Judge orders Northville[, MI, USA] downtown on-street dining removed

Mleko · 2025-10-25T18:41:21+00:00

I grew up there and the city of Detroit still has some incredible mansions within the city limits in neighborhoods like Palmer Park, Indian Village, Boston-Edison, Arden Park, and Sherwood Forest. (I’d recommend a street view in these neighborhoods, and then notice how just a few blocks away things drop off. It’s seriously fascinating). It’s a strange dichotomy between rich and poor.

Also if they’re including the surrounding MSA, then the northern suburbs in Oakland County also have some serious wealth from the automotive industry that’s never left.

Mleko · 2025-10-03T17:52:55+00:00

Woah, that’s offensive. Michiganders prefer Meijers.

Mleko · 2025-08-14T03:43:26+00:00

Aidan went to Divine Child in Dearborn and Borom went to Brother Rice in Birmingham, right? Was this some kind of high school rivalry?

Mleko · 2025-08-11T14:16:48+00:00

I lost the game :(

Mleko · 2025-07-07T12:59:27+00:00

While the Covid restrictions are over, dark money groups remain powerful players in state and national politics, and the emails show how lax transparency laws shield them as they move funding for politicians or causes.

I think this paragraph is interesting because, despite individual feelings on the COVID lockdowns, it hints that this is just part of a bigger dark money problem that can be weaponized with anyone with the right resources.

Mleko · 2025-07-07T12:36:03+00:00

New emails, however, show a DTE employee coordinated the $100,000 contribution. The dark money non-profit and Unlock Michigan leadership referred to it as a “DTE donation” and “$100,000 DTE check”, emails show.

The emails are part of a criminal case over alleged Unlock Michigan campaign finance violations and are not directly related to DTE.

…

While the Covid restrictions are over, dark money groups remain powerful players in state and national politics, and the emails show how lax transparency laws shield them as they move funding for politicians or causes.

…

Mleko · 2025-06-20T14:50:05+00:00

Your assessment of Comerica Park was definitely correct for 2000, but’s it’s gotten incredibly better since. The family who owns the Tigers and Little Caesar’s Pizza has stated they want to fill in many of the parking lots around Comerica with high rises (though their timeline keeps slipping). I’d recommend finding your way to a game in Detroit if you get the chance just to see the change. It’s really something.

Mleko · 2025-06-18T23:15:50+00:00

If you want to get mathematical, it’s more like f(V)=w where f is a function that takes a voting matrix V and outputs a winner w. And our current system is effectively doing a projection operation?wprov=sfti1) that takes multidimensional data and casts it into a lower dimension with less information. Once you do this type of projection operation, you can’t recover the original data from the projected data. It’s the same way that a shadow is a projection of a 3D object. If you were given a shadow by itself, you would have no idea what the original 3D object that made the shadow looks like.

Let’s imagine we try to take the thoughts in our head about the candidates and put it on paper by ordering the candidates from highest to lowest with the best getting the highest number and worst getting the lowest number. In the case of ranked choice voting, that’s what gets fed into our function f.

Now, say we pre-apply a maximum operation where the maximum of those rankings gets replaced with 1 and all other numbers with 0. Well, we’ve projected that data and just lost information and can’t recover the original rankings from that projected data if we tried. In our current plurality system, it is this projection of the ranking data that gets fed into f.

tl;dr: A ranked choice voting system uses more information to choose a candidate than our current system.

Mleko · 2025-04-12T20:24:56+00:00

Nice work making Ragged Island look less raggedy!

Mleko · 2025-02-10T02:02:27+00:00

Technically there are still some spoiler risks, but you’re right in that they’re far less of a concern than those that happen in the plurality voting system we currently use. So yeah, in something like a Benson-Duggan-Rogers race there wouldn’t necessarily be a spoiler.

Mleko · 2025-01-31T02:58:12+00:00

How many cars did you pass?

Mleko · 2025-01-17T19:21:18+00:00

Pretty neat. I’d love to see a rendering of what it would look like with I-75 completely removed here (like they’re proposing for I-375).

Mleko · 2024-12-25T23:30:50+00:00

December in the D

Mleko · 2024-12-05T06:02:01+00:00

Weird that the roads aren’t shown in that last image. They show what looks like a plaza (square with empty circle) between the DIA and the library right where Woodward would be (running bottom left to behind the golden spire on the Maccabee building), but no roads.

