That isn't especially surprising, given that there's no point in raising (or using) the capital to build urban infrastructure where none exists. It's a flywheel-shaped problem; the fact that the average American lives in a local optima of suburban sprawl doesn't itself indicate the absence of a better optima.
A bit of relevant context: the quote is from Yiddish, which is primarily Germanic with significant admixture from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic languages.
(One of my current favorite party tricks is speaking Yiddish to German speakers, and cranking up the other aspects to see where the intelligibility breaks down.)
I took a trip to Germany with my Dad, who grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents, and it was amazing to watch people's eyeballs pop out as they began to understand him and then realize what they were hearing.
I can't find any source online that says felony assaults on the subway are up 9% this year. Even the Post, which is typically inclined towards hyping crime rates, reports that felony assault rates are flat this year[1]. The same source claims that major offenses have dropped 18% YoY so far.
As with so many other things about NYC, salacious stories are given a funhouse mirror effect: you wouldn't want to fill your car's gas tank next to someone who has a victim in their trunk, but that person isn't being given national news coverage like the corpse abuser was.
This Post article doesn't provide a source. Mine claims the NYPD as a source but doesn't link it either, though. It seems like only one of these can be correct: there would have to be a very large spike in felony assaults in a single month for the number to go up by 9% YoY.
The Times article doesn't mention this year's stats. Last year's were definitely worse, so it's not surprising they mention that.
These would be examples of normalization, not a slippery slope. The OP's example makes this clear (from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car," not "congestion pricing in NYC" to "congestion pricing elsewhere").
(Regardless, I think the answer is simple: congestion pricing is only economically viable when an area is simultaneously congested and has alternative transportation methods that would prevent the local economy from collapsing. NYC is one of a very small handful of cities in the US where this is true, although that's largely a function of 80 years of car-centric design. Maybe it will change.)
Sounds like an arbitrary distinction, but in any event, it was the OP who used "slippery slope" to refer to going from "congestion pricing in NYC" to "they're going to take my car."
The distinction is important: a change in a law isn’t always a slippery slope towards other things. Implementing congestion pricing isn’t a slippery slope towards seizing peoples’ cars, which was GP’s point (which I agree with).
To make it obvious: universal suffrage is a change that happened, but it wasn’t a slippery slope towards giving dogs the right to vote. Some changes result in new stases.
But nobody was claiming congestion pricing would absolutely lead to seizing cars. The OP was talking about the fear that more things may happen, which is perfectly logical. Today, nobody (including you) can say whether 10 or 20 years from now, ICE cars will be banned. But observing steps that appear to lead in that direction, and being concerned or fearful, is rational and logical.
Numerous politicians and advocates have suggested exempting electric vehicles from the NYC congestion pricing. Such vehicles are exempt in London. It isnt unusual for governments to start a program with one goal or purpose, then expand it (or use as a launching point) to achieve further goals, such as banning ICE vehicles.
This is currently happening with cigarettes. Banning them at workplaces and other public places is one thing. But we live in a capitalist country that celebrates individual freedom. Or do we? Beverly Hills CA and Manhattan Beach CA have both banned the sale of cigarettes entirely. Massachusetts banned all flavored cigarettes and is trying to permanently ban the sale of cigarettes to anyone a born after a certain date.
These go beyond "normalization", it is exactly slippery slope... get a small foothold then keep expanding the position.
People suggest all kinds of things. Just about every special interest group in the city wanted a congestion exemption; most did not get it. I don’t think this itself makes for good evidence of a slippery slope.
New York's congestion pricing was just implemented. It's far too early to know whether it will, or to claim it won't, lead to further restrictions, such as banning some vehicles altogether.
Over 300 recreationally used molecules have been banned outright by UN conventions alone. Not saying this is good, but cigarettes are very much an exception to the norm.
Hizzoner aside, I don’t think NYC’s government is markedly more crooked than any other American municipality.
(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)
NYC has a markedly more pronounced history with organized crime - including that extant sort which is associated with the financial industry - and the municipal culture that develops to deal with it. Of course, this implies that now that Dallas is getting a stock exchange, your claim might become salient in a decade or two.
Emphasis on history: NYC very famously broke its organized crime groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It's what made Giuliani famous before he became a politician[1].
(I would hazard a demographic claim around organized crime: just about any mid-sized city with large suburbs almost certainly has more per-capita organized crime than NYC does. You just don't hear about it because most of it is of the "extortion for trash pickup" variety, not the "Murder, Inc." variety.)
I took pains to mention the extant nature of organized financial criminality which yet influences NYC (and state, and national) politics. Wall Street gets their way a lot when they shouldn't, and it's because government officials and elites are happy to pledge fealty to money over law.
As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor. I think this speaks to my point, which is that NYC corruption vis a vis organized crime didn't go away, it just became part of the institution.
I don’t think Wall Street is responsible for that much corruption at the city level. I agree about the federal level, but at the city level it’s probably mostly real estate with NGOs as a close second.
(But again, I don’t think it’s been evidenced that NYC is uniquely corrupt, which was the original claim.)
> As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor.
Except that the man is nowhere close to the halls of power in NYC, and hasn’t been so for three decades!
He is of course a crook, but that doesn’t evidence NYC being corrupt in 2025. It evidences Giuliani being a crook at the federal level.
No; Trail of Bits has always had multiple internal groups, including an OSS engineering group that does security and performance engineering. We still do plenty of audits as a company; you can see recent work on that front here[1] :-).
pytest's magic is not itself a significant overhead factor. All test suite systems need to perform a similar type of collection; unittest does the exact same thing via `unittest.main()`.
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