Thursday, January 28, 2016

Housekeeping

With rapidly approaching retirement and other life altering events, Rabett Run has come perhaps to a fork in the roast.  Eli has questions:

1.  Should RR put up a donation box? After all income is required for trips to AGU, gifts for Ms. Rabett so she allows Eli to go to AGU and housing at AGU.   The holes that the Rabett has been hutching up in San Francisco, are, to put it mildly, very 1950s motelish.  Not quite rent by the hour but not . . .

2.  Or should RR take advertising, which, since it requires that readers actually click on something is not a wealth generating activity either as Eli judges that his Rabett Run Readers are as cheap as he is.  Sou appears to make a buck or two from this, but really, how low can Eli and Brian and John sink?

3.  All in favor Eli's handing the keys over to Brian and slinking into the twittering sunset raise your paws. You will be ignored.

4.  Anybunny interested in a book of RR's best takes showing how Eli was there before there was?  Self publishing is a thing these days and one can pray for an Amazon review by George Taki

26 comments:

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

I will volunteer half my winnings if I can find anyone to bet against a less than half degree positive delta T in the next decade.

PG said...

Eli put up a donation box and if we turn out to be a bunch of tight-arsed bastards throw the lever to advertising.
As Peter Pan never said To retire will be such a great adventure

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

30 years ago somebunny remarked:

'Having known Sin at Hiroshima, science was bound to run into advertising sooner or later.'

Bernard J. said...

Become a Denialatus, Eli. If you can get a gig with, say, Heartland or Cato, I hear that it pays rather well...

cRR Kampen said...

4., very.

Tom said...

I would advocate self publishing a book. Mosher and my climategate book did very well. My more recent book published by Stairway Press isn't doing quite so well. There are reasons, of course--no climategate scandal to drive sales, no advertising to speak of, etc.

It won't support your retirement. But if you do it, put a link on your website, get Tobis and ATTP to put a GIF on their sites leading to Amazon, it might upgrade your hotel choices from the Lombard Street dives to something a little closer to the conference venue.

If you do self publish I highly recommend the Amazon vehicle Create Space. It fights a bit with charts and graphs, but is otherwise user friendly.

From what you describe I would not limit myself to one option. I would go all in and use advertising, a tip jar and a book or two. Why not?

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

Wasn't Hiatus Denialatus the guy who went to vacation in Pompei after swearing Plinian eruptions were a hoax?

TheMostCasualObserver said...

OT, From the Gruniad:

Batten down the hutches: Bumper the flying rabbit rescued from rooftop
Firefighters equipped with ladder and carrot rescue bunny blown on to owner’s roof by Storm Gertrude’s strong winds

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/29/bumper-flying-rabbit-rescued-storm-gertrude-winds

William M. Connolley said...

Yeah, do a book. I keep wanting to vanity-publish "best of Stoat".

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

We should respect the contrarian monopoly on hare-brained vanity press books.

Dano said...

One thing about CreateSpace is the maximum file size, but otherwise I second: go that way.

Best,

D

Tom said...

Are you brandishing your cane at me again, Mr. Seitz? Given the reception it received from the Rabett's side of the fence, it was more of a humbling exercise than feeding our vanity. Fortunately there are at least two sides of the fence.

As you must have read it to have formed such an opinion, pray tell what was the part that fired your ire the most?

Anonymous said...

Tommy: " Fortunately there are at least two sides of the fence."

I hope the side of the fence you are on has caring professionals that can help you with your many psychological problems.

BBD said...

I've had a brilliant idea, bunnies!

Let's *not* talk about Tom's book. Let's talk about Eli instead!

1/. Face the truth: there's no money in blogging

2/. No, because (1), but with added integrity

3/. No. Twitter is limiting. A bunny should soar like... an eagle :-)

4/. I'd buy it

Kevin O'Neill said...

I've always liked Barenaked Ladies:

"I'm haunted by a story and I do my best to tell it.
Can't even give this stuff away, why would I sell it?"




Howard said...

Eli: The book idea is a huge time waster. Fuller is right, you need a great public controversy coupled with direct access (like he had on WUWT) to a clamoring market ripe with conspiracy-loving morons who are hungry to lap up tripe and gossip. Then, once sales erode to a trickle, you can parlay that into a grant from the Koch-heads to fund your research to confirm their bias. Then, you can bite the hand that fed you seed money and turn on your fans to make a run to befriend those you slandered and create yourself a permanent research position at a privately funded think tank.

You are never going to make any money on your website, so lose that notion as well.

Use your chemistry skills in a hobby like beer wine or kombucha making and sell it at craft fairs and/or farmers markets. Become a tutor. Get a part time job at one of those science toy stores.

What ever it is, don't sit around.

Greg Laden said...

I've been using Google Ad Sense on my "other" blog for five years. They pay whenever the total reaches $100. I expect my first payment in 2017.

If you do a donation box, let me know how it goes, I'm interested to see how it is done. I would go for it, I think people appreciate your work and would donate.

Self publishing is easy and cheap. You cold also integrate that with the donation box idea. "If you want to help out, buy one of these Kindle books even if you don't want it."

Kevin O'Neill said...

Many smartphone game apps now allow you to earn free coins, tokens, or similar game rewards by watching short promo videos or downloading other apps.

I've been waiting for something similar to show up on websites, but haven't seen it yet. There are multiple services competing - LNE free coins is just one -- picked at random, not an endorsement :)

This is relatively painless (cheap!!!) way to reward someone - just watch a 30 second video they have linked on their website. Of course this could be expanded to actually give away coins and a prize for the person that accrues the most coins each week/month/year.

Some people will sit in front of a computer and stuff the ballot box (political surveys, All-Star voting, etc). Making a game of it might actually earn some dinero.

Brandon R. Gates said...

Eli,

My vote is absolutely NOT 3, 2 only as a last resort, 1 and 4 would be rewarded, especially the latter.

Mike Dombroski said...

You guys should start a foundation to fund grants or prizes to bloggers. Your side looks like it has plenty of potential sugar daddies -- Tom Steyer, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, ...

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

We should chip in and get Tom new spectacles- poor wight can't tell a cane from a Fox twelvebore.

I would have stayed on blog sabatical after I got my first $ 100 from Google, but Tom's pal Willard started snipping my comments.

(I gave the adsense cupon to the rabbit.)



Tom said...

Spectacles? Mr. Seitz, please. Glasses. Spectacles describes the comments section of this blog. Welcome to the 21st Century.

THE CLIMATE WARS said...

No, Tom.
This is a spectacle

Susan Anderson said...

I would definitely buy the book.

Priceless and timeless was the backstory on Revelle and follow-on, but there have been others.

Unknown said...

Become a skeptic, sell books, buy mrs bunny 24 karats.

Toms book, as he describes it (or allowed it to be described):

"In The Lukewarmer's Way...justifies a middle ground in the ongoing debate between human-caused climate skeptics and Anthropogenic Global Warming activists. Presenting reasoned arguments and dispassionate data, Fuller suggests heated rhetoric be set aside so a rational way forward can be found."

Blurb on the front cover:

“The Climategate files opened up what was happening behind the scenes, and it turned out there was no paranoid fantasy: they really were out to get you.”

Phil Clarke said...

"I actually don’t believe men of honour publish correspondence without permission. Nor do I believe men of honour would select portions of the email that don’t correspond to the entire message."

Tom Fuller writing at Deltoid after Tim gave some of Tom's email the disinfectant of sunlight.

I'd buy a Rabbet book, on Kindle anyway.