I wrote blog post the other day for BloggingStocks which poked fun at Donald Trump for his attitude towards the big oil companies. Needless to say, that blog post garnered quite a bit of interest. One of our readers left a comment on that post which put forward a concept for selling gasoline which might merit some extra attention. That reader, identified as "gumbo koontz", suggests that gasoline be priced for individuals according to the fuel efficiency of the vehicle they drive. This idea may sound rather punitive or arbitrary, but I think it has a lot of valuable merit.

What better way could there be to make people really think about their fuel usage than to make their effect on the situation more personally tangible for them? As the driver of a full-sized pick-up truck, I'm not against the idea of paying five or six cents a gallon more for my gasoline that someone who chooses to drive a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle. I do use my truck bed almost daily for various chores and payloads which a smaller vehicle couldn't touch, but the fact is that I use more gasoline to get from point A to point B. I can definitely see the merit in rewarding those drivers who trade off convenience for frugality.

How might a program like this work, and how could we administrate it accurately and fairly? Would it be viewed as punishment for those who use more gasoline or as reward for those who use less? Could it be administered at the pump or would it have to be handled with the government through the submission of forms and records? These are just a few of the questions which would need to be answered before a program like this could be made real.

In what could probably be construed as an act of war, the United States is unleashing The Donald on the friendly folks from down under. This November, The Chump will be heading to Australia for a series of "Think Like a Billionaire" seminars

The Age reports that while promoters declined to say how much Trump is being paid, his usual fee is somewhere in the $1.5 million per hour range. All of this raises an interesting question: What could Trump possibly have to say that's worth $1.5 million per hour? Perhaps he could put together a Power Point presentation on how he actually managed to lose an enormous amount of money operating a casino.

Apparently this is Trump's first visit to Australia. The visit could do wonders for diplomacy as those wonderful folks will now get some idea of what Americans have been putting up with for the past 62 years.

Perhaps we could threaten to send Trump to Iran -- that should put an end to the country's aggression in a hurry.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Ivana Trump -- the former Mrs. Donald and mother of Ivanka, Donald Jr. and Eric -- failed to pay a $145,216 tax bill because of all the excitement surrounding her $3 million wedding to Rossano Rubicondi.

According to The Daily Dish, "Trump was named and shamed by Florida authorities after failing to pay the property tax on her $10 million estate."

I say leave this woman alone. Not only did she marry Donald Trump, she slept with him enough times to have 3 children. Anyone who did that should not have to pay taxes again. She's suffered enough! I know that she received a reported divorce settlement of more than $40 million but still. That's not nearly enough for putting up with him.

Speaking on CNBC's Squawk Box, Donald Trump announced that he had sold his prized home in Palm Beach for $100 million. Trump had originally listed the home at $125 million. According to RISMedia, a CNBC commentator asked him "Are you going to make the Russian who bought your house put up an American flag, like the big controversy you had with the town?" The commentator was referring to one of Trump's lame publicity stunts from a few years back, where he made a big stink about a town law that prevented him from flying a gaudily large American flag at his Mar-A-Lago club in the same town.

Trump answered the interviewer's question with this thoughtful and politically correct comment: "I think what I'll do is I will demand that he puts up the American flag - and the Russian flag can fly right under it."

Well isn't that wonderful. It's a good thing that we have a guy who's been married three times, gets in cat fights with Rosie O'Donnell, sits at the top of a failing Atlantic City casino empire, and plans to host a reality show featuring former prostitutes here to promote patriotism.

As I have written many times before, I hate Donald Trump. But as I discussed in my review of Trump Style Negotiation, his unfortunate status as the most prominent figure in real estate has attracted some great collaborators for his books. A book with Trump's name on it sells better than a book by someone nobody's heard of and, consequently, some of the best real estate minds you've never heard of have lent their work to Trump's name.

Trump: The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received is a perfect example of this. Basically, this book contains 100 short essays written by some of the most successful real estate people in the world, all sharing the best piece of advice about the business that they ever received.

