Al's Morning Meeting

I found another story that said pizza delivery drivers may start adding a surcharge, which would mean picking it up yourself would cut your cost.   

BizNewOrleans.com has an interesting angle on all of this. The site says that the cost of operating a car is about the same this year as last year despite the higher fuel costs:

The average cost of driving a passenger vehicle in the United States is nearly unchanged from one year ago; despite higher costs for gasoline, according to AAA's 2005 edition of Your Driving Costs report.

This year AAA estimates it will cost an average of 56.1 cents per mile or $8,410 per year to own and operate a new passenger car, compared with $56.2 cents per mile or $8,431 annually in 2004.

Offsetting higher gasoline costs are reductions in the annual average cost of insurance, licensing, registration and taxes, as well as tires and maintenance. The cost of gasoline in 2005 is estimated to average 8.5 cents per mile or $1,285 per year in the AAA study, compared to 6.5 cents per mile or $975 last year.

The hospitalized kids had one thing in common: They touched animals recently at petting zoos at area fairs, including the Central Florida Fair in Orlando and the Florida Strawberry Festival in Plant City, between March 3 and 13.

The kidney infection known as Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome, which causes kidneys to malfunction, is usually contracted by touching under-cooked meat or contaminated food. But in this case, health officials believe the children were exposed to it via animal droppings.  

When the results of the investigation come out today parents should not freak out and boycott petting zoos. The big thing health experts stress is to tell little kids not to put their hands in their mouth after visiting a petting zoo until they have thoroughly washed their hands. Hand sanitizer is a must for trips to those petting zoos. Leave the sippy cups and pacifiers outside the zoo area. 

Boomers Shun Meetings  

Al’s Morning Meeting has, on a few occasions, touched on the interesting trend among baby boomers not to join groups that require lots of meetings.

The Orlando Sentinel included this interesting story:

AARP's national membership has ballooned to 36 million, but its chapters are folding faster than card tables at a rummage sale. Once numbering close to 4,000 there are now 2,535 nationwide.

The demise of the chapter in Orlando leaves Florida with 112 -- down from 250 two decades ago.

"We were just all getting tired and couldn't get anybody to come in," said Joan Wozniak, who was in the fifth year of her two-year term as president of the chapter.

The decline in the AARP chapters follows the trend of other groups -- everything from the Elks, Moose and Veterans of Foreign Wars to garden clubs, sewing guilds and ladies auxiliaries.

The social and fraternal organizations built and populated by the "greatest generation" are being shunned by the baby boomers and the newly retired.

"Any group is one generation away from being extinct. You always have to reach out to the next generation and not just to join up but to become involved and assume leadership roles," said Bill Clark, the Florida AARP associate director in charge of chapters.

For years, organizations such as the AARP chapters thrived as men and women wanted a place to go to feel a sense of belonging and camaraderie.

But for many Americans, retirement now means a time of personal freedom -- freedom from membership dues, monthly meetings and leadership obligations.

"We are going into a generation that isn't so much about getting together in a common group, just to socialize," Clark said.

Nowadays, many of those 50 and older plunk down their $12.50 a year to join AARP for the discounts membership provides -- on everything from rental cars to theme parks to computers.

Nationwide, only about 1 percent of AARP's membership belongs to chapters. But those 300,000 members are twice as likely to become involved in issue-oriented activities, said Bob Toye, AARP's national manager for community networks, which includes the chapters.

No sooner had I read this article that I drove by the Cape Canaveral, Florida Moose Lodge (on my way to NASA) and cars were spilling out of the parking lot. I am not kidding. I have no idea what was happening in there but it stuck me as so unusual for a fraternal organization to have such a full lot these days. How are your local organizations doing? How do they try to attract younger members?

P-to-P Case Before Court

Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could have some far-reaching implications for the entertainment industry. It could go further. The lawsuit raises the question of whether the investors of new technologies that allow people to download movies and songs could be sued when their inventions are illegally used. PC World explains: 

Lawyers for the plaintiffs--Motion Picture Association of America, the National Music Publisher's Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America--say they're simply trying to get the court to recognize that the Grokster and Morpheus Peer-to-Peer software packages were created primarily to encourage users to illegally trade copyright songs and movies. They argue that while users are responsible for copyright violations, P-to-P vendors share a secondary liability.

The issue before the Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case focuses on a relatively narrow question: whether movie and music companies should be able to sue the P-to-P distributors for the copyright violations of their users.

Critics of the entertainment industry's position, including some technology trade groups, say the case has much broader implications: If copyright owners are able to sue inventors of new technologies for the sins of their users, few tech companies would be safe.

"Demanding that innovators guess how people use a new technology, and holding them liable retroactively if they fail to anticipate what users will do ... is a radical new definition of secondary liability that will chill innovation," says Mark Cooper, research director of the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer rights advocacy group. "The tyranny of copyright risk and the liability it will bring will make innovators timid in inventing new communications technologies."

If the Supreme Court allows entertainment companies to sue P-to-P vendors, it will overturn its own 21-year-old ruling that has balanced the rights of copyright owners with those of the creators of innovative new technologies such as the VCR, the copying machine and the MP3 player, say critics of the entertainment industry's position.

"This case is not just about peer-to-peer, it's fundamentally about trying to change the rules for all of the technology industry," says Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and lawyer for Morpheus distributor StreamCast Networks in this case.

The case centers around the Supreme Court's 1984 Sony Betamax ruling, in which judges rejected claims of a movie studio brought against Sony, maker of the Betamax VCR. The court ruled against Universal City Studios, saying that makers of technologies with significant uses other than infringing copyrights were not liable for their users' copyright violations.

I just wanted to be sure you saw this from the Social Security Administration. It is the annual report that the feds send out to tell you, officially, how fast the fund is going down the tubes.

 The 2005 Social Security Trustees Report shows little change in the projected financial status of the Social Security program over last year. The Trustees Report projects that the Social Security Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2041 - one year sooner than last year’s projection. The Trustees recommend that projected trust fund deficits be addressed in a timely way to allow for gradual changes and advance notice to workers.

In the 2005 Annual Report to Congress, the Trustees announced:

• The projected point at which tax revenues will fall below program costs comes in 2017 – one year earlier than the projection in last year’s report.
• The projected point at which the Trust Funds will be exhausted comes in 2041 – also one year earlier than the projection in last year’s report.
• The projected actuarial deficit over the 75-year long-range period is 1.92 percent of taxable payroll, slightly higher than the estimate in last year’s report and the same as in the 2003 Trustees Report.
• Over the 75-year period, the Trust Funds require additional revenue equivalent to $4.0 trillion in today’s dollars to pay all scheduled benefits. This unfunded obligation is $300 billion higher than the amount estimated last year.

Document Costs

Friday I mentioned a Des Moines Register story about price gouging for public documents. Dan Geiser, Managing Editor for the The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette wants you to know the report was a collaborative effort among 15 Iowa newspapers.

School Pictures

Every year some version of this story seems to come up.  Some high school kids do not like the pictures that the official school photographer takes so they want to go out on their own and get school pictures. In Pennsylvania, Senate Bill 445 would allow students to choose their own photographer and still get the picture in the school yearbook if the picture meets specs set down by the yearbook staff.

What’s new in school photography?