But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
> But. Mamdani just had a good PR campaign. The bar majority of the "good" work he has done was actually some by someone else, the state, former administration.
PR and communications is a necessary component to demonstrate the value being delivered to your constituents, but the work must still be done. Mamdani is using his position and tenure to prove that Democratic Socialism can and does work, in one of the largest cities in the world, for other potential candidates, and for the voters who might support them. He froze the rent for over 2 million renters, and has recovered in ~$130M in wage theft for delivery workers from DoorDash alone. He's implemented universal childcare for 2-year-olds. He has established enforcement against deceptive and abusive landlord practices, hidden junk fees and misleading charges, and illegal auto-renewals and subscriptions.
"Make it work. Make it right. Make it fast." This will be the case study for every mayoral election over the next decade, and who to vote for: putting promise into practice.
(as of this comment, Mamdani polls at ~69% for favorability)
It is almost a cliche' that New Yorker's hate their Mayors. I was there for the 3 which were previous to Mamdani, and everybody hated them.
I thought that Mamdani would set back the cause of Democratic Socialism by 100 years, because surely, after 2 weeks, everybody would just start hating him and the mainstream of both parties could point to him as an obvious warning.
But he's the most popular politician in the country. That doesn't happen by good P.R. It happens when that pothole which has been there for 3 mayors suddenly gets fixed.
There is only a finite number of times you can see:
1. A pothole get fixed Mamdani has repaired over 200,000 of them.
2. Your landlord finally repairs that leaky roof. Mamdani has had landlords do $34 million worth of repairs and upkeep they were legally obliged to do.
3. Or Door Dash finally paid you for those hours you worked....
...yeah, that only happens a finite number of times before you ask yourself? Why didn't any of the other mayors do that? What were the other mayers doing with that 8.5% income tax I pay to live in this city?
And from there it's just a short step to asking "why has government taken all my money in taxes and given me nothing in return?"
It's not P.R. man. It is an existential threat to the mainstream politicians.
This isn't a "changed"title. The title matches the linked "newspaper" article. But the op was saying that the research paper the article talks about has a better, easier to read, title.
Why are you comparing apples to oranges? Implementing a speed limit, it size limit on a computer is just idiotic. It works be again to saying, no you can't use a calculator to do the arithmetic, you must use pen and paper, because I said so. Which means who ever doesn't implement this arbitrary speed limit is going to eat you for lunch. This is a Luddite argument.
Yeah, I can argue against it. How much time did he spend on it, how much is games on the user the (as in, is this a common use path or an uncommon one) you may have doubled the speed but did it go from several seconds to a few, it a split second to a half split second? Are there other things that should be implemented before speeding things up. Etc etc.
As someone who lived in the West my entire life, not many people would call a couple of swing sets and a slide a park. A playground maybe, but not a park. Now I believe the city would officially call it a park, but that doesn't make it a park.
It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it.
You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.
The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.
Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?
The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.
Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."
I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).
Of course running a vegetable shop is political. Politics is the question of who gets what. There have been countless societies across history, and still exist many, where the political formations meant the very concepts of “shop”, “business”, or even “employment” per se were foreign.
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