Rounding Out My Reading

{ March 13th, 2008 }

This weekly round-up is being brought to you exclusively from my feed reader. I found each of these posts particularly useful or interesting and worth sharing:

Clever Dude wrote another article about snagging a laptop on the cheap through one of those internet laptop giveaway sites that pop up on random places, like weather.com. It would be good to check out his first post for the skinny on how to best manage the system so that you don’t end up forking out hundreds of dollars for a laptop you really wanted for free. He cautions that going this route may not be for everyone, mentioning that even he won’t be taking advantage of this promotion in particular. But it is good information to lock away if one day you decide that you are going to take the “free laptop” internet promotion plunge. It even has a cool spreadsheet- *drool*.

Lily at The Honest Dollar wrote a really interesting post on price discrimination and why coupons exist. Since my wife is a minority and a coupon user, I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t gettin’ no short end of no stuff buying stick from “the man.” Lily did a great job of explaining that the discrimination is actually against non-coupon users. Silly people who pay full price for stuff, there getting it stuck to them by “the man. ” I recommend we all stop buying gas until they start making coupons for it. Come on, you know those one day boycotts work - we just got to get this coordinated and we can finally turn the tables on the king of Antarctica.

The CVS police are after My Good Cents. Apparently she was infringing on some intellectual property rights that CVS was really proud of and didn’t want anyones else to know about or share on the internet. I think that means no more CVS coupon links on her sight or else CVS will unleash their intellectual property rights dogs to brutally and expeditiously send emails. The good times are over!

Gather Little by Little wrote a post about why he thinks peer-to-peer lending is a bad idea. It might have been a little inconsistent but really funny if he had included an affiliate link with his article since one of his main points is that the generous affiliate program these sites offer may be a significant factor in the ubiquity of P2P lending articles. I slightly toyed with the idea of dabbling in P2P lending, especially after hearing how it helped out Amanda from Me vs Debt. But in the end I think I decided that I just couldn’t do it. The thought of charging people interest just doesn’t seem to jive with me even though I might be helping them out.

SVB from the Digerati Life posted a good article about why new toys suck and old toys are the best. Science has finally proven what secret mountain training camps have known for centuries. She didn’t mention anything about how old toys help your child to actualize their inner ninja, but I think that was the subliminal message encoded into the cute images. I suddenly feel the urge to flip out and kill some bad guys …

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