Our friends at Forbes have put out their annual list of the "Best cities for singles." San Francisco was the top city last year, but Atlanta crowded it out because of lower cost of living and job growth.

While job growth and living above the poverty level are certainly nice when you are a young single-something, in reality you are mainly looking for other singles to make yourself less single (or something.)

The rest of the top five include a bizarre tie between Dallas and Minnesota (maybe depending on your political affiliation you prefer one to the other.) and our nation's capitol, Washington, D.C.

One aspect of any really big decision is the degree to which it changes one's identity. The little decisions are things that can be reversed, replaced, or otherwise ignored, while the big ones leave their mark.

For example, my college majors determined a large part of the path that my life has followed. They have influenced my perspective, my group of friends, and all the other decisions that I subsequently made. The same goes for marriage and parenthood, as well as a few other biggies.

Shortly after moving to New York, I realized that this decision would have a monumental effect on my identity. Using Facebook, I reconnected with my buddy Aubin. Once he learned that I had moved to the city, he began referring to me as "Yankee." Having spent all my life in the south, this was a pretty big shift. Still, given that my relatives fought for the north (or, as I always put it, the winners), this made some sense.

I'm listening to Koko Taylor as I write this, so consider me a biased source of insight on this story. I also saw her live when I had a summer job at the Cape Cod Melody Tent.

Nevertheless, here's a quick run-down of the story: 79-year old blues legend Koko Taylor is in poor health. According to a Forbes article, she "needs a wheelchair pushed by her child to reach the stage for her fewer and fewer live gigs." Other than her home valued at $280 thousand, she has no significant assets.

Oh yeah: the IRS says she owes them $400 thousand in taxes, penalties and interest. To try to keep her house, she offered to take out a reverse mortgage and pay $200 thousand plus half of any future net revenue. But the IRS refused.

You can read the details in the Forbes article and I know: people have a responsibility to pay taxes and it's the IRS' job to collect and blah blah blah.

But there aren't there better, more efficient and, frankly, less mean-spirited ways to increase tax revenues than going after an 80-year old blues singer who lacks any significant savings?

Scrolling through Forbes' new slideshow of America's Fastest Dying Industries can easily get the mind wandering on a Big Lebowski tangent. Okay, maybe that's a stretch. But, the fact that our nation may suffer a dearth of bowling alleys and beer seems a little disconcerting.

As part of this new feature, in conjunction with AOL Small Business, Forbes lists 10 U.S. industries that will most likely see a drop in output, revenue and employment in the next four years.

According to Forbes, the industries that had the foresight to adjust to change and diversify are doing the best. "While technology is changing the face of many industries," writes the magazine's Joshua Zumbrun and Brian Wingfield, "the firms within them are often doing quite well." AT&T and Verizon, for instance, are not worried about their outdated "land lines" since their wireless subscriber numbers are surging.