She delayed it by 6 months because she thought it would hurt some candidates in House elections, and then she reduced the fee by a significant amount when it did go into effect in January, but it's still working incredibly well.
I don't think it made sense either, especially because cutting the congestion pricing revenue last-second meant she had to start talking about raising taxes on the entire state instead, but that is the consensus on what she was thinking.
She delayed it by many months and lowered the fee, but eventually it went through. There was a theory that she wanted to delay it to win some contested seats in the November election, but that did not bear fruit. Now those voters still hate her, as do all the people that wanted congestion pricing. She was not well liked at the Democratic National Convention.
The reason she's not well liked is because she did absolutely nothing about probably one of the most corrupt mayors in the history of NYC.
The congestion charge is nowhere on the DNC's radar nationally. The mayor of the largest city in the country engaging in blatant quid pro quo with a president from another party, certainly is.
I'm not quite following here. What is Hochul supposed to do about Adams? The DoJ suit against Adams didn't happen until a month after the DNC. Blatant quid pro quo with a president from another party couldn't have happened until long after the DNC.
> I'm not quite following here. What is Hochul supposed to do about Adams?
Remove him from office? That's a power the governor has, and which the previous governor (Cuomo) threatened to use for petty personal disagreements with the previous mayor (DeBlasio), so actually invoking it to remove someone who has been indicted on federal charges is clearly fair game.
> The DoJ suit against Adams didn't happen until a month after the DNC.
The indictment didn't happen until the fall, but Adams had his home raided and phone seized long before that. The perjury also happened before that, I believe.
This guy is so cool, he uses the word "ratfucked"! Twice! Not just "fucked", but "ratfucked". Of course, congestion pricing was in fact implemented and remains in effect, so maybe not entirely "ratfucked"? Guess I'm not cool enough to understand. And because of his choice of words, people who are unfamiliar with this project don't even know what action(s) Kathy Hochul actually took that was/were detrimental.
My guess is that she lacks the essential political skill of reading the room. It's not like NYC is the first city to attempt congestion pricing. Anyone who has spent any time in London can see its benefits. So I think Hochul had her political focus on the wrong things.
It took a lot of time and effort to bring the stakeholders together for congestion pricing. And to withhold her approval at the last moment was shocking. It's hard to imagine what she was really thinking and even harder to understand how she felt she would be rewarded for it. That's not a real answer to your question, but her reasoning on both congestion pricing and Eric Adams just seems opaque.
Perhaps it's a social sign for being one of the NYC local. They also referred to a person by a single name, further emphasizing they were speaking to the select few who would know what they were talking about.
If only they could also write with a heavy NYC accent, their comment would be even cooler. Forget about it.
That's interesting. It must be that I associate rats with NYC. You used some terms that not everyone is familair with, I jump to the wrong conclusion, taking some guesses as to what you're talking about, and here we are.
ratfucking as a term in political context was dramatically popularized by the movie All the President’s Men, where a (historical) character describes his covert political actions thusly.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
> Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
To give a non-software example: think of wearing a clean shirt in a job interview. Nobody will hire you for the clean shirt, but plenty of people will reject you for stains.
> There is such a thing as negative value, if you do something that is a commodity poorly, then you are actively less valuable relative to competitors that do a good job of the same thing.
I think negative value would look something like bombing someone. Negative relative-[commodity-]value does not imply negative value.
Also, software is not a commodity at all. There's no cost to reproducing it.
> You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "commodity". I think you mean "commonplace" or something like that.
It's not the deciding factor yet. You can bet the IP hammer is going to swing in again once the big players have been decided just to keep the small players out.
> The other piece of "evidence", Cal-Maine's quarterly P/L, is also useless, for all we know they decided to invest in less capital equipment than previously in Q3 2025
There's no serious moral or value distinction here; if you insist on pointing fingers you can, but at the end of the day the profits we see celebrated come with higher costs, and the continuing-to-increase wealth inequality in this country confirms that not everyone sees the benefit.
> You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket.
> They always feel slightly like academics reading into things too much when it's totally possible they were meant platonically or like a brotherly type of love.
Why on earth are you looking for definitive proof of specific claims when it comes to history? That just seems like a fool's errand.
I think you should strive for definitive proof and also acknowledge that you will probably never get there.
To be honest, the title did seem click baity leading to one to assume there was a possible misreading of the era. But I think this should be unflagged because as foldr points out downthread [0], the family wanted the passages removed not some editors generations later?
Or the Democratic Party can get their house in order before the next federal election? They run a decent pro-growth platform at the federal level, but CA is a living counterexample that will be a sink on their credibility until it's fixed. It should be an existential issue for them given they'll lose a bunch of congressional seats in 2030 if they fail to start building.
I am not judging them based on price, because price is not under their direct control. I am judging them based on artificially depressed housing starts per capita and the lack of will to address it.
