> Some drivers can apply for Low-Income Discount or Low-Income Tax Credit for Residents.
> A 50% discount is available for low-income vehicle owners enrolled in the Low-Income Discount Plan (LIDP). This discount begins after the first 10 trips in a calendar month and applies to all peak period trips after that for the remainder of the calendar month.
The revenue also goes towards public transit, and the congestion charge applies mainly to the wealthiest part of the wealthiest borough.
I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all, even if the policy effects are incredibly income-progressive overall. This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy, the populace justifying turnstile hopping, lack of traffic enforcement by police, opposition to speed and red light cameras, opposition to rezoning unless it's built by free-range grass-fed vegan union labour and 100% below market, etc.
I mean, if we're gonna pick a group to impact, the ones who aren't already deeply struggling seem like the place to do it. Given the parent poster's commenting history here, though, I don't think they have a genuine concern in "disparate impact" at all.
>I hate this distinctly American idea that no policy can cause any detriment to any disadvantaged people at all
This "Distinctly American idea" you cite does not at all exist.
Tens of millions watch a news channel that openly stated we should euthanize homeless people. Millions more moved to a crazier channel because that one wasn't lying enough
They vote against free school lunch programs that cost very little.
They hate "welfare queens" with a passion, despite that being a lie, and still being a lie decades later.
Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
>This is how we end up with carveouts for every special interest group in every single policy
No, the reason we get so many special interest carve outs in the US is that special interest groups fund election campaigns. Fix campaign funding (IE, make it publicly funded and extremely time limited) and you make it significantly easier for people who eschew bribery to be and stay politicians.
Sure, HN has a strong "Not perfect should never be done" bias, because HN is full of turbonerds that crave validation for how smart they are and always need to pipe up with a nitpick to be heard. 95% of the time, the exact "complaint" someone on HN makes up was already noted and covered in the very article. We aren't allowed to sass people for not reading the article.
This is not the case off of HN and in reality. Conservatives are perfectly happy doing "Obvious and common sense" measures that actually have insane second order effects. They insist tariffs are a good policy the way they are being implemented. Democrats want all sorts of things that are not at all perfect and would be happy to have slightly fewer new problems than the same problems our grandparents had to fight about.
> Democrats had no qualms voting for the Crime Bill back in the 90s, and were willing to turn around and get aggressive about the border to win an election.
this seems awfully coy. Why not just say who cheerled the bill and who went on the TV circuit to explain how great it was because of "super predators" - nice euphemism.
"Democrats" isn't some amorphous thing we can't tag to individual people. The last president of the USA and his sponsor (Bill Clinton) were adamant to get that bill passed. Biden spearheaded the legislation. This isn't just some "he voted yea on it!" sort of thing.
No, just one of the 99% of universities in this world where people aren't en masse claiming to have disabilities for selfish gain. Neither long ago - this is as of 2025 - nor particularly far away.
"culture i grew up in" could easily mean "what my parents/older relatives told me they did, when they told me to be like them."
Once you grow up, you realize your parents were human, made self-interested decisions, and then told themselves stories that made their actions sound principled. Some more than others, of course.
I'll skip the "my parents" part, because I'm an old, but ... NO ONE had independent housing their Freshman year in college at my hometown uni, unless they had prior residency in the area (were commuting from home).
So, yeah: that morality did exist, and not just in fables.
I went to a mediocre undergrad, and a top 5 school for grad. The difference in morals was quite notable, and cheating was much more prevalent in the latter (not just in classes, but for things like this as well).
Just because the punishment for seeking mental health care is losing one’s entire career doesn’t make these problems disappear, it just makes everyone very good at masking or self medicating.
> filters out the people who are too mentally ill to mask
this is a very good point - only vulnerability is a person decompensates from "able to mask" to "lets gooooo" in a very short period of time - between two flights say - then we're gonna have some problems
No, it really hasn't. Sweeping the problem under the rug has already resulted in at least 150 deaths, which could have been prevented by allowing pilots to seek mental health care.
150 deaths is statistically insignificant on this scenario and actual a very good evidence the current policy is working.
It is hard for some people to have the emotional maturity to understand this, but we can't fucking prevent every fucking death. We will all fucking die sooner or later, too.
You have absolutely no objective reason to suppose that changing this policy would have prevented this, not to mention the risk of making things worse.
But the paradox is, all of them will die and not all preventions are Pareto efficient.
I can keep an old decrepit rich guy living a miserable life for some more 6 months at the same cost that would take to me to improve the life expectancy of some 100 poor babies a few decades.
I can try save a bunch of fat very-sick boomers from a respiratory infection at the cost of causing an economic crisis that will completely fuck a lot of young people too for decades ahead. Was it fucking worth?
The amount of flying that people do is not constant; if lots of airplanes fall out of the sky and explode in fiery wrecks, people will fly less.
In this case, "lots" is "anything more than once a month" because footage of the above is addictive to anyone trying to make money from the news. Look at how many flights there are a day. How high can the crash rate be until those pictures are seared into our eyeballs?
It's actually funny you bring up COVID, because I agree with you that the restrictions were... not good. I also think that the FAA could use a lighter touch on just about everything, EXCEPT the level of safety it requires from Part 121 operators.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
The community got together, worked on a solution, that solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven ability to drive results.
Agreed. I think it's important to remember the lack of real "mass deportations now" when you see two things:
1) low Trump approval rating. Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
2) protests against deportations. Why do dems simultaneously crow about their superior deportation numbers while condemning current efforts as heavy handed and cruel?