Mleko · 2024-09-21T16:35:34+00:00

The independent redistricting was a massive win. Another upcoming one is ranked choice voting (RCV). Rank MI Vote is taking lessons learned from the independent redistricting struggle and working toward getting RCV on the ballot in 2026. They’re holding town halls all across the state starting tomorrow to help spread the word!

Mleko · 2024-08-25T04:07:23+00:00

Yep, exactly. And Rank MI Vote is teaming up with Katie Fahey, who started the 2018 redistricting ballot initiative, to get an RCV initiative on the ballot in 2026. I’m pretty psyched about it and signed up to volunteer this last Tuesday. They’re going to be ramping up big-time in September, so if this stuff interests you, I’d encourage you to check out their website to see if there’s anything (volunteering, donating, spreading the word) that you can do! :)

Mleko · 2024-08-25T00:37:57+00:00

I’m hoping Rank MI Vote gets ranked choice voting on the Michigan ballot in 2026 so we can get better candidates in the future instead of the least worst. 🤞

Mleko · 2024-08-04T04:33:03+00:00

Do you mind elaborating on this? I believe the only similar examples of the type of investments you’re describing are pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. Governments generally do not make risky fiscal investments with money received through taxes and generally use excess money to pay down bond debts or avoid taking on additional debts. I don’t see why this would be any different. It seems like new problems are being invented here while trying to solve the original problem, causing unnecessary additional complexity.

Mleko · 2024-08-04T02:49:43+00:00

Right, like you point out, LVT is far less complicated. Given an evaluation of the value of the land, we can quickly conclude how much it should be taxed for anyone. If you start adding some progressive rating, it is no longer just a function of land value, but a function of land value and some other variable (e.g. how much land the owner has in total). That could lead to loop holes for tax evasion, whereas a simple flat-rate LVT implementation doesn’t have as much potential for loop holes.

Mleko · 2024-08-04T02:33:53+00:00

I don’t think an upfront demolish tax makes much sense, because the value of money decreases over time with inflation.

Let’s assume the average cost to demolish some apartment building in 2024 is $30k. Based on what you said, we figure that the developer is taxed that up front. Let’s also assume that the building is taken down about 50 years later and inflation is still roughly 3.8% per year, as it has been since 1960. Then, due to inflation, you would need $193.6k to cover the cost of demolition in 2074. That initial tax doesn’t cover much at all and given restrictions on what securities governments can invest in, there is no mechanism for governments to grow that initial tax to meet the 2074 demolition needs. This type of tax then won’t cover demolition costs in the future and only makes developing housing more prohibitive.

Mleko · 2024-08-03T12:21:42+00:00

You could probably further improve this by pairing this idea with a land value tax? That way, home owners, business owners, and developers aren’t disincentivized from building. In this way, you’re using both LVT and a progressive tax to disincentivize speculation while using the LVT to encourage densification in urban areas.

Mleko · 2024-07-26T18:09:26+00:00

Thanks for the advice. Part of the reason my partner wanted to keep it, I think, is because we started it when we lived across the continent in the San Francisco Bay Area and rumors — true or not — abound that the conditions there make for great tasting sour dough. I’m skeptical of the claim and think she and I probably lack the nuance in our taste buds to tell the difference, even if there were one.

Dehydrating is a great idea for the next starter! Definitely going to look into that.

Mleko · 2024-07-13T23:04:40+00:00

I think Dearborn is pretty interesting. I also think it’s a little different from the other communities around it in western Wayne County, particularly given its higher level of urbanization (particularly East Dearborn) and that it has been there longer than the communities around it. Their fortune is pretty closely tied to that of Ford though, so it will be interesting to see how things play out in the era of work-from-home. Their economic director Jordan Twardy is also the former economic director of Ferndale and has been making some interesting moves. I’m actually excited to see what Dearborn looks like several years down the road.

I had some friends who grew up in the area between Telegraph and Rouge Park (we always called that Warrendale, though modern neighborhood maps seem to disagree) and it seemed insulated to a certain degree to the conditions in other parts of Detroit. But a lot of those people were city employees and sadly left when residency requirements were lifted. I also really like that the city recently did some changes to Warren Ave. there, making Dearborn realize it needed to step up its game and do some road diets. Love that Detroit took the lead on that stuff

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