Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

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> This one is extra bad. Not even a communication plan? They did manage to spend $13 MILLION on Oracle shit though. The best part is the solution they sold, which is not even working in New Hampshire, and was built on DynamicsCRM (not portable to oracle)... That person needs to be fired immediately and probably arrested.

To be honest, as someone who lives in New York, that doesn't even sound that bad, as far as corruption in government contract goes.

To give you an idea, the MTA was recently caught paying $200,000 per day to people who literally did not have any jobs to do[0]. They were able to cover this up for years, and when it was finally made public, nobody batted an eyelid because, well, this level of corruption and wasteful spending is so commonplace that nobody was surprised in the least.

Hopefully Nevada has a functioning democratic government (unlike New York) and the state government decides to hold these people accountable. It's been over a month since that NYTimes piece came out, and Governor Cuomo hasn't even felt the need to respond to it - that's how little accountability our elected officials here have.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

From your link:

> The labor deals negotiated between the unions and construction companies also ensure that workers are well paid. The agreement for Local 147, the union for the famed “sandhogs” who dig the tunnels, includes a pay rate for most members of $111 per hour in salary and benefits. The pay doubles for overtime or Sunday work, which is common in transit construction. Weekend overtime pays quadruple — more than $400 per hour.

Wow. Seems like programming isn't a good field if you're in it for the money. The base pay may not be far off if you're a big shot superstar in a small market or normal in SV, but which of us gets 4x salary for weekend hours?

I am sure the workers wouldn't see much of this overtime pay as the TM would have just billed NV DMV at that rate.

That's because we've outsourced enforcing government's accountability to The People...to government.

See the problem?

What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption? E.g. promoting a constitutional amendment against conflict-of-interest or corruption. The closest I can think of is The Rootstrikers campaign, started by Lawrence Lessig:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers

Represent.Us and this weekend the big UnrigTheSystem conference in Louisiana.

Represent.Us has been focusing on passing state level anticorruption acts until we fix congress enough to pass federal ones. To show just how corrupt things are, they got one passed in South Dakota and the powers turned around and did this https://www.salon.com/2017/01/25/south-dakota-republicans-st...

Personally I have spent a long time thinking about these issues and I think at the federal level both parties are so corrupt that my 2020 campaign will be based on taking the majority away from both parties, and uniting independents, libertarians, constitutionalists, the green, and other parties under a coalition dedicated to actually representing their constituents.

> What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption? E.g. promoting a constitutional amendment against conflict-of-interest or corruption. The closest I can think of is The Rootstrikers campaign, started by Lawrence Les

New York doesn't have ballot initiatives like some states do. Constitutional amendments have to be proposed by the legislature, and they're going to be pretty unlikely to vote to take away their own power.

> What are some well-established initiatives working to on governmental accountability and reducing corruption?

In the not-so-distant past, there was a pretty successful initiative where people would occasionally end the lives of people who blatantly stole from them, or egregiously misrepresented them, while holding a position in representative government.

Can you elaborate on this? I don't follow.

One of the root causes of New York's government dysfunction (though not the only one) is that New Yorkers reliably vote in the democrat candidate regardless of pretty much any other consideration. It's what in the UK would be called a "safe seat".

Politicians in safe seats are theoretically accountable but due to the partisan nature of the electorate can in reality do whatever they like. Regardless of how badly they perform, they or their allies will always get re-elected.

In the UK there are some seats like that and they're usually associated with the most hilariously incompetent politicians. Diane Abbott became famous in the last couple of years for all sorts of useless and bad behaviour, like this famous exchange in which she went on the radio to explain a new policy of hiring more police, but repeatedly gave nonsensical and inconsistent numbers for how many and how much it'd cost:

http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/diane-abb...

e.g. she claimed hiring 10,000 police would cost only 300,000 pounds and when it was pointed out that'd mean paying them 30 pounds a year, she just invented another number on the spot that was also an order of magnitude away from anything that could possibly be correct.

She also routinely posts racist and sexist stuff on Twitter, skips important votes and generally fails at basic politics but her share of the vote went up in the election - because she's Labour.

No competition? No accountability!

> One of the root causes of New York's government dysfunction (though not the only one) is that New Yorkers reliably vote in the democrat candidate regardless of pretty much any other consideration.

Er, what? That's not really true. Bloomberg was an independent and his predecessor was Giuliani.

Over the last 40 years, the mayor has been a democrat less than half the time (18 years over Koch, Dinkins, and now de Blasio).

