Ask for federal money? Grab money from drivers? Raise the fare prices? Cut down on services?

The amount of gymnastics to avoid tackling the obvious is staggering:

$500 million per year lost because of unpaid fares. Any decent effort could recover half of that.

The ideology doesn’t serve anyone.

> But the overall budget to buy and install five Portland Loos, in one pilot location in each borough, starting as early as summer 2024, could reach as much as $5.3 million.

1 million per loo. Not even counting operation/maintenance costs.

And I naively thought that 5k per homesless shelter bed per month was too expensive.

Why is he still being charged?

It’s paradoxical how DA Bragg and the criminal justice crowd suddenly become “tough-on-crime” whenever someone is just trying to protect their honest livelihood.

There are worse defendants out there with public defense representation.

If they don’t have an attorney representing them in court, then the whole case could be canceled because no one can be tried criminally without an attorney.

Wouldn’t that make it harder to win wage theft cases?

Criminal cases can be dropped for a lot of non-merit reasons and require a “beyond any reasonable doubt” burden of proof.

Civil cases only require preponderance of evidence and don’t have strict timelines (such as speedy trial) or onerous discovery requirements on the plaintiff side.

>Prosecutors said that Gzim Shabaj, who was charged earlier this week, had responded to one worker’s early September request to be paid by pulling out a knife and, with his other hand, repeatedly punching the worker in the head until his ear bled.
>
>About three weeks later, a second day laborer asked for his money. This time, prosecutors said, Gzim Shabaj ripped a side mirror off the worker’s van and repeatedly hit the vehicle with the detached mirror, denting a hubcap and cracking the windshield. He also hit the laborer in the shoulder, and threatened to call immigration enforcement on him, cursing at him and telling him: “Hispanics, get out of the country.”

As a vocal critic of DA Bragg, I'm glad to see Bragg doing something.

The lack of oversight into NYC shelters is staggering. And the silence of our “progressive” advocates is complicit.

A typical congregate shelter cost the city over 5k per bed per month. And we are still building new shelters that are even more expensive.

And at the same time, their conditions are so bad that people who stay in a NYC shelter are more likely to die than people who stay at Riker’s.

A capped highway would be a lot cheaper and simpler to construct than a tunnel. This may be an example of the "perfect" being the enemy of the good.

And it would still be transformative.

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/traffic/transit-traffic/new-proposal-would-replace-bqe-with-tunnel-open-up-brooklyn-bridge-park/2301108/

>Time could be an issue if the city chooses to build a tunnel. In Boston, the "Big Dig" construction project was plagued by delays and overruns — causing their tunnel project to take more than a decade and cost $24 billion.
>
>...
>
>The other option, called the "capped highway plan," calls for the BQE to be replaced by a street-level roadway with a deck over it. That plan would expand Brooklyn Bridge Park, making it one of the largest in the borough.
>
>The latter plan would cost $3.5 billion and take six years to complete.

If you buy a co-op, you would actually become a shareholder in a company that owns the building, but that shareholder ownership also gives you a permanent lease of the unit.

Co-ops require board approval for transactions, so a co-op board could just deny your purchase without giving any reason. And that opens a lot of doors for potential discrimination. The application package you submit to the board can be invasive, like resume, copies of your tax returns, letters of recommendations and such (some describe as more invasive than going to a dentist). They may even require an interview... for what's practically the right to rent a unit after paying a huge deposit.

Despite the difficulties, that may still be a financially sound strategy compared to the alternatives. If you don't plan on living there for many years, it's probably not worth it.

The problem is that the concerns strike as either exaggerated or selective outrage in NYC when considering, for example, that our homeless shelters are deadlier than Riker's.

And it's just factual that the oversight board has an agenda, I mean they need to have a purpose. The problem is when that purpose trumps basic human dignity considerations, for example, when they released Tavira's footage after his death, that's not the kind of flattering footage any decent human being would want to portrait another who passed away.

That doesn’t seem like a regular fare evasion.

With the camera person right there, the framing and the movement of the camera, music editing etc, this actually strikes as a premeditated violation.

Violations committed for the sake of TikTok income should receive a lot less sympathy.

That seems plausible.

IPO and section 230 could be forcing functions causing the push for "mod training".

>“It’s been eight years of working between agencies trying to get stuff done,” said Ms. King, who looks forward to a more streamlined process in the future. “Think of how many brain cells die in the process. You start to lose your mind.”

This can go both ways. If it's just another bureaucratic layer. Things will get worse.

But if her role will cut through the bureaucracy so that departments spend less effort passing the buck around and more effort solving problems, this might be good.

Let us hope for the best.

>Jon, a 15-year-old boy from Queens who asked to be identified by only his first name out of concern for potential legal repercussions, said he got caught surfing on the back of the No. 5 train by the police in early 2022, but got off with a warning.

The warning should ideally be like those anti-smoking warnings and show them some graphic image of what has happened to other teens in the past.

Not sure it would make a difference either way.

Because the vast majority of the Legal Aid’s revenue comes the government, so tax payers are already donating.

And specifically, the amount they spend on fundraising appears to practically cancel how much they actually raise from non-government revenue.

A big problem with cops is that because they work to protect the law (which is good), they too often start believing they are superior to others.

Big hats in NGOs doing work that is morally good are liable to the same problem.

> The Legal Aid Society has given raises of up to $40,000 to management, while offering 2 percent to workers under conditions where there are 300 vacant positions in their front-line staff.

I didn’t imagine Legal Aid as an exploitative employer. But here we are. One more for the 2023 bingo card.

>Although the Staten Island Parade Committee blames the exclusion on the teachings of the Catholic Church, the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan ended a two-decade ban of LGBTQ+ groups in 2014, while parades in Boston and Dublin have done the same. And a St. Patrick’s Parade in the Bronx last year for the first time allowed an LGBTQ+ group to march openly.

The church actually teaches the opposite of hatred and exclusion, but the delusions of moral superiority and righteous attitude provided fertile grounds for bigots to hide and fester there for centuries.

It's surprising to see this kind of old-school bigotry still today.

As far as jail goes, it’s not the biggest mortality problem in NYC.

People who stay in a NYC shelter are more likely to die than people who stay in Riker’s.

So the sanitation dept will collect garbage using bikes?

So let the roads degrade just because we can’t expect people (who can very well afford it) to pay their transit fares?

I don’t know where you read any anger in my comment, to be honest.

If I’m going to get angry at every instance of inverted priorities I come across in this city, I’m not going to live a good live.

> Soaring fare evasion on subways and buses cost the MTA $119 million in the first three months of the year

I accidentally observed that happening. That’s money I and others will be paying though.

The MTA is going to increase the fare because of a $300 million per year budget short fall..

I wasn’t in a very busy station. And it was just one person jumping the turnstile.

Not like the bulk evasion of people using the emergency door like in this video: https://youtu.be/gqRQ5_TiVA8

I’ve actually seen a person once (on his way out) purposely open and hold that kind of door just to see if anyone would want to come in for free. But I didn’t stick around to see if anyone took the opportunity.