If you think flying commercial airlines is empowering, I suggest that you haven't flown on one lately. For 99% of human history, people did not fly on airplanes. Even today, many human beings live healthy and rewarding lives without once flying on an airplane. Flying is not breathing.

Java > 1000 jobs (dunno how much greater) C# > 1000 jobs (again, dunno how much greater) Cobol = 249 jobs As a job-seeker we want an imbalance in supply and demand where demand greatly exceeds supply. This gives us choices and to some extent leverage when negotiating compensation. I do not know how many COBOL programmers there are, but I would hazard a guess that they are dying faster than they are being created. The supply may very well be shrinking. It's certainly not considered a cool language by current CSci students. So, if you want to find a niche where you can find work from age 45-65, maybe COBOL is not such a bad idea.

Organic, grass-fed beef is available where most of us live. We just choose to buy cheaper beef because we'd rather eat poo and buy a 50" flat-screen TV than eat healthy food and watch American Idol on some old 19" CRT.

to this, but I just can't think of anything creative to say about it.

Look, they got $612 million from RIM and they have to use it somehow. This is just another flush to keep the money swirling in the great porcelain basin of our economy.

I just got back from a couple of days in the woods. Man, am I now glad I've got all those comforts and I no longer take them for granted. It was 95F and 80% relative humidity (at night) and the bugs were particularly vicious. I'm sure my immune system is now way stronger, but I've got Malaria.

...is to file for copyright on millions of images and thousands of hours of video of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico. Followed shortly by hundreds of lawsuits against news agencies for copyright infringement.

...stupidity. Write a new application, don't re-write the old one. Don't promise to completely match the function of the legacy system with no downtime. If that's all that matters to your users/customers then they should stick with the legacy system and spend their money on something other than re-writing a working system in a fancy new programming language. Most of the time, a system grows over a decade or more and becomes difficult for new programmers to understand. Customers want a few simple changes and lazy, immature programmers say: "we can't change it because the old technology is no good, we have to rewrite it with the new technogloy" when they really just are too lazy or stupid to learn to use the old technology to make small changes to the existing system. I've seen this happen more than once. Never with a good result.

...with church-state separation will suffer in a government-funded HELL for eternity.

Where's any actual data that supports your assertion that the USA innovates more because it's more right-leaning?

Food bloggers are simply braggarts. "Look at me and the wonderful food I'm enjoying! Aren't I just precious?" This is the sub-text of almost every food blog. It's even more obnoxious than disturbing the fellow diners.

More like And you HAVE to keep it afterwards...

I live in the land of Qworst and Comcast. I gave up on Qworst DSL a couple of years ago and switched to Comcast. I had no desire for cable tv and bought the service without Cable. A couple of months later, some nice person from Comcast called and tried to sell me a bundle with phone and cable for like $20-$30 / month more than I was paying for internet alone. I asked them how much was Cable + Internet vs. Internet alone and it turned it Cable + Internet was $67 and Internet only was $73. So, I've got cable. It sucks and I don't watch it, but I've got it. BTW, Hulu kicks TV's ass. I can watch a show on Hulu with 5 mins of commercials or I can watch the same show on TV with 22 minutes of commercials. I'm considering netflix on-demand or Amazon.

Did someone hold a gun to your head and force you to fly to Dubai? Nope. You chose to do it. Stop whining or stop flying.

"Sucrose needs to be broken down first, and that can only happen at a limited rate."

This is generally true of everything we eat. Not just refined sugars. A simple rule, if we want to lose weight, is to include more minimally pre-processed foods in our diet...in other words, chew our own food. A hamburger from any of the drive-thru restaurants is basically chewed for us before we put it in our mouths. And this goes for cooking too. Eat raw foods and we burn more energy digesting, digesting slower and netting fewer calories. So a pound of carrots isn't always a pound of carrots. Not when you think about what happens inside your GI-tract.

P.S. I love BBQ. I am not advocating a completely raw food diet. However, maybe 30-50% raw, unprocessed foods combined with moderation in intake and making sure we get a wide variety of mostly plants will certainly improve the health of the normal North American (including me).