I like grape juice. No, that’s not quite right. I love grape juice. When it’s ice-cold it just goes down perfect. It’s got the right blend of tart and sweet. Man, it’s good stuff!

Last night my wife and I were at the grocery and I headed down the juice isle. There I noticed for the first time (yes, I can be very unobservant) diet grape juice.

“Whoa…” I thought to myself, “How can they make grape juice diet?”

I suspected an infiltration of Splenda or Equal or some other non-sugar type evil. I grabbed the package and flipped it over, scanning the label for signs of Aspartame. I didn’t see any.

I flipped it back over and looked at the front of it. It thought, “Huh, maybe I should get this. Juice has a lot of calories per ounce.”

It was about this time that a little voice in my head said, “Hey dummy, they can’t take calories out without putting something else in. Look again!”

So I checked the label a second time. This time I noticed the first ingredient in the list; “filtered water.” Turning the bottle around again I spied - in tiny print - the words “40% juice”.

This “diet” grape juice was just regular grape juice that had been cut with water! And it was about $0.10 more expensive to boot!

I cried out, “Nuts to you Mr. “Diet” Grape juice!” and bought the regular, 100%-juice, juice.

When I got home I poured about half a glass and topped it off with water. It tasted okay - a little diluted - but passable. I have to wonder how many people buy it thinking that it’s a miracle of our modern world they can get “diet” juice?

I still can’t decide if this is an example of brilliant marketing or deceptive packaging.

Happy birthday to…me! Cazz.org is two years old today!

I found an excellent quote today and when I read it my first thought was, “That’s exactly true!” I know several people who fall into the “loser” category exactly because of this behaviour.

“Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.” –ARMONK, NY - Aug. 8

I’m not the first person to write about the ridiculously high cost of health care, and I won’t be the last I’m sure. But I want to share a story of a recent experience I had with my insurance provider and my healthcare provider.

A week ago I was down and out with what I thought was a sinus cold. After 4 days of feeling ill and running a low grade fever I called my doctor to make an appointment. Her staff was sympathetic, but the doctor was leaving for a two week vacation the next day and simply could not work me in for an appointment.

So I did what I usually do in such situations, I headed to a nearby immediate care, “doc-in-a-box” center to get checked out. After a short wait I was seen by a doctor who determined I likely had a sinus infection and I definitely had an ear infection. He wrote a script for Amoxicillin and sent me on my way. Total time with the doctor? About 8 minutes.

When I went to the front desk to pay I was told the co-pay was $35, not my insurance plan’s $20. I figured there was a premium for immediate care centers and didn’t quibble, I just paid the lady.

Let’s jump ahead a week; last night I received a “statement of benefits” from my insurance company. This is normal anytime I have a claim, and it usually tells me what I paid, what was billed to me, and what the insurance provider paid. I think the biggest reason they send them out is to make you think you should be grateful by how much they’re paying on your behalf.

This statement of benefit said quite the opposite, it said I owed the doctor $50! It didn’t say why, only that they paid their part - $2.96 - and I was responsible for the remainder of the tab. I of course jumped online to their “e-benefits” web site to find out what coverage they provide for immediate care centers. I couldn’t find any specific exclusion for immediate care centers. The only language they have about fees is for a doctor visit co-pay and an ER visit co-pay.

What really burns my beans is not the money but the principal. My annual out-of-picket costs just for health insurance is over $5000. My employee is also picking up some part of the tab. If you look at the frequency I go to the doctor or otherwise use my insurance (that is, not a lot) I’m really taking it in the shorts. But the “gotcha” is that if you don’t have insurance and something Really Bad ^tm happens to you; you’re really in a tough spot. Did you know that almost 50% of personal bankruptcy in the United States is caused by medical bills?

In 2004 the US gross domestic product (GDP) was $11.3 trillion dollars. Healthcare spending was 15% of GDP or $1.7 trillion dollars.

Wrap you mind about that for a second, $1.7 trillion dollars. That’s $5,667 for every man, woman and child in the United States, every single one!

The amount of money the US spends on healthcare is 3% of the gross domestic product of the entire world. Yes, that’s right, 3% of every “dollar” of every country in the entire world is spend by the United States on healthcare.

How is it that a country can spend this much money and have a healthcare system that is almost universally reviled as being broken and untenable?

Why is our biggest national concern not healthcare reform? I’m not advocating cradle-to-grave government provided healthcare, but there has to be some sweeping reform to the overall system of healthcare, insurance and tort-reform.

Malpractice insurance costs and the threat of lawsuits are two of the biggest reasons healthcare costs as much as it does. Don’t think that malpractice costs are a huge problem? Consider this; an OB-GYN with 21 lawsuit-free years of practice saw the costs of his malpractice insurance rise from $23,000 in 2002 to $84,000 in 2004.

If you had to absorb a price increase of $61,000 how would you make money? You wouldn’t, you would pass the cost along to your customers. The result? Healthcare and medical insurance costs that are spiraling out of control.

The fact that the United States - one of the only “superpower” countries left on the Earth- can’t figure out how to tame our healthcare crises is simply shameful.

I was reading an online discussion about a rumored video recorder from Apple when I came across a very interesting reply to a comment:

“Something friends with PVRs have told me is they ended up watching a lot less TV once they started using one .”

“That is *definitely* not the case in my house. Truth be told, we probably watch about the same amount of TV we always did, if not more, and we watch for the same reason we always did - it’s ‘down time’. We’re relaxing in the living room after dinner and want a couple of hours of mindless entrainment before bedtime.”

