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Comment by gregorymichael | Hacker News Reader

Last year I helped the owner of my local coffee shop renew his NYC license. I've been doing web development over 20 years and barely managed to navigate their website. It took over an hour and dozens of attempts to pay a couple hundred dollars to renew one of the many licenses he needs to stay open. We moved to New York five years ago and I've come to believe the propaganda that it is the Greatest City in the World. This experience more than any other -- the hoops that every smalltime entrepreneur has to hop through -- seriously called that claim into question.

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Worse still - New York is dead last among 50 states for economic recovery from covid. With NYC supposedly being the global center of business and finance. Vacant storefronts are everywhere and I don't see it getting better anytime soon. Reminds me too much of the 1980s.

I'm done. Packing it up and getting out in 2 months.

This is not even true.

New York is not dead last in recovery. It’s definitely in the top half of not better.

And to the extent the NYC economy has been damaged it’s entirely because NYC faced the brunt of COVID in the beginning snd because a larger part of its economy than many others is dependent on tourism and service industries that were most affected by Covid.

There's multiple reports and studies on this in the last month that put New York either in dead last or second to last (after Michigan).

If you look at CNN's report, New York is doing the worst in every single metric where they compare states against each other: https://www.cnn.com/business/us-economic-recovery-coronaviru...

TOP Agency, who specialize in marketing data, put out this report putting NY second to last: https://topagency.com/report/pandemic-recovery/

Both get their data from different places and corroborate each others' findings.

I not only have data, but I live here and have been traveling the US all year. You can see this plainly with your eyeballs. The state of NY's economy is complete shit.

I have an easy time believing the process is complicated and probably very out of date and cumbersome, but I have a hard time believing the guy in this video about it being so impossible. The proof being that there's thousands of operating small businesses in NYC.

How do you know they're not encountering the same issue? Louis is the only one with a large enough audience to be vocal about it.

Louis seems to be caught up in the middle of an intersection of some COVID related issues and his own mistake for several years.

It will also get resolved and/or not matter (in that once things return a bit to normal any accrued fines/fees will be forgiven). But in the meanwhile it provides Louis, whose YT channel no longer resembles the educational/right to repair focused channel it used to be, but rather dependent on views from whining about different stuff, more fodder for views.

I say this as a liberal believer in government: NYC (and NY state) make one of the worst cases for effective governance out of anywhere I’ve lived. (it’s all relative, of course: the places I’ve lived have been cities and towns in relatively prosperous western nations)

Guess you haven't lived in California.

To be fair the California online systems are better than any other state I worked in.

California goveement workers I've had to interact with are smart and helpful and go the extra mile to let you know what you need to do. The problem is the rules they don't make.

New York (the state and the city), Chicago, and California are the reasons why I will never live in a state or city with only one strong political party at this point. All of them are kleptocracies (and effectively dictatorships).

You forgot Texas and Florida in there

I've never lived in Texas or Florida.

I really don't think you could say that about Wyoming and many others.

Regulatory capture definitely exists in some red states.

To be honest that doesn't seem to bad. About an hour to renew a yearly license?

The happy path was 5 minutes.

I agree it could be more simple an hour doesn't seem too awful.

To renew something that is honestly no more than probably the following: (1) Update address/contact info if changed (2) Estimate earnings (3) Pay fee

Yea, I'd say an hour is too much.

This is longer than it should be but it's not overbearing.

The idea of a yearly license to operate a coffee shop, that requires renewal and payment, is pretty absurd in my opinion.

Clearly worse than it should be, but my experiences with health insurers and hospital billing departments made the anecdote read a lot funnier than it was intended to, for sure. "Only an hour!?"

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