Yes, I Still Blog On Business (Links for 060205)
Business news worth blogging:
- Taxing information: Forbes has a great graphic on worldwide taxes (surprising, at least to me, the link appears not to require registration). The US tax burden is among the lowest. France’s is the highest, and it’s one of the few countries that taxes wealth.And whose economy is growing faster?
- Not Big Brother, Big Mom and Dad: Further proof that any time you let someone collect data, someone will figure out how to use it to intrude:
MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) — As Garin Hughes picks through his school-lunch burrito and unidentifiable apple-pear dessert, he has a secret. Hidden underneath the eighth-grader’s right leg is a chocolate cookie in shrink-wrapped plastic. That’s for dessert.
In the past, his parents had no clue when he bought a treat at school. Now, thanks to a new school-lunch monitoring system, they can check over the Internet and learn about that secret cookie.
Health officials hope it will increase parents’ involvement in what their kids eat at school. It’s a concern because federal health data shows that up to 30% of U.S. children are either overweight or obese.
….Three school districts in the Atlanta area last week became the first in the country to offer the parental-monitoring option of an electronic lunch payment system called Mealpay.com, created by Horizon Software International of Loganville, Ga.
For two years, the payment system, used by 1,000 school districts in 21 states, has allowed parents to electronically prepay for student lunches. Students type in their identification number before the cafeteria cashier rings up each day’s lunch bill. The bill then is deducted from the student’s account.
The system was initially designed as a convenient way to make sure children bought lunch without worrying that lunch money would get lost, spent on other things or stolen.
However, these days parents increasingly are interested in what their kids eat away from home. It was requests from concerned parents that prompted Horizon Software to develop the online meal-monitoring option.
Under the system, parents can see all of a student’s lunch purchases. Even those paid in nickels and dimes — instead of the prepaid lunch account — are recorded in the system, said Tina Bennett, program director.
- Give The South (free) Credit (information): Effective yesterday, folks in the following states representing most of The South can get free credit reports: AL, AR, FL, GA, KY, LA, MS, OK, SC, TN, and TX.The contact info is:
Online: www.annualcreditreport.com
Phone: 877-322-8228
Mail: Annual Credit Report Request Service
P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281Credit reports are free. Credit scores are not.
A March BizzyBlog post suggested that because of the possibility of online cryptographic hijacking, requesting your information by phone or snail mail would be safer.