As I read this I was really struck by the sentence, “it’s ‘down time’. We’re relaxing in the living room after dinner and want a couple of hours of mindless entrainment before bedtime.”

After having a digital video recorder for the better part of 6 months now I would have to say I agree; my wife and I don’t watch less TV, we just spend more time watching TV we normally wouldn’t be able to see due to our schedules.

But what really struck me is the “mindless entertainment” part of the comment. The author is correct, 90% of the TV we watch is totally mindless. It’s so seldom that we turn off the TV, look at each other and say, “Gee, we really learned something new!”

It’s just what we do after dinner. And by “we” I mean the collective “we”. The behavior of sitting on the couch after dinner and watching TV is the modus operandi of almost every friend, family member, colleague and co-worker I have.

It’s the default behaviour of a lot of people in America today.

Just last night I was on the couch reading a book while my wife had the television on. I found it increasingly difficult to keep my attention turned toward my book. The Pavlovian response of paying attention to a TV that’s on was working hard to get the better of me!

So what’s the answer? The knee-jerk easy answer is to simply turn off the TV. But is that really the best answer? There are still programs I find interesting, informative, and humorous. I don’t want to cut TV out of my life completely - and I think that’s true for most of us who are addicted (and we shouldn’t kid ourselves, it’s an addiction).

Just like alcohol, I think television is fine in moderation, but it’s easy to over-do and the ramifications of overindulgence are not as clear as with alcohol. For me the biggest is the loss of time to do what I want to do with my time. There are only a finite number of hours we’re on this earth, and we should consider the time we have precious, we shouldn’t be so quick to squander it on television.

I think that the answer is to be more aware of the television I do consume and to be much more aware of the time I give to watching television. I don’t know about you, but my “to do” list for life is longer than I probably have time for even if I completely cut out television. It doesn’t make any sense to give up more of the long-term goals I want to accomplish by spending the limited time I have in front of the “boob tube.”

Almost exactly one year ago I first wrote about Debbie Lafave in an article entitled “Double standards”. In the past twelve months that article - and the accompanying pictures of Ms. Lafave - has been one of the most visited articles (and pictures) on this web site.

It seems that people can’t get enough of Debbie and why not? She’s cute and you know she’ll put out, but I think the reason most people can’t get enough is because they don’t understand what’s going on with this story.

And people want to try to understand why, with our puritanical, mixed-up views on sex, an attractive older woman would solicit sex from an under age male. It’s not supposed to work that way according to society! It’s a double standard, and it’s really causing people to be interested in this story.

See, if Debbie had a penis and was caught having sex with a student (boy or girl) the book would have already been thrown and she would have been locked away for a long time.

Instead Ms. Lafave will get three years of house arrest and seven years of probation. She will also be registered as a sex-offender, probably the harshest part of her punishment.

This sentence is so light as to almost not be a punishment. It’s a double standard.

In this country we have a terribly mixed up sense of what is and what isn’t acceptable. Is sex with a minor a bad thing or a not-so-bad thing? It depends. Does it depend on the minor or the relationship or the circumstances of the sex? No, not really. It appears that it depends more on whether the older party to the sex is a man or a woman.

Maybe it’s time for the United States of America and it’s people to think long and hard about situations like this. And, maybe it’s time we look more towards Europe for guidance.

P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. Actually I think there are a few thousand suckers born every minute thanks to modern technology and the Internet.

A few days ago I received a slick mailer for a MLM program called “MoneywayZ” and it intrigued me because it said absolutely nothing about how you could make money with their program, only that you could make a lot of money doing it.

So I decided to search about on the Internet to see if I could find anything out about this program; much to my surprise I wasn’t able to easily find anything out about this MLM scheme. I found a lot of links to other people who were promoting it, and I found a lot of very similarly written come-ons posted to various newsgroups, but I didn’t find one person saying it was the “real deal” or calling it out as a scam. I thought that was very odd.

In searching for this particular program I ran across a myriad of other MLM program web sites out on the Internet. The thing that struck me most about almost every MLM program out there is that it promotes itself as requiring no selling whatsoever. Almost each and every program I looked at insisted that once I enrolled in their program the system would just start working for me and start generating income while I slept!

And no program I looked at save one mentioned anything about how exactly all of this money (with no selling required) was to be generated. The one lone MLM program I saw was upfront about it’s scheme; as a prospect you buy in for almost $4,000 and then you are in their system. When (or if) someone else signs up using your code and pays their almost-four-thousand-dollar fee to join the MLM program you receive a huge commission.

Sounds great, except I couldn’t actually find any other products or services being sold. So it sounded like a very elaborate pyramid scheme to me. I’m sure the program does just enough to be legitimate and keeps itself just the right side of legal.

I think it’s for this very reason I’m so turned off by the concept of multi-level-marketing programs. They have all abandoned the idea of requiring you to have (or learn) some sales and marketing skills, and they all scream, “NO SELLING REQUIRED” in a huge, bold font on their web sites. The focus is now so much on recruiting and driving your “lines” that all pretense of selling and marketing has been swept under the rug.

I know most people are intimidated by the thought of “selling” but I think that this is a disservice to people because they will otherwise have to “sell” at some point when they join a MLM program. If they never sell they’ll end up getting out what they put in to the program – which is just about nothing – and they’ll wonder why they failed.

Where is the market for an honest MLM program? There has to be a large audience willing to join a program that is upfront and says, “Yeah, you have to sell and market yourself and this program to be successful.”

Maybe such a program is out there, but it’s being masked by all of the MLM programs that leave me feeling dirty when I read their come-on pitch.