Under the students’ plan, called the UC Student Investment Proposal, students in the system would pay no upfront costs for their education but would agree to pay 5% of their income to the system for 20 years after graduating and entering the workforce.

Building a profitable small-market company is difficult and carries a high risk of failure. Building a profitable large-market company is also difficult and carries a high risk of failure. But the marginal risk in building a company decreases as the addressable market increases. While a larger company may require more total work, the relative effort is less. Make no mistake: small-market companies still come with 18 hour days, flaky vendors, upset customers, and exasperated spouses.

Thinking small increases our risk. So let’s think big.

Imagine, if you will, a man who, as Speaker of the House, orchestrates the impeachment of a President for an adulterous affair with a White House aide twenty-six years his junior while he himself is conducting an adulterous affair with a congressional aide twenty-two years his junior, having earlier left the first of his three wives while she was hospitalized with cancer. Imagine a man who attributes these behaviors to “how passionately I felt about this country.” Imagine a man who, told he can’t sit in a front section of Air Force One, shuts down the government. Imagine a man who becomes the only House Speaker ever to be disciplined for ethics violations. Imagine a man who, in a country just staggering out of the worst recession of the past fifty years and facing the threat of worldwide economic collapse, proposes to hire small children to work as janitors, mopping floors and cleaning toilets in their schools (or their orphanages, perhaps). Imagine that man as Commander-in-Chief.

Karen Matthews, a reporter with The Associated Press, asked, via Twitter, whether the mayor saw one teacher and 62 children as a good model. The mayor’s press secretary, Stu Loeser, shot back: “Are you asking as a journalist, advocate, or mom?

Stern’s concern for his league’s fans was as transparently phony as was Carnegie’s concern for his workers. (Hearing the commissioner’s unctuous solicitude for the paying customers must have occasioned rueful chuckling, and projectile vomiting, in Seattle.) His primary constituency is a group of 29 men who don’t have to deal much with unions in their principal occupations anymore and who, therefore, are not accustomed to reacting well when the help gets, well, uppity. The lockout was THE perfect oligarch’s answer.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.

I feel less and less that way when I read angry tweets and newspaper comments about my profession. Maybe I shouldn’t read what angry tax paying trolls write and say on the internet, but I’m so appalled I keep checking to see if it’s still there. I’m told I’m ungrateful. I read that I am greedy, or a tool of greedy union bosses. I am a selfish son of a bitch, one guy informed me, when I was trying to explain the details and the facts of current legislation. I read that everyone’s life is going down the toilet, because I am breaking their backs. I have ruined everything. Everything is ruined.

Please know it did not feel like ruining everything. It felt like sitting in a tiny plastic chair at a tiny table, cajoling an autistic preschooler into brushing watercolor across a white wax face i had pre drawn, then watching him laugh at the big reveal. It felt like receiving a drawing as a gift from a talented little boy who drew like an adult, but suffered crippling arthritis in his hands and for whom i had arranged free classes at SAIC. It felt like crossing a name off a roster because she and her grandmother had been raped and killed in their house near the school. It felt like a million little notes shoved into my hands and pockets from eager little people who only came up to my waist. It felt like tamales from mothers who could not speak much English, but beamed widely as they handed the foil package over.

“For years owners have treated players as if they are just their property,” Goodwin said, “fining them over how they dress, act, everything. This is the first time the players have the opportunity to say no.”

Whoa. For months and months, bubbling beneath the surface of the posturing and rhetoric, buried under anonymous leaks, veiled threats and everything else that makes any professional sports lockout or strike so insufferable, a dynamic had been swelling that was entirely, 100 percent personal.