Happily, the book is free of get-rich-quick charlatans like Robert Kiyosaki, and includes passages from the likes of Barbara Corcoran, Robert Boykin, and Steve Bollenbach. If you've never heard of these people, that's the point: they're real real estate tycoons who've focused on creating wealth and value rather than ego trips, unlike the man whose visage appears on the cover.

True: a lot of the advice is trite and obvious. But it's a book that you can't read without learning something, which is more than can be said for most investing-related books.

If you're more interested in stocks than real estate, check out Liz Claman's very similar book The Best Investment Advice I Ever Received: Priceless Wisdom from Warren Buffett, Jim Cramer, Suze Orman, Steve Forbes, and Dozens of Other Top Financial Experts.

No matter what you plan to do with your life, skills in negotiation are incredibly important. It's generally a field that's associated with business deals, but teachers with a room full of boisterous 8-year olds have quite a bit of negotiation to do as well. If you aspire to ever earn more than you do now, getting a raise will likely involve some kind of negotiation.

Looking to learn more about this art form, I started googling around for books on negotiation and saw some good reviews of Trump Style Negotiation: Powerful Strategies and Tactics for Mastering Every Deal, written by Trump's longtime lawyer, George H. Ross.

Full disclosure: I hate Donald Trump.

That said, this is actually an amazing book. With an emphasis on relationship building and fair play, Ross walks the reader through the various tactics negotiators can use: simple solutions, dead dog on the table, deadlocking, the crunch, and many, many more. You'll also learn about how to deal with difficult people" Ivan the Intimidator, Waffling Wilma, and Know-it-all Charlie.

Examples from mega-deals in real estate -- involving Trump and other high profile developers -- add color, making this a surprisingly breezy and enjoyable read. If you ever plan to negotiate anything -- and that's pretty much everyone -- you would do well to read this book. Don't let Trump's scary face on the cover scare you.

I'm writing about women's incomes -- what were you thinking?

In a recent scan of Donald Trump's blog, Trump University, I read a blog post the Donald wrote regarding women who earn better incomes than their male partners and what that disparity can do to the men in their lives. Referring to a report provided by Psych Central, Mr. Trump admonishes the partners of women who earn higher salaries to swallow their false pride and examine the upside.

It would seem that being the husband of a woman who is the major bread winner can have some pretty serious health consequences for the man, at least that's what the report points out. However, it's my opinion that men who develop health issues because they begin to earn less than their sweeties are men who already have issues wedged somewhere deep within their mentalities and they should consult with someone about those issues.

As you may have noticed, I scour the internet several times a month with one goal in mind: finding stories that reinforce my distaste for Donald Trump.

This week, I have three for you -- all in one post!

First, in an interview with Martin Bashir of Nightline, Trump said that his confidence has increased with age: "You do develop a confidence, sort of like golf. If you sink the first putt, and if you keep sinking a couple of more putts and as the round goes on, you just feel confident. It's that way in life. If you sink the putt, you get more and more confident. And very few people have sunk more putts than I have."

But here's the problem: if Donald Trump were a golfer, he wouldn't exactly be giving Tiger Woods a run for his money. He'd be more like Happy Gilmore in the first part of that movie: shanking drives and missing 1-foot putts. If you don't believe me, just ask the shareholders of his Trump Entertainment Resorts company or the numerous other failures that he's lent his name and ego to.

In my weekly quest to find at least one bloggable item to serve a vehicle for mocking Donald Trump, I bring you this: Donald Trump runs afoul of 1672 Scottish law.

It seems that the Donald has been using an emblem with three lions and a fist holding an arrow to promote his proposed golf resort in northeast Scotland. The problem is that there's a Scottish law from 1672 that says you can't use a coat of arms without registering it.

According to the Associated Press, Heraldry expert (!) Hugh Peskett said authorities have the right to fine Trump or destroy the emblems unless he pays a registration fee of $1,700: "The Lord Lyon may not have used its powers in decades, but he has the power to send the boys round and go in and smash up any of these coats of arms."

I'd like to see Donald's comb-over sentenced to a lengthy stay in a Scottish penitentiary. Trump's people say he will register the coat of arms and pay the fee. Glad to see the Scots taking a stand against this clown.

