Ben Carlos Thypin

@bct.bsky.social

2490 Followers 1322 Following

Moral high ground?!? That's the most expensive real estate on the face of the earth! - Larry Ellison (who otherwise sucks but this is a good quote) 📍NYC

Calvin peeing on Covid-19
The consensus among our class - which I shared! - was that our society was imperfectly but sufficiently a meritocracy, and that the basic frame of what came to be called "neoliberalism" was correct. A heavily marketized society was a society we-the-merited could succeed within, and it was also the form of society that would maximize all of our prosperity. The fact that our successes might be generously remunerated was not just a matter of private enjoyment, but reflected genuine social virtue. We had achieved a society in which one did well by doing good. This was never accurate. But journalists, think-tankers, and academic social scientists who were willing to advance this perspective in their work could count on career success. Which contributed to a consensus (not least but not only within the discipline of economics) that this suspiciously self-flattering perspective was in fact true. It was "science". The people at the top of many fields embraced it. Dissidence became hard to distinguish from sour-grapes conspiracism. ['Liberal professionals" had been recruited into what John Kenneth Galbraith describes as the role of the modern conservative. They were "engaged...in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness
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"Please stop emailing me. I'm voting for Curtis and if he loses I'm moving out of NY"
The Municipal Art Society of New York MASNYC MAS Advocacy Updates: Vote YES on Ballot Proposals 2, 3, and 4
@nick_garber 👀 in response to a question, Mamdani commits to evicting the Elizabeth Street Garden and building housing there in year 1 of his mayoralty
Cuomo with Eric Adams courtside at the Knicks game
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In an interview with The New York Times last Friday, Venezuela's vice presider, Delcy Rodriguez, said that her country was not a major producer or exporter of drugs and that she had "no doubt that one of the strategic objectives" of the Trump administration "is what they call 'regime change." Ms. Rodríguez said Venezuela sought to continue dialogue with Mr. Grenell and to normalize economic relations with the United States, saying that Mr. Trump's base had voted for economic growth, "not more wars."
FIGHTING FOR THE ROCKAWAYS CURTIS SLIWA for NVC MAYOR SLIWAFORNYC.COM
Two pieces. The 2019 law needs to be changed. It wasn't done right in terms of the MCIs, the major capital improvements. I agree with your statement before. We had a law, previously, that was extremely prone to abuse and the whole legal structure supported landlords over tenants in a way that led to a lot of displacement. Classic scenarios where people who had been part of a neighborhood for a long time were pushed out, priced out, consistently. So the impulse for the 2019 rent law in general was right, but the part about MCIs went too far the other way and took away, in my opinion, the ability of some landlords to appropriately maintain their buildings and improve their apartments and get some kind of appropriate return but one that did not encourage aggressive displacement efforts. So that needs to be fixed, still. And I would argue fixing that particularly would be a good balance to a rent freeze or other actions to address affordability. The affordability situation is insane right now. So I think using measures like a rent freeze, as needed, to give some measure of relief to people is a perfectly legitimate strategy. But I would contextualize it. My argument would be you do it in concert with other actions. And one thing I think that really would help would be if Albany, with the city's urging, would correct that mistake from 2019.