Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

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This is how NYC raises money - when the revenue dips they send out the sidewalk inspectors, health inspectors, tow trucks, etc. and write up a bunch of fines.

Most restaurants have a way to signal the kitchen that an inspector has arrived and they'll quickly toss everything they are cooking into the garbage because it's cheaper than getting a fine. Former mayor Bloomberg's planned crack down on soda drinks was more about issuing fines for not serving precisely 8oz of liquid - though the next mayor dropped it and all the special order measuring cups for the health inspectors went to a warehouse.

I've witnessed a fleets of NYPD tow trucks clearing out streets of UPS and Fedex trucks. They know what time the delivery companies hit various parts of town and they are ready for them.

Recently the New York fire inspectors have started fining landlords for debris in the hallways (debris = amazon deliveries left at the door). So now if the delivery comes to the door you have to get it before the building super throws it away to save the landlord from being fined, if it gets left by the mailbox then the food delivery people steal it on their way out. No winning.

About ten years ago there was a good samaritan going around feeding parking meters to keep people from being fined. He was arrested and taken to jail. They let him go without charges but not before he spent the weekend - because the person who processes releases doesn't work on weekends they said. I think he sued and ended up settling out of court.

This is a really good point. You always need to look at incentives. It's OK for both society and politicians to benefit, but you should always dig a little deeper.

Someone else in this thread pointed out "the city does not make getting the payout easy and it requires many hours of follow up to maybe get paid." So now we should be at least a bit cynical, and start asking questions about why it's so difficult to get paid. Maybe legitimate reasons like verification that they aren't just making it up I guess? If a fine is issued though then can't we simply assume the person reporting was being honest? Who benefits from a difficult collection process?

A difficult payout process disincentivizes reporting, but only after you discover the hassle of it. So this could be a quick cash grab w/ dismal long term benefits once the word spreads. They should definitely fix that (assuming they want to).

Also Department of Environmental Protection issuing fines to house owners, sometimes big ones, because a random person dumped furniture in front of the house. Meanwhile, you have mounds of garbage at intersections for days, and debris that's permanent around government and NYCHA buildings.

NYC's arbitrary enforcement schemes should make even the most ardent statist cringe.

I’ve had that happen before, while on vacation someone dumped rolls of carpet on my driveway and I got fined for not removing it, plus had to pay to have someone remove it because the sanitation department wouldn’t take it.

The police said it’s usually a two-for. The people get paid to dispose of bulk items that the sanitation department won’t accept then they dump it in someone’s driveway and pocket the cash. Then they come back a few days later to see if it’s still there, if it is then they know the house is unoccupied and they’ll come gut it for copper. Luckily I came home before anything else happened.

Here's another. There used to be people who'd cut slices into sidewalks using a hand held circular saw, and then reporting it to the city as a trip hazard, and then offering to fix it and get it resolved with the city. Being a house owner is a punishment in NYC.

NYC wouldn't be my first choice of a place to live. This sounds stressful.

It's also just an incredibly filthy place to live.

The streets all smell like piss and walking at night means seeing tons of rats.

The subways are absolutely disgusting and there's always a car that reeks of shit (you can tell because that car will have far fewer people than the surrounding cars).

I don't know if New Yorkers have never visited any other cities, or if they're just so blind from all the NYC-exceptionalism (Ayy if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!!!) but that city is disgusting.

Yes it’s definitely less than ideal that New York was built without alleys or some other means to store large amounts of household trash besides the sidewalk, but I disagree (at least with the severity) with the rest of this comment.

A subway car that’s vacated due to smells, while it happens, is extremely rare, and the average station is just as clean as any I saw in Rome or Paris. There are definitely exceptions to that, and the worst case is worse than what you’d see in the rest of the developed world, but it’s still an exceptional experience to see something or smell something terrible in the subway system.

Yea, GP seems like it really bothers them (which is okay, we all value different things) but I love living in NYC.

I’m always going to new events, parks, restaurants, museums. Transportation’s extensive, cheap, and quick for the most part. There are rivers, beaches, woods, bays. Biking is becoming a real joy with all the new bike infrastructure. Love the new outdoor dining scene, the people, incredible amounts of architecture styles.

And besides, we upgraded from piss smell, to weed smell! Much better.

I have experienced pretty much everything in GP’s post (although the way they go on you’d think it’s a near constant which I don’t think is true even in the rougher neighborhoods like Brownsville that I’ve lived in) at some point or another… they’re just not the parts of NYC that I focus on I guess.

I can't help but think of the phrase "Stockholm Syndrome"... I'm sure it's a fine city aside from all the excrement, waste and rot! ;)

Except, like I said… I just don’t really notice those things that much, and if your description is so tainted by that stuff that you remember that instead of walks in the parks; nights of omikasa sushi; basketball, football, and baseball games; evenings out with friends; Persian, Thai, Chinese, Italian, Georgian restaurants; world class museum after world class museum; days on the beach; parades that go on for hours with incredible costumes and floats; Broadway plays; movies in the parks and squares; concerts; and the wonderful varied architecture… then yea, you provably should live somewhere you enjoy more!

That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis. Are there downsides? Certainly. Calling it Stockholm Syndrome when I and many others in my situation have both lived elsewhere and could leave tomorrow? That just seems like a laughable failure to see things through a different view point than you have.

It’s fine not to like a place, it’s the whole “I don’t like it so you must be deluded by ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’ and have Stockholm Syndrome” part that seems a bit like a mindset that’s not great at accepting other view points or ideas.

>That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis.

there are many other giant megalopolises in the world that somehow manage not to have giant piles of trash everywhere. london and tokyo for example. demand better from your government.

