America even seems to be experiencing a “fitness shortage”

There are times in big business when the marketing and product people should talk more with the engineers and scientists. I think this was true recently when companies like Apple and Research In Motion started pumping their mobile devices. As you may know, as a result of the explosive growth of this market, we’re now rapidly running out of the materials used in their manufacture, with China kind of cornering the market on them. The shortage of these materials should come as no surprise though; they are after all called (ahem) rare earth minerals. But since we also seem to have a shortage of common sense in America, this allows crafty neo-cons to point out that we’re now plagued with what could be called a “shortage deficit”. Meaning if those dirty liberals hadn’t put so many restrictions on mining these materials, WE could be running out of them instead of the Chinese. What these incessantly politicizing wingnuts fail to mention is that China is running out of water too. This will make it hard for the Chinese to capitalize on this shortage deficit for very long; it is after all harder to put the squeeze on anybody if you’re DYING OF THIRST. Besides, if you take a larger view, it quickly becomes apparent we’re running out of just about everything. We’re running out of oil, gold and silver, we’re running out of farm laborers (which is weird, because we’re not running out of people looking for jobs), we’re running out of drugs (at least the legal ones, the illegal ones are thriving), we’re running out of food…why, we’re even running out of internet addresses. Speaking of running out of food, the fact that we’re running out of tuna and red snapper (bet you didn’t know oil rigs were such a crucial part of the ecosystem, did you!) is probably a blessing since – as we mentioned – we’re running out of water to keep them in. Given the continued bailing out of the failed banking industry and the floundering global economy, I imagine that after years of being on the road to recovery, we’ll be running out of trees again to print all the cash needed to keep the party going. Ultimately though, I think what we’re shortest on is common sense, compassion, and patience.