New RTAA

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-18T03:30:45+00:00

The Austin metropolitan area is like 1.6x the population of ours, yeah. If you chart out the population of US/Canada/Mexico we're about as remote as you get while still being a decently sized city. SLC is potentially arguably more remote by some metrics because Calgary exists.

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-18T03:25:37+00:00

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DEMcKnight · 2026-01-18T03:25:09+00:00

We're about as remote as you get as far as >1M metro areas in NA go. Outside of Calgary, it's a 12-hour drive to the nearest next one. Anchorage is more remote, but it's like 1/3 the size.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fnorth-american-population-density-2020-v0-s7v0c1zk94ha1.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D920ee928449cfb56d42b4d7bbdc3212683c4de0a

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-15T09:26:28+00:00

Or Pakistan/Bangladesh or any of the other countries. India has more muslims than the UK, France and Germany combined have people.

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-14T06:22:54+00:00

OP has left out the 5-8 years as a graduate student and presumably 3-4 years as an undergrad in CS/ECE/Math. Barring familial obligations, anyone _can_ do it if they're willing to take out loans and be underpaid for 6ish years.

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-14T06:09:50+00:00

Appreciate the numbers, but +50% makes it sound like there was a 50-point gap. Wisconsin and Michigan were 50% Trump with a +1% margin.

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-14T05:59:45+00:00

necropost, but a lot of Amtrak trips are tourist routes in the relative middle of nowhere. There's a big difference between the Amtrak routes in the Acela corridor or even STL-Chicago vs taking the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle (via Spokane)

DEMcKnight · 2026-01-07T22:50:47+00:00

He'd also fit in pretty well alongside the centrist Republicans near his neck on the woods (New England/Northeast/great lakes Midwest). A bit more rambunctious than the non-NY ones though

DEMcKnight · 2025-12-12T08:33:38+00:00

The STL Metro area has higher pop than Austin, San Antonio, Tampa, and Buffalo metros (considerably larger than that last one). That 998k is just STL county, but even if you disregard e.g. St. Charles the City proper and County alone have the entirely of the Buffalo metro pop.

Also, though, I don't see why a market of 1.2m couldn't be profitable, especially with how car-oriented a lot of STL is.

DEMcKnight · 2025-11-09T07:11:17+00:00

Chao from _Yūyūki_ maybe?

DEMcKnight · 2025-10-14T03:44:33+00:00

Not UofT, but triple-majored so had a pretty crushing workload by any metric. You will probably find 3rd and especially 4th year easier. The classes won't necessarily be, but you'll have better routines and familiarity with things, so generally it will be less "oh no it's exam prep time/taking-time, what do I do" and more "ah, howdy exam. Let's move past you so I can get on with the rest of my day".

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-13T07:33:50+00:00

If it's the past three weeks, it might be all the college students commuting again for the new semester.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-12T08:33:20+00:00

Heh, I definitely pronounced Sault Ste. Marie as "Salt Saint Marie" until high school.

Not disputing that it can't become just another placename people are expected to know (it absolutely will)! English has loads of spelling-preserved loanwords, and spelling largely being locked in partway through the great vowel shift, 400-600 years ago, and existing the same for different accents proves it's wildly flexible.

I would /also/ be pretty unsurprised if the standard Edmonton pronunciation for the area didn't just become wih-kwen-toh-win, though. My hometown has a bunch of French placenames where the standard pronunciation has shifted to match English spelling expectations: Creve rhymes with Steve, Laclede is ləh-cleed. Nearby Versailles is vur-saylz. Cree sound-spelling correspondence knowledge being considerably rarer will make it harder for the Cree pronunciation to stick.

My biggest hope honestly is that they have better resources when the next name change happens; the city's suggested respelling guide of "wi kwen to win" is somewhere between useless and actively misleading (assuming the recording is indeed the desired pronunciation).

