Car Insurance

WE’VE teamed up with Bennetts, the UK’s number one for motorcycle insurance, to bring our readers the chance to win VIP tickets to the Bennetts British Superbike Round at Knockhill.

This once in a lifetime prize also includes the chance to take a trip in the safety car ahead of the race.

Bennetts is the title sponsor of the 2005 British Superbike Championship and one lucky bike fan will win a pair of VIP tickets to round 7 at Knockhill on Sunday 26th June as well as a trip in the safety car on race day.

This money can’t buy prize includes full hospitality including complimentary food and drink all day, the chance to meet key BSB riders, and a pit walk at the circuit.

And that’s not all, our first place lucky winner will also receive some Bennetts BSB goodies as a memento! Two runners-up will win a pair of stand tickets for race day.

MAYFIELD VILLAGE, Ohio — While golf carts are primarily designed for transportation from one green to the next, many people are now putting around gated communities, retirement parks and condo complexes in these energy-efficient, nimble three- or four-wheeled vehicles. In fact, whether it’s due to higher gas prices or simply convenience, industry experts report that golf cart sales to individuals have doubled over the past ten years. As snowbirds flock to warmer climes, Progressive, the third largest auto insurance group and leading specialty insurer of motorcycles, RVs and boats, wants them to know that specialized golf cart insurance is available for both gas and electric vehicles.

“Golf cart insurance gives people peace of mind that their vehicles will be protected on and, more importantly, off their property,” said Marcy Gray, product manager, Progressive. “Many people simply add golf carts onto their homeowners policy but this generally only provides coverage when they’re being used on the owner’s property–not common areas or roadways. If they take a ride down to the community pool and get into an accident they might not be covered. Our specialized insurance provides coverage for virtually any non-commercial purpose and location.”

Coverages and services include:

* Bodily Injury and Property Damage liability;

* Accessory coverage - which covers custom parts and accessories;

* Transport Trailer coverage - which protects trailers used to transport golf carts; and

* 24/7 claims service, including Roadside Assistance.

Progressive’s specialized golf cart insurance is currently available in more than 30 states and is expected to be available in most states by year-end 2008.

About Progressive

The Progressive Group of Insurance Companies, now celebrating its 70th year in business, is the country’s third largest auto insurance group and largest seller of motorcycle and personal watercraft policies based on premiums written, and is a market leader in commercial auto insurance.

Progressive is committed to becoming consumers’ #1 choice for auto insurance by providing competitive products and rates that meet drivers’ needs throughout their lifetimes, superior online and in-person customer service, and best-in-class, 24-hour claims service, including its concierge level of claims service available at service centers located in major metropolitan areas throughout the United States.

Progressive companies offer consumers choices in how to shop for, buy and manage their auto insurance policies. Progressive offers its products, including personal and commercial auto, motorcycle, boat and recreational vehicle insurance, through more than 30,000 independent insurance agencies throughout the U.S. and online and by phone directly from the Company. Private passenger auto products and prices are different when purchased directly from Progressive or through independent agencies.

Rick Dinger plunges into civic and political responsibilities while running an agency and the Young Agents of California To say that Rick Dinger is busy these days is an understatement. He undertakes supervision chores for his 14-monthold twin boys, serves as chairman of IBA West’s Young Brokers and Agents Committee and as president of his agency, Crescenta Valley Insurance in Glendale, California.

The 34-year-old multiline producer has been on IBA West’s Young Brokers and Agents Association Committee for three years and took over last fall as chairman for 2001. Dinger has been a member of the IBA West’s young agents group, traditionally one of the strongest chapters in the United States, for 15 years.

He reflects proudly on the recent work the Young Agents group has done. “Our main accomplishments have been associated with our conference in June. We raised a record amount of sponsorships to help underwrite the cost and allow more young producers to attend,” Dinger said. “Under the direction of Lou Partee, we started a statewide blood drive in association with the American Red Cross. For the first time we have a Web page that is updated monthly and we have turned our newsletter into an e-newsletter which allows us to get the information out faster, easier and basically for free.”

In addition, under Dinger’s direction, the Young Agent Committee has built up an impressive e-mail list that grows every month. It allows the committee to target its audience and get messages out more easily.

“We have a large annual conference and it continues to grow each year. I have really enjoyed the experience,” Dinger said. “It has been a challenge to communicate with our committee, which is spread out all over California; but thanks to the Internet, we have been very successful.”

The main goal of the Young Agent’s committee is to raise money to offset the cost of its conference which is about $225 per person. Dinger says it is important to make the event affordable in order to attract young producers. This year it has surpassed its goal by over 20%. Most companies are eager to participate in the event because IBA West’s Young Agent group has young, energetic, and hungry producers that are looking for direction and company-general agent contacts that they will use for their entire career. It is the benefit of networking early in their career that can pay dividends down the road.

