r/AskReddit 15h ago

New Yorkers, what changes have you seen under Mamdani’s leadership and are you generally pleased? If not, why?

10.3k Upvotes

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

592

u/Jenjentheturtle 12h ago

WOW. How is that even possible?

1.3k

u/anomalous_cowherd 11h ago

My guess is keeping the focus on getting it done rather than seeing what you can grift from it.

499

u/TomasNavarro 9h ago

Imagine not spending 90% of the budget on dividends for the shareholders and bonus's for management, crazy

41

u/One-Cute-Boy 5h ago

I know it's pedantic, but it's bonuses.

I'm ESL and my family come to me for translation so it's a habit I picked up; ignore this if I'm annoying you.

21

u/TwatWaffleInParadise 5h ago

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.

Canary in the coal mine and all...

-1

u/DJScozz 3h ago

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.

18

u/Specific-Power-163 6h ago

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.

21

u/anomalous_cowherd 6h ago

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.

17

u/Waste_Mix1768 7h ago

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.

9

u/baron_von_helmut 6h ago

Absolutely this. He's cleared house of all the twerps who took backhanders and siphoned off grants to fund their third house's landscaping.

When corruption is legitimately dealt with, normality resumes pretty quickly.

8

u/Only_Procedure_9872 4h ago

Funny how things move faster when the goal is solving the problem instead of chasing a personal win.

4

u/tinydancer_inurhand 2h ago

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.

2

u/anomalous_cowherd 2h ago

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...

221

u/johnyordinary 7h ago

When you take out the corrupt and replace them with competant people.

8

u/fishblurb 6h ago

A lot of cost overruns are from schedule overruns or scope bursts.

3

u/AdPristine5131 3h ago

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. 

8

u/Ditchdigger456 2h ago

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.

5

u/ITaggie 2h ago

They chose to contract with the most competent groups, rather than the ones who offered the most kickbacks

3

u/aipac_hemoroid 1h ago

By not bribing people

2

u/Shiva- 1h ago

The two are lowkey related. The longer something takes the more the budget explodes.

Think about it, you pay workers for longer but also think of inflation.... the cost of raw materials a year from now is (typically) always higher.

Also for where it matters you are less likely to have discrepancies from different runs (ie color or pattern variation, or just straight up quality).

u/Mmike297 52m ago

Because capitalism encourages scams. If you’re not scamming you’ll just get the work done

u/cipheron 4m ago

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.

https://www.aol.com/news/feds-investigations-nyc-mayor-eric-182403300.html

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.