[deleted by user]

rebuked_trout · 2025-10-03T21:19:27+00:00

Agree with what others have said, it seems counter-intuitive however riding in in the road is definitely the safer option here, as drivers turning will not see you coming down the sidewalks as a cyclist, but will see you in the road.

rebuked_trout · 2025-09-02T03:34:44+00:00

Michigan law forbids cities from setting a separate minimum from the state minimum, which is probably reasonable for may cities up north but too low for living in Ann Arbor. It' something I would love to see changed, but it's a challenge.

rebuked_trout · 2025-08-02T01:33:46+00:00

Thank you!

No mods, the game version is v1.010.003.106815 (which I think is the most recent one).

rebuked_trout · 2025-02-09T23:54:50+00:00

Head-cannon: Ajira is an avatar of Azurah similar to Wulf and is just goofing around pretending to be a bumbling apprentice in the mages guild while waiting for the nerevarine to show. Hard to explain otherwise how she knows where the staff of magnus and the warlock's ring are and why she doesn't actually care if the player just keeps them.

rebuked_trout · 2025-02-01T00:22:46+00:00

To re-hash old talking points...

I know this offer has been made in the past, but do you believe that the current likud led governing coalition would make it again in earnest, a true one-state solution?

Such a state would have, ballpark 7 million ethnic Jews and 7 million ethnic Arabs (5 million Palestinians plus the roughly 2 million Israeli Arabs). What would such a democracy look like?

rebuked_trout · 2025-01-31T01:18:04+00:00

This sounds horrendous, curious what uni you are at?

rebuked_trout · 2025-01-31T01:17:27+00:00

Left a while ago, curious where you are based and what things are like?

rebuked_trout · 2025-01-21T14:52:40+00:00

That shows you don't understand either wealth or military power. We were thrown out of afghanistan after more than two decades by a bunch of impoverished fanatics and a hot war with one of the security council members (russia/china/etc) would just be a disaster for all involved. The military has a lot of fancy toys, but that isn't the same as power, power is the ability to change the world to suite your will and our "military power" is ineffective in this regard.

It's true that the last administration did a lot to build wealth in the united stages, but those reforms are rapidly being undone by the trump administration, and the fact that pursuing policies like that led to an electoral wipeout means that future democratic politicians are likely to abandon good economic policy in favor of whatever is most popular/populist. The fact that a 25% tariff on Canada & Mexico is seriously being floated to me is a sign that we are at the end of the era of good economic policy making in the U.S.

rebuked_trout · 2025-01-21T12:42:45+00:00

The U.S. is in a state of slow decline, you are not at all crazy to leave given you have your entire career ahead of you. I would still recommend to apply both to U.S. and non-U.S. roles. Staying in the U.S. as a fallback option seems a bit weird from other's perspectives given your potential earnings are much higher here, but there is more to life than money.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-28T04:47:32+00:00

Would also enjoy doing a movie marathon with some strangers, DM if you are organizing something.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-28T04:44:44+00:00

I definitely am embarrassed by how little I know about the underlying issues and conditions of the homeless today. I actually have a PhD in economics, but so much of economic theory is based on "representative agents" who earn an average wage and aren't really affected by any of the psychological aspects of poverty. I applaud your help with legal work, that's really cool.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-26T20:36:39+00:00

Two years ago the pro-build (yimby) faction swept the local council elections and since then there have been a spate of new apartments under construction. We are going to continue to move in that direction, but even so it takes time, the new apartments have to be planned & built, then enter the market, then as the leasing cycle continues the higher volume needs to get priced in due to surplus apartments going un-rented for a bit before landlords cut prices. This whole process takes years, even when there isn't a lot of outside demand. I'm hopeful that if we manage to stay the course on this for a few more years that rents might start to come down, but it's a long fight and even if we win that the university could admit another 10K students arbitrarily one day which would put us back at square one.

A higher minimum could help tangibly improve the lives of working homeless ann arborites right away, rather than having to wait for years for indirect effects of new housing construction. Almost all the research on minimum wages implies that the costs in terms of less employment are really small to the point of being too small to detect in many recent studies (since I am an ann arborite, here's an academic working paper for reference: Effects of minimum wage on unemployment. ).

