This is a very online oriented debate. Derek Thompson might hear mostly from left coded anti-trust types on twitter, but I really don't think that's the main opponent to abundance.
If you spend time in the individual communities where this battle happens, the voice of the classic NIMBY (worried about property values and crime) drowns out the left-NIMBYs that worry about "greedy developers" and gentrification. At least that's been my experience in West LA. Many of the less-online left critics eventually come around to realize that upzoning type solutions and public housing type solutions aren't actually in conflict with each other even if they disagree on relative priority and impact.
I use MyShake which will let me get alerts based on specific magnitude cutoffs. I actually just ratcheted up my "global" alert from 7.5 to 8 because of all the alerts from the last couple weeks in the pacific.
> Others have said it would hurt businesses in the congestion zone. The report, however, says pedestrian activity inside the zone was up 8.4% in May, compared with the same period last year, while outside the zone only saw an increase of 2.7%.
And from an earlier post
> And just to take a different kind of measure, The New York Times visited 40 storefronts on a stretch of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village to gauge how businesses felt about congestion pricing. People working in four of those businesses said the change had been positive, 10 said it had been negative — and 25 said it had had no impact.
So, do you notice how the first quote doesn’t actually answer the question? Of course pedestrian activity was up. Because cars were taxed. But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
And businesses saying it had a negative impact were more than twice as prevalent (10 to 4) than businesses saying it had a positive impact, with 25 saying no impact.
So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
> But was pedestrian traffic up to the same rate as cars were down such that overall traffic was unaffected? No, probably not, because the story says vehicles are down 11% but pedestrian traffic is only up 8%.
Those percentages are only directly comparable if the number of cars and the number of pedestrians is the same, which I'm guessing it's not. Some quick searching doesn't seem to yield an answer to this question, but in a city like NYC I'd venture to guess there is more pedestrian traffic than car traffic, so it's entirely possible that an 8% increase in pedestrian traffic more than makes up for an 11% drop in car traffic.
> So, overall, a negative impact. You can debate the magnitude and whether it is “worth it,” but it’s definitely a negative impact on commerce.
I don't think you can conclude that at all because you're missing some key pieces of information, like whether the average positively impacted businesses had a greater positive impact than the average negatively impacted business had negative impact. You also don't know the long term impacts that might change what types of businesses are in the area of how they attract customers. Businesses that optimize for car traffic (like Costco, at the extreme end of the spectrum) might see an initial decrease in customers, but longer term could either adapt to be more pedestrian friendly or be replaced with pedestrian friendly businesses that might generate even more economic activity.
Also not to put too fine a point on it, but the "business impact" numbers were based off a reporter going to 40 businesses in one neighborhood and asking "people working there" what the impact had been. I'm not sure that's a very scientific way to draw broad conclusions, as the NYT freely admits.
Perhaps pedestrian traffic would make up for it, but nothing said in the article actually shows that.
I agree with you that the article doesn’t contain enough information to make a firm conclusion. In fact, that was my point.
Yes, I’m basing my conclusion on the fact that more than twice the number of businesses said it went down as up. Yes, that’s qualitative at some level, but if it supports any conclusion whatsoever, it supports the conclusion of business being down, not “no impact.”
The article is trying to whitewash the impact. It reports a bunch of numbers but those numbers don’t say much at all, and if they say anything, it’s actually opposite of what the reporter claims they say.
To be clear, I don’t live in NYC and I don’t have an opinion on the policy. I’m just noticing the poor reporting.
What does this have to do with government mandated websites? Seems that the US had a government website about climate and few heat deaths. If the number of heat deaths goes up this year without the websites would you think that is because the website went away (obviously not).
Seems like a website with information about climate change without a mandate about max AC is a pretty conservative strategy all things considered.
Yeah, imo using musicbrainz/picard is great for the process of bringing something into your collection. I encounter errors like others here have mentioned, but they're straightforward to fix. Importantly, it sets up a reference to an evolving update process so changes down the line can get back to my files cleanly.
I assume the person you're replying to is talking about the Filibuster and supermajority requirements not the direct election history. The filibuster is a senate rule not a constitutional design, so it wasn't part of the "design". Maybe they're both different ways of adding veto points to the same effect, but I think spoilers as "explicit design" is probably not how I'd describe it.
If you spend time in the individual communities where this battle happens, the voice of the classic NIMBY (worried about property values and crime) drowns out the left-NIMBYs that worry about "greedy developers" and gentrification. At least that's been my experience in West LA. Many of the less-online left critics eventually come around to realize that upzoning type solutions and public housing type solutions aren't actually in conflict with each other even if they disagree on relative priority and impact.
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