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Comment by Alifatisk | Hacker News Reader

Its incredible how much changes Mandani is doing to benefit the citizens. I start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing.

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I get that people are excited about Mamdani, but the internet is really overselling his successes. New York state already has an automatic renewal law: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/GBS/527-A . The NYC version reuses much of that law's text!

This is a consistent pattern. I've seen people praise him for the use of snow melters (they use them most blizzards), praise him for switching to garbage bins (the decision to switch happened under Adams), praise him for putting his desk backwards to send a message of solidarity (the desk was not backwards, it just has drawers on both sides), etc.

He seems like a decent mayor, but there are a lot of overeager boosters who have warped him into some miracle maker. It reminds me a bit of when Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in the enthusiasm after his election — it's nice to feel like a politician is "your guy", but don't get too swept up in it!

you're kinda cherry picking minor accomplishments here. There are things like the doordash settlement, public toilets, rent freeze, childcare funding that are unprecedented.

I agree on all points. His social media team is arguably the best of all previous mayors, and I think that's largely why we're seeing people praising him for things he didn't actually do. He is also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and DSA members are *HEAVY* social media users, so they tend to give him a lot of praise because he's on their team.

Mamdani is a master of social media.

Communicate what you do -> "master of social media"

Don't communicate what you do -> "what did they even do?"

To be fair, Bloomberg and De Blasio held a lot of press conferences which is fine for people over 40 years old. The secret sauce of Mamdani is creating viral content on social media that hits well with people under 40 years old. Did you see the YouTube video[1] where he was a phone operator for 311? It is so raw and funny. It hard not to be enthusiastic about a mayor (leader) like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1vbAdFkVvA

The right is making him out to be the literal anti-Christ. Which is a strong signal that he will actually be effective at making positive change.

I live in France and we just had a good week with the Pope followed by a terrible week with the hard-left. The actually conquered a university, tagged it completely, made piles of stones to throw at cops, put soap on the ground to make it slipely. It's not only the students, many are complicit in this loss of values.

Is France planning to address the concerns of the protesters? The state of some public schools is terrible.

last i saw they were mostly interested in firing stun grenades at children

As a result of that horrible incident of a student losing their hand, the government suspended the use of certain weapons and stun grenades.

The French gov't also announced the "Five Point Plan". There are lots of good details here[1].

[1] https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/05/from-school-blockades-to...

wild that it requires children to be permanently maimed before the cops stop shooting at them, but there you go.

then again, it's wild that it took such large scale protests for Lecornu to commit to filling long-vacant teaching posts, ensuring school buildings are fit for human occupation with functioning sanitary facilities, and implementing basic reforms to the notoriously bad university application system. my expectations from Matignon were always low but,

Do you know the root cause of these issues? Example: Is teacher pay too low so they cannot attract quality candidates? Or just general under-funding of public schools?

The question assumes the state is at fault and the fault is not providing enough funding. In reality, the fault can come from many sources: students (which aren't literally children); parents; foreign, national and local political influence; teachers and other staff and association members; the broken windows theory; lack of old-fashined values and discipline?

You can provide the same X euros per year of funding for each student of each school and end up with widly different results.

> put soap on the ground to make it slipely

they dropped a piano on a CRS's head and all his teeth turned to piano keys. does their perfidy know no bounds?

Just be thankful you’re privileged enough that their behavior doesn’t make sense to you.

Both ends of the political spectrum read this comment and think you're calling out the opposing end.

> start to wonder what the prior mayors was even doing

The last productive mayor New York had was Bloomberg. Then we had a leftist idiot (who did, granted, pass universal pre-K). Then we had a reactionary centrist muppet (who did, granted, pass some decent pro-development policies). So over a decade of bad executives coming to power with one or two good ideas that they implemented in their first year and then became pests.

The problem is that the Democrats have NYC in their bag. The other party in America literally hates New York and basically all cities.

Imagine if you will an America were every vote counted equally. The GOP would actually have to campaign in the cities and cater to urban voters.

Bloomberg won three terms as a non-Democrat.

The Democrats seemed to have hard time learning that in reverse with today’s rules, I wouldn’t count on the GOP being any smarter.

> problem is that the Democrats have NYC in their bag

New York has elected independents (Bloomberg and Republicans (Giuliani) to Gracie Manor. Staten Island tends to swing that way in general. It’s really only post-Iraq War that New York went pretty much permanently Democrat, a fate sealed by the collapse of the GOP into MAGA.

> other party in America literally hates New York

Trump is a New Yorker. I haven’t seen that much hate for it compared with the California metropolises.

The previous mayors were doing lots. Just ask any LLM for a list of their major accomplishments.

Michael Bloomberg launched NYC311 in 2003. 311 has fielded millions of calls in the last twenty years. A huge part of 311 is being able to report quality of life issues. Plus Bloomberg made it easier to build, which unleashed a massive development wave in Manhattan and Brooklyn. More homes to house people, and more offices to grow the economy.

Bill de Blasio started Universal Pre-Kindergarten and reduced Stop-and-Frisk by 90%.

Eric Adams was a doofus and will soon be forgotten.

