Earlier quoted context omitted.
When your road is all the way to the right, then yea, none of it is middle of the road.
Please explain how city run grocery stores are middle of the road politics. Perhaps they’re middle of the road when your road is all the way to the left.
Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
461–470 of 1001 posts
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#462Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash. But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left. It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL…
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
When your road is all the way to the right, then yea, none of it is middle of the road.
Please explain how city run grocery stores are middle of the road politics. Perhaps they’re middle of the road when your road is all the way to the left.
Using the market is well and fine, but if it for some reason does not work it's the government's job to find a solution which works. Think about how things are handled in emergencies. The neutral thing is to find a solution, not be married to some ideological ball and chain saying that THAT particular necessity must be solved in one particular way no matter what.
When that is said I don't live in NYC, idk how the food desert situation is there. But I have heard enough stories from credible sources that I would be surprised if it's all made up.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll give you one reason, among many, it wasn't a failure. It made it illegal to deny people health insurance coverage based on pre existing conditions. That was a big step forward in a broken system to restore some humanity to the system.
No that is a huge failure. That is perhaps the biggest failure of Obamacare. That means I, as someone with healthy lifestyle habits, has to pay largely the same premium as someone who smokes, is obese, and doesn't exercise. And sure enough, life expectancy in the US immediately stalled after the law's implementation: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... . Exactly what economics would predic…
It’s nice the above can no longer happen. You could, at the same time, still allow insurers to charge a premium to smokers and obese and for other lifestyle risks within one’s control. They are not mutually exclusive.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
>his policies are relatively common sense and middle of the road. Rent control isn't middle of the road, it's 100% socialist. Same thing with city run grocery stores. He also wants to defund the police while replacing them with community outreach people, as well as raising the minimum wage to $30 in 5 years which is absolutely wild. None of this is middle of the road in any way, shape, or form.
The minimum wage should easily be 11-13 by any inflation metric you use for the last 40 years, and doubling that for a high cost of living place is reasonable. Lots of states have state-run liquor stores, even super conservative ones. It’s a smaller delta than you think.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#466For decades mainstream parties (both centre-left and centre-right) have repeatedly promised change but after getting into power somehow (re-)converged on technocratic, market-friendly "consensus politics".
If you're worried about stagnant wages, job insecurity, crumbling public infrastructure and/or the cost of housing, then you probably don't notice - or care - whether the stock markets are going up.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll give you one reason, among many, it wasn't a failure. It made it illegal to deny people health insurance coverage based on pre existing conditions. That was a big step forward in a broken system to restore some humanity to the system.
No that is a huge failure. That is perhaps the biggest failure of Obamacare. That means I, as someone with healthy lifestyle habits, has to pay largely the same premium as someone who smokes, is obese, and doesn't exercise. And sure enough, life expectancy in the US immediately stalled after the law's implementation: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... . Exactly what economics would predic…
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#468I'm noticing that this election result has made a lot of people I know really hopeful. It's apparent that many people are fed up with the status quo so they're pushing towards more experimental candidates. If anyone here is well-read on his policies and they have specific opinions I'd love to hear what you think. Do you think Zohran will be successful with his agenda or will he get blocked by pushback from other poli…
Experiments have already been done. You just need to look at history. Or you can just look at north korea and Kabul .
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rent control in particular is an economic basket case policy, the fact that it's popular at election time should have about as much bearing on it making sense as the fact that another "experimental" candidate was considered by voters in 2024 to be "better on immigration" As for offering free stuff, the problem that - if you look at relative population numbers - NY, CA, etc are already facing is that on the margin peo…
You can’t find another city that even approaches NYC without moving to another country. And moving to London or Paris to escape taxes doesn’t make a lot of sense.
In case of the cities you don't even need to move that far. I know multiple people in Seattle who just moved to nearby towns 105-15 minutes by car, 20-45 by transit) to avoid Seattle specific issues, and some people who move just outside of king county to avoid even more nonsense. Mostly techies, but not exclusively.
It's not like American cities haven't been hollowed out before, NYC included.
Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race
#470Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash. But Zohran's not alone, today's election was a massive swing back in almost every single race. School boards, city councils, state houses and senates, all swung radically left. It should be ringing alarm bells that the SF / YC / startup community that used to champion utilitarian, meritocratic QoL…
> Zohran is exactly the kind of change candidate that the San Francisco machine with Grow SF would actively seek to squash. GrowSF is a conservative group with a right-wing policy platform trying to pretend it's progressive, so I'm not sure why that would be surprising. The SF tech millionaires/billionaires are not progressive. They may have claimed to be in the past, but that was either opportunism, or they lost it…
Grow SF really only exists to go after city council members or school board members who get into twitter fights with a certain someone.