Month: May 2011

Defense of Dwelling and Person Act Will Be Heard Friday

Talk about fast results. “Representative” Limmer claimed that the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee didn’t have enough time to heard the S.F. 1357, the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act, but miraculously was able to conjure up some time after Minnesota gun rights activists flooded his office with call. Good work everybody.

The hearing will be on Friday May 5th starting at noon. If you can make it to the hearing do so. We want a strong showing in order to prevent any rumors being spread that there isn’t enough support for this bill. If we get the Committee’s approval on this it goes for an actual vote.

How’s That Pricing Fixing Working For You

Cuba being a communist nation has a fixed economic system. Part of a fixed economic system involved fixing prices at certain levels which are usually absurdly skewed from what the free-market value is. What happens when the price of a good is fixed so low that money is lost on that item? Simple, the price must either be raised of the quality must be lowered. Cuba has decided to go with the latter and have reinstated the mixing of peas in coffee:

Cuba is resuming mixing coffee with roasted peas in a bid to cope with rising international coffee prices, the authorities say.

The blend for domestic consumption will help cut costs, given that coffee prices had risen some 69% over the last year, the announcement said.

Coffee mixed with peas isn’t exactly something that tastes all that great:

The measures mean that the authorities will be able to continue distributing coffee with the subsidised price fixed at at 4 pesos (17 US cents) for a 115g (4oz) bag, the statement said.
Workers handles sacks of coffee imported from Brazil Imports of coffee help to meet local demand

Cubans, who tend to drink small cups of highly sweetened coffee, are used to pea-blended coffee.

“It’s much, much more bitter than pure coffee, which is smoother,” Havana resident Froilan Valido told AP news agency.

This is the inevitable end to a planned economy. It’s impossible to actually plan an economy due to the extremely large number of factors that determine the value of a consumer good. Since coffee harvests have been poor in Cuba the commodity is rarer which raises the price. Harvest amounts aren’t fixed and can be affected by everything from weather to disease. This combined with countless other factors means any economic plan is likely to fail as such events can’t be predicted with any amount of regularity.

Of course this action will lead to higher pea consumption which will make the product rarer and thus increase it’s market value. Thus this action won’t bring the price of coffee down for any meaningful amount of time because the price of peas will have to go up with increased demand. This is akin to corn subsidies in the United States which involves much of produced corn being consumed in producing ethanol fuel which drives the price of corn up. Thus a food product becomes more expensive.

Gun Owners Prove Safe Once Again

So 71,139 National Rifle Association (NRA) members descended upon Pittsburgh and none of those scary gun lovers, many of whom were carrying, killed anybody. This isn’t surprising to people who pay attention as gun owners are generally very peaceful people but according to the anti-gunners allowing the carrying of firearms can only lead to blood in the streets as all arguments will turn into shooting wars.

So when exactly is this supposed to happen because it wasn’t when tens of thousands of gun owners were all crammed into the same area at the same time.

A Difference in Numbers

I mentioned that the National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting had 71,139 people attending and was curious how many people attended anti-gunner rallies. It seems Snowflakes in Hell was good enough to give us the skinny on an anti-gun protest that was somewhat near the NRA Annual Meeting.

According to Bitter there were somewhere between 200 and 250 protesters. I’m a fan of using worst case scenarios so we’ll assume 250 protesters were there. Put into perspective if the protesters had attended the NRA Annual Meeting they would have composed only 0.35% of the people there. Put another way we had 284.556 times as many people attending our event as they had attending their event. We decimated them as far as numbers go which isn’t surprising.

More Products From the Bad Ideas Department

There are bad ideas, really bad ideas, and epically bad ideas. Having an umbrella that looks like a firearm is hovering somewhere between the latter two. It seems like nothing but trouble could be had from having an umbrella in the shape of a firearm but as Every Day, No Days Off points out one company decided this bad idea needed to be implemented.

I often wonder how some products get past the lawyer department.

Senator Limmer Trying To Bar Hearing the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act

What’s the easiest way to kill a bill? By tabling it. Word just dropped from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) that “representative” Limmer is baring the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act from being heard by the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee.

S.F. 1357,The Defense of Dwelling and Person Act, is the companion bill to the previously mentioned H.F. 1467.

This is nothing more than an underhanded way to prevent the much needed self-defense act from moving forward. GOCRA is asking that you call “representative” Limmer at 1 (651) 296-2159 and “representative” Koch at 1 (651) 296-5981 as soon as possible and tell them this bill needs to be near this week.

My Take on TenFourFox

Not too long ago I mentioned TenFourFox, a port of FireFox 4 to the PowerPC. Last night I actually had time to load and try it out on my old PowerBook G4 and I must say I’m rather impressed.

Understand that the PowerPC G4 processor is pretty damned slow by today’s standard. Playing a Flash video while downloading e-mail generally turns the video into a slide show and makes any interaction with other processes a slow ordeal. Firefox 3 always ran a bit shitty on that system thus I wasn’t impressed. TenFourFox on the other hand ran pretty well for a modern piece of software ported to an ancient system. All my Firefox add-ons (NoScript, Certificate Patrol, LastPass, and Xmarks) work just find in TenFourFox and every webpage I visited appeared to render correctly. The browser’s performance wasn’t noticeably different than Safari’s which was a big plus. Overall I’m very impressed with what the team working on TenFourFox has managed to accomplish.

Yet Another New and Obscure Cartridge

I’ve seen a few people mention the new 7.62x40mm WT cartridge but never read any real detail about it. Thankfully a guest blogger over at The Firearm Blog has the scoop. Basically the 7.62x40mm is a .223 casing necked up to accept a .30 bullet. It’s also yet another caliber I’ll toss onto the list of cartridges that seem like a good idea but are obscure and thus will be prohibitively expensive and difficult to come across.

I like having my guns in fairly common calibers even though I reload all my own ammunition. For instance my main handguns are in .45 ACP while my main rifles are in 7.26x51mm (can you tell I have a preference towards larger calibers). Both are common as they were military issue leading them to be easy to find. Likewise I can go to the range and find discarded casing for either which allows for some cheaper reloading.

I’ll give credit to Wilson Combat for coming up with a cartridge based on the .223 which is as common as water now. My bet is that this new cartridge will join the 6.8 and 6.5 on the list of cool but uncommon rounds and I still want to get but probably never will. Still the idea of firing a .30 using a standard AR lower is neat.

If You Have a Credit Card Tied to Sony’s PlayStation Network Cancel It

I haven’t commented on the serious security breech Sony is dealing with involving their PlayStation Network but I thought I’d toss out a warning. It appears as though whoever broke into Sony’s network was able to walk off with account information for 24.6 million of Sony’s customers. Sony has listed that following information is likely compromised:

name
address
e-mail address
birthdate
gender
phone number
login name
hashed password.

In addition to the information above, the 10,700 direct debit records from accounts in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain, include:

bank account number
customer name
account name
customer address.

That amount of personal information is perfect for malicious people wanting to perform targeted scams so watch yourself. Likewise if you have a debit or credit card tied to your PlayStation Network account call the bank that issued you the card and report it as stolen because it likely was.