• Gun thoughts

    October 3, 2015 / No Comments

    Welcome to America, where our guns are more important than your kids. 

    Don’t get me wrong, I love my country, but like anything it needs upkeep. The two things I am most jealous of other countries is their healthcare and lack of gun violence. At least on the healthcare front we are pretending to improve. Guns? We couldn’t care less if your school gets shot up. That’s just the “price of freedom” in this country. Overall violent crimes have been dropping since the 70s and our country has never been safer, but we can do better. 

    It’s a shame that the gun manufactures and NRA aren’t behind regulations to make their products and hobbies safer. It seems like they are so afraid of us totally banning guns that they don’t even want to look at reasonable gun laws. Very few people want guns banned. We just want laws to limit the number of mass shootings. No matter what we do, we will be number one it shooting deaths for many years to come. Gun laws are only part of the solution, but they are probably the easy part. Our gun culture and mental health treatments are another ball of wax. 

    Car accident are one of the leading causes of death and car companies are doing everything they can to make driving safer. We should make gun ownership similar to car ownership. You should have to go through proper training and background checks to get licensed to own a gun. Just like a drivers license, you should have to go through the background checks every four years. A 48 hour or more waiting period to buy any gun is a no brainer. Most importantly though is proper storage of the guns. Gun safes and biometric trigger locks should almost be mandatory. 

    Those are just a few of my thoughts. I’m sure there’s more that could be done. We have lots of data from all the past shootings to base the new laws on. If I was a gun owner, none of these laws would bother me. Like car crashes, no law is going to prevent all mass shootings, but if just one school is saved from a tragedy, then it’s totally worth it. We need to start somewhere. 

    Sadly nothing is going to happen. The gun lobby is strong. Gun sales go up after mass shootings. Mass shooting are a good thing for the gun manufactures. So they are going to make sure our congress critters do nothing to threaten their bottom line. Money is also more important than your kids. 

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  • Back on Spotify

    September 22, 2015 / No Comments

    So when Spotify first came to the US I signed up right away. While I liked it, I didn’t love it enough to keep paying for it. It’s been a while now, so this month I thought I would give it another shot, and so far I love many of the improvements they have made over the years. Spotify’s improvements along with Apple making iTunes and the Music app worse with each update, there is a good chance that I will be paying for Spotify for quite some time.

    Spotify isn’t going to be stoping me from buying music though. I have a massive music collection, and I’m going to keep on buying it to keep it growing. I don’t want any company controlling what I can listen to. That been said, I love Spotify on my phone. I love how easy they make it to download the songs to your device. I’m pretty much using it to replace my Music app. Any album that I want to listen to I just download it to my phone. One of my favorite features though are the user created playlists. I’ve downloaded a few 800ish song playlists that other people have created. They pretty much act as a radio station except for the fact that they have variety and I can skip a song if I don’t like it. It pretty much blows Sirius out of the water. So while Spotify is a steaming service, most of the time I’m just playing songs off my devices because of Verizon data caps, but hey it works.

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