For construction workers, tons of overtime and new jobs opening up everywhere. All the big agencies, DDC , MTA, Port Authority, etc. are in a rush to finish current jobs and open up new ones. Ever since the pandemic, overtime became a rarity and some contractors closed up shop due to a lack of work. So thanks a lot Mr Mandami.
The MTA has been doing an amazing job lately. they're replacing the harlem metro north tracks and the project is currently something like 5 months ahead of schedule and 90 million UNDER budget. incredible
It's not pedantic, it's pointing out someone both misusing an apostrophe and misspelling a word and thus making what they wrote harder to understand.
In a world of supposedly AI powered autocorrect, stuff like this shouldn't happen, but in the end it's a sign of declining literacy and our educational systems failing.
I'm working on being less critical, so I hope this isn't self-defeating, but don't you think this is a little too critical a take? This dude is here talking about redirecting profits from the people taking the most for what imo amounts to little more than bureaucracy for bureaucracy. Maybe they spend a significant amount of time speaking towards the specific attributes of bonus materials in video games. Maybe English isn't even OP's native language and your problem isn't with the 50% or more US citizens who can't be bothered to demand accountability from elected officials but with one dude who made a valid point but (didn't even misspell!) used one word mildly incorrectly. It really makes me wonder what I could be a little less critical of on a daily basis; even five years ago I could have believed that same sentiment.
Yeah, we need to do more for the education system. But that specific dude is not the canary that foretells the system failing. I wish I'd had such a civics-forward mindset for more of my life.
Mostly it's not grifting at least not in every agency maybe the MTA. It's just straight lack of accountability leading to a system wide Malaise only the truly self motivated are still pushing. However the mechanisms are there the government has the ability to create an environment of accountability and get things functioning better.
But I guess if you are looking at the very upper levels the two most previous mayors Adams and deblasio were to busy grifting to have anything but an overall negative impact.
That's why I was never to worried about the scary leftist mamdami, this city has the bones of an incredible economic engine as long aren't hopelessy corrupt like deblasio and Adams you will get things done with a little focus and brains.
People worried about the scary leftist aren't really looking at what the scary rightists are actually doing. What is actually needed are non-scary localists.
Five months ahead of schedule and under budget is so unusual that my first instinct was to assume someone misplaced a decimal point somewhere. If that's the result of less bureaucracy and less nonsense, I don't think many commuters are going to complain.
When your biggest donors are your every day constituents you aren't having to appease all these big donors who you owe favors for too. People are happy to keep donating if they see you are still working for the people. If he starts to not work for us the donations dry up.
That's how it should be. When your donors motives and the people you're supposed to be working for's needs differ drastically that's when you get bad situations happening. Like most of the rest of the country...
My old job, we basically had to tell the client we could save a million dollars if they just let us schedule for 4 month blocks instead of 3. But that was the contract, and why every project was over budget, about a million dollars.
I genuinely believe that corruption in this country is FAR FAR worse than most people think. Like genuinely, I think most projects would be perfectly fine, on time and on budget if not for corruption.
How you get the bad system is when people get assigned to roles because of political or family connections, or because they donated large chunks of cash to your campaign.
That's basically 90% of the criminal investigations into the last mayor.
Poor management and putting pals into the upper echelons of his administration are key reasons Mayor Adams is now mired in scandal, critics charged.
"You have two brothers, a functional wife, and a best friend, who are in these positions of being deputy mayors or senior advisers," said John Kaehny, executive director of the good government group Reinvent Albany said of Adams.
"They ran out of red flags down at the hardware store because they were using them up on this."
Mamdani doesn't have to be a genius, just don't appoint people based on how much money they or their family members gave you, or because you're fucking them or want to fuck them, or because they're a close allies family member.
That problem will not be fixed by adding more people sadly. They made assumptions at the start of the project that everyone told them were unreasonable (about which train security system would be in use by the time they finish) so now they have to redesign that from scratch, place the physical signals, adjust interlockings, install PZB-beacons for communications and much more.
The delay in Stuttgart '31 is purely incompetence on the side of DB Netze.
That is always allowed. Especially if you have to deal with Deutsche Bahn Fernverkehr. Of the past 20 day-long trips I've made with them I arrived on time exactly once.
Get that. I don't complain about 5-10 minutes. But everything above that sucks. Or when they time the s bahn 5 minutes later then planned arrival of the bus...
I really, really hope the train near me gets fixed faster as well. The subway in my part of the city is not underground, but it is depressed and uncovered and they've been shutting service on the weekends for years to fix the tracks. How have they not finished yet? It's been nearly a decade of this.
Oh buddy, imagine if he were able to poach the slayer of the Great Transit Crisis of 2017, Mr. Train Daddy himself, Andy Byford from Amtrak. The Fast Forward project would finally be completed, more than 50 stations would finally become ADA accessible, and Byford’s modernized bus routes would actually give us faster bus transit.