Dinger’s agency, Crescenta Valley Insurance, is located in Glendale, California, a sprawling suburb 15 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Established in 1969, the agency has grown into a full-service independent insurance agency. It serves the insurance needs of about 4,000 individuals and families and over 250 business concerns in the Crescenta Valley and throughout Los Angeles County. It boasts state-of-theart methods for obtaining immediate quotes over the Internet from its computer system.

“We realize that more and more of our customers are looking for the additional convenience of conducting their business online, yet they still require our traditional expertise as their broker in dealing with the insurance process,” Dinger said. “Rest assured that we are here to give our clients and potential clients the quality professional representation and service as a client of our agency.”

Crescenta Valley Insurance currently has nine employees and produces a volume of approximately $6.2 million in written premium per year. “The agency writes a majority of its business with Mercury Insurance Group that specializes in personal auto insurance coverage. My personal book is spread out with personal, commercial, life and health accounts,” Dinger says. “I work on referrals, using a computerized direct mail program that I developed that allows me to write small commercial business throughout California.”

Ultimately he writes most of his business within a 10-mile radius of his office. In a metropolitan area of about 3 million people, Dinger maintains this refreshing focus because he has lived in the area all of his life and that is where his referral base is the strongest. The Glendale-Foothill area of Los Angeles County has what Dinger calls a “good mix of young working families and the very wealthy.”

The agency just signed on with Arrowhead’s increasingly popular YouZoom to help it meet part of its Internet needs and to provide a presence on the Web. “We are developing a program to attract auto dealers, escrow agents and real estate agents in our community to our Web page,” Dinger adds. “We are only a couple of months into our YouZoom project. We chose them because of the professional looking pages they provide and an opportunity to create another income stream.”

As part of his immersion in the happenings of the industry, in 1999, Dinger testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C., on small business liability reform. He did so at the request of former Congressman Jim Rogan. Dinger was asked to testify on behalf of the Small Business Liability Reform Act of 1999 because of his insurance expertise and the contacts he made during his tenure as the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce president.

“This was a thrill of a lifetime and a great learning experience,” Dinger said. “Basically the Act protects small business retailers from being dragged into lawsuits because of products they sell that may be defective.”

Under the Small Business Liability Reform Act of 1999, if a claimant is unable to sue the manufacturer, then a small business owner is liable only up to $250,000. Dinger read a testimony that was written with the help of the Independent Insurance Agents of America (IIAA). It told the story of a local business that was sued for a defective motorcycle part.

Dinger remains involved, fascinated with the speed and intrigue of politics. He plans to run for a seat on the Glendale City Council in April 2002.

Currently, Dinger runs the Montrose-Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce golf tournament, as well as the golf classic of the Independent Brokers and Agents of Pasadena, Burbank and Glendale. He also assists with the Saint Francis High School Alumni Golf Classic. His other involvement includes serving on his high school’s alumni association board of directors and doing the play-by-play announcing of all the Saint Francis High School football home games.

His list of accomplishments in 2000 continues. He was the recipient of the Harlan Miller Award that is presented to an IBA West young agent in western states who has been active in its Federal Ambassador Program that promotes the IIAA national agenda to local congressmen and U.S. senators.

FOR MOST OF human history, the two birds More and Better roosted on the same branch. You could toss one stone and hope to hit them both. That’s why the centuries since Adam Smith launched modern economics with his book The Wealth of Nations have been so single-mindedly devoted to the dogged pursuit of maximum economic production. Smith’s core ideas–that individuals pursuing their own interests in a market society end up making each other richer; and that increasing efficiency, usually by increasing scale, is the key to increasing wealth–have indisputably worked. They’ve produced more More than he could ever have imagined. They’ve built the unprecedented prosperity and ease that distinguish the lives of most of the people reading these words. It is no wonder and no accident that Smith’s ideas still dominate our politics, our outlook, even our personalities.

But the distinguishing feature of our moment is this: Better has flown a few trees over to make her nest. And that changes everything. Now, with the stone of your life or your society gripped in your hand, you have to choose. It’s More or Better.

Which means, according to new research emerging from many quarters, that our continued devotion to growth above all is, on balance, making our lives worse, both collectively and individually. Growth no longer makes most people wealthier, but instead generates inequality and insecurity. Growth is bumping up against physical limits so profound–like climate change and peak oil–that trying to keep expanding the economy may be not just impossible but also dangerous. And perhaps most surprisingly, growth no longer makes us happier. Given our current dogma, that’s as bizarre an idea as proposing that gravity pushes apples skyward. But then, even Newtonian physics eventually shifted to acknowledge Einstein’s more complicated universe.

