Angry New Yorker

Semi-Daily Rants from New York City's Angry Man

"As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly." - Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, Life of Johnson, Sept. 1783

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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
 
Til Death do us Blog?

I'm still not sure of what to make about this whole blogging frenzy. Here I'm writing this on one of the several blogs I run, with varying frequency, but do I care that this is a blog? Not really. Before this I just updated items on my various websites, so blogging, to me, is more like picking up a notebook PC and walking out to the backyard with it than it's some massive democracy-enhancing culture redefining experiment, as some maintain. Writing it writing. Ideas are ideas. But where I part companies with the drum-beaters is that I've never agreed that "knowledge is power", as the Sir Fracis Bacon maxim states.

Rather, the right knowledge in the right place at the right time is power. Everything else is mere trivia. So if blogging, the web, or even smoke signals, helps get that information to the right place at the right time they're all rightly power conduits. Focusing on the semantics and method of blogging is like focusing on what guage wire your house is using. Unless is causes a fire, who cares? You care about the electrons moving through that wire. And that's all I have to say.

posted by anonymous at 2:18 PM

Monday, July 21, 2003
 
Yet another stupid idea...

The New York Daily News reports [here] that a report by economist Charles Komanoff and traffic engineer Brian Ketcham claim east river tolls are a good idea. I disagree strongly. NYC's five boroughs are balkanized enough already; adding tolls to the currently free crossings would add insult to the injuries already suffered by residents of Queens and Brooklyn with an additional cost to simply move from one part of the same city to another part.
Granted there is currently NO free way to drive from Queens to the Bronx, or from Brooklyn to Staten Island, and indeed since Brooklyn and Queens are located on an island, there is NO free way to drive to any other part of the country. I think an argument, albeit one that would not survive rational basis review, could be made that ANY tolls on the route from Long Island to the rest of the country violate the dormant commerce clause. In short, the entire system in NYC is one massive shakedown from stem to stern. We need regime change here in New York City. Perhaps we can petition the British to come liberate New York state from itself. Just a thought.

posted by anonymous at 1:25 PM

Tuesday, July 01, 2003
 
Tax Hike From Gotham Gazette...

"Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed into law yesterday an income tax increase that raises the tax from 3.648 percent to 4.35 percent for single New Yorkers who make more than $100,000 and married couples whose combined income is more than $150,000. The "temporary" tax hike is retroactive to January 1 but will be phased out over the next two years and is scheduled to disappear entirely after 2005. It will raise $644 million for the city. "The burden of the increase falls on those taxpayers most able to afford the increase," said Bloomberg during the signing ceremony where only one member of the City Council showed up." [more]


posted by anonymous at 10:35 AM

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