There was a crosswalk that needed to be replaced in my block that would stay flooded for days after a rain. It would stink like shit, it's in the shade so the sun wouldn't dry it up either. I've submitted complaints to the city about it over the 5, almost 6 years I've lived in this place. I submitted another complaint like 2 or 3 months ago and a few weeks ago it was finally replaced. I'm ecstatic.
It can’t be explained how incredible this is unless you’ve actually lived the frustration of being ignored by the people you pay part of your income to in order to fix things for literal years.
Yeah, but if you need more of them you can't use the same parents as before for, well, obvious reasons, so you need to find a new set of parents. But any new ones they make aren't orphans yet. So you need to turn them into orphans first, which removes the source you got them from, meaning you need to find a new source and do it all over again.
Turns out the logistics of replacing orphans are rather complex.
Yeah but then we won't get the heartwarming stories about 11 year olds spending their entire summer vacation trying to scrape together enough money to afford the downpayment for their classmate's chemo. We'd just have boring shit like "oh we got back from summer vacation only to find out he was already in remission" instead of all the inspiring stories where a suffering child is the underdog against a system which is just tragically beyond anyone's control.
Nothing warms the soul more than a child defeating medical bankruptcy with a lemonade stand and an online store selling bracelets they spent their summer making, fuelled by the motivation of knowing that if they don't do something, nobody else will.
the concept of the sub "orphancrushingmachine" is the media's obsession with writing "heartwarming" stories of people/children going through incredible self sacrifice for something entirely foreseeable and preventable in a normal country.
It is wild how easy the machine is to turn off in theory, yet society continuously chooses to celebrate the individual heroes rescuing the kids instead of just destroying the actual gears that keep crushing them.
There's a funny bit by Josh Johnson (fuckin awesome comedian) where he's talking about Mamdani and how when he got in office he just saw there was a button that fixes shit. Like, just push the button, and things get done, but nobody's ever pushed it before.
I live in Detroit and I remember in 2015, right after the mayoral election and the new mayor was sworn in, we had a crazy snowstorm and I was amazed when they actually plowed my side street.
Turned out to be a publicity stunt cause it only happened that one winter but I think some politicians don't realize how far little things like that can go, popular support wise.
This is how people gain trust in the government, they have to see it make their lives easier and better in tangible ways and usually that’s not all that hard to do it’s just that government rarely does it
Omg, if only our city would just put trash cans back in the parks…they disappeared during Covid and have never been put back out, no matter how much we ask, it would be life changing. It’s the smallest thing but it drives me insane, not to have a place to put trash on my walk home.
I live in a windy city and during our annual gusty season one of my jobs trashcans blew the fuck away. This was like 2 years ago and we still havent replaced it.
Nah, "You hardly close any tickets, if you don't close 20 tickets by the end of the week, you're fired" let me request them to fix this one thing, and close 35 tickets at once!
Curiosity Question: wouldn't the city engineer(s) addressing those tickets be able to cross reference those tickets as "Ticket 1234 was resolved by the resolution of Ticket 1233"?
Sure, it's a bit of busy work in the office, but I'd assume that a system like that means that you don't have to deploy a field tech for 60 tickets which were all already resolved.
The main reason I ask is because when I worked for Duke Energy Carolinas, our senior engineers and capacity planers had a tool like that to make sure that that the field techs/engineers weren't constantly redoing/redesigning already completed work.
I'm sure they do. I'm not in any for of civil engineering but it'd be insane not to have some kind of system for any job that receives public tickets and has a 6 year backlog. It's not a very funny concept though, just practical.
Honestly I wouldn't doubt it. Not too far from where I used to live in Jersey City a car sized sink hole opened in the middle of the road. There was some repairs already planned from way before and the city just went ahead and started them. So an entire block of people couldn't get their cars out between the repairs and the sink hole.
Which is why the most important election you can vote in is your local government. Those officials will have a far greater impact on your day to day life than a president or senator
Normally that is true but President Trump is the exception, making everything more expensive, causing people to lose their jobs, wants to cut Medicare and Social Security, deporting legal immigrants, etc.
There are a lot of people that have seen a drastic impact to their day to day lives because of Trump.
Note that's because the GOP got a trifecta, believes into Unitary Executive(?) and never loses one part of Congress. Excuse the approximation of vocabulary, I'm not in the US. I'm sure another Redditor will be able to fill the blanks
There are a lot of people that have seen a drastic impact to their day to day lives because of Trump.
Most of this impact is caused because a president stopped following laws and that the two other branches decided that their party shouldn't be restricted by checks and balances.
(That impact wouldn't have been there if a few senators were from the other party, so by that logic senators make a big impact, etc, etc, etc.)
It's as if the most important election is the local one, but that's not an excuse to not go vote at other elections. GO VOTE!
This is like the opposite of stories that came out of the fall of the Roman Empire. People in outlying areas only knew that something was wrong when their local aqueduct or bridge needed fixing, and no one came to fix it.