I think the answer to 2) is that the Obama administration scrupulously followed the law, actually targeted those with criminal records rather than grabbing people just based on their ethnicity, and didn't engage in practices like sending people to prisons in third countries such as El Salvador. I suspect you already know this, given your choice to draw a contrast between numbers and methods.
It's the untrained masked men with guns dragging people away because the computer said to, that's the new heavy-handed method that America has not seen before except in WW2 Germany and the Soviet Union.
Correct. "Once hired, ICE agents receive training before beginning fieldwork" [1].
That said, "unlike many law enforcement roles, no previous experience in law enforcement is required, and candidates do not need to take a pre-employment exam." And the training is minimal, as evidenced by the dismal deportation figures.
> so just normal law enforcement arresting people
Normal law enforcement is bound by laws and identifies itself. We do that to prevent abuses of power and to ensure that unidentifiable agents shoving Americans into unmarked cars is something that raises alarm, because there is zero assurance it's ICE versus e.g. foreign operatives or gangs.
> Oh no everyone its WWII Germany oh no I mean it's my political opponents governing
These processes are being kept under wraps because they're a massive expansion of state power. The kind conservatives and libertartians oppose. The narrow branch of MAGA that's distrating federal law enforcement isn't representative of any governing coalition.
Understanding why process matters is difficult for everyone when your guy is in charge. A good method is to imagine a left-wing President having these extralegal authorities and resources.
Here's a job posting for CBP: https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849185400
I'm having trouble finding the ICE requirements, my understanding is even less than CBP. The ones without firearms training won't have guns, fortunately.
Compare to state police officers, who go through half a year of academy. FBI needs a college education or two years work experience, and then they do another 1000 hours of training.
If you've ever watched real cops working, the difference in training / professionalism is obvious. They will identify themselves, and be familiar with the case history before dragging anyone away.
Here's one of the apps used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Fortify . ICE agents aren't psychic. There's a database of people who's legal status has expired, the database is not perfect. An ICE official decides who is guilty and issues a civil arrest warrant. The supervisor sends agents to where the computer has tracked them, and the agents arrests if the computer says so. There's no judge issuing the warrant before, or trying the case afterward.
These are a real changes in America, we have a right to speak about it, and it's reasonable to guard against these tools being turned on Trump's "enemies within" next.
> Likely due to lack of following through on these promises (rather than disapproval of the promises themselves)
No. Most of it has to do with the fact that masked, unidentified ICE agents are abducting and disappearing people with no due process.
American citizens are being taken away. People who are here legally are being abducted and sent to countries they aren't from.
Of the deportations, Trump said they would be targeted toward violent criminals. Over 90% of those who have been rounded up have no criminal history.
Masked men with weapons who refuse to identify themselves are shooting people and lying about it, directly refuted by video others took of the event.
This isn't some case where "Americans are upset Trump isn't doing what he said!". This is a case where Americans are finally seeing the reality of what he is doing and are sickened by it.
Ah, I see how you perceive this situation. You think the Democrats manufactured a police state by flooding America with undocumented immigrants in order to get Republicans to go full gestopo in order to fix it. Some 5D chess move where the left is to blame for "forcing" the right into authoritarianism. And somehow the videos coming from communities within America are just "hysterics".
So just pure conspiratorial nonsense that absolves all blame from the perpetuator and abuser. Got it.
No, it’s not a police state in the first place. The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Those videos are not evidence of a police state. A police state would have locked them up the minute they started their ridiculous, childish public tantrums.
They’re evidence of the hysteria people like you are driven to by the media you consume.
Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
> The belief that it is? Hysterics being fed by your media diet.
You know nothing about my media diet, except that yours tells you all others are being fed hysterics.
> The videos that you’re seeing of people losing their minds over law enforcement actually doing their jobs?
Huh? No, these aren't reaction videos. These are videos of ICE violently detaining people they have no right to detain. I'm just going to completely ignore their "stop and frisk" style of fishing for undocumented folks and focus solely on them abusing American citizens.
Which they have done. Countless times. One time they hit someone driving to work in their car. Then they got out of their vehicle and violently ripped a lady out of her car--an American driving to work as ICE did an illegal U-turn in the road--and put their weight on her while they detained her.
That's a police state.
And your media diet didn't show it to you. Your media diet is feeding you propaganda by means of telling you "everything is fine, it's hYsTeRicS".
> Do you not realize that outside your bubble, this is how you and your compatriots are perceived? Hysterical and fully disconnected from reality?
Your head is in the sand, but I understand you honestly believe this nonsense. But you're factually wrong.
The US police state is obvious to most Americans and the vast majority of the world. Any global polling--or interaction with people from other countries, which I do daily--will show you that.
You are in the minority, blaming what's happening here on hysterics. You are wrong.
> reevaluate your own neurosis and realize how hysterical you’ve been
What are you talking about? Everything I've stated is pure fact. Your whole strategy around the conversation appears to be attacking, insulting and avoiding reality.
> You’re just a confused kid throwing a tantrum.
You're incredibly disrespectful and it's clear you're not fit to be posting on HN. You aren't winning anyone over by pretending authoritarianism isn't prevalent and growing. What is happening in the US is not normal, and no amount of you pretending otherwise is going to change that reality. The fact that you consider people being alarmed by masked men with guns who refuse to identify themselves abducting people (including Americans, mind you) off of the streets is telling.
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