Two related questions:

1. From Tonks:

Mr. Tonks and I are thinking of starting a business but he needs some more samples and I need some ideas. So, tell me, what's your ideal kid's room or playroom look like?

2. From me: What would you put as a lower bound, square-footage-wise, if you were designing a kid's bedroom? What about a lower bound for 2 kids sharing, or for 3 kids sharing? As in, I do believe kids can get along quite well in something closet-sized, but there's not really any reason to go quite that small if you're building, which we may be.

Suppose, hypothetically, you were going to build one room for three kids to share. Suppose your plan was that as they grew older, you could put bookshelves or drywall to subdivide the space if they needed privacy or isolation. How big would you make this room?

(We don't know for sure how many kids we want, etc. I just want to sample square-footage ideas for a plan like this.)

So great. During her $100,000 teabavaganza, Sarah Palin has "Energy", "Tax" and "Lift American Spirits" and "Budget cuts" written on the palm of her hand. She consults her crib notes during the Q&A.

Sometimes I think the teabaggers are a wonderful movement, for giving clear labels and organization for the wingnuts. I'm pretty sure the average American thinks the teabaggers are fucking nuts. It's good to have that set of beliefs cordoned off and given the fucking nuts stigma.

This is a thread for discussing the Super Bowl.

Nick sends some entries my way. Here and here. In short:

But it still strikes me as massively disappointing that the recorded music industry has never really been able to make audio quality a sufficient selling point to discourage people from sharing compressed versions.

I don't know that I find this disappointing exactly. I've never been a huge quality-o-phile, though; I just like to tap my toe to the beat. So maybe I'm not the right one to judge.

I get totally annoyed with the male gender at the college age, at least here at Heebie U, for their basic desire to relish in laziness and irresponsibility. Examples: at math club, I presented a request from a nearby middle school that they desperately need after school tutors. The commitment would be thirty minutes a week, any day of the week. Out of about twenty students, seven (women? girls? what exactly do you call college age females?) volunteered and no boys. Or, in each of my lower level classes, I give a test at the beginning of the semester, described here. This semester, I have 15 girls and 20 boys in my two lower level classes. Who failed the basics test? 1 girl and 8 boys. Get your goddamn act together, stupid boys.

The "Oh, the plight of our boys!" articles that appear periodically are annoying, but there is something to them. It would be really great if boys were socialized more like girls.

When audacious's playlist window is minimized, using the font I use, the "H" looks kind of like a "B", if you aren't looking too closely.

Apparently, one of the free OTA stations has gone to a format of showing random movies from the '80s and '90s, all the time. Last night's was great: War Games. Tic Tac Toe FTW!

Tonight's, however, is Blame It on Rio, which has me wondering if this film is all an elaborate prank. This cannot possibly have been an actual cinematic release.

"Inequality," [Ona Porter] says, "really holds us back."

[Samuel Bowles] offers a key reason why this is so. "Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources," he says.

In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls "guard labor." In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.

Interesting article, via Emerson.

I can't say that I buy the proposal at the end as the best way to redistribute wealth.

"Suppose instead what we did is this: We said, 'Look, when somebody turns 18, he gets a quarter of a million dollars and, after that, you're on your own,'" Bowles says. "Once you've got your quarter-million, you've got to make a decision: 'Should I go to college or do I want to start a business?'--which you could do with a quarter of a million."

This is a variant of an old idea, more recently popularized--at least in Europe--by the Belgian economist Philippe Van Parijs. Under his "basic income grant" proposal, the government would redistribute wealth so that everyone has enough to live.

I've heard this sort of thing before, but never as a one-time lump sum. That certainly sets up a litmus test of one's ability to plan and organize at age 18. Would you then not provide a safety net if someone hits rock bottom at age 30?