regmonkey pretending to understand econ
Joined April 2020
- Tweets 16,302
- Following 990
- Followers 1,376
- Likes 101,157
1,216 Photos and videos
Sorrow Residual retweeted
Jun 14
Every city that doesn't implement congestion pricing should be required to write a report like this
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Jun 14
the skepticism in the discussion to the Callendar effect paper (first to document the increase in land tempratures linked to co2 emissions) is interesting to read. also see these graphs:
rmets.org/sites/default/file…
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Jun 14
But if you say a financially constrained tier 2 city doesn't need a fancy metro that will need to price itself at 3x the next cheapest option, the entire infra-bro consortium on twitter will reign down upon you with their might x.com/sethposting/status/153…
May 13
“Forty years of transportation economics at Harvard can be boiled down to four words. Bus good, train bad.”
Ed Glaeser on this week's episode of Ideas in Development.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Jun 12
My paper using LPM was flagged as 165% AI written.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Jun 9
if you meant to read Capital in the 21st Century back in 2014 but never got to it, you can now pretend you were right in shorting Piketty all along.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Jun 9
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Encountered a paper from a decade ago with the same findings as my thesis, but it’s fine because it’s a history paper with no formal model
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Jun 4
Subway takes guests will say this is evil
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Turns out that the ideology of authors working on the impact of ideology on research outcomes had an influence on the outcome of their research
A few months ago, a high profile paper in Science claimed to find that researchers' ideology produced biased results in favour of immigration.
A reanalysis of the data finds that result came from a coding error, which once corrected, shows no effect.
Will people who shared that original finding update their views?
osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/4…
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
May 18
Idk where this “they tried teaching Indians that Aurangzeb was a hero” idea came from. My parents gave me a bunch of Indian history textbooks from the 90s as a kid and none of them said that shit lol. There was often an explicit “good Mughal-bad Mughal” contrast with Akbar lol
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Feb 25
Every time I see this account on my TL, it's a tweet that is confidently wrong. Incredibly consistent on that front.
Feb 24
> Indian revenues did not go to the British exchequer
This is straight up false, basically all RW historians make up stuff to flatter their audience
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May 17
Again and again
x.com/i/status/2055849807500…
May 17
Why does anyone care about Stiglitz ? Explain without jargon ? he seems like a massive midwit leftist who's just wrong about everything
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
May 14
i was reading this piece by avinash dixit which is more interesting than the praise around krugman. on the section of oligopoly and trade. the paper explicitly says trade can reduce monopoly power and push prices closer to costs.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Minimum Parking Requirements are based on statistical analysis, provide precise estimates, and even include R^2.
So let’s look at that “science”.
(Examples from Shoup, The High Cost Of Free Parking — read this if you haven’t!)
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
May 2
Had a Jane Street phone interview in 2016. "Price a 6-month forward on carrots."
There's no carrot futures market, so I build one from scratch: seasonal harvest cycles, USDA demand elasticity, cold storage decay rates.
One trader stops me. "Your storage cost function– you're modeling the carrot as dead inventory. Like grain in a silo." He asks me the metabolic respiration rate of a post-harvest carrot at 2°C. I estimate.
"Your forward is overpriced by exactly that shrinkage. The underlying is consuming its own sugars. It's alive." Good correction. I adjust the model. I think I've recovered.
Rejection email comes the next morning. Subject: "Ethical Review." My framework, they write, "relied on the severance of the root organism from its growth medium." The question about respiration was a test. The carrot was still alive and I'd built an entire derivatives structure on top of its death without questioning whether harvest was an acceptable act.
I pull up the recruiter's original email. It doesn't say Jane Street. It says Jain Street– a non-violent quantitative commodities fund.
The carrot was never supposed to be priced. It was supposed to be refused. I later learn the only candidate who passed that round was a former monk from Gujarat who sat in silence for eleven minutes and said, "I cannot put a price on life." He's now a partner.
Jane Street made ~$40B in 2025 with 3,500 employees, a ~2x from the year before.
At ~65-70% profit margin, that's $8M profit / employee, the highest for a 1000 ppl company. High-frequency trading continues to be the most efficient money making engine.
I want to share an old story about my Jane Street interview in 2014. Jane Street was known for hiring a lot of math, physics and CS olympiad winners from top universities and putting them through many rounds - including, for trading roles, a gauntlet of mental math. It was my 6th interview and my final round and I recall being asked "What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?" They'd toy with you and say "You can use a pencil and paper, if you want" but you knew that was an instant no. Painstakingly and as quickly as I could, I came to an answer. "How confident are you that this is correct on a 0-1 probability scale?" the interviewer said. "0.95", I blurted out, not fully knowing how to answer that. "Are you sure?" After thinking harder for a few more seconds, I realized I could've flipped the digits around to get a closer date. I gave the interviewer my answer. It was correct. "0.95 huh?" he chuckled. That's when I knew I failed.
Note: fwiw, other companies that come close in efficiency are
- Tether ($90M profit/emp)
- Hyperliquid ($80M profit/emp)
and on revenue:
- Valve ($50M/emp)
- OnlyFans ($37M/emp)
- Craigslist ($14M/emp)
- Anthropic ($12M/emp, run rate)
- OpenAI ($8M/emp, run rate)
For comparison, Nvidia is very efficient at scale and is $4.4M/emp.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
As bigoted as this is, it’s important to note this isn’t true and not amplify his message as reality. Large numbers of Bengali Hindu’s have been in these camps, a lot of people have taken their own lives and subjected to a variety of procedural harassment.
Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma in Bengal on 22 April:
"In the detention camps in Assam, there are no Hindus. We only spit on Bangladeshi Muslims in these camps".
"We do not consider Bangladeshi Hindus foreigners, but we give full ‘treatment’ to ‘Bangladeshi Muslims.’"
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Edited picture because the pre-GST average line was misplaced
Chart to avoid mis-understanding latest GST numbers
The relevant numbers:
-are NET not gross revenues
-should include cess collections
-should be seen relative to GDP
After peaking at 6% in FY24, they have declined-for multiple reasons-to 5.7% & below pre-GST average of 6.1%
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
The idea that tree cutting in Mumbai is because you can build 25 floors instead of 3-floor buildings, rather than because the city has been horizontally sprawling by roughly 12 sq. km a year for 3 decades, is just bizarre. Everyone just ignores the very basic urbanization pattern
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
There is something to be said about Indian journalists and academics who reminisce about how great life under Sheila Dixit was, as if tree cutting and slum demolition are very recent features of Indian cities rather than the explosion of an established pattern.
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worlds tiniest violin or smth, the FSI will increase.
Apr 29
Mumbai is now a free-for all paradise for builders and contractors with friends in power:
Cut as many trees as you want, conjure up with ridiculous infra projects worth thousands of crores, build high-rises in places fire engines can't reach.
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Very funny twist on the "You couldn't make this today" claim
Apr 26
Zach Galifianakis says Between Two Ferns "wouldn't work anymore," explaining that "we're living in meaner times."
consequence.net/2026/04/zach…
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Sorrow Residual retweeted
Apr 25
In India any perceived slight is downplayed as sarcasm lol, interesting quirk of the language
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