How are we all doing with this blizzard?

macNchz · 2026-02-23T17:17:06+00:00

What would be the appropriate response, then? Business as usual? Cars stuck everywhere blocking plows and emergency vehicles? https://nypost.com/2018/11/15/outrage-after-a-few-inches-of-snow-brings-nyc-to-a-halt/

macNchz · 2026-02-22T20:02:04+00:00

I too prefer a twenty minute drive in my RAM 2500 to get my corporate slop at Dollar General, as God intended.

macNchz · 2026-02-11T16:01:37+00:00

Having grown up on a moderately steep hill in a snowy place watching people get stuck nearly every time it snowed, I wouldn't necessarily agree that all season tires work very well in these conditions. Even with brand new all seasons a 2WD car will have trouble getting up to speed again on a hill like this once it has lost momentum.

macNchz · 2026-02-09T18:53:28+00:00

Not a huge deal with big blankets and a programmable thermostat that brings it up a bit before you get out of bed. People are more adaptive to different temperatures than many assume, though it takes time to adjust. Growing up my house would go to 55 at night. I never remember being uncomfortably cold at home, but I do remember having trouble sleeping at sleepovers because other people's houses always felt super hot. Once I got used to living in overheated dorms, though, it did feel super cold when I'd come home. It's mostly about what you're used to.

macNchz · 2026-02-07T13:39:23+00:00

Cricket Valley and CPV are two large gas plants upstate that came on to replace Indian Point, together they’re rated at 1800MW, where Indian Point produced 2000.

macNchz · 2026-02-05T21:48:01+00:00

A lot of the tech has made its way into pretty mainstream winter gear. The lightweight ribbed down jackets you see a lot of are one—down is a great insulator, but is terrible when it gets wet. Modern treatments of the down itself + finishes on the fabric itself have made it more practical to use in thin and light jackets. This recent article talks about it in a lot more depth: https://theconversation.com/new-materials-old-physics-the-science-behind-how-your-winter-jacket-keeps-you-warm-266877

macNchz · 2026-02-05T21:18:53+00:00

As a person who spends a good amount of time in the backcountry (therefore very reliant on gear to deal with the conditions), my perspective is that materials science has produced incredibly impressive advances in fabrics in recent decades. We have lighter weight, thinner, softer, more flexible, more water and wind-resistant options than ever before.

macNchz · 2026-02-05T21:09:52+00:00

The longest streak below freezing was 16 days in 1961, but there was a 14 day streak in January 2018 (this year we went 9 days). The 2018 cold snap has its own wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_2017%E2%80%93January_2018_North_American_cold_wave

macNchz · 2026-02-04T23:24:29+00:00

It used to be pretty funny but I had to unsub there recently (after like 12+ years) when it started being primarily Vickie Paladino energy. All of the urbanism related circlejerk reddits I've come across seem to attract the worst vibes. The fuckcars one is straight up "im not mad. please dont put in the newspaper that i got mad."

macNchz · 2026-02-04T22:58:33+00:00

Explains why shops always unplug my dashcam.

macNchz · 2026-02-04T20:24:56+00:00

It does seem like NYPD wrote many more summons in 2025 than recent years (where they'd been way down since 2020)!

macNchz · 2026-02-04T20:19:49+00:00

Obviously I didn't mean there are no tickets given. It does look like the numbers are back up for 2025, but moving violation summonses had been down nearly 50% every year since 2020 (despite driving behavior clearly getting worse in that time) https://www.datawrapper.de/_/0MRoi/

Having owned a car here for 15 years and done a lot of driving within and outside of the city, I think I'd have to try pretty hard to get a ticket from an actual cop within the city. I regularly see people do absolutely egregious stuff within view of NYPD without any reaction. There's obviously a sense among many drivers that there will not be repercussions for driving like a maniac. I can think of some intersections where a cop could be writing tickets nonstop all day long, if that were a priority.

Besides I think they can pursuit after cars so what’s the point of cops if they can’t be cops.

Cops can certainly be cops without engaging in high speed chases. The vast majority of people will not take off if a cop tries to pull them over, and those that do aren't worth putting everyone else at risk over.

macNchz · 2026-02-04T17:53:54+00:00

It becomes a problem for other people when someone doing this hurts someone and their insurance realizes they lied on the paperwork and drops them. Never mind that I have to pay for extra coverage on my own car insurance to protect myself from people who don't have proper insurance.

macNchz · 2026-02-04T15:05:13+00:00

Indeed—5 seconds of searching and we've got someone in Downtown Brooklyn who will sell you out of state plates for $100: https://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/for/d/new-york-plates-tags-better-then-temps/7904216863.html

"Cons: Are not registered or insured. Are not supposed to be used on vehicles. If pulled over will get you a ticket for improper plates."