One of my least favorite human beings, Donald Trump, is making headlines with his suggestion that he could do a quicker, less expensive completion of the over-budget, delayed renovations taking place at the United Nations headquarters.

Trump told the Associated Press that "It's a total disgrace. First of all, it's going to take seven and a half years to renovate; it should take 18 months .... It shouldn't cost more than $750 million. What's happening to all that money?"

But the UN, which awarded the $1 billion contract to Skanska USA, says that it wished Trump would have stepped forward earlier. Vivian Van de Perre, the U.N.'s chief of administration for its capital master plan told the Associated Press that it had encouraged Trump to bid on the renovations but that he didn't: "We wish he had put in a bid for $750 million."

So here's my question: If efficiency expert Donald Trump, who has managed to lose a boatload of money running casinos, could do it for less than $750 million, why did he let someone else take it for $1 billion when he'd been invited to bid?

Methinks the Combed Over One doth protest too much -- He's frustrated that his show's a flop and he isn't making headlines anymore.

Most everyone knows by now that there's money to be made in blogging, yet there's much confusion about how to do so effectively. You've heard all the hype about Google Adsense, and that's a fine option for some people, but honestly folks, unless you can develop content which is undeniably brilliant and original, trying to make money with Adsense can be like putting up a lemonade stand in a McDonald's parking lot.

You can make pretty good money blogging if you are a fairly talented writer and you are willing to pound on the keyboard and knock on some doors until an Internet media outlet takes a chance on you. There's also the possibility that you could land a blogging position by being a dedicated commenter in the comments section of an active mainstream blog. The fact of the matter is, that's how I got my gig.

Yesterday we reported that Donald Trump, the king of the comb-over, tipped an L.A. waiter ten grand. However, this turned out to be a fabrication speculated to have been planted by the restaurant. Trump told the New York Post, "This was done by the stupid restaurant to get publicity... It's not my signature." This doesn't mean Trump isn't a good tipper, though.

What I found interesting is our readers' passion about The Donald. As you can see from our reader comments, he has a lot of friends, and a lot of readers that revile him. Half of you thought his reported largesse was in character, half wrote it off as a publicity stunt to stroke his ego.

Reggie Jackson, when playing for the Yankees, reveled in controversy, calling himself "the straw that stirs the drink." What I thought was an innocuous story drew over a million page views and 800 comments, showing that Trump is very much such a straw. From now on, I'll have a lot more respect for his ability to shape public opinion.

If you're a waiter and The Donald is seated in your area, I'd give him constant attention. He may just surprise you by justifying the original story. The gesture would be positively Trumpish.

UPDATE: The New York Post's Page Six reported Friday that Donald Trump denies tipping this waiter $10,000, saying he wasn't in California on Monday. Trump was quoted as saying, "This was done by the stupid restaurant to get publicity. . . It's not my signature."

Donald Trump. When you hear that name, do you think blow-hard, cad, an annoying man whose wealth makes him hard to ignore? Me, too. Certainly, the word munificent doesn't come to mind. Therefore, the report of his generosity toward a Hollywood waiter took me by surprise. It appears that Mr. Trump, when not humiliating apprentices, is capable of some very nice actions, such as tipping like a king.

According to the report on Derober, Trump and another man shared dinner Monday at the Buffalo Club in L.A. Their waiter had trouble even getting their attention to order, but a co-worker told him that Trump had tipped generously in the past, so the waiter had hopes of a C-note or such. When the meal was over. Trump asked him what was the biggest tip he'd ever received, to which he hesitantly responded, $500.

When The Donald left the building, the lucky waiter found, much to his shock and awe, that he'd been left a $10,000 tip. Trump, apparently, doesn't like to be one-upped at anything.

Hearing this, I'll view The Donald's actions with a lot more generosity. As someone I can't recall Raytheon CEO Bill Swanson once said, a person who treats you well and the waiter badly is not a nice person. Perhaps the reverse is also true.

You can vote for Trump in AOL's annual Best & Worst in Money awards. He's in the category Most Annoying Celebrity Feud, thanks to his tiff with Rosie O'Donnell.