Two days a week I pick up Riley after his half day of kindergarten. At the beginning of the year, they sent home (oh yeah, there's another whole fiasco - remind me to tell you about school bureaucracy later) a sheet on the procedure for picking up kids after the morning kindergarten session. It was very specific.

You could tell from the letter that the school's primary concern was safety. They didn't want any kids getting run over. It was obvious from the way that the letter was worded that parents frequently found ways to get around the rules, and the school had to spell out specific things just to make sure those incidents weren't repeated.

The main problem seemed to be this: There is a driveway, in kind of an oval shape, that parents drive up through to pick up the kids. You park near the curb and hold up the sign for your kid. The teacher on duty sees the kid's name on the sign and sends him out to the car. You load up the kid in the car and only upon all cars having moved away in front of you you may continue around the drive and exit the school grounds. Basically, you may not pass the car in front of you, for the safety of the kids. For the most part, this works. But there is a problem.

There are a few parents who load their kids, drive around to the other side of the oval, and park. I don't know why they do this, but they then get out of their cars, fiddle around with their kid in the back seat, and then move on. This process takes probably less than 5 minutes, but the whole process of picking up kids form the school only takes 10, so this is a substantial portion of the pickup process. Note that they're specifically causing the parents behind them to break the no passing rule, either that or they hold up the whole process when a parent follows the rules.

To compound the insanity, just outside the exit to the oval, there's a parking lot. It's easily entered, 20 seconds drive from where they usually stop, and just as easily exited. It would cause them no inconvenience to pull into the lot instead of causing confusion and traffic issues by stopping inside the pickup driveway.

But that's just the setting. Let me tell you what makes all of this more interesting to me. The cars that do it are always, always, always $60k+ luxury vehicles.

Granted, we live in a nice area, and there are a lot of people around with a lot of money. And I'm not driving a used beater, but I'm not driving a car that has TVs in the back of every seat with separate heat controls and a personal masseuse in the trunk. There are a handful of the standard minivans and family cars, but it's always the luxury cars, the Cadillac SUVs, that feel the need to ignore the rules. And this has me wondering the fundamental question of this post: Does having money lead you to ignore the rules, or does ignoring the rules lead you to money?

There is a good deal of evidence both ways. I'm not really advocating getting money illegally, but look at the extreme examples. Do you think the Enron guys weren't rich at some point? And that is probably the wild "took it too far and got nailed" edge case. Think of all of the people who must be just skirting the rules and raking in the money.

Probably a better example is people who turn the rules sideways. It's not that they're breaking a rule, not even that a rule hasn't been written, just that they've discovered a place outside of the box that everyone else thinks in, and they result in profit. I'm sure you can think of a handful of examples of companies that started out with a crazy idea - outside the rules - and ended up quite rich as a result.

But on the other hand... I also get the impression from meeting some of these people that privilege makes them better. Completely opposite to the people who come up with a good idea and work it, these folks have money for one reason or another (no doubt there is plenty of old money spread around in this area) and just expect a certain amount of extra consideration. They have money, they have the fancy car, they have things, and so they're entitled - for no reason that's apparent to the rest of us - to park someplace and cause that, albeit minor, amount of consternation in everyone else just... because.

It's even funny talking to those folks. When they do those things, there's no remorse or apology. "Yeah, I did park there, and did you see my son's drawing from art class today? Nothing like what he did in his private lesson last week."

The answer to the question seems vital. After all, if simply ignoring a few key rules, or at least bending them a bit, leads to more cash, leads to my not caring whether I disrupt the flow of drivers behind me, then apparently my following of the rules really isn't getting me anywhere! I should just skip the rules I don't like and take what I want, right? Works for them.

There's a movie - I think it's either Diggstown or Roadhouse - where the antagonist drives this antique car, and has no mind for what side of the road he's on. He's so rich that he doesn't care. He feels like he's above the law, without need to care for the rules in society. It's a good scene to illustrate what I think of every time I see these parents showing their kids how to ignore the rules by parking in that spot.

I'm inclined to put up some traffic cones on the sidewalk with signs, "Do not park here. Park in the lot." Just to see how many people outright ignore them. But every time, without fail, there's some parent that parks in that spot.

I've been trying to have my 401k from my old employer transferred into a new tax-deferred "vehicle". I finally managed to get all of the paperwork handled, and sent it all away to be processed. Recently I received a notice that there was a certified letter to pick up at the post office.

Digressing into my first annoyance- I am home all day, pretty much every day, because I work from home. Please, Ms. Postwoman, knock on my door instead of filling out one of those stupid little pink cards and making me trek to the postoffice, which is way off yonder toward Yellow Springs, aka "nowhere". Anyway...

So today I picked up the certified letter, which was sent from my old employer. Inside is a check with a post-it note affixed to it: "Don't know why sent here." The check was the value of my emptied 401k: $146,061.96

Well, that's bad. I shouldn't get a check from one of my retirement funds until, you know, I'm retired. Getting a check early basically means that I get taxed. I don't want to be taxed. Not now, anyway. I want to make some more money on that money first.