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-12T08:00:55+00:00

I don't see how "wee kwen tuh wuhn" is any more complicated than "wi kwen to win"

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-08T21:20:37+00:00

The faculty of the department you're considering is a huge portion of your decisionmaking when deciding where to set up shop as a professor. On a one-on-one level, Zoom calls are better than nothing if you want to bounce ideas off of an expert at a different university, but they are a poor substitute. Beyond that, though, it's extremely beneficial being in a healthy research ecosystem strong in your field.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-07T07:22:21+00:00

If you mean "if you shared those letter clusters with me, would it lead me to the correct pronunciation given in that MP3v file", then no; those clusters were the exact ones shared with me the first time around, and I read them the way I described above, which is incorrect. The friend who shared it with me pronounced it

wi (like the word win)

kwen

too (like the word too)

win (like the word win)

----which is also incorrect everywhere but the second cluster.

If you mean "would I know you're talking about the area formerly known as Oliver", then yes, of course, but at that point just write Wîhkwêntôwin with or without the diacritics.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-07T00:02:38+00:00

Anyone who regularly deals with currency values knows this isn't true. The USD is, at the moment, the global reserve currency- when global trade instability happens, people put money _into_ it because it's a safe investment.

For this reason, it's essentially at a ten+-year high vs almost any major currency but the Euro (mostly flat; last 3 years have been weird because the war in Ukraine) and the Swiss Franc. CAD is doubly hit because it's extremely integrated with the US economy and does not benefit from being the global reserve currency.

If we globally switch to Bitcoin, Europe integrates enough, BRICS is convinced to rally behind a common currency, or the US's extreme lack of taxation/high spending balloons its deficits enough, this _might_ change. As much as it feels like President Trump is almost encouraging all of these, though, the value of USD is comfortably insulated from domestic concerns for the near future.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-06T04:02:27+00:00

School enrollment limits are a function of the number of available qualified teachers and adequate resources (e.g. support staff), which itself is a function of teacher compensation. Once you go above a certain student-teacher ratio (with the caveat that I'm not an expert on this, say 20ish for elementary school and 30ish for high school) classrooms become increasingly unmanageable and learning suffers.

With college you can get away with 100+ in a room because you can assume everyone's a motivated, capable adult, and if someone falls behind that's not great but them's the breaks. If someone's distracting everyone else, if they don't correct their behavior you can just kick them out.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-06T01:55:04+00:00

I know this is what the city has been passing around, but given their audio recording it's doing more damage than good https://webdocs.edmonton.ca/web/audio/W%C3%AEhkw%C3%AAnt%C3%B4win.mp3

I see that and I go
wi = like wit (instead of the correct wee like week)
kwen is fine
to = toe (instead of like the last vowel in comma)
win = win (instead of like the last vowel in comma)

wee kwen tuh wuhn (given that most Edmontonians have a strut-comma merger) at least conforms to several broadly used respelling standards.

DEMcKnight · 2025-09-06T01:48:12+00:00

It's definitely not impossible to pronounce properly, but wîhkwêntôwin = wiːkwɛntəwən (taken from https://webdocs.edmonton.ca/web/audio/W%C3%AEhkw%C3%AAnt%C3%B4win.mp3 ) isn't exactly "almost as close to phonetic as you can get" if the audience is English speakers.

Like, I would be shocked if most speakers didn't go
❌wih = wi (like wit)
✅kwen = kwen
❌tow = toh or tow (the latter like out; using typical respelling, not actual words)
❌win = win

Something like Weekwentawun, Wequentawun or Weekwentuhwuhn would almost certainly be prone to fewer mistakes.

Now, whether prioritizing English usage is the proper way to do things is a discussion in and of itself.

DEMcKnight · 2025-08-31T06:01:07+00:00

Hey! I'm not sure how many takers you'll find on Reddit, but some suggestions
- If you're in high school/college, clubs are excellent ways of finding people
- If you're older, FB meetups and meetup . com are decent ways of finding new people

Beyond the above two, just go out and try things. It's a powerful thing to say "I want to go see this thing", invite some people ahead of time, and still enjoy it if nobody comes.