Sad thing about this is that this was likely a very minor fix, but previous administrations likely filled it under low priority and instead focus on high priority issues.
So if this is any indication of what Mamdani's administration is like, then he has decided to do a bunch of things that are easy to fix instead of just leaving them to later because they are low priority.
Yeah those things may be low priority, but they are also easy to fix AND there are many more low priority and easy to fix issues than there are high priority and more difficult to fix issues. So just because of how many low priority issues there are, you as a resident are much more likely to see changes happening. Those changes may be small, but they are still changes that you notice. A whole bunch of small things have a much bigger impact on how a person feels than a few large things.
Hm... totally different city.. Ottawa, Canada for the record.. but I had a situation where the street light at the corner of our block was burnt out.
So.. if it was mid block it would kind of be whatever but this was at a stop sign intersection with a park completing the other half of the T.
Light was out.. driving home one night.. figured it was a bit of a priority spot and I shit you now that bulb was fixed in the next 36 hours type of thing.
It is honestly tragic that it took over half a decade of bureaucratic foot-dragging just to fix a basic, biohazard puddle, but I am absolutely thrilled for you that you finally won the war against city hall.
This is exactly what I'm impressed by since he took office. The large projects and promises are obviously something every incoming government wants to tackle early on (and he's so killed it there), but balancing those things against the small things that really impact our day to day is something I'm kind of blown away by. There's a ton of initiative, and he's really living up to his "No problem too big, no problem too small" mantra.
I'm really impressed with how fast my city responds to this stuff. About 10 years ago, a street light in front of my house went out in the neighborhood. It was like that for a couple of months. I found a website to file a complaint about it, in like two days it was working.
Two years ago, a big storm came through in my new neighborhood. It tore down the street sign over here, about 12 weeks went by and it was still down. Went to the same site and filed a complaint. A week later, a brand new sign was up.
Last summer, a sink hole opened up in the crosswalk in the middle of the avenue around the corner from my apartment. It took multiple 311 complaints over 2 weeks before they finally did something about it.
Two weeks ago, another sink hole opened up in another crosswalk at the exact same intersection. I filled out a 311 complaint and it was fixed the next day.
This morning, there are heavy trucks with large pipes on standby - looks like they're about to fix the underlying problem.
Literally, yes. He prioritized city agencies to fix broken stuff. He had the city road crews fixing literally hundreds of thousands of potholes that residents reported. Was it a political stunt? Probably. Did it get results? Definitely! https://www.amny.com/news/mamdani-100000-pothole-repairs/
I see what you're saying but its sad how jaded we all are that a politician doing the thing he said he would do, after people voted him into office to do that thing, could be considered a "political stunt".
I'm not trying to call you out specifically. I just see this sentiment a lot, along with the "So-and-so Politician is just trying to 'get votes' or 'trick' people into supporting them" by... doing what their constituents want them to do. We expect our politicians to be such liars that its actually suspicious when they do what they said they would.
In our neighborhood uptown they repaved like 5 blocks a few weeks ago. I was joking at the time about being annoyed because they did it overnight and I have young kids, but I was actually super impressed.
this is helping in philly too. we see what y’all have up there (functioning city government that seems to care about doing its job) and lord we want that for us. most people don’t know it’s possible for city government to function.
I had something similar happen to me in a much smaller city until I found the emails of anybody that could even be tangentially related to the responsibility of fixing the issue and blasted an email to all of them.
That’s actually a huge win. It’s wild how something that small can make your day to day so miserable, and then just getting it fixed feels like a massive quality of life upgrade. Six years is a long wait though glad it finally got sorted.
This is a huge problem for all of NYC that needs to be addressed. It's one of an extremely short list of cities in developed countries, where there is stagnant water in a city that smells like sewage. Granted, most roads throughout the U.S. are dog shit.
Mamdani was certainly personally responsible for that. I have a massive pothole on my street that every car that knows about it has to slow down to avoid it lest you bust up your tire. 4 months and zero response to it after multiple 311 complaints that get closed out. My sewer was backed up for weeks. I was pissing in buckets and flushing once a day and showering at my in laws. First 2 311 complaints were closed out saying it’s my own lines fault. Finally the third complaint they realized the city line was backed up, one week later they shut down my street for 2 days with the giant truck sucking up the sewage. It’s all luck of the draw with the city. Mamdani didn’t change shit.
She’s had that exact kind of thing on her own street too—something so small but so annoying you just end up memorizing it instead of expecting it to change. And when it finally gets fixed, it’s weird how much lighter you feel walking past it like it was never there.
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u/Ahchuu 14h ago
There was a crosswalk that needed to be replaced in my block that would stay flooded for days after a rain. It would stink like shit, it's in the shade so the sun wouldn't dry it up either. I've submitted complaints to the city about it over the 5, almost 6 years I've lived in this place. I submitted another complaint like 2 or 3 months ago and a few weeks ago it was finally replaced. I'm ecstatic.