"That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis."

this is fine.

Yea, it is. We walk by it and move on with our lives and then it gets picked up by decently paid garbage men. The buildings are 30, 40, 50 stories tall… do you think trash disposal is magic?

why did you down vote me? i was agreeing with you

I didn’t vote on your post at all, although I will say I didn’t think you were agreeing with me. Anyways! I don’t think talking about voting is encouraged, bowing out :-)

I agree with you, I was only teasing :)

I know, I dunno why I took the comment seriously, the wink should have tipped me off :-)

You should watch this scene from "My Dinner with Andre":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWZk24MA7TE

Sorry man, the subway is much much worse than the Paris metro. Can't speak for Rome but it's definitely worse than the metro in terms of cleanliness, not even close. Plus the MTA is pretty terrible service wise compared to the metro as well.

I live in NYC, I’ve lived in a bunch of cities globally and I’d say you’re exaggerating to the extreme here.

“The streets all smell like piss” genuinely sounds like a take from someone that visited midtown while on a three day conference and then left. There are some disgusting streets, no doubt. There’s too much trash on the street on trash days. On rare occasions a subway car has homeless people in it and it smells. None of this is great by any means. But the idea that all New Yorkers are walking around smelling piss 24/7 and saying “huh, guess it must be like this everywhere” doesn’t pass any kind of sanity test.

Reminds me of the Principal Skinner meme: “am I wrong? No, it is the eight million inhabitants of NYC who are all wrong”

Both sides are exaggerating.

Some streets do smell like piss at some times. The building superintendents periodically hose off the front sidewalks to wash away the dog urine, especially during the hottest parts of the summer. Especially on nice streets.

Oh, I’d never deny that there are streets that smell like piss from time to time, it’s the OP’s assertion that “all” streets do. It’s just silly, as is the extrapolation that New Yorkers must be clueless about the disgusting filth surrounding them.

>I’d never deny that there are streets that smell like piss from time to time

in my city we somehow contrive not to have any streets at all smell like piss, ever. in the civilized world we stopped using streets as outdoor latrines over a century ago.

I’m not trying to suggest that NYC is a utopia. Far from it, I’m very well aware of its shortcomings. But they can be pointed out without resorting to hyperbole.

I wonder how it compares to other cities: Melbourne, Tokyo, Paris, London, Munich, Boston, San Francisco, etc.

Then, I think we can pin-point exaggerations from objective truth. I admit, when I visited NY, it was very nice but we went around central park and such.

I just dislike this law, this is a great way to make NY city worse - pitting citizens against each other. There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.

> There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.

Unfortunately for New York, the closest they have is NYPD, which I don't think I've ever heard anything good about - but have heard plenty of bad.

the one time i visited NYC i naively tried to use a public toilet at a subway station. entered the stall -- faecal matter coating every surface. filthy is an understatement.

I once saw a subway car where someone had not just defecated, but had defecated on each and every seat individually - and with amazing uniformity. Standing in the next car for the remainder of my commute I worked out that either multiple people had to have participated (entirely possible there is public defectors club around here someplace) or one super-constipated individual had cleared out the entire length of an average human’s large intestine. Could one person be that backed up and not only walk around but have the control to squat over each seat and leave a uniform amount? The smell was horrific so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an art project. I wonder if someone cleaned that car, or if they just rolled it into the ocean one dark night.

Cleaning the subway cars overall is a joke - they have people with mops at the terminus stations and they get 30secs to 2 minutes to mop the first and last cars before they go out again. All the cars in the middle just accumulate debris and stains until the train is taken out of service for regular maintenance.

One side effect of the pandemic is I have to leave the apartment so infrequently that I can take Lyft everywhere and still come out ahead of what I used to spend on metrocards - I don’t miss riding the subway at all.

Try the Rest Rooms in the city Emergency Rooms where there is all that and blood, too everywhere or the police stations even in the time of COVID and AIDS!

I remember someone I knew stating that "The official smell of New York City is urine."

Better than the old pollution from the 1970s.

When I first came to the US, in the late '60s, or early '70s (I think I visited before moving to the US), we came on a ship, which docked in New York.

My mother brought me out onto the deck, one night, to smell New York. We couldn't see the lights yet, but I remember that nasty, metallic stench.

I have never witnessed anything like his comment. If it happens, it hasn't directly impacted my living here. Still my first choice city in the US.

That's because you're, perhaps correctly, choosing not to own anything? If you rent and ride a bike and only ever take the subway and occasional Uber, then this stuff seems foreign. If you want to buy a property then you'll see for yourself the joys of bureaucracy. When you get a Kafkaesque fine that you can't reach a human being to talk about, and discover a byzantine system of 'expeditors' you might reconsider.

Government bureaucracy at its best….

It baffles me that New Yorkers just bend over and take that stuff.

In most places, when an identifiable group of people, (e.g. city government employees) is such a bunch of jerks to everyone they would normally be abused right back until they stop being jerks.

Imagine if the government of Detroit acted that way. The inspector would come out to find their car on blocks three days a week and nobody would admit to having seen anything.

survivorship bias, in New York only the people who are rich enough to avoid all these rules or the ones who will bend over and take it are left. We literally just had a president who bribed the NYPD to get his concealed carry license.

> bribed the NYPD to get his concealed carry license

This is in the supreme court right now, hopefully it gets overturned and average people can start protecting themselves. We have the same BS law in CA…”prove you need a conceal carry, no death threats aren’t enough…”

Nope. Usually people take it and take it until they can't take it anymore and go berserk.

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