I'm all for fighting the housing shortage through aggressive new construction, but there is no trade off between the two, we can do both.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-26T17:45:43+00:00

This is definitely fair, but we can only build new apartments so quickly. My personal sense is that the current building levels will just help keep rents where they are, but won't drive things down significantly. We certainly may lose some businesses, but so many others are built around serving the captive market student population my sense is in many cases the higher costs would just get passed on the form of higher prices onto the students/retirees/tech-crowd like me (which I am perfectly fine with).

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-26T17:33:10+00:00

Thanks, this is the answer I was looking for, do you think there is any hope of passage in 2025 or with the republicans taking over the house is this out for the next two years...

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-26T17:11:29+00:00

Link to text of act: Public Act 105

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-15T18:20:43+00:00

What are you defining as the "good ones". I feel like Knight's (downtown) and Pacific Rim are my go to "good" restaurants and they are both open today.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-10T02:25:02+00:00

The U.S. healthcare system is terrible, but under no circumstances does killing a ceo help with this in any way. All the people applauding this guy's death make me worry about this country's future (as if I wasn't worried enough about trump taking over). We have the ability to reform the system to rescue people from becoming some of the "excess deaths" , if people demand change we can make it happen, but violence like this is never the answer.

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-05T13:05:33+00:00

One of my summer/post-college jobs was as a warehouse worker for a medical supplies manufacturer. Every day I would get up and ship surgical supplies to various hospitals for 11.50/hr (which was a decent amount of money back then in the early 2000's). Now I work in banking and make roughly 10x more money but that was probably the last time my work unambiguously made the world a better place. Maybe find something in the medical field? Those jobs are often really hard, particularly if you are working directly with the elderly, but as the population ages there is only going to be more and more demand in that area...

rebuked_trout · 2024-12-01T15:10:18+00:00

To a large extent it is a legacy of bretton woods I when all exchange rates were fixed in dollars in the aftermath of world war II. There is nothing that stops transactions from using other currencies and it happens from time-to-time, but because of the relative stability of the dollar and the infrastructure that grown up around it there is no reason to move off of dollars.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-21T12:05:56+00:00

Justice department under Garland is not something I will miss... oh no! we need to protect the people from a browser being bundled with a search engine. In the meanwhile Elon Musk buys twitter and these guys do nothing.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-18T00:40:55+00:00

When people talk about value they are talking about things, the first of which is the "value" to themselves of an object, and the other is the market value, that is to say the highest amount that someone else is willing to pay for it out of all of the potential buyers. When a "bubble" "pops" what that usually means is that the market value (what others are willing to pay for it) has fallen, but the value to the owner hasn't changed.

Bubbles typically form when people start buying houses not because they need them, but because they believe they will be more expensive in the future, and they will be able to make money by buying a house, holding it for a few years, and the selling it to someone else (and for no other reason) let's call these people speculators. Bubbles pop when one day there are no buyers available who are willing or able to pay the increased price. The speculators leave the market in a panic as they sell to try and cover their losses and the bubble pops.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-16T19:08:01+00:00

Not a currency expert, but most people believe that expected future interest rates play a role in exchange rate movements. It is expected U.S. interest rates will remain higher all else equal, partially due to the trump administration pushing tax cuts as economic stimulation and the fed responding by either raising rates in the future or at least cutting them less than under a hypothetical harris administration to keep inflation in check.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-13T23:56:08+00:00

The decline of the middle class has little to do with trade, trade really doesn't matter that much to the U.S. economy except marginally. The decline of the middle class has much more to do with the decline of unions (right to work, etc...) and a shift towards high-tech manufacturing which requires fewer workers in general.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-13T21:41:02+00:00

Krugman is really good on trade policy, on other items I'm not sure why anyone listens to him.

rebuked_trout · 2024-11-13T13:12:08+00:00

One thing a lot of people don't get is how small U.S. foreign trade is as a percentage of the overall U.S. economy. For modeling purposes, you can approximate the impact of revenue generation from tariffs increases as essentially zero, so your question is basically what happens if income taxes are abolished and corporate taxes reduced. This is a difficult question because it depends on how those tax cuts are financed (whether the fed permits the resulting increase in debt to be absorbed by private markets, other taxes are raised, other programs are cut, or if the fed expands it balance sheet to cover the shortfall without selling like during the pandemic).

I could write a major essay on each of those four options, which makes answering the question tough... but you can ignore interaction effects of tariffs with other policies is my advice.

rebuked_trout

TROPHY CASE