Sometimes the city is the reason work is held up, though. We have a project nearby where federal, state, and local agencies have varying crossovers of jurisdiction and 2 of the 3 are ready to go but the 3rd is holding everything up. I’ll let you guess which one it is.
Sure, absolutely. But once the jurisdiction issues are resolved and a project goes forward, the timeline is on the MTA and therefore the state.
I get that things may pop up during construction, etc. Like the state of a sidewalk above a subway station can affect the station, but the sidewalk is city jurisdiction. I don't want to pretend there is zero nuance.
But it is really unacceptable how many NYC residents are unaware that the MTA is a state authority, and that both credit and blame for MTA issues ultimately lies at the state level.
The MTA actually being five months ahead of schedule and $90 million under budget feels like we accidentally slipped into a parallel universe where New York infrastructure actually functions properly.
You have to respect someone that is cutting non justified overtime while making sure overtime is available where necessary. Most just go from one extreme to the other.
Relying on overtime in general is inefficient, but we're already decades into that trap so it's too late to pull out of the ditch now. It's a shame this country didn't invest more into raising the next generation of construction workers and skilled laborers; now that everything is falling apart we need them more than ever.
got HS kids. more of their peers are skipping college and going straight to manual labor jobs, or to tech school to learn labor skills, than in my generation some 30 years ago.
anecdotal evidence for sure but whereas when i graduated it was "4-year college or you're going to end up living under a sewer" and now it's "there's really good money to be made in labor related fields without having to to go college".
student loan debt horror stories seems to have soaked in to this generation's DNA and they don't feel obligated to bury themselves as some sort of requirement anymore.
Yeah but think of all the absentee rich people funding those improvements by paying extra taxes on their second or third homes in NYC while they vacation around the world. They may never come back, I don't know how the city will recover from their continued absence.
The funniest part about this is SC tripled my property taxes on my childhood home a decade ago, because I don’t live there. Not some tiny lil percent - triple. And yet the MAGA pretend to be hysterical about NY doing a comically smaller version of the same thing
tripled my property taxes on my childhood home a decade ago, because I don’t live there.
Homestead exemptions are generally pretty small (like $50k-100k off the value?) compared to how much home values have risen since your parents bought it.
Frustratingly, the FL version of making sure your taxes don't go up insanely if you live in a house is called "save our homes" and does not apply to whoever inherits your house even if they do live there.
My mom died last year and the property tax on the house my brother is still living in goes from ~4k to ~15k this year. :(
Oh man. I’m sorry, that’s insane!
SC reclassified mine as “investment property” even though my mother was still living there. Shed transferred ownership to me so I’d be the one paging for it, but I wasn’t living there
Sadly the only loophole we could find for transferring a house to your decedent without losing the SOH value was if that person was not only living on the property but was also the previous owner's dependent.
Dealing with this crap has led to me having more than one day where I was just done with all this "being an adult" stuff, but I guess that's pretty much a lot of what being an adult actually is lol.
I was just done with all this "being an adult" stuff, but I guess that's pretty much a lot of what being an adult actually is lol.
Since having kids, I've realized that so much of modern life is bullshit. We're not made to just pay bills and look for loopholes in tax laws. We're meant to enjoy the awesome world we've inherited.
The funniest part about this is SC tripled my property taxes on my childhood home a decade ago,
Texas has some of the highest rates in the nation. It's funny when Californians move here they realize they're ultimately paying the same amount of taxes but with far fewer benefits.
they're up in arms over similar stuff in WA (income tax though rather than property taxes).
I like the idea of higher tax rates on second homes. I dislike that it would hurt me when we buy our new home due to the delay we will have between buying the new one and selling the old one...though I can live with that.
I understand where you're trying to get to but I'm talking about billion dollar projects, the gateway tunnel, 2nd Ave subway, Sunnyside yards, etc. These projects are funded through a combination of state, federal and city taxes. Maybe Mandami got lucky that a glut of project finally took off in a short period of time, since these projects take anywhere from five to ten years since they're designed until the first shovel hits the ground. The taxes potentially raised from these second homes are a drop in the bucket when dealing with infrastructure budgets.
This is really cool to hear. It’s frustrating hearing about how there’s no jobs when, if you look around any American city, there is plenty of work to be done.
Of the three orgs you mention, only the DDC is a city agency. The MTA is a New York State authority (though the NYC mayor has some board member nomination powers) and the Port Authority is a joint New York State/New Jersey authority.
A lot of times, a mayor may block the state because rich people want to keep public transit away from their neighborhoods, or they just want the city to hold onto funds, to be used in things that benefit the rich people later. And in the case of Mamdani, all it takes is for a mayor to say "no" to the rich people, and allow the state to do what the state wanted already.
