. Twelve years ago, economist Sam Peltzman — a free market advocate not known for consumer-friendly research — conducted a vast study of price “shocks,” which could have dispelled these complaints as yet another whiny consumer myth. Instead, it fueled the fire. His review of 77 consumer goods that had been subject to abrupt price increases – including gas — led Peltzman to write a paper called simply “Prices rise faster than they fall.”

“The title summarizes the main result: the person in the street is right and we are wrong,”Peltzman wrote.(PDF) In fact, the results were so vexing he called it “a serious gap in a fundamental area of economic theory.”

Consumers might call it price gouging; economists like Peltzman have settled on a more neutral term: “asymmetric price adjustment.” And while economists have conceded this time that whiny consumers happened to be right, they aren’t yet ready to sign up for their conspiracy theories.

For economists interested in the more general problem of pricing, gas prices are a fantastic real-world laboratory.  Nearly all consumers need gas.  Prices fluctuate often, and there is (theoretically) widespread competition, making gas stations a nearly ideal marketplace to study.  And nowadays, thanks to services like GasBuddy.com, it’s relatively easy to gather price data across wide geographic regions.

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The first research into what some called gas price “stickiness” was published in 1997 by a research team headed by Severin Borenstein, who found that gas prices fall about twice as slowly as they rise after a price shock. For example, if prices rise 50 cents in four weeks, and the cause of the increase is eliminated, it’ll take about eight weeks for the prices to return to pre-shock levels.

Matt Lewis, an economist at Ohio State University, has been studying gas prices for more than a decade. He’s considered some of the usual allegations, like pricing fixing and collusion among stations. He doesn’t entirely discount those, but he thinks he’s found a better explanation for the fast rise/slow fall phenomenon.  Here’s his theory in a nutshell: When prices fall, consumers are so relieved that they stop shopping around for the best price. That eliminates the normal downward pressure on gas prices and allows stations to squeeze out a few more cents of profit while prices slowly fall.

Matt Lewis 

One chart from Lewis’ research, showing the inexact relationship between wholesale and retail gas prices during 2003-2005 in the Los Angeles market. Notice the soft, rounded peaks on retail prices, as opposed to the sharp peaks on wholesale prices, showing that prices don’t go down as quickly as they could. Also notice that stations’ profit margins often shrink as prices rise.

“Consumers shop around more intensely when prices are going up. When they are falling, they don’t shop around as much,” Lewis said.

A key element of his theory is something economists call a “reference price.”  Your local car salesman might know it as “framing.” Once consumers get a number in their head — $10,000 for that car, $3.70 for that gallon of gas — all subsequent choices are impacted by a new price’s relation to that reference price.  When the car dealer says, “OK, $9,500,” you think you have a good deal. When the nearest gas station drops the price to $3.63, the average consumer impulsively stops searching.

“If prices are falling, you pull into a station and think ‘I have a good deal,’” Lewis said.

The last big gas price shock — the speculation price bubble of 2008 — created a perfect opportunity for Lewis to test his theory.  Consumers can use GasBuddy.com to search for the lowest gas price in their area.  As prices soared in the first half of 2008, Lewis charted a similar spike in GasBuddy.com traffic.  When prices fell that fall, GasBuddy.com Web traffic fell, too — showing gas shoppers became less interested in shopping around while gas prices waned.

Lewis’ more recent research has added another nuance to his theory that might make consumer conspiracy theorists feel a bit better. Lewis has, for years, observed several Midwestern retail gas markets that don’t behave like other U.S. markets. Intense competition in some small towns near his Columbus, Ohio, home has led to regular cyclical price wars. Stations undercut each other on a daily basis, engaging in short-term price wars that might drop prices from $2.50 to $2.38, for example. But after a few weeks, one station will bite the bullet and raise prices back to $2.50.  Other stations follow suit.  Then, the cycle begins again.

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In these areas of cyclical price wars, Lewis has found that the fast rise/slow fall phenomenon doesn’t apply.  In other words, stations facing intense competition can’t get away with what consumers might call “gouging” and economists call asymmetric price adjustment.

Lewis isn’t ready to generalize those observations just yet, but conventional wisdom will tell you there’s not enough real competition in gas prices. Twelve years ago, Pelzman predicted imperfect competition would be blamed for the sharp rise/slow  fall price pattern. He dismissed that explanation as “unlikely to be rewarding.”

But Lee Branstetter, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, said that local monopolistic behavior is probably the fundamental cause of “downward price rigidity.” When prices go up, retailers who don’t react immediately lose money.  Failing to raise prices in lockstep with higher wholesale prices leads to an obvious, quantifiable loss. But when wholesale prices go down, many gas station owners play the game every retailer does – “How much extra can I get away with charging before I lose consumers?”  And even with competitor’s prices so obviously posted, station owners face little risk in trying to grab a few extra pennies per gallon from drivers

“Retail gas sellers in the same neighborhood can function as a kind of local oligopoly,” Branstetter said — a small group of businesses that collectively operate with monopoly power. And consumers are often loath to change their buying habits.  “If you are lagging behind a little bit —  all your consumers aren’t going to desert you immediately. … (Consumers) are willing to be abused a little bit in the short run.”

