The subway is also a basic tool to get to work, which even more people use, and we charge a fare for that. So why not for driving?
The point isn’t that it won’t negatively affect anybody of moderate or lower income, it’s that overall it will positively affect most people of moderate or lower income, because most of those people do not drive regularly into Manhattan.
I'm not saying it's not a fair price -- I think largely it's a positive to discourage people from deciding to commute into Manhattan by car. I'm in my 40s and only recently got my license, so I'm certainly on team public transit.
But I am saying that not everyone that lives in the congestion zone are well off office workers, particularly those born and raised in lower Manhattan that have housing arrangements that go back a few decades. An extra $2-300 month in tolls is not nothing for many people. You can't easily bring hundreds of pounds of art and building supplies to your art warehouse in Newark every day on the path train.
That’s fair, I guess I just don’t have much sympathy for that person as from my perspective, they were getting a massive subsidy for a long time, and we’re all better off if we cut off their gravy train. And I say this as a former artist myself — if they need the space, they can move to Brooklyn like the rest of us.
I see where you’re coming from, but it does assume the American approach to basic housing as an investment opportunity vs a basic need the government should ensure is available and affordable.
Because on public transit, you're paying to use someone else's vehicle, and needing to cover the maintenance, depreciation, etc., of it, plus the driver's time. But with your own vehicle, those are all already your expenses, so it's double-dipping to charge you like that at all.
But it's not double dipping, because the cost of infrastructure for motor vehicles is absurdly high - higher than even a lot of public transportation. Because individual vehicles are horribly inefficient, and require significantly more space per capita. Roads are not free, congestion is not free, pollution is not free. You're used to being subsidized, so when you're not it may seem unfair. But it's not.
Cars are still subsidized, just a little less. And public transit is absolutely subsidized, but in a similar position to cars - some of it is subsidized, and some of it you pay. It's not free to ride the bus. To me, it seems fair.
> Literally everything we buy and use in the city gets more expensive because of this law.
Aruguable. It’s very possible that the time saved by not sitting in traffic will outweigh the congestion charge for delivery trucks (which is what I assume you’re referring to).
> This is no different than, say, the typical anecdote of a junior engineer dropping the database. Should the junior be held accountable? Of course not - it's the senior's fault for allowing that to happen at the first place. If the junior is held accountable, that would more be an indication of poor software engineering practices.
Of course the junior should be held accountable, along with the senior. Without accountability, what incentive do they have to not continue to fuck up?
Dropping the database is an extreme example because it's pretty easy to put in checks that should make that impossible. But plenty of times I've seen juniors introduce avoidable bugs simply because they did not bother to test their code -- that is where teaching accountability is a vital part of growth as an engineer.
My take from this comment is that maybe you do not understand it as well as you think you do.
Claiming that "other modern infrastructure" is easier to understand than CSS is wild to me. Infrastructure includes networking and several protocol, authentication and security in many ways, physical or virtual resources and their respective capabilities, etc etc etc.
In what world is all of that more easy than understanding CSS?
When did I say I was blindly allowing an AI to set up my docker infrastructure? Obviously I wouldn't delegate that to a junior. My goalposts have always been in the same place - perhaps you're confusing them with someone else's goalposts.
This is a result of there being a general consensus that video game consoles are "a thing" that we are all used to, and that the loosely-coupled movements of right-to-repair and antitrust are not seeking to disrupt the video game industry for fear of distracting from their larger goals.
It's an uneasy balance and it will be interesting to see where it goes once the dust settles on the current antitrust actions against big tech. I can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
(I'm saying this all as a right-to-repair and antitrust advocate, by the way)
I think a lot of this is a result of nostalgia, and a recognition that the business model of the video game industry has depended on this sort of control for a significantly longer than the personal computing industry. So no one really wants to kill Nintendo like they don't want to kill Mickey Mouse. Or, more cynically, no one really wants Nintendo and other video game behemoths to step into this fight on the other side, because going after Big Tech is hard enough as it is.
> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?
Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.
Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.
And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)
> Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game.
Well, this becomes a bit of a circular argument, but certainly part of the reason for that is the only thing one can do on a Nintendo Switch is game, due to its restrictive software.
And, strictly speaking, this statement is false. The only thing most people do on a Nintendo Switch is play games, but there is a subset of people that hack their switches and install things like Android TV. The thing is basically just an Nvidea Shield, hardware-wise. Not being able to do everything an Nvidea Shield can do is a software restriction.
I do see your point re: Apple's ambitions being far vaster than Nintendo's. But in terms of controlling their own markets, they are still seeking similar levels of control.
I’m all for critiques of capitalism, but it’s extremely unconvincing to say capitalism must go, but at the same time, you don’t know what to replace it with.
How are you so convinced that there is a better solution than capitalism if you can’t even articulate what that solution would be? How do you know that capitalism, for all it’s flaws, is not still the least-worst among an array of bad options?
This is usually the extent of online discussion. Everyone can agree that "just build more housing" is the answer to the homelessness epidemic, but nobody has anything to say about HOW to accomplish that. The person saying it can't build a house on their own, nor can the collective number of people who regularly eject that sentiment. So the question is "how do you get enough money in one place and apply it to building more housing". And that's the tricky part. Because as you keep asking "how" you eventually arrive at thorny problems like "how do you ensure that the politician you elect who promises to build more housing... actually does it?"
Lots of people are screaming at the top of their lungs about how to build more housing. Primarily through deregulation. Examples would be zoning codes, building codes, relaxed public comment and relaxed environmental impact assessments.
Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!
In fact, its the complete financial ideation of rentals and homes. That's what's even pushed 2 earner homes to even afford a house.
But those who have, can get a house loan, rent it out for 150% of the total mortgage and paracitize off the public. And nobody is the better, except for the paracite class (landlords).
Rent controls would also do a great deal. But we hear howls from the libertarian types over controls ala Adam Smith.
And progressive heavy taxation on more than 3 houses would also help the situation of houses being bought for rental or AirBNB purposes. Again, those are parasites on all of us.
Of course, all these mean housing number go down. And those who own a large stake will definitely complain. But these are steps that would help, alongside building more with a rent-controlled and reasonable cost.
And reforming how banks are required to provide loans (proof of X rent = proof of covering x mortgage). But really? This country is going the opposite way of the common person, and has been for decades. Now, that strategy has been ramped up to extremes.
> Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!
No, its not, restrictive zoning preventing actually building housing is. Which is why the mess is most acute in places which have the most such restrictions, and least in places that have less of them, wven when they are similar across all the dimensions you suggest are the real issues.
> Rent controls would also do a great deal.
At further reducing supply of housing by discouraging development? Yes, they would do a great deal of that.
Just to point that most places with a "housing problem" actually have a transit problem that will get even worse if one goes naively building more housing in single-use or empty land.
For starters, we have to acknowledge that capitalism isn't really a system as such. It's a set of ad hoc economic arrangements that each came into being as a result of historic evolution in many different societies, not some kind of coherent arrangement with any specific goal. If you were to have the same discussion 400 years ago, proponents of then-existing economic relationships would say, "how are you so convinced that there's a better solution than what we have right now if you can't even articulate what the replacement would be?".
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