My Readers, Occasional and Otherwise, Rule

Many thanks for the advice you doled out yesterday ... and for clicking on books I've linked to and purchasing something from Amazon in the next 24 hours.  (With hugs and sickly sweet kisses going to the random offerings by devotees of Great God Hello Kitty.)  Were it not for you, I wouldn't have spent all day transfixed by this.  It's both mesmerizing and the best cat toy ever ...

... and I never would've bought it if I wasn't playing with Monopoly money.  (Which, to be frank, is what the pittance I make blogging feels like.  I could buy more books, but then I'd have to move out of my own apartment.)

Comments

[Sisyphus]

Are you shitting me??? I thought it was going to be, like, a shiny sparkle thing or perhaps a laser pointer and then I clicked over...

That's real money by my counting... so, how do I sell out and make the big bucks? Although, I'd probably be able to afford some Pez or something and that's it, based on my blog hits. I guess that's why I don't have a real name and am purely fictitious.

Ah well.

[SEK]

I see some people lack faith in the Power of Hello Kitty. HELLO!?! KITTY!?!

[Naadir Jeewa]

What? Did you make $350 out of the hello kitty page?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Hey, with that $350, Scott could have bought more than a week of family health insurance coverage! (But less than two weeks.)

$350 is real money, but it's the kind of real money that structurally makes no difference as a one-time event. I've written this often before, but when I talk to libertarians of the universal-health-coverage-is-evil variety, I generally try to ask them what they do. They are almost always comfortably cocooned in the lower to middle ranks of a large business. They have no idea what the lack of universal health coverage actually does to small business people who must take actual risks.

[SEK]

Did you make $350 out of the hello kitty page?

I made $350 over the past six months from the Amazon Associates program. I think Hello Kitty helped because I never made that much per month before.

Hey, with that $350, Scott could have bought more than a week of family health insurance coverage!

Only if Amazon offered health insurance. Which, when you think about it, wouldn't be a bad idea (for me).

[Rich Puchalsky]

It's actually pretty easy to get private health insurance, as long as you live in a state that disallows them from jacking up your rates for previous health conditions. You start a business -- it can be a sole proprietorship, it doesn't have to be incorporated -- then sign up through a business association of some kind. It costs an extra $100-$200/year bribe, excuse me, yearly dues, to the business association that does nothing for you other than to let you sign up for health insurance through their group bargaining, which will set you back somewhere around $1000/month for family coverage. On the other hand, the business association that I do it through recently started to demand that members send in Schedule C's to prove that they were actually doing business.

[alkau]

As long as you are wasting money why not buy a really, really good book - "The Last Lecture" - since I have read it once and now am reading it again, I will not be sending it to you as promised. Ever teacher could read this book and come up with writing subjects to fill a few semesters of work. So, get it for yourself and one for your wife and one for your sister and one for your brother, etc.