Why stop at mayors? How about legislators... city, state, and federal, hell, what about governors and presidents?

Cuomo is a morally-bankrupt man. But he was an effective governor in many respects.

No, he was clearly always a corporate shill his entire time as governor. He tried to get NYC to pay for half the subway without giving us increased power of how it's run [1].

Then he lied about the COVID numbers so he could write a shitty book about how great of a governor he was around that time. That seems decidedly ineffective to me, unless the goal was to kill people I guess. He sucked, we're good to be rid of him.

He sucked. He probably still does.

[1] If the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent.

He kept the budget on time, played an equal role in getting the 2nd Avenue subway opened and presided over economic growth. He fumbled with COVID and was being a rapist in the background, which is unforgivable, but it’s not unreasonable to say he had positive impacts, even if I’m not sure whether he was net positive.

> the city actually ran the MTA I suspect it would be competent

I’m cautiously doubtful. We lost control for a reason. And the current MTA is pretty well run, especially if you include commuter rail in the mix.

It was still under his role that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today.

I guess I don't concede that he did anything competently, or at least more competently than any other politician would be.

> that the MTA became the strange slush fund that it is today

Do you have a source or dataset that shows this delineation? (Not challenging you, genuinely curious.)

paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

Non-paywalled: https://web.archive.org/web/20180103141201/https://www.nytim...

> The budget showed that 900 workers were being paid to dig caverns for the platforms as part of a 3.5-mile tunnel connecting the historic station to the Long Island Rail Road. But the accountant could only identify about 700 jobs that needed to be done, according to three project supervisors. Officials could not find any reason for the other 200 people to be there.

> “Nobody knew what those people were doing, if they were doing anything,” said Michael Horodniceanu, who was then the head of construction at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs transit in New York. The workers were laid off, Mr. Horodniceanu said, but no one figured out how long they had been employed. “All we knew is they were each being paid about $1,000 every day.”

To be fair, a lot of the bullshit slush-fundiness of the MTA predates Cuomo. Still, this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started and since the MTA is the states responsibility, it was his responsibility.

ETA:

That particular anecdote appears to be from 2010, so admittedly before Cuomo took power. I still think it's fair to blame him for the subway not significantly improving in the nearly ten years he was in office.

> this article was 2017, six years after his tenure started

I will totally agree with you that Cuomo—nor Hochul—did anything around improving the MTA’s fiscal efficiency. I’m just not convinced he even accelerates that.

Sure, I'm not sure he made it "worse", just think it's fine to blame him for making no significant effort (as far as I can tell) to fix it in the ten years he was in office.

But that's kind of what I'm getting at; I don't concede that he was effective.

Several states have click to cancel laws including New York state.

Mamdani simply has better PR.

Yeah, like it or not at this point if you have to be an effective politician, you have to be a good influencer too much as I hate saying that sentence.

It might seem this way because he is showing off his wins on different channels. In terms of passing policy its not different than other mayors. Maybe you think the policy is good and the other mayors policy was bad and thats the gap.

This was actually started federally under Biden, but thrown out as soon as Trump came in

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/10/...

So many other similar examples, like Bank Overdraft Fee Caps, Credit card late fees, personal data safeguards, and so much more.

I'm old enough to remember that everyone said the same thing about Giuliani when he was mayor. Now everyone hates him

Did he put up though? Do you have multiple examples of pro-consumer wins he had early in his tenure?

  Doubled the police force and cut crime in half, including murders down 66%, shootings down 72%
  Zero-tolerance policy against public disorder, panhandling and public nuisance crimes (unheard of today!)
  Cleaned up times square transforming from a seedy red light district into a major tourist destination
  Converted a $2.3 billion city budget deficit into a $2.9 billion surplus
  Reduced or eliminated 23 different city taxes, saving taxpayers over $9 billion
  Overhauled the welfare system, helping people get jobs and successfully moved over 600K people off assistance
  Led NYC and USA through the immediate aftermath of 9/11
  Earned the title America's Mayor, Time magazine Person of the Year and an honorary knighthood

After 911, all he talked about was 911 and how he was in charge when that happened. Then, when Trump got into office, if you wanted a presidential pardon, you paid Giuliani $2,000,000 for one.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/giuliani-accu...

Then there's the defamation lawsuits that he lost:

$148,000,000 for Georgian election workers:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trial-over-rudy-giulia...

And $1,300,000,000 for Dominion Voting Systems:

https://archive.ph/eRkG5

Imagine a world where every city has its own special laws for computer and internet use, that businesses globally have to comply with at all times…

This type of thing should never have been up to the mayor of any city to legislate.

Yes, better decided top dowm by a cabal. The more uniformity, the better.

It’s incredible how much virtue signaling this is. He has no power to enforce it - I’d just ignore him anyway, nothing he can do about it.

did it make you _feel good_ though?

Fines to the non-compliant businesses and forcing them to refund are two major ways he will enforce this.

I thought Yandex was taken out

Yeah, much better just to sit around and do nothing. Wouldn’t want randos on the internet to accuse you of virtue signaling.

Are representatives necessarily either virtue signaling or vice signaling?

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