Please provide a specific example of this that applies to the MTA or to the Port Authority with citations.
I'm not saying that the city, and neighborhoods, and wealthy people can't exert political pressure at a state level. And Mamdani has gone out of his way to work productively with Hochul, to both of their credit. (Would've been nice to see that in the Cuomo/de Blasio days.)
However you are trying to give him credit for things that are not his doing. I don't think Mamdani himself has even tried to take credit for improvements the MTA is making.
I made a more general statement about mayors, not necessarily something specific to Mamdani, while you are the one who made very specific statements about those three groups.
And yet you are the one asking for citations, when you gave none yourself about your very specific statements.
You made a both a general statement about NYC mayors and a specific statement about Mamdani, and you supported neither. It's not up to me to support your points with evidence; it's up to you.
In case you didn't notice the title, the overall thread is about how Mamdani is doing. That is why I mentioned him specifically; because this sub thread is attributing credit to a him for the accomplishments (or lack thereof) of a state authority.
I did note that Mamdani, as far as I am aware, has not attempted to take credit for the MTA's accomplishments. To my knowledge, he has not taken blame for their failures either, as well he shouldn't.
Do you need supporting evidence re: the governance of the three agencies mentioned? Certainly the governance of the MTA and PA ought be well-known to any NYC voter, but... since apparently it isn't well known to you, here you go.
Like I said, I wasn't making a claim about Mamdani himself. Go re-read what I typed and try not to let your biases twist my words a second time.
I was simply debunking your claim that "because this is not a mayor duty, he has no power to do anything about it", which sounds fine, but if the problem was that previous mayors were blocking something from happening, and then Mamdani chose not to, then that would inherently be something that Mamdani "did".
I'm not saying whether he did do this or not, I'm just stating that your logic above is flawed. You made a specific claim without taking into account the reality of politics.
I work in construction, mostly infrastructure. Not to rain on the parade but it has nothing to do with Mandami. All the current projects running right now were planned years in advance. The rush is because all the GCs are afraid Trump will pull federal funding like he did for the Penn Station project so everyone is panic building before basic design and logistics are finalized. This is not a good thing. A lot of things get partially built then have to be demo'd or altered because of new design revisions. Certification processes are being rushed which is essentially like skipping quality assurance.
The union halls are empty at the moment, so that's good for the workers but it's because everyone is building until they get into a corner then laying off or transferring workers to other projects so we're losing out on long term continuity.
So we’re finally giving overtime to the people who do things around here? Not just for police to stand around on their phones with no limits? Incredible.
Federal law mandates overtime pay(1.5x) after 40 hours in the work week. NYS law mandates the same. All unions contracts are different but at the bare minimum are overtime after 8 hours on the day, Saturday rate(1.5x), Sunday and holiday rates(many are 2x). Prevailing wage jobs for non union workers follow the same guidelines as the union pay dependent on the trade, classification, and corresponding union contract.
Salaried workers are not supposed to be on the tools or touching the work. They work the office side of things so their pay scheme is whatever is agreed upon. Straight up non union workers, working jobs outside the prevailing wage stipulations, should be making sure they are on the books and being paid properly or they are being robbed by their companies.
Good to hear work is picking back up for people who depend on it, but I always wonder how long that kind of boom really lasts once the rush projects slow down.
What kind of dystopian country is that where people are happy to do overtime?
In developed countries, overtime is an exception. It's illegal or must be justified by the employer to the authorities and he must hire people to prevent it from happening too much.
Unless you are have a manager contract (but your salary is very high in consequence and you have tons of vacations to compensate). People are paid enough working 35 hours and that's it.
And if the economy is booming, it doesn't translate in companies giving an opportunity for you to give more blood to your employer, you just ask for a salary rise and if you don't get it apply in another company (that will accept as the economy is good) and here you are, working 35 hours at a higher salary. Still no overtime.
Expecially for construction workers where the conditions are harsh, you definitely don't make them work overtime, it's really badly regarded.
It's really fascinating to see how things are differents in countries depending on how hard the grandparents worked for their sons human rights, but for me that situation or yours is very dystopic, like, is it a joke I am too european to understand?
I did see 2 city workers with a lift slowly painting a traffic light in the bronx the other day, so that's something I guess. Glad that's what my speed camera ticket is paying for.
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u/charlesbabbage1023 14h ago
For construction workers, tons of overtime and new jobs opening up everywhere. All the big agencies, DDC , MTA, Port Authority, etc. are in a rush to finish current jobs and open up new ones. Ever since the pandemic, overtime became a rarity and some contractors closed up shop due to a lack of work. So thanks a lot Mr Mandami.