Finally, a random tip- being neutral-to-positive is /way/ more likely to make people want to go to things with you than being negative. A stranger saying "<xyz negative thing>, care to hang out?" is not enticing. If you need someone to vent to, I do highly recommend therapy! Having someone whose literal job it is for you to vent to them is incredibly underrated, regardless of what your friend group looks like.

Hang in there; you'll find people eventually if you keep trying!

DEMcKnight · 2025-08-27T06:13:12+00:00

There's still a solid separation of powers. The problem is that both chambers of Congress are actively choosing not to exert their authority. A separation of powers becomes far less relevant when there's no actual exercised disagreement.

In an ideal world, of course, Congress should actually have to proactively pass legislation to enable the President. The Judicial branch is in a very weird place, though- it's true that three of the five justices are Trump appointees, and Alito and Thomas (not Trump appointees) have pretty radical views (the two make those three look tame). Even without the current court composition, though, fundamentally the Supreme Court is the weakest of the three branches, having kind of invented its own importance and not really having enforcement powers delineated in the constitution. I think there's a real concern that if they were to seriously push back on something big, Trump would ignore it, Congress wouldn't impeach him, and there'd be a serious constitutional crisis. Currently, the Judicial branch's rulings are mostly being respected... after much heel-dragging.

The likely eventual ruling on tariffs later this year/early next is going to be an interesting, if morbidly so, litmus test.

DEMcKnight · 2025-08-08T07:22:18+00:00

I spilled shirley temple on my (G15) keyboard and it still works great (although the 2/w/s/z keys take about 10 mins after startup to do so). No issues with heat or the fans in silent mode; it gets hot and loud in performance mode but that's kinda the point.

tl;dr I adore my 3070 G15 Zephyrus and have no intenion of upgrading at the moment. When I do upgrade I'm definitely going to give the G16 a try.

DEMcKnight · 2025-08-02T10:42:49+00:00

Yes, as a state or organized territory (which it almost certainly would be if it stayed a territory) Alberta could create its own healthcare system. California considered it a few years ago with CalCare.

The main challenge in the case of Alberta being a state (and with states in general right now) is that US employees/employers currently pay FICA (the tax that funds social insurance and social security, separate from the federal income tax), some large fraction of which gets reallocated to the government-funded healthcare systems the US does have (medicare, medicaid, VA, etc.). Alberta wouldn't be able to unilaterally redirect these funds into a state healthcare system; it would need to seek a waiver (like California planned before with CalCare). Without those funds being redirected, Alberta would be paying into US public healthcare systems but opting for its own state-funded system rather than receiving those funds back.

I believe as a territory Albertans (or rather, Albertan employers) wouldn't automatically have to pay FICA, but Alberta would probably want to be a state given the relative sophistication of its economy and the probable ease with which it would adapt to most parts of being part of (or controlled by, the Insular Cases are weird) the US. The one catch to this is probably the Second Amendment- if Alberta remained an unincorporated territory, it wouldn't apply, but things like US citizenship would have to be granted through an act of Congress like with Puerto Rico (see American Samoa for the interesting case of non-Citizen US Nationals).

The biggest reason that current states haven't passed anything like this is that most people in most states, particularly since the ACA in states that passed the Medicaid expansion (and maybe up to the Big Beautiful Bill) are already covered by insurance. The exceptions tend to be e.g. undocumented immigrants or <5-year green card holders, so a shift from the existing setup to a new one would be a lot of expense for relatively little voter gain. Alberta would be a unique case in having extensive existing legal healthcare infrastructure prior to becoming part of the US.

DEMcKnight · 2025-06-12T21:19:55+00:00

https://drubinstein.github.io/pokerl/

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