Any study of retail gas prices risks ignoring complex factors in a market that is anything but pure: The spot price is controlled by speculators making bets on the whims of the oil producing nations’ cartel, the threat posed by government-subsidized energy alternatives and the likelihood of another environmental disaster, to name a few.  A mysterious wholesaling and distribution system adds to the cost in difficult-to-measure ways.   Also, gas stations often make very thin margins on retail gas sales – many use gas as a loss leader for chips and soda sales.  As prices go up, their razor-thin margins shrink toward zero, Lewis said – and station owners naturally try to recover some of those lost profits as prices head back down.

Making the issue even murkier, behavioral economists will tell you, is the fact that gas shoppers are anything but rational agents who constantly seek out the best price. Instead, many are pesky realists for whom the nearest station will do.  On the other hand, some consumers overestimate the true value of a cheaper gallon of gas, because they underestimate the cost of driving to get that cheaper gas (what economists call “search costs”).

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In “The Cheapest Gas in Your Area Can Cost More,” Loyola College Professor Joseph Ganem makes the argument succinctly.

“If you drive five miles out-of-the-way to purchase gas in a car that gets 25 miles per gallon, that 10-mile round trip burned 0.4 gallons. If you drove that distance to pay $2.95 per gallon to fill a 12-gallon tank, instead of paying $3.00 at your local pump, you actually spent almost a nickel more per gallon for your tank of gas,” writes Ganem, author of “The Two-Headed Quarter: How to See Through Deceptive Numbers and Save Money.”  He has a nifty “Is it worth it” calculator on his Web site.

It should also be noted that while retail gas prices – in fact, all commodity prices — remain artificially high temporarily, retailers can’t get away with exorbitant overcharges for long. Gas price history bears this out.

“While it takes much longer for price of retail products to adjust downward, eventually you do observe adjustments,” Lee said. “The forces of competition do eventually assert themselves.”

Still, Lewis’ theory has implications far beyond the gas market. If there is a general lack of price sensitivity when prices fall, basic supply and demand just took another body blow, and comparison shopping just isn’t what we thought it was.  The lesson for consumers is clear: As gas prices fall during the next few months, don’t abandon the good price shopping habits you’ve acquired. While consumers tend to be hyper-vigilant while the price of gas is soaring, the real rip-offs will occur when it’s declining  –  when you’re likely to have stopped paying attention.

So far I have been amazed by a couple of aspects of the mac machines…one is pleasant the other is surprising and a little concerning.

First and foremost I have been shocked by the stability of this platform.  Mac equipment has always been a bit spendy compared to IBM counterparts and my experience was always that they are unstable and just all around not worth the money.  I knew things had changed with OS X, but really, how much could it have changed?  I’ve been knocked over really.  It’s like Linux for a desktop that just works.  They are incredibly stable, if an app locks…force kill it and try to fire it up again…etc.  If something doesn’t work you have the unix command line to fix things and work out permissions and so forth.  I’m really digging on it.

The second thing that has surprised me is how easy it is to “recover a password” on these boxes.  Most any machine is susceptible to booting to alternate media, that’s to be expected but if you look online for how to recover a password it takes you about 2 min to find out how to force the machine to go through the setup process again.  This will allow you to setup another account with admin access…it takes about 5min.  Also, you can boot to single user and reset the root password.  It’s pretty simple and has helped me out on several occasions.

I’m not going to go all governmental level of paranoia over this situation…I think 99.9% of the kids that mess with the machines won’t know how to do this, won’t know how to look up how to do it, or just don’t care.  But I do think there is that .1% that knows how, and will want to mess with things a bit just to do it.  When I worked at sykes there was one dude that was in high school and was pretty damn sharp with machines.  He was rockin’ out Linux at a time when I could hardly pronounce it.  He “hacked” in to the school’s linux system(s) a couple of times, just because he could do it.  While I’m not going to try to tighten things down to the level that would keep a highly motivated attacker out, with the ease of installing an OS on a thumb drive and single user mode being so open, a few steps to heighten the security of these machines is not unwarranted.

These few problems can be solved by using a firmware password on each machine.  This will block certain key command for starting in this alternate modes or starting to an alternate disk.  The only person this step should affect would be me when I’m performing diagnostic actions on these machines, but with the software package I’m looking at (deep freeze) hopefully any of those actions will be significantly reduced.

It’s probably because I came from a company that was so edgy about “security” that my mind naturally veers off in that direction.  While I don’t want to go to the extreme that we had to there…some steps are necessary to keep users from getting in to things that will cause me more headache.