IT WAS THE GREAT economist John Maynard Keynes who pointed out that until very recently, “there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilized centers of the earth.” At the utmost, Keynes calculated, the standard of living roughly doubled between 2000 B.C. and the dawn of the 18th century–four millennia during which we basically didn’t learn to do much of anything new. Before history began, we had already figured out fire, language, cattle, the wheel, the plow, the sail, the pot. We had banks and governments and mathematics and religion.

And then, something new finally did happen. In 1712, a British inventor named Thomas Newcomen created the first practical steam engine. Over the centuries that followed, fossil fuels helped create everything we consider normal and obvious about the modern world, from electricity to steel to fertilizer; now, a 100 percent jump in the standard of living could suddenly be accomplished in a few decades, not a few millennia.

In some ways, the invention of the idea of economic growth was almost as significant as the invention of fossil-fuel power. But it took a little longer to take hold. During the Depression, even FDR routinely spoke of America’s economy as mature, with no further expansion anticipated. Then came World War II and the postwar boom–by the time Lyndon Johnson moved into the White House in 1963, he said things like: “I’m sick of all the people who talk about the things we can’t do. Hell, we’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful. We can do it all…. We can do it if we believe it.” He wasn’t alone in thinking this way. From Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev thundered, “Growth of industrial and agricultural production is the battering ram with which we shall smash the capitalist system.”

Such ambivalence, Etzioni predicted, “is too stressful for societies to endure,” and Ronald Reagan proved his point. He convinced us it was “Morning in America”–out with limits, in with Trump. Today, mainstream liberals and conservatives compete mainly on the question of who can flog the economy harder. Larry Summers, who served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of the treasury, at one point declared that the Clinton administration “cannot and will not accept any ’speed limit’ on American economic growth. It is the task of economic policy to grow the economy as rapidly, sustainably, and inclusively as possible.” It’s the economy, stupid.

EXCEPT THERE ARE three small things. The first I’ll mention mostly in passing: Even though the economy continues to grow, most of us are no longer getting wealthier. The average wage in the United States is less now, in real dollars, than it was 30 years ago. Even for those with college degrees, and although productivity was growing faster than it had for decades, between 2000 and 2004 earnings fell 5.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to the most recent data from White House economists. Much the same thing has happened across most of the globe. More than 60 countries around the world, in fact, have seen incomes per capita fall in the past decade.

For the second point, it’s useful to remember what Thomas Newcomen was up to when he helped launch the Industrial Revolution–burning coal to pump water out of a coal mine. This revolution both depended on, and revolved around, fossil fuels. “Before coal,” writes the economist Jeffrey Sachs, “economic production was limited by energy inputs, almost all of which depended on the production of biomass: food for humans and farm animals, and fuel wood for heating and certain industrial processes.” That is, energy depended on how much you could grow. But fossil energy depended on how much had grown eons before–all those billions of tons of ancient biology squashed by the weight of time fill they’d turned into strata and pools and seams of hydrocarbons, waiting for us to discover them.

To understand how valuable, and irreplaceable, that lake of fuel was, consider a few other forms of creating usable energy. Ethanol can perfectly well replace gasoline in a tank; like petroleum, it’s a way of using biology to create energy, and right now it’s a hot commodity, backed with billions of dollars of government subsidies. But ethanol relies on plants that grow anew each year, most often corn; by the time you’ve driven your tractor to tend the fields, and your truck to carry the crop to the refinery, and powered your refinery, the best-case “energy output-to-input ratio” is something like 1.34-to-1. You’ve spent 100 Btu of fossil energy to get 134 Btu. Perhaps that’s worth doing, but as Kamyar Enshayan of the University of Northern Iowa points out, “it’s not impressive” compared to the ratio for oil, which ranges from 30-to-1 to 200-to-1, depending on where you drill it. To go from our fossil-fuel world to a biomass world would be a little like leaving the Garden of Eden for the land where bread must be earned by “the sweat of your brow.”

And east of Eden is precisely where we may be headed. As everyone knows, the past three years have seen a spate of reports and books and documentaries suggesting that humanity may have neared or passed its oil peak–that is, the point at which those pools of primeval plankton are half used up, where each new year brings us closer to the bottom of the barrel. The major oil companies report that they can’t find enough new wells most years to offset the depletion in the old ones; rumors circulate that the giant Saudi fields are dwindling faster than expected; and, of course, all this is reflected in the cost of oil.

Many paper recyclers who enter the document destruction business are familiar with aspects of plant layout and matching production equipment to anticipated volume.

But the information destruction industry also brings new considerations, such as choosing the right mobile shredding truck for on-site customers and shredding equipment that provides optimal particle size.

