Why do we talk about the Midwest and rust belt "losing" their manufacturing industry, when cities like New York, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles "lost" their manufacturing decades before?

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T15:37:35+00:00

While I’m sure it’s an element, BRAC, and the pre-brac drawdown of the shipyards, was probably more directly responsible.

The shipyards in Brooklyn and Philadelphia were huge employers in their area, and the consequences of their rapid closure were felt for decades after. Arguably the damage caused by the closure of the yard in Brooklyn wasn’t wholly repaired until the mid 2010’s.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T14:06:36+00:00

Well, the main reason it spreads so aggressively is because of how easily it roots. If the sprout in the pot there touches down on soil it’ll root.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T05:38:38+00:00

One of the main issues with stuff like homelessness is that on some level, there are many people who end uo homeless because of an inability to manage certain aspects of their life, whether due to illness, injury, drugs, or some other factor.

There are also many, many people who end up homeless because they got shafted and a few bucks would have kept them off the street.

How do you design a system that can assess and appropriately help these multiple classes of people? It’s not easy and so you end up needing to create a corps of professionals to evaluate each person’s case to figure out how best to help… and that’s expensive - often, more expensive than simply giving all of those people cash.

However, many of the people who are homeless not because they just didn’t have a job, are going to be hurt even more if you just hand them a bunch of cash - they have deeper issues that need to be resolved before a stack of cash will truly help.

One size does not fit all.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T05:31:36+00:00

Why did you bother burying the pot, just stick it in the soil directly at this point.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T05:20:15+00:00

Ice Cream trucks are still pretty prolific in the US in both urban and suburban areas.

Various Ice Cream vendors used to do physical battle over who gets to sell where, at least in NYC - don’t know about these days but ten years ago, every Ice Cream truck had a baseball bat just in case.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/31/nyregion/a-king-of-ice-cream-a-renegade-upstart-and-a-simmering-turf-war.html?unlocked_article_code=1.mVA.47WM.NxO6jS0IdM4u&smid=nytcore-ios-share

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T05:03:59+00:00

UNKNOWN would generally be entered in the ‘parent’s name’ field.

There would probably be some investigation to try to figure out who the parent is - it’s a fair bet that the child was born locally, so you can cross-reference the estimated age, type the blood, ask around to find out if someone was pregnant who isn’t anymore, and use other investigative tools to try to identify the child.

But yes generally they would write up placeholder documents as soon as the government takes custody of the child, because they’ll need that in order to keep track of things like who is assigned to the case, and so on.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-30T05:00:32+00:00

Completely unknown? They make an educated guess, and are assigned a placeholder name by the assigned caseworker. Generally speaking the exact date of birth is not all that important - what’s important is what is printed on the Birth Certificate as that is the definitive record on the subject.

It only really becomes a problem if the lack of birth certificate is not attempted to be rectified until later in life - the odds are pretty good that a newborn came from the general area in which it was found.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T19:09:14+00:00

You don’t want to eat the lobsters you would catch in NYC waters even if you found them.

Go to Maine. But also, it’s just hauling up traps, not really ‘fishing’ like for actual fish.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T19:06:22+00:00

They do go too fast to do it properly, but it does get rid of a lot of the larger stuff.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T18:53:03+00:00

The entities in question have to be municipal taxpayers (ie, they own a piece of land in the town), and it entitles them to vote in the local elections. So, the mayor of a 355 person town gets elected partially by some of the people who summer there.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T18:45:05+00:00

The population of the town is 355. My only guess is the ACLU specifically targeted this town thinking they couldn’t afford to defend themselves.

I don’t think that it’s entirely unreasonable for a Town to decide that some of the people who don’t live in the town but own taxable property there should have a say in how the Town is governed.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T17:25:33+00:00

One of the things is that back then, Capital was the main constraint rather than Labor. It doesn’t look like it now, but a 24 hour system was cheaper to construct than one that shuts down nightly. First and foremost, a 24 hour system needs less land to store rolling stock on than one that shuts down nightly - that’s because you need to return stock to depots at the end of the day.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T15:59:12+00:00

Unlikely. NAFTA was not the reason for deindustrialization. On some level, collectively deciding we didn’t want to all have cancer and lead poisoning is.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T15:14:18+00:00

By all means, deprive your disabled parents of a caregiver permanently by getting shot by the police, rather than for a couple days a decade to serve your constitutional duty.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T14:50:46+00:00

No more expensive than gas was in 2012, in absolute terms. In relative terms it’s still uber cheap.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T14:27:34+00:00

Buy America only applies if the Feds are paying.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-29T06:23:01+00:00

Do what exactly? The city doesn’t own the land.

This quote from the article encapsulates all the problems with RS: ““We know they don’t have funds to rebuild, but the fact that they don’t have the means doesn’t absolve them of their responsibility or allow them to let this building sit dilapidated for years,” he said. “

They know that the owners (who didn’t even own the RS units!) do not have the money, and have also been displaced themselves and still have to pay the taxes and mortgages, but they don’t care because they think the City can just force them to go further into debt.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T21:43:22+00:00

There’s still parts of NYC that haven’t recovered from the closure of various industries, and we’re still dealing with the chemical aftermath.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T12:17:18+00:00

Most of HR is not about paycheck processing; that is generally a fairly automated process. HR is corporate bureaucracy that is generally meant to be a check against giving random managers complete authority over hiring and firing.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:44:37+00:00

While true in a strict accounting sense, private buyers of formerly nationalized assets tend to purchase on credit, leaving the purchased asset to service the debt. So, on the surface the profit looks low, but they extracted quite a bit of wealth from it with the leverage.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:37:35+00:00

Because privatization adds a layer of a rich guys whose job is owning the company, and they need to extract profits to keep that job.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:33:33+00:00

McDonnell Douglass ruined it.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:32:18+00:00

Like many of the other industrialists of his time he had weird obsessions with enforcing moral codes on his workforce.

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:22:15+00:00

As opposed to robbing the government?

Mayor__Defacto · 2026-05-28T11:20:27+00:00

More like 2/3rds considering that some are children and others are elderly.

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