For a while I’ve been reading, watching, and hearing about America’s broken health care system. It’s privatized, which is showing that the system simply doesn’t work. Why is priority being given to certain citizens, just because of their social status? It really makes no sense. Why should a CEO earning millions of dollars a year be allowed to receive expensive surgery, when a person working at Wal-mart for minimum wage cannot? I don’t have an answer, although the Republicans will try to tell you something along the lines of…

“Well, the CEO obviously worked harder to get where he is now, so he should be given priority.”

Let me tell you why this is absolute crap. First off, how do you know one person worked harder? Oh right, stereotypes. You’re assuming that the CEO is working 12 hours a day, and the Wal-mart employee obviously slacked off in school.

Most of the time this simply isn’t true. What if the Wal-mart employee got straight A’s, but his parents couldn’t afford to send him to collage, so he had to get a joe job? Hmm. Not so fair now, is it?

I’m not saying that everything should be perfectly equal. No, not at all. The wealthier can obviously afford more amenities, such as first class flights, expensive cars, etc. Healthcare should simply not be considered a privilege, it should be considered a right.

The government should level the playing field, so people can concentrate on providing for their family, not “how will I pay if I get injured”.

Another thing that blows me away is how scared most Americans are of the word “Socialized”. Get over it already. You’re not going to turn into The Soviet Union or something.

The root of the matter is, America already has many socialized programs. The Postal Service, Fire departments, schools, the list goes on. “I’m sorry m’am, we can’t put out your housefire because you don’t have a FMO (Fire Maintenance Organization). We’re going to have to let it burn, or you need to pay us $10,000″.

Sort of sounds like extortion, eh? What makes health care any different? What about schools? Are you going to stop sending poor students to school because they can’t afford it, like what they do in Africa? Didn’t think so. What about the USPS? Can’t recieve letters if you can’t pay the monthly fee to receive them?

Please get over your fear of the word Socialized. You’ll live a much better life then you do now.

Figure we’ve had enough depressing cloud pictures for now. So here’s something happy. Yay! What, not happy enough you say? Oh well.

And before you ask, no, I wasn’t in a sailing boat. I don’t trust the wind. We’ve had too many confrontations in the past.

Over at Tom’s Hardware, they’ve posted a very interesting article, showing that a Mac Pro is indeed at a competitive price with an equivalent PC.

Keep in mind, this wasn’t priced out at the “very expensive computer parts store”, it was done at newegg, which is pretty much the cheapest place around for parts (At the consumer level.)

What is the cost difference you say? $200? Naa, think lower. $100? Still to high? Yep. Give up? Thought so. The actual retail price is… a whopping difference of $5.67! If you can’t afford that, well, maybe you shouldn’t be buying a $2800 machine.

Here’s the whole article, in it’s entirety.

Shot of the Customs House clock tower, from near the aquarium. Rain followed quickly after.

Here’s a shot that I grabbed while on a duck boat tour of Boston, obviously of Charles St.

I recently was hired to design an icon for a new Mac app that’s soon to be released. In this post I’m going to outline the steps involved in creating that icon, from concept to completion.

So, yeah. For about the past month we’ve been getting rain almost every single day in Ottawa. It’s unbelievable. Usually the summer is really dry, but still humid somehow. But this summer, it’s been like living in a rainforest. Every day, like clockwork it starts raining at about 4pm, and then again later at night. Hopefully we won’t have to build an arc.

This is a shot of the Trinity Church and the John Hancock Tower, in (you guessed it!) Boston. This picture didn’t really catch my eye as a normal shot, so it got HDR’ed.

Yeah. I’m late, I know. Took this on Canada Day (July 1st for all you foreigners), when they closed down all the streets within 10 (or so) blocks of the parliament buildings. Thought it looked sort of cool.