This check is going into a "short-term" tax-deferred investment called an indexed annuity. The basic idea of this type of account is that when the market does well, I ride the market. When the market does poorly, I make 3.2%. So I'm never making less than 3.2% on my money, which is better than a savings account these days. Over the life of the account (I think it's 10 years), the market is likely to have some good years, so that'll be good, too.

What gets me though, is how they printed the money words on the check. "One hundred and forty." According to my second-grade math teacher, that's not correct. The only place in a number where you're supposed to use an "and" is where the decimal place is. You'd think John Hancock would know that. But then, you'd think they would know better than to send this check directly to me. Guess not.

Wow. The folks in this presentation are really naive in their perception of paid blogging. A major concern is that bloggers would take money to support a product that they might not otherwise say good things about. Or maybe they'd take money for advertising that would "junk up" their blogs. The weird thing is the double-standard they have about when you can take money.

If you're a small site with no traffic, whether it's because you haven't been discovered or haven't said anything that people want to read, it's apparently ok to advertise on your piece of crap blog. But as soon as you start getting noticed, you are supposed to have "integrity", and therefore you should be taking money for writing, not money for advertising.

Well, where the heck do they think the money comes from for those bigger sites? Sure, you can do sponsorship, but not everybody can, and aren't those bloggers beholden (in at least the same way the complainers would complain about) to their sponsors? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. But there's more to the seminar than this.

What I'm really interested in is the "paid commenting" part of this seminar, and I haven't heard anything about it.

But finally, a good idea. One of the crowd brought up the topic of a media kit. Everyplace that is trying to shop their publication (TV, newspaper, whatever) to advertisers assembles a media kit that provides specific details. Basically for a blog, these kits would include details about the blog's visitors -- whether they were male/female, their zip code, and age group. Add to that demographic data, the type of content that your blog publishes along with your analytic information -- Number of uniques, page views, and the more recently valuable metric time spent per page/visitor.

Put that information into a PDF and publish it from your blog. Point to it when trying to advertisers, or print it out and send it. Have it professionally produced or at least graphically designed well. This will go a long way to having your advertisers take you seriously and stick with you because of the specific niche you provide them access to.

It wasn't spoken of, but is it possible that a network of small, directed blogs could court the attention of advertisers as well as a single large blog? Of course, the share would not be as big as if it was your site alone serving the ads, but you might get some income from it that you wouldn't have access to otherwise.

If you're selling your own links or ads on your site, you need to figure how much your blog is worth. There were some good points about valuing your blog or site. On one hand, you are the producer of value for the site. So if the buying offer isn't worth the effort that you're putting into it, then you're obviously not getting enough money from it.

An interesting example of the converse of this idea was illustrated from the buyer's side. A certain blogger who had made a good name for his political site wanted to sell his whole site and the content for $100,000 to a local media agency. For the price and traffic that it generated, it seemed to them like a good deal, but upon consultation they revealed that the author of the blog was going to move on. Since the value of the site was mostly tied to his ability to produce content that people trusted (and read, and cause visitor to happen), the consultant suggested that they instead spend $30,000 on a new site and dedicate one of their political reporters to the task of creating a new brand. This worked much better than buying out the site, and cost less.

The lesson is that you need to value your site not only on what it is worth but also by what you as a blogger bring to the table when you're blogging. To be more succinct, don't sell ads on PageRank alone.

Someone suggested using a paid content model. I think this is the option for payment with the least moral issues, and yet probably the least palatable to readers. His idea was to allow bloggers to push content to their visitor's cell phones for about $3 per publication. Seems a tad expensive, especially when things are so duplicated on the net that you could likely get the same information for free via RSS. But I still like the payment model for unique information that you can't get elsewhere. Trusted reviews of specific niche products will likely have more value and be able to command that kind of payment. A good example is Pyramid Magazine, which is an inexpensive online-only magazine with content that is unique enough to merit payment.

After you get all of the money rolling in, there are interesting issues to consider of a legal nature. What responsibility do you have to your advertisers? What if your computer explodes or something else happens that makes it difficult to continue blogging? What does your community think of your selling ads from your home?

The suggestion was that if you are selling ads on your site, you should at least know a lawyer you can call if things go wrong. The way things work these days - and you know how it is - you could say something controversial, and some company's ad shows up from Google that day, and their CEO just happened by your site somehow and asked his team of lawyers, "Why does our name appear on that site?" The next thing you know you're paying fees to Cousin Vinnie.

Another thing to think about (and I should do this) is that if you are blogging from home (and we wouldn't be blogging from work, would we?) and essentially you're making money from doing so, then your community may require that you get a business privilege license to do that. It's a pretty crazy thought, but if you're pulling in a few hundred or a few thousand dollars in a month, then you are already subject to taxes on that money (yeah, you had better start filing those with your other income) and so the government is aware that you are running a "business" from your house. Don't incur the fines when the paperwork is pretty cheap and easy. Just saying.

There were a few good nuggets to get out of this seminar. It would have been nice if we would have spent more time on the actual money making rather than the supposed and sketchy ethics of links and paid posts, but still informative.