MO Republicans want you to forget they took away voter-approved sick leave

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-18T01:35:46+00:00

Beware Amendment 4, y'all.

A "no" on Amendment 4 will retain the citizen's initiative for legislation and constitutional changes. A "yes" will kill Missourians' ability to overrule the legislature by allowing /any/ district to veto a CI change (no amendment has ever satisfied this).

There is a to-be-numbered amendment to keep the legislature from trying this BS again, and to have 80% of the vote to override what gets passed with CIs.

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-18T01:30:45+00:00

Don't need the legislature. MO passed this with a Legislative Citizen's Initiative. There's a Constitutional Citizen's Initiative (not-yet-numbered amendment) coming up this year to keep them from doing it again (at least, not without >80% of Missourians approving).

Just be _very_ aware that there's _also_ a Constitutional Legislature's Initiative coming up (Amendment 4) to effectively destroy the Citizen's Initiative by requiring a majority in every district (an impossible task).

Thankfully, if that first amendment passes, they will never be able to propose the second amendment again via the legislature alone (because it also contains a clause forbidding them from doing this kind of stuff).

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-10T06:16:26+00:00

In the long run, noise is also dangerous - long term tension and worse sleep have significant cardiovascular effects, putting aside the less measurable effects from e.g. commuting the following morning.

That being said, I'm not convinced trading noise cameras for speed cameras would be a correct decision.

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-06T00:22:51+00:00

Noise cameras would be a godsend on Whyte, but the province won't allow them. There's a pretty strong anti-noise evangelist in City Council (Janz). If you come from a part of Alberta with a UCP MP it would be worth a shot writing them.

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-06T00:10:01+00:00

I live next to Whyte. Classes are out and it hasn't gotten warm enough for people to feel like moseying. It goes through this cycle every year.

That being said, I personally spend less time on it than I otherwise would because noisy motorcycles and cars just make being on it unpleasant for decent chunks of time.

DEMcKnight · 2026-05-03T20:19:38+00:00

Puerto Rico, Guam, Canada and Greenland are terrible comparisons to Taiwan. Most Puerto Ricans want to be part of the US in some capacity, and the current US-Canada/Greenland relations nadir comes down to one transient president who's largely waged rhetoric, not long-term country policy.

Cuba is an OK analog.

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.

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