We're talking about New York State, not New York City.

GP isn't quite right that New York is a single-party state, but he is right that most districts aren't at all competitive. There are certain districts that are deemed Democratic territory and others that are Republican territory, and the two parties have gentleman's agreements with each other not to compete in each other's turf.

> We're talking about New York State, not New York City.

That's pretty hard to infer given the context, since the MTA is controlled by both the city and the state.

> but he is right that most districts aren't at all competitive

This is also true of say, Georgia. You can see for example that no one even ran against Buddy Carter in 2016 [1]. Most districts, period, aren't really that competitive.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_1st_congressional_...

> That's pretty hard to infer given the context, since the MTA is controlled by both the city and the state.

Not really - the MTA is a private entity which receives the bulk of its funding from the state, and the state government is (ostensibly) responsible for holding it accountable.

> This is also true of say, Georgia. You can see for example that no one even ran against Buddy Carter in 2016 [1]. Most districts, period, aren't really that competitive.

New York is a special case in the degree to which both parties collude to keep districts non-competitive for general elections, how they ensure that even primary elections are non-competitive[0], and the number of state laws that they have passed in order to shield this power from being checked by voters at any step.

I don't really want to get too into the details here, because it's tangential to the original topic, but it's been discussed on HN before.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-poli...

> the MTA is a private entity which receives the bulk of its funding from the state

That's not really true. The biggest source of funding for the MTA is fares, followed closely by dedicated taxes (i.e. there would be no reason for the taxes to exist were it not specifically for the MTA). A majority of those taxes are levied specifically on people who live in the MTA's core area (basically counties surrounding and including the city) [1].

The state actually dips into these dedicated taxes to cover other budget shortfalls.

You make it sound as though the state covers for the MTA using the general tax pool, which is such a minor part of the MTA's budget (through subsidies largely) as to be not meaningful.

> the state government is (ostensibly) responsible for holding it accountable.

No, the board is. The governor appoints 6 board members, the city 4, and the other 7 are delegates from various counties throughout the state.

> New York is a special case

Special case according to whom? Georgia rated 3rd-to-last on Ballotpedia's "competitiveness index" for the 2016 election cycle [2]. If your argument is that:

1) New York overtly colludes to remain uncompetitive

2) Georgia doesn't

3) George still manages to hold less competitive elections than New York

then I think a logical conclusion is one of:

1) Georgia legislators collude but less overtly

2) There's less transparency about the collusion in Georgia

3) Collusion clearly isn't as large a factor in uncompetitive elections as other factors

1: http://interactive.nydailynews.com/project/mta-funding

2: https://ballotpedia.org/2016_state_legislative_elections_ana...

Having lived in both states here's my perspective:

NY has long been a NYC/everything else split. As home prices rose and blue collar workers got priced out of LI, it too is lumping in with NYC as a Dem block. Between the two they way outvote in statewide elections.

Upstate is mainly Repub with a few blue areas.

GA was Dem for years until the mid-90's. Even the Dems were fairly conservative (remember Zell Miller's "My party left me" comments) and since taking control of statewide and anything other than ATL and Macon proper they have gerrymandered districts to the point of there is no way the Democrats could take back either of the legislative bodies.

TL;DL NY has been like this a long time. Albany has played the game for centuries. GA is just learning.

That's not how state government works though. Representatives are not businesses that can steal customers. They each have interests they wish to serve. If people are electing the people they want and those people are doing what they are elected to do then democracy is working. How have we outsourced accountability any more than we intended to in the first place with representative democracy?

> If people are electing the people they want and those people are doing what they are elected to do then democracy is working.

New York election law has been engineered to the point where it's actually impossible for voters to have any influence on the outcome. (That's why New York perennially has the lowest election turnout in the country).

Even our primary elections are essentially coronations for the candidates that the parties themselves hand-pick[0], with no real way for voters to override that choice. That's just one law, and if it were only that one, it might not be such a problem, but it's part of a carefully-constructed system that leaves New York residents with truly no control over our government.

[0] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/nyregion/new-york-poli...

> it's part of a carefully-constructed system that leaves New York residents with truly no control over our government.

That’s an extraordinary claim. You’re essentially arguing that democracy has failed in New York and that there was some conspiracy to undermine it.

I only skimmed but your linked article seems to focus on filling vacancies in the middle of a term.

Has NY done anything to prevent candidates from getting on the ballot in regular elections?

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