Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

nbcnews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#601

Post by anon291 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #526
crypto420 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel and Mamdani are more alike than you may think. https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns... Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.

Sure, Thiel is identifying some of the same problems, but the solutions he's proposing are basically the opposite of the ones Mamdani is. Unsurprisingly, he's proposing solutions that benefit billionaires rather than everyone else (e.g. just les us build whatever wherever we want, of course we'll build cheap housing that brings property houses down! Who could ever imagine we'll build luxury mansions that keep propert…

I mean thiels policies are in effect in Austin Texas which is one of the few jurisdictions seeing decreasing rents.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#602

Post by [deleted] »

CjHuber wrote: post #587
dyauspitr wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got to have a Zohran that is also going to be tough on crime and homelessness but our political separations don’t allow for that right now.

From a non-american perspective it seems to me that in the US the problem of homelessness often gets mistaken for a problem with the homeless, maybe changing that narrative is a starting point?

[deleted]

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#603

Post by johnnyanmac »

thereitgoes456 wrote: post #584
idiotsecant wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at this Ubermensch that will never have a stroke, develop cancer, or any number of debilitating conditions. Must be nice! It is the basic duty of every human to do their best to make sure every other living human is afforded a life of simple human dignity. Full stop. We have the resources. Let's just do it.

Sadly we do not have, and will never have, the resources to help everyone, even to a baseline of human dignity. Surely we can't give people unlimited talk therapy, MRIs, and cancer treatment for free. But some people sorely need these things. Preventative/propylactic care is orders of magnitude cheaper than treatment once a disease has manifested. It makes sense to me to punish people for not doing this care, thereby…

That's the point of insurance. It's the idea that everyone pools together money and when something bad happens to one person, its finances are mitigated by the input of others. Some will benefit more and others benefit not at all. But no one can predict who is on what end.

Yes, if everyone gets cancer at the same time then Health Care is boned. But then again, so is society. So why worry about that worst case scenario?

>Note that GP only mentioned things we have control over -- exercise, weight, not smoking.

We couldn't pass laws to help control what companies put in food, and failed to subsidize healthier food options. I wish you the best of luck with healthcare trying to pull off that endeavor with punishments for obesity. I'm guessing it wouldn't be poolitically popular.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#604

Post by WillPostForFood »

monocasa wrote: post #357
WillPostForFood wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Republicans in Congress never wanted or proposed anything like ACA. It is weird half truth because Massachusetts, one the more liberal states, with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, passed something similar while Mitt Romney was Governor. It was the brainchild of Jonathan Gruber, MIT Economist and Democratic consultant who worked on the ACA for Obama. You can go back and read the GOP platforms of the time, t…

The 1993 HEART Act was very much like the ACA, built around the individual mandate to purchase private health insurance, primarily through your employer. Romneycare was massaged out of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Equity_and_Access_Refor... This was the Republican alternative to the time's Hillarycare proposal, and was authored by the Heritage Foundation of Project 2025 fame.

Good point! But HEART was just a tactical response to the Clinton plan. Never a part of the party platform, not something candidates ran on, and it disappeared as support for the Clinton plan died. When Republicans won the presidency back in 2000, and held the house, and briefly the Senate, they didn't make any attempt to bring back HEART. It was never the Republican plan for health care. It is also somewhat of a mischaracterization to call it a mandate for health insurance, it was much more narrowly focused covering catastrophic events.

Some side notes. It was introduced by Lincoln Chafee, who then switched to the democratic party. Heritage itself disowned it. The author later wrote, "I headed Heritage's health work for 30 years, and make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court." There was also never any intent to have a punitive mandate, just a tax credit would be lost if for people who didn't buy insurance - more carrot than stick.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#605

Post by adrian17 »

GenerWork wrote: post #225
noobermin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He has moderated on the police funding issue, and the rent freeze is for already rent controlled apartments.

>He has moderated on the police funding issue So he already backtracked on a core election promise even before he got elected? Doesn’t bode well for his supporters expectations going forward.

As far as I know, “defunding the police” wasn’t a campaign promise, let alone a “core” one. It indeed was the opinion he had in the past (and you can argue about whether he still thinks that privately), but there are also many statements from the last several months that he’s explicitly _not_ running on that.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#606

Post by petralithic »

tsimionescu wrote: post #526
crypto420 wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peter Thiel and Mamdani are more alike than you may think. https://x.com/aphysicist/status/1937879912221667792 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-peter-thiel-warns... Nobody wants to hear this because it departs from the 'billionaire bad' trope. But Thiel has been remarkably consistent in his criticism of housing being the center of all of the Millenial economic woes.

Sure, Thiel is identifying some of the same problems, but the solutions he's proposing are basically the opposite of the ones Mamdani is. Unsurprisingly, he's proposing solutions that benefit billionaires rather than everyone else (e.g. just les us build whatever wherever we want, of course we'll build cheap housing that brings property houses down! Who could ever imagine we'll build luxury mansions that keep propert…

More housing, regardless of type, is directly correlated to cheaper average rents [0]. So Thiel is right in that regard, the red tape for construction and opposition from NIMBYs must be curtailed.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/733977

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#607

Post by bigstrat2003 »

voidhorse wrote: post #143
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #117

I'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…

The biggest takeaway to me is how ridiculous it is that the US considers Mamdani somehow "experimental" or even radical. His campaign revolves around three policies: 1. Universal Child Care 2. Fast and Free Busses 3. Freezing Rent for certain Rent Controlled Units In any other context these would be policies that basically every citizen, except for a handful of people making buttloads of money off the privatization o…

> Politics in america is like entering an inverted world in which some weird internal drive actively makes people vote against their own personal interests.

Nobody willingly does this. If you think they are, that should be a strong sign to you that those people and you disagree about what their best interests are, and you should seriously consider the possibility that they are right and you are wrong. You might not be wrong, but jumping to "they are voting against their own interests because they are dumb" as many do is both unhelpful and untrue.

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#609

Post by ithkuil »

Eisenstein wrote: post #455
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obama was hated by San Franciscan progressives because Because San Francisco progressivism doesn’t win on a national stage.

Times are changing. The pendulum swing back from MAGA is going to be interesting.

Hopefully we don't add too much energy to the pendulum because eventually it will swing back again

Re: Zohran Mamdani wins the New York mayoral race

#610

Post by petralithic »

samdoesnothing wrote: post #555
testfoobar wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent control is always initially popular with the people who are already in apartments. But it is longer term effects on supply and quality that are corrosive. An alternative is Austin: https://www.texastribune.org/2025/01/22/austin-texas-rents-f... "Austin rents have fallen for nearly two years. Here’s why. Austin rents have tumbled for 19 straight months, data from Zillow show. The typical asking rent in the capita…

It's kind of incredible how the obvious and true solution to rents being too high is to BUILD MORE HOUSES and yet somehow people manage to convince themselves that in fact, the real solution to rents being to high is to artificially cap their prices. Incredible stupidity.

Mamdani is doing both though, in a controlled manner. He voted to oppose NIMBYism as well and has a plan for new construction.
Post reply on HN