Among the things they learn are that trucks equipped with a high-production shredder will offer fewer advantages if they don’t also have considerable storage capacity. And in terms of shred size, a smaller particle can be a security selling point and a paper value stumbling block at the same time.

TRUCKING. Paper recyclers entering the secure shredding sector may have some familiarity with selecting equipment for on-site customer use if they have ever placed balers in warehouses or store rooms.

But buying a truck that is also outfitted with a critical piece of production equipment will probably prompt new and unique considerations.

Mark McKenna of Shred-Tech, Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, has helped that company develop a sales and marketing program specifically targeting new and prospective customers considering entering the secure shredding business.

McKenna, who works from an office in Durham, N.C., says among the first questions those new to the secure destruction industry should ask is whether to buy a new or used truck and whether they are buying “enough” truck to service anticipated future business.

“The benefits of a new truck are higher throughput and the reliability of the chassis,” McKenna says. “Shredding equipment is fairly reliable whether it is used or new, but warranty coverage [on the truck] eliminates a lot of your maintenance costs over the first couple of years.”

Used equipment offers a lower barrier to entry, but if buyers can afford an upgraded truck, it can pay off in several ways, McKenna contends. “We have tracked it, and it is astounding how high the resale value of our residual trucks is,” he says, adding that the trucks are “selling at 75 or 80 percent of their value after three years.”

The industry and its suppliers have generally found that a truck is limited in its trailer size and capacity because a semi-sized truck and trailer combination is too cumbersome and fuel-inefficient for most routes, and qualified drivers become even harder to find.

What makers and buyers are finding is that even though shredder outputs have increased, a high-powered shredder loses its efficiency if the driver is always heading to the recycling plant to empty the storage compartment.

“Operators want to have both a capacity and a throughput edge,” says McKenna.

In a feature in Secure Destruction Business magazine earlier this year, Evelyn Jefferson of Allegheny Paper Shredders Corp., Delmont., Pa., says, “The industry standard is to get as much payload as you can.”

A new, larger model offered by one manufacturer lists a payload capacity of 10,000 pounds if mounted on a single axle and 19,000 pounds if mounted on a tandem-axle chassis.

While wrestling with truck size on one front, mobile shredding truck buyers also have to determine the shred size they wish to produce once their truck is on the road.

BITS AND PIECES. When secure destruction companies shop for document shredders, security may be prompting them to consider the smallest possible particle size, but productivity and recycling markets can be reasons to consider the other options.

According to equipment manufacturers, the considerations of customers and of the National Association for Information Destruction (NMD) play a role in what customers request. “A lot of our customers consider what the NAID specifications are to meet AAA certification,” remarks Chris Hawn, director of business sevelopment for waste systems at Vecoplan LLC, High Point, N.C.

Hawn says that other customers, particularly those with recycling roots who can be more aware of the value that paper mills place on better fiber quality, may gear their units toward producing larger shreds.

On the other end of the spectrum, customers who serve clients that have to meet Department of Defense (DOD) specifications of 3/32nd of an inch shreds must use screens that will meet this tight specification.

Mike Spiger, CEO of Ultrashred, Spokane, Wash., says his company’s mobile shredding trucks contain hammermill-style shredders usually outfitted with 2-inch screens. “Because of the way our feed system works, there is nothing that is not shredded by the hammers before it goes through the screen,” says Spiger. “The hammers continue to pulverize the paper until it will fall through that screen, and once it does, it is not possible for that document to be reconstructed,” he says.

An option Vecoplan keeps open to buyers is the availability of screens in many sizes to suit different customers. “Our machines are flexible,” says Hawn. “If they want to go small, they can do that, but then if they want to go larger they can change the screen.”

Spiger says hammermills will operate faster, perhaps chewing through 5,000 pounds per hour on a setting where a grinder can only handle 1,500 pounds. He notes, though, that the Ultrashred hammermill is designed for paper rather than a variety of products. “It’s a paper destruction product that isn’t necessarily designed to handle X-rays or other items.”

Mobile shredding trucks are the workhorses for many startup secure shredding companies, most of which are probably working with thin marketing budgets.

One technique companies might be able to use is taking maximum advantage of the “moving billboard” space on the sides of their shredding trucks.

When Bob Leventhal and Don Adriaansen started Titan Mobile Shredding in Doylestown, Pa., last year, they did not hesitate to put their marketing dollars into truck signage. “We felt that that was the top thing we could do,” says Leventhal. “Once the truck is rolling, everywhere we go we want people to notice it,” he remarks.

Leventhal says he and Adriaansen wanted their trucks to produce both direct results as well as build the kind of brand identity that yields subtle, long-term results. “For us, we’re trying to develop brand recognition,” he notes.