Nick Molina

@invis4yo He’s destroying their ability to cut services in the future with the “it’s the only solution we have” excuse

The socialist mayor they said would destroy New York just closed a $12 billion deficit without cutting a single city service.

@mattyglesias People are calling it The Art of the Deal

I mean … he is deferring pension payments and got a big bailout from the state (and also isn’t going to implement the class size reduction law he championed). I could balance the DC government without cutting services pretty easily someone gave me a bunch of free money.

Do you have an elderly or disabled neighbor in NYC? Be a good neighbor and let them know about the free air conditioner program. If they earn $3473 or less a month, NYC will cover the costs of an A/C. Remember…last summer we had 95 degree weather. Look out for them

@billybinion Wealthier people visiting are more likely to spend frivolously (which is good). Also there’s more policy benefits in making it livable for people with children vs a place to visit for people with children. Local governments should focus on benefits to local populations first

When NYC effectively banned Airbnb, the primary effect was that hotel prices skyrocketed. So not only is housing still expensive, but now lower-income people can’t even visit. Super helpful, great job everyone.

This is economically illiterate. Airbnb has a trivial effect on rent prices—we're talking near 0 percent. NYC banned it & rents still increased. We know why housing costs are high: lack of supply. But some people would rather scapegoat the rich than acknowledge basic economics.

@bdomenech If America is special in that it allows people like this to become rich, you have to believe either that our population is uniquely different (less likely) OR that our government provides some unique benefits that enable that. If it’s the 2nd, then they didn’t do it alone

Jeff Bezos was born in Alberquerque to a 17 year old high school mom who divorced his alcoholic dad before Jeff was 2. He worked at McDonald's before his grades earned his way into Princeton. He started Amazon in a garage with a 245k investment from his parents. That's reality.

@floor_per_area If we ask people if they want financing or more competition, you would not believe which option they chose!

I keep seeing things in the spirit ot “if we ask builders what they need to build, they say financing is more important than zoning”. And I think this type of argument is not a good way to help us find good policy. Zoning (and permitting reform etc) aren’t like financing. The key difference is that up-zoning is (simplified) “free”: We get more housing and more tax revenue without having to spend money. In its most trivial form, financing is the exact opposite: If interest rates are high, then little gets built. But there’s no good policy implication from this: We could of course subsidize supply directly, but that’s very expensive. How can we set policy well? We look at an intervention (up-zoning, permitting reform, etc) and estimate the costs and benefits. I can tell that, in NYC, pure zoning constraints are very large, and relatively simple approaches at upzoning would (in my estimate) lead to large increases in housing. There might many places where zoning isn’t a big constraint. And maybe there are financing reforms with high cost-benefit, but we can’t infer that just by asking builders about relative importance. We need to measure the costs and benefits!

It turns out telling a model to roleplay is less important than we thought ai-analytics.wharton.upenn.edu/insights/stop-…

@Austen It’s part owned by Jobi which uses it as a captive market for its EVTOL and is playing at a bigger game

So Blade is pretty awesome: 5 min flight from Manhattan to JFK for $150. But I’m the only person on this helicopter. Surely they’re hemorrhaging money, no?

@TomKlingenstein I agree with this concept except for liberals who believe in democracy

Preferring dignified defeat to harsh victory is how you lose a country.

The war is going well I’m sure

I am taking out a PPP loan this time

I don't get greed. If I had Bezos cash, I'd be fixing a problem every week. Homelessness? Not on my watch. Hungry kids in school? No way. Animal shelters full? I'll build 10,000 more.

@jasonc_nc I actually think they should. The government should provide a floor in terms of service and value.

I don’t think private businesses should have to compete with the government.

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

Source has a lot of other cool info and good news on this front ember-energy.org/app/uploads/20…

This is pretty cool - China's fossil fuel generation has been flat for 2 years. Relatedly, fossil fuel generation was flat (technically small decline) globally in 2025, and renewables overtook coal's share for the first time in over 100 years

@StevenFulop Incredible to see the immediate 180 from maybe progressive to corporate shill. I get you have a new job but did not expect you to become a parrot

Before calling something a millionaire tax break, it helps to understand how it actually works. Mischaracterizing who benefits from the pass-through tax doesn’t make for good policy - it makes for bad outcomes for small businesses The pass-through tax wasn’t a gift to millionaires - it was a fix for small business owners hammered by the federal SALT cap. LLCs and S-Corps pay state taxes at the entity level, allowing owners to fully deduct what they owe without hitting the SALT ceiling. Eliminating it doesn’t hurt hedge funds but it hurts the small business owner in the Bronx who’s already stretched thin.

@andrewcuomo Honestly did anyone fucking ask you?

Zohran Mamdani’s latest budget gimmick is exactly the wrong approach for New York City’s fiscal challenges. My administration enacted the Pass-Through Entity Tax (PTET) because New York families and businesses were under attack by Republicans in Washington when they capped the SALT deduction, targeting New York and other Democratic states. It was double taxation — taxing New Yorkers on the very taxes they already paid to support their schools, police, firefighters, hospitals, infrastructure, and basic services. PTET was not created as a loophole. It was created as a lawful, common-sense shield to protect New Yorkers from an unfair federal tax assault and to keep jobs, investment, small businesses, professional partnerships, and taxpayers in New York. Now Mamdani wants to take the Washington Republican tax attack and have City Hall compound it in the name of "fairness". It is not "fairness" to make New York less competitive, less affordable, and less attractive to the people and businesses who pay the bills and create the jobs. New York City cannot tax its way out of every problem. We have seen this movie before: when government raises costs in an already high-tax city and state, people and businesses have choices. They leave; jobs leave; investment leaves; and working families are left paying the price. @KathyHochul is right to reject this proposal. Albany should not make New Yorkers collateral damage for New York City’s inability to control spending. We should be fighting Washington to fully restore SALT — not surrendering one of the few tools New York has to protect itself in the meantime. Strong government means making hard choices: managing expenses, setting priorities, protecting essential services, and growing the economy. It does not mean dressing up a tax increase as loophole closure and pretending there will be no consequences.

Manhattan On top of existing buildings, this shows blue outlines for addable floor space (aka air rights) under current zoning, based on the Floor-Area-Ratio. As you change the FAR, the city becomes full of blue potential. Attribution: MapLibre, Carto, OpenStreetMap

@aaron_renn @Noahpinion Yes. That’s a sensible reaction. If you want to stop that general concept, you stop the scamming. Otherwise you’re basically dumb to play by the rules. If you want people to play by the rules, make it costly not to do so. Morality alone won’t cut it against feeling dumb

Stealing is wrong, of course. And that discussion was ludicrous. But the general concept of, "Everyone else is scamming the system, so why not me?" is taking over our society (e.g. disability accommodations at Ivy League schools).