Parking enforcement in NYC is currently also handled by the sanitation department. They can and do ticket cars blocking street cleaning operations, which parked personally-owned vehicles of cops do interfere with.
I would settle for a bit of towing, or even just fining the individual cops who park their personal cars on the sidewalk. Parking of city-owned vehicles is also a problem, but the former seems easier to enforce per your point.
I'd love to see a division of DOT have a bounty program for illegal parking. They do it for idling trucks, why not do it for vehicles parked in bike lanes/illegal double parking/etc?
The type of enforcement that the public supports is only a tiny sliver of what the kind of people who make the most use of such programs are willing to submit.
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported and there's a lot more public apetite for enforcement against businesses than the general public and they write it off as a cost of doing business.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
Yes, but clearly that's not what Zitron was implying. The rest of his thread's commentary makes that clearer. He's saying:
OpenAI is going to implode soon. They would have to raise an unfathomable amount of money, it's literally never been done and is so much it won't happen. That's why they're going to collapse.
He could have predicted that OpenAI would raise an unprecedented amount of money and are not going to collapse. He clearly believed differently.
I really don't know anything here, but I'm assuming that Astra's weird coding [1] is probably more a result of RSI than intentional behavior. And if it's not, then it's some other change in their training process.
Can't imagine that RSI will result in something useful in practice. There are serious obstacles like alignment drift and model collapse. All while we still cannot solve the accuracy problem with current frontier models.
Mamdani explicitly campaigned on building more, especially housing, so not sure where you got that idea. NIMBYs show up at community board meetings, sure, but your post makes it sound like that's somehow the mayor's fault?
I'm also not sure if you're a New Yorker or not but the NYC EDC remit is a hell of a lot more than just "encourage big business". They run the ferry, for example, and other infrastructure projects
In any Mamdani's interview that I've heard him talk about housing, he always talks about short-term solutions like temporary rent freeze and long term solutions of building new housing.
There's pretty consistent reporting that rental building owners are earning considerable returns from rent. Rent freezes are one (of several) ways to encourage building owners to reinvest those returns to build/improve properties.
Whether it'll work at large scale is an unproven experiment (Detroit, Paris, Estonia, and many others all show competing possible futures here), but it doesn't seem hypocritical--not any more than, say, the idea of using high tax rates on businesses to encourage reinvestment of profits to drive growth/hiring/expansion.
How do rent freezes encourage building owners to reinvest? They can't raise the rent to recover the cost of any improvements they make. And new buildings would presumably be at risk of becoming rent controlled which reduces or eliminates profits. From my understanding rent controls just encourage maintenance at the lowest possible level.
Neither do high tax rates on businesses encourage (re)investment. They reduce the reward for any given investment. In combination with tax breaks for investment, that does incentivise investment, but that's not the high tax rates doing that.
Rent control is just one of many factors that affect an incentive to build. For example (and these are hypothetical numbers just to show the point), if rent control made developers 10 percent less likely to build but easing building restrictions made them 50 percent more likely, it would result in a net gain for building overall.
Rent Control is a settled topic in economics, bar some fringe theorists. It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment. I implore you to do some academic reading.
> It would be impossible for me to explain all the negative externalities that rent control has on both existing and new housing stock in a single comment.
The same is true for pricing out 40% of the population.
That has a solution. Build (or permit) more housing where people want to live and the price will go down. Simple.
Rent control destroys all the market incentives that are the point of having housing be private. If you're going to do that you might as well have the government directly own and rent the housing stock itself.
"His strategy uses market-oriented policies — easing building regulations, loosening zoning restrictions and rescuing the city’s crumbling public housing stock through private financing — to advance his social democratic goals of 200,000 affordable homes over the next decade."
He's just not letting it be an excuse to profiteer off existing tenants in existing housing.