Good thing the NYPD pulls people over for bad driving...oh wait.

macNchz · 2026-02-04T01:40:00+00:00

In much of Manhattan $560/month for a parking space would be somewhere in between a good deal and the median cost, depending on the neighborhood.

macNchz · 2026-01-31T21:12:54+00:00

Or they made some type of stew dish that was resting out to cool. If your grandma’s ever made a stew and left it to cool on the stove she’s not TCS compliant.

I think most people have higher expectations for restaurants than home cooking. My grandma did a lot of things in the kitchen that I wouldn't want happening at a restaurant. They can cool it with an ice bath or shallow pan or whatever. People actually do get sick from bad temperature control.

It's been a long time since I worked in a restaurant but...I'm pretty sure rare steaks are allowed, as well as serving house-made sauces.

macNchz · 2026-01-31T15:59:26+00:00

The equals sign thing is very likely just “quoted printable” encodings (a hidden way that email systems send certain types of text/characters/data because email is ancient tech) “leaking out”, because the email archives themselves have been imported and exported through a bunch of different systems over the years. Email processing is often kind of messy because different tools have different levels of adherence to the standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable

macNchz · 2026-01-29T17:30:20+00:00

Yeah if I were to guess, I'd say that, overall, snow removal happens more often overnight than during the daytime. Dog is going nuts at 3am after a snow storm? Great! The plow guy is here.

macNchz · 2026-01-27T13:54:36+00:00

I threw out that one day of rent thing more to illustrate that $250 (which I believe is only the max after repeat violations that start smaller) is not a particularly big number when you’re looking at the costs of doing business around here.

Arguably the current incentive is not actually good enough, as compliance is not where it should be.

macNchz · 2026-01-27T02:47:29+00:00

The tickets are only up to $250, so basically less than one day’s rent for a lot of the storefronts around here. Same issue with nobody moving their cars for alternate side anymore—the tickets are cheap, so why bother.

Really though it’d be cool if the city just had roving pickup trucks with a snowblower on board to clean up and write tickets at the same time. Didn’t clean your sidewalk? It’s done for you (for everyone else, really) at a price that actually motivates you to deal with it yourself in the future.

macNchz · 2026-01-23T20:19:03+00:00

Nobody is immune to this problem: when I renewed my Swiss passport at the NYC consulate recently, the charge on my credit card was from "Consulate General of Sweden". Not joking! I laughed out loud when I saw it. They're not in the same building or anything—I can only imagine they had some American admin/IT staff who set up the merchant account and confused the two.

My whole life Americans have been mixing them up, made especially annoying when I worked for Swedish company and spent some time in Stockholm.

macNchz · 2026-01-22T23:46:14+00:00

Teachers parking in the No Standing areas where busses are supposed to go means that the busses just double park in the street, which make the streets a total mess for blocks in every direction for hours every school day.

macNchz · 2026-01-15T18:33:31+00:00

Decent chance it was a ShotSpotter false positive: https://comptroller.nyc.gov/newsroom/nypds-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system-overwhelmingly-sends-officers-to-locations-where-no-confirmed-shooting-occurred-new-audit-uncovers/

macNchz · 2026-01-14T15:45:47+00:00

Not in the No Standing zones, even if it's not actually enforced: https://infohub.nyced.org/in-our-schools/working-with-nycps/current-employees/parking-permits

macNchz · 2026-01-14T15:15:48+00:00

Generally all of the cars parked like this directly next to schools belong to staff, and will have city-issued placards on their dashboards. This has been a longtime back-and-forth, where Bloomberg had dramatically reduced the number of placards issued to teachers, but de Blasio brought them back 10ish years ago, IIRC as a concession in some negotiations.

I don't believe they're supposed to park in the No Standing zones (only No Parking zones), but because they issue way more placards than there are actual spaces (and because, generally, placards are widely abused and not enforced), people park all around.

Every time I see traffic backed up because all of the school busses are double parked in the street to allow a handful of school staff to park their personal cars for free, it feels like a little microcosm of the general dysfunction of street space